Remembering Huxley

I got my hands on a collection of writings by Aldous Huxley recently. It had been many years since I had relished going through some of the works of Huxley. Below are some of the extracts from the book titled Moksha – Aldous Huxley's Classical Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer. This exercise is mainly so that I have some of his writing as a reference for me in case the book moves on (which is quite likely to happen and which is how it should be). Am putting this in the public domain so that it provides as uplifting an experience for whoever comes across it as it did for me. Enjoy the trip....

'Open you eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you've already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death,order and disintegration,impartially. But now look at Shiva's other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does this gesture signify? It signifies, “Don't be afraid; it's All Right'. But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid, when it is so obvious that they're all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He's using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing?Look closely you will see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature -the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf but immensely powerful in his malignity, Mulayaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that is precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn't at this trampling right foot that he points his finger; it's at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he's in the act of raising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity, - it's the symbol of release, of Moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once – in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light...' from Aldous Huxley's Island (1961)

'Drug- taking, it is significant, plays an important role in every primitive religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed them with the gift of tongues. And so on. The devotional exercises of the later mystics are all designed to produce the drug's miraculous effects by purely psychological means. How many of the current ideas of eternity, of heaven, of supernatural states are ultimately derived from the experiences of drug-takers? - from A Treatise on Drugs(1931)

'All existing drugs are treacherous and harmful.The heaven into which they usher their victims soon turns into a hell of sickness and moral degradation. They kill, first the soul, then, in a few years,the body. What is the remedy?”Prohibition” answer all contemporary governments in chorus. But the results of prohibition are not encouraging. Men and women feel such an urgent need to take occasional trips from reality, that they will do almost anything to procure the means of escape. The only justification for prohibition would be success;but it is not, and in the nature of things, cannot, be successful. The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine or cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity”- from A Treatise on Drugs(1931)

'...Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement – or to be more accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair – I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty, deeper significance.The fear, as I analysed it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed,of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to live most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the Mysterium Tremendum.In theological language this fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egoism and the divine purity, between man's self aggravated separatedness and the infinity of God.Following Boehme and William Law,we may say that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can be apprehended only as a burning purgatorial fire. An almost identical doctrine is to be found in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the Pure Light of the Void, and even from the less tempered Lights, in order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of self-hood as a reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated Reality -anything! - from the Doors of Perception (1954)

' ...i took down my copy of Evans -Wentz's edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and opened at random.'O nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.' That was the problem – to remain undistracted. Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and humiliations, by all the fears and hate and cravings that ordinarily eclipse the Light. What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the dead, might not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there be a voice to assure them, by day and even when they are asleep, that in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate Reality remains unshakeably itself and is of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruely tormented mind. By means of such devices as recorders, clock controlled switches, public address systems and pillow speakers it should be very easy to keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly reminded of this primordial fact.Perhaps a few of the lost souls might in this way be helped to win some measure of control over the universe -at once beautiful and appalling, but always other than human, always totally incomprehensible – in which they find themselves condemned to live.' - from the Doors of Perception (1954)

'Now, the problem is, how can we visit the remote areas of the mind, where these creatures live? Some people, it is clear, can go there spontaneously and more or less at will. A few of these travelers were great artists, who could not only visit the Antipodes[of the mind], but could also give an account of what they saw, in words, or in pictures. Much more numerous are those who have been to the Antipodes[of the mind], have seen its strange inhabitants, but are incapable of giving adequate expression to what they have observed. At the present time they are reluctant to give even an inadequate expression to their experience. The mental climate of our age is not favorable to visionaries. Those who have such spontaneous experiences, and are unwise enough to talk about them, are looked on with suspicion and told that they ought to see a psychiatrist. In the past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who had them were looked up to. This is one of the reasons (though not perhaps the only reason) why there were more visionaries in earlier centuries than there are today' – from Mescaline and the “Other World”(1955)

' The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Blissful visions are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a feeling of deindividualization. (It is, no doubt, this feeling of deindividualization which makes it possible for the Indians who practice the peyote cult to use the drug not merely as a shortcut to the visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving solidarity within the participating group) When the visionary experience is terrible and the world is transfigured for the worse, individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to grow progressively more tense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an insipated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands' - from Heaven and Hell (1956)

'Negative emotions-the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred, anger or malice which exclude love – are the guarantee that visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling. The Pharisee is a virtuous man; but his virtue if of the kind which is compatible with negative emotion. His visionary experiences are therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful' - from Heaven and Hell (1956)

'When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes mescaline or LSD may suddenly understand – not only intellectually but organically, experientially – the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is Love,” or “Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him”. It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a 'gratuitous grace', which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which, if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring simultaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of 'spiritual exercises' or bodily mortification. Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self -torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; an the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentrations upon a single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing' – from Drugs that Shape Men's Minds(1958)

'If i had the control of education I would start pointing out to children, of quite small age, that the fundamental rule of morality, the golden rule, begins on the sub-human level, even the sub-biological level. If you want nature to treat you well, you must treat nature well.If you start destroying nature, nature will destroy you, and this basic moral precept is fundamental in our present knowledge of ecology and conservation. What we know now about ecology points to the fact taht nature exists in the most delicate balance, and that anything which tends to upset the balance will produce consequences of the most unexpected character and often of the most disastrous character. We see then that many of the most important ethical truths flow quite naturally and simply from scientific facts, and I feel very strongly that this kind of bridging between the world of pure science and the world of ethics should be made from the earliest age.' - from the Final Revolution( 1959)

'In the past we have had revolutions which were all on the periphery of things. The environment was changed in the hope of changing the individual at the center of the environment. Today, thanks to the application of techniques to human beings, we are in a position to change the human being. So that the final revolution will concern man and woman as they are, and not the environment in which they live, and I can't see how one could go any further than the ultimate nature of this revolution.' - from The Final Revolution(1959)

'Now the question arises, what if anything, can be done about this steady advance of technicization? Obviously, stopping it is out of the question. Technicization is going on whether we like it or not., and also it seems perfectly clear that without a steady increase of technicization in many fields it would be almost impossible to manage or provide a decent life for the rapidly increasing numbers of the human species. So that we have to put up with the fact that this technical process is going on, and is going to go on developing according to the laws of its own being. It is going to be developed for the purpose of producing more and efficiency, not necessarily for the purpose of producing fully developed human beings. That has nothing to do with it, nor have any questions of ethics got anything to do with it. The categorical imperative of technology is efficiency'- from The Final Revolution(1959)

'These bio-chemical methods are, I suppose, the most powerful and the most foolproof, so to say, of all the methods for transporting us into this other world that at present exist, I think, as Professor Leary will point out tonight, that there is here a very large field for systematic experimentation by psychologists, because it is now possible to explore areas of the mind at minimum expense to the body, areas which were almost impossible to get at before, except either by the use of extremely dangerous drugs or else by looking around for the rather rare people who spontaneously can go into this world. (of course it is very difficult for them to go in on demand, “ the Spirit bloweth where it listeth,”we can never be sure that the people with the spontaneous gift of visionary experience will have it on demand). With such drugs as psilocybin it is possible for the majority of people to go into this other world with very little trouble and with almost no harm to themselves.'- From Visionary Experience (1961)

'There is a kind of visionary experience which people have with the eyes open and which consists in a transfiguration of the external world so that it seems overwhelmingly beautiful and alive and shining. This of course is what Wordsworth described so beautifully and so accurately in his great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and similar experiences can be found in the works of the mystics, in the work of the Anglican mystic, Traherne, who gives an incredibly beautiful description of the kind of transfigured world in which he lived in childhood. This description ends up with the most beautiful passage where he describes this wonderful world, and says, “And so with much ado I was taught the dirty devices of the world which now I unlearn and become as a little child again so that I now enter once more the Kingdom of God.”.

And here, as I said before, here is surely one of the great challenges to modern education: How to keep alive this world of immense value which people have during childhood and which certain privileged people retain throughout their lives? How do we keep this alive and at the same time impart a sufficient amount of conceptual education to make them efficient citizens and scientists? This I don't know, but I am absolutely certain that this is on of the important challenges confronting modern education'- From Visionary Experience (1961)

'Spiritual...For sensitive ears, alive to its overtones of inspirational twaddle, this is almost a dirty word.And yet, in certain contexts, what other word can one use?Reading Meister Eckhart , for example, or listening as we did at Gstaad, to Krishnamurti, one is forced to recognise that “spiritual”can be mot juste.”I show you sorrow and the ending of sorrow.”

All the great masters of the spiritual life (that word again!) have been at once profoundly pessimistic and almost infinitely optimistic. If certain conditions are fulfilled, human beings may cease to behave as the pathetic or deplorable creatures they mistakenly think they are and be what in fact they have always been, if they had only given themselves a chance of knowing it -enlightened, liberated, “godded in God”. But that more than a very few of us will ever fulfill those conditions is overwhelmingly improbable. Many are called, but very few are chosen; for very few ever choose to be chosen. The ending of sorrow is feasible;but the continuance of sorrow is certain.All that the masters of the spiritual life can do is to remind us of who in fact we are and of the means whereby we may come to the recognition of our identity – meditation in the sense of complete and inclusive awareness at every instant, and the corollaries of such meditation, right being and, from right being, spontaneous right action.' - from Exploring the Borderlands of the Mind (1961)

'Dear Tim,

I forgot, in my last letter, to answer your question about Tantra. There are enormous books on subject by “Arthur Avalon” (Sir John Woodroffe), which one can dip into with some profit.Then there is the chapter on it in Heinrich Zimmer's Philosophies of India. The fullest scholarly treatment , on a manageable scale, is in Mircea Eliade's various books on Yoga. See also Conze's Buddhist Texts. As far as one can understand it, Tantra seems to be a strange mixture of superstition and magic with sublime philosophy and acute philosophical insights. There is an endless amount of ritual and word-magic. But the basic ideal seems to me the highest possible ideal- enlightenment, not apart from the world (as with the Vedantists and the Nirvana-addicts of the Hinayana School of Buddhists) but within the world, through the world, by means of the ordinary processes of living. Tantra teaches a yoga of sex,a yoga of eating (even eating forbidden foods and drinking forbidden drinks). The sacramentalizing of common life, so that every event may become a means whereby enlightenment can be realized, is achieved, essentially, through constant awareness. This is the ultimate yoga – being aware, conscious even of the unconscious – on every level from the physiological to the spiritual. In this context see the list of 112 exercises in awareness, extracted from a Tantric text and printed at the end of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (by Paul Reps)(now in paperback). The whole of “Gestalt Therapy” is anticipated in these exercises – and the therapy is not merely for the abnormal, it is above all a therapy for the much graver sickness of insensitiveness and ignorance which we call “normality” or “mental health”. LSD and the mushrooms should be used, it seems to me, in context of this basic Tantric idea of the yoga of total awareness, leading to enlightenment within the world of everyday experience – which of course becomes the world of miracle and beauty and divine mystery when experience is what it always ought to be.

Yours, Aldous' – Letter to Dr Timothy Leary (1962)

'”Dope...Murugun was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope”.

“What's in a name?...Answer, practically everything. Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We on the contrary, give the stuff good names – the moksha medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try. For him it's dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in”. - from Island (1961)

“Another thing we're just beginning to understand.”said Vijaya,”is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What's happening in the brain when you're having a vision? And what's happening when you pass from a premystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?”

“Do you know?” Will asked.

“'Know' is a big word. Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas – they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection – the visual cortex, for example. Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out. The important fact is that,somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.”

“And how do the silent areas respond?” Will inquired.

“Let's start with what they don't respond with. They don't respond with visions or auditions, they don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing premystical stuff. Their response is the full blown mystical experience. You know – One in all and All in one. The basic experience, with its corollaries – boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.”

“Not to mention joy,” said Dr. Robert,”inexpressible joy.” - from Island (1961)

“You're like that mynah.” said Dr. Robert at last. “Trained to repeat words you don't understand, or know the reaon for, 'It isn't real. It isn't real.' But if you'd experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday you'd know better. You'd know that it was much more real that what you call reality. More real that what you're thinking and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But not real is what you've been taught to say. Not real, not real.” Dr. Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder.” You've been told that we're just a set of self-indulgent dope-takers, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis. Listen, Murugan – forget all the bad language that's been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you've got to live in, learn in,suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to die one day – maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't prepare for it.” - from Island (1961)

'What can, and what should, the individual do to improve his ironically equivocal relationship with the culture he finds himself embedded? How can he continue to enjoy the benefits of culture, without at the same time, being stupefied or frenziedly intoxicated by it's poisons? How can he become discriminatingly acculturated, rejecting what is silly and downright evil in his conditioning, and holding fast to that which makes for humane and intelligent behavior?

A culture cannot be discriminatingly accepted, much less be modified, except by persons who have seen through it – by persons who have cut holes in the confining stockade of verbalized symbols and are able to look at the world and, by reflection, at themselves in a new and relatively unprejudiced way. Such persons are not merely born; they must also be made. But how?

In the field of formal education, what the would-be hole cutter needs is knowledge. Knowledge of the past and present history of cultures in all their fantastic variety, and knowledge about the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses, of language. A man who knows that there have been many cultures, and that each culture claims to be the best and truest of all, will find it hard to take too seriously the boastings and dogmatizings of his own tradition. Similarly a man who knows how symbols are related to experience, who practices the kind of linguistic self-control taught by the exponents of General Semantics, is unlikely to take too seriously the absurd or dangerous nonsense that, within every culture, passes for philosophy, practical wisdom and political argument.

As a preparation for hole cutting, this kind of intellectual education is certainly valuable, but no less certainly insufficient. Training on the verbal level needs to be supplemented by training in wordless experiencing. We must learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate the art of pure receptivity.' - from Culture and the Individual (1963)

'Like the culture by which it is conditioned, normal waking consciousness is at once our best friend and a most dangerous enemy. It helps us to survive and make progress; but at the same time it prevents us from actualizing some of our most valuable potentialities and, on occasion, gets us into all kinds of trouble. To become fully human, man, proud man, the player of fantastic tricks, must learn to get out of his own way; only then will his infinite faculties and angelic apprehension get a chance of coming to the surface.In Blake's words, we must “cleanse the doors of perception”; for when the doors of perception are cleansed, “everything appears to man as it is – infinite.” To normal waking consciousness things are the strictly finite and insulated embodiments of verbal labels. How can we break the habit of automatically imposing our prejudices and the memory of culture-hallowed words upon immediate experience? Answer: by the practice of pure receptivity and mental silence. These will cleanse the doors of perception and, in the process, make possible the emergence of other than normal forms of consciousness – aesthetic consciousness, visionary consciousness, mystical consciousness. Thanks to culture we are the heirs of vast accumulations of knowledge,to a priceless treasure of logical and scientific method, to thousands upon thousands of useful pieces of technological and organizational know-how.But the human mind-body possesses other sources of information, makes use of other types of reasoning, is gifted with an intrinsic wisdom that is independent of cultural conditioning.' - from Culture and the Individual (1963)

'Self-education on the non-verbal level is as old as civilization.”Be still and know that I am God” - for the visionaries and mystics of every time and every place, this has been the first and greatest of the commandments. Poets listen to their Muse and in the same way the visionary and the mystic wait upon inspiration in a state of wise passiveness, of dynamic vacuity. In the Western tradition this state is called “the prayer of simple regard.” At the other end of the world it is described in terms that are psychological rather than theistic. In mental silence we “look into our own Self-Nature,” we “hold fast to the Not-Thought which lies in thought.” We “become that which essentially we have always been.” By wise activity we can acquire useful analytical knowledge about the world, knowledge that can be communicated by means of verbal symbols. In the state of wise passiveness we make possible the emergence of forms of consciousness other than the utilitarian consciousness of normal waking life. Useful analytical knowledge of the world is replaced by some kind of biologically inessential but spiritually enlightening acquaintance with the world as beauty. Or there can be direct acquaintance with the intrinsic strangeness of existence, its wild implausibility. And finally there can be direct acquaintance with the world's unity. This immediate mystical experience of being at one with the fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the infinite diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed in words. Like visionary experience, the experience of the mystic can be talked about only from the outside. Verbal symbols can never convey its inwardness.' - from Culture and the Individual (1963)

'Through these new psychedelics, the subject's normal waking consciousness may be modified in many different ways. It is as though, for each individual, his deeper self decides which kind of experience will be most advantageous. Having decided, it makes use of the drug's mind-changing powers to give the person what he needs. Thus, if it would be good for him to have deeply buried memories uncovered, deeply buried memories will duly be uncovered.In cases where this is of no great importance, something else will happen. Normal waking consciousness will be replaced by aesthetic consciousness, and the world will be perceived in all its unimaginable beauty, all the blazing intensity of its”thereness.” And aesthetic consciousness may modulate into visionary consciousness. Thanks to yet another kind of seeing, the world will now reveal itself as not only unimaginably beautiful, but also fathomlessly mysterious – as a multitudinous abyss of possibility forever actualizing itself into unprecedented forms. New insights into a new, transfigured world of givenness, new combinations of thought and fantasy – the stream of novelty pours through the world in a torrent, whose every drop is charged with meaning.There are the symbols whose meaning lies outside themselves in the given facts of visionary experience, and there are these given facts which signify only themselves. But “only themselves” is also “no less than the divine ground of all being.” “Nothing but this” is at the same time “the Suchness of all.” And now the aesthetic and visionary consciousness deepen into mystical consciousness. The world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity, and the beholder experiences himself as being at one with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and perpetual renewal. Our normal word-conditioned consciousness creates a universe of sharp distinctions, black and white, this and that, me and you and it. In the mystical consciousness of being at one with infinite Oneness, there is a reconciliation of opposites, a perception of the Not-Particular in the particulars, a transcending of our ingrained subject-object relationships with things and persons ; there is an immediate experience of our solidarity with all being and a kind of organic conviction that in spite of the inscrutabilities of fate, in spite of our own dark stupidities and deliberate malevolence, yes, in spite of all that is so manifestly wrong with the world, it is yet, in some profound, paradoxical and entirely inexpressible way,All Right.For normal waking consciousness, the phrase, “God is Love,” is no more than a piece of wishful positive thinking. For the mystical consciousness, it is a self-evident truth.' - - from Culture and the Individual (1963)

The choice is always ours.Then, let me choose

The longest art, the hard Promethean way

Cherishingly to tend and feed and fan

That inward fire,whose small precious flame,

Kindled or quenched,creates

The noble or the ignoble men we are,

The worlds we live in and the very fates,

Our bright or muddy star – from Orion (1931)