The Return of Aldous Huxley
This article explains very well why I admire Huxley so immensely, and why I am going to write a novel where he is one of the main characters.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=6c7qhqnj6thps2p38zg30zsbgk28zxm6
From the issue dated December 12, 2008
Brave New Worldview
The Return of Aldous Huxley
Article tools
By JEFFREY J. KRIPAL
Was that a peace-sign flag I saw waving in Grant Park before
President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech? Despite all the talk of
Obama's being next generation, 21st century, post everything, and of the
divisive culture wars bred in the 60s finally being put to rest, on
election night I couldn't help but think of that distant decade that
brought us the peace sign and how some of its dreams might now be
realized. What's next?
Spiritual exploration and the debunking of religion were other features
of the 60s that people have tended to either ridicule or denounce, but
we seem to be revisiting those themes as well. Before the presidential
campaigns kicked into high gear, David Brooks, a conservative columnist
for The New York Times, wrote an essay called "The Neural Buddhists." In
it he called arguments defending the existence of God against atheists
like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins easy, and predicted that
the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the
sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural
artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In
unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing
each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize
self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."
The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions
of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices
developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical
conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate
nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego. Such ideas,
of course, are part of a much broader interest in "mysticism" and
"spirituality," themselves, perhaps ironically, markers of that
quintessentially modern and eminently democratic turn to the individual
as the most reliable source of religious authority and insight.
Significantly, the modern, Western use of those terms - mysticism and
spirituality - arose in the middle of the 19th century at the exact
moment that science, in the form of an ascending Darwinism, was first
seriously challenging institutional religion. This, of course, is a
cultural war that is still very much with us in the present debates
around religion and science, belief and atheism, creationism and
evolution. Add to that volatile mix the violent terrorism of radical
Islam, the likely role of modern technology and carbon-burning fuels in
global warming and the environmental crisis, and the ability of
institutions and governments to monitor our thoughts and words in
extraordinarily precise and effective ways, and you have all the
ingredients for ... what?
What do neural Buddhists, individualist spiritualities, cultural wars
over science and religion and creationism and evolution, a nature-hating
technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and potentially
omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were all
core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963).
Perhaps not coincidentally, a kind of Huxley renaissance is under way.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Brave New World is being made into a
film, to be directed by Ridley Scott and produced by George DiCaprio,
starring his son, Leonardo. New editions of Huxley's books are in the
works, and serious global interest in his writing is on the rise,
particularly in Eastern Europe. It is worth returning to Huxley, then,
not as he has been for us in the past - the author of the prophetic,
dystopian Brave New World - but as he might be for us in the future.
Huxley was an iconic literary figure who embodied many of the tensions
and coincidences of our contemporary intellectual scene, particularly
those orbiting around those warring twin Titans, science and religion.
On the scientific side, Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley,
the great English defender of Charles Darwin - winner of the first great
cultural war over religion and science - and the man who, in 1869,
coined the word "agnosticism." Other than Darwin himself, T.H. Huxley, a
biologist, probably did more than anyone else to lay the cultural
foundation for our present scientific worldview. The results, as is well
known but not always admitted, were devastating for traditional
religious belief. W.H. Mallock captured the tone in 1878: "It is said
that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing," he
wrote. "One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying."
One can only guess what Mallock would say now.
Aldous's older brother was Sir Julian Huxley, a well-known evolutionary
biologist. Sir Julian thought that there is "one world stuff" that
manifests both material and mental properties, depending upon whether it
is viewed from without (matter) or from within (mind). The mental and
the material aspects of reality, in other words, are two sides of the
same cosmic coin. Aldous would arrive at a nearly identical position,
drawn not from science but from comparative mysticism, and described in
his still popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). His primary
inspiration seems to have been Advaita Vedanta, a classical Indian
philosophy that captured much of elite Hindu thought and practice in the
19th century and subsequently influenced the reception of Hinduism among
American intellectuals and artists in the 20th.
But Huxley was suspicious of gurus and gods of any sort, and he finally
aligned himself with a deep stream of unorthodox doctrine and practice
that he found running through all the Asian religions, which, he
proclaimed in Island (his last novel, published in 1962), was a "new
conscious Wisdom ... prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and
Tantra." That worldview - which Huxley also linked to ancient fertility
cults, the study of sexuality in the modern West, and Darwinian biology
- emerges from the refusal of all traditional dualisms; that is, it
rejects any religious or moral system that separates the world and the
divine, matter and mind, sex and spirit, purity and pollution (and
that's rejecting a lot). Put more positively, Huxley's new Wisdom
focuses on the embodied particularities of moment-to-moment experience,
including sexual experience, as the place of "luminous bliss."
Science, particularly what would become neuroscience, was a key part of
that mature vision. Very late in life, Huxley would drift further and
further into an oddly prescient fusion of Tantric Buddhism and
neurophysiology, a worldview captured in the "neurotheologian" of
Island, identified there as someone "who thinks about people in terms,
simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative
nervous system." This Buddhist neurotheologian was in fact a fictional
embodiment of Huxley's own philosophy, which we might frame as "the
filter thesis." Following the philosophers Henri-Louis Bergson and C.D.
Broad, Huxley consistently argued that consciousness was filtered and
translated by the brain through incredibly complex neurophysiological,
linguistic, psychological, and cultural processes, but not finally
produced by it. We are not who we think we are. Or better, who we think
we are is only a temporary mask (persona) that a greater Consciousness
wears for a time and a season in order to "speak through" (per-sona).
That old English bard had it just right, then: The world really is a
stage.
Huxley also became profoundly interested in psychical research (J.B.
Rhine, founder of the parapsychology lab at Duke University, was a good
friend), in animal magnetism (which he would sometimes practice at home,
even on an occasional baffled guest), various alternative therapeutic
practices (which he was driven to because he was half-blind), and,
perhaps most famously, the spiritual potentials of mind-altering plants
and drugs. Here, too, Huxley was a pioneer. His correspondence with his
psychiatrist friend Humphrey Osmond produced the English neologism
"psychedelic" (literally, "mind-manifesting"), and, of course, he wrote
one of the earliest, and probably the best, pieces of literature on the
mind-manifesting potentials of psychotropic plants and chemicals - that
beautiful little Blakean book The Doors of Perception (1954).
Here again Huxley was thinking along neuroscientific lines, if in highly
unorthodox ways. In Doors Huxley used his filter thesis to explain how
the mystical states so often reported during psychedelic sessions could
be related to the obvious chemical catalysts in an associative but
noncausal way: Essentially, something like mescaline, Huxley speculated,
could suppress the brain's filter, thus allowing what he called "Mind at
Large" to bleed through into the individual's experience. Psychotropic
substances do not cause Mind at Large; they allow us to become aware of
it.
This was no whim or passing phase for Huxley. He was so committed to the
sacramental potential of psychedelic substances that he literally ended
his life on LSD. Huxley's second wife, Laura, in her lovely biography of
her husband, This Timeless Moment (1975), published a facsimile of the
very last sentence Aldous shakily wrote a few hours before he died of
cancer: a self-prescription for 100 micrograms of LSD to be delivered
intramuscularly. That is the door through which he departed the stage.
In what Huxley called Mind at Large lies the deepest secret of his
work's significance for us today, caught as we have been for so long in
a conflicted world of historically constructed political, ethnic, and
religious roles, or masks.
Huxley's vision was not yet in place in 1932, when he published what
remains his most famous work, Brave New World. The story revolves around
a future civilization that produces happiness through a regime of high
biotechnology in which humans are genetically engineered in test tubes
on a conveyor belt and then socialized into a rigid caste system. The
regime includes abolition of the nuclear family, establishment of a free
sexuality decoupled from procreation, systematic hatred of nature, and a
constant government supply of "soma tablets" - named after the
mysterious ambrosia of ancient Indian Vedic seers - that deliver
mindless happiness or, in higher doses, sound sleep. Motherhood is
obscene in this brave new world, and all genuine individuality is
socialized away. The novel depicts a scientifically savvy but
superficial monoculture that accomplishes its day-to-day tasks through
social stratification, the systematic suppression of individualism, and
an unlimited supply of free sex and drugs. Constant distraction makes
the system work.
Brave New World was the mirror opposite or photographic negative of the
world Huxley described 30 years later in Island. That novel, the
author's utopian answer to his own dystopian legacy, revolves around a
jaded Western journalist, Will Farnaby, who finds himself shipwrecked on
the island of Pala. Founded by an Indian Tantric Buddhist (the Old Raja)
and a Scottish doctor who had become friends, Palanian culture is a
synthesis of East and West that answers the authoritarian monoculture of
Brave New World point by point.
Biotechnology is present, but as a kind of ecologically wise
agricultural system. Family planning is in place too, but through
genetically gifted frozen sperm and the disciplined practice of
maithuna, a kind of coitus reservatus inspired by the American Oneida
community and Asian Tantric practices that allows Palanians as much sex
as they wish without the constant burden of pregnancy (maithuna is a
Sanskrit term for "ritual sexual intercourse"). The nuclear family has
been abolished on Pala, but only to increase human attachment among all
its inhabitants and share the responsibilities of child rearing among
multiple couples and families. Soma tablets have been replaced by
"moksha medicine," a sacred mushroom named after the Sanskrit word for
spiritual liberation, which initiates the taker into a direct experience
of cosmic consciousness - that is, Mind at Large. Finally, just as Brave
New World ends with the despairing suicide of the rare and true
individual, Island ends with the political murder of the enlightened
island doctor, as Pala is invaded by a foreign power hungry for the
island's oil reserves and morally supported by a fundamentalist
religion.
Things do not quite end there, though. The novel really ends, exactly as
it began, with the island's mynah birds repeating the mantra they have
been trained to mimic over and over again: "Attention." Constant
attention to the here and now is the key to the island's contemplative
culture, even and especially when it is being invaded by a military
power bent on oil, with God on its side.
I find it strange, and more than a little depressing, that, despite all
of this well-known biographical and metaphysical material, Aldous Huxley
is best known today for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Why is a
man who had so much to say about the synthesis of science and
spirituality and the deeper dimensions of human consciousness known
primarily for a novel about the authoritarian horrors and technological
dead-ends of the modern consumer state? Why is this consummate
individualist, intrigued by the potential for spiritual ecstasy, still
mostly identified with a story of moral despair and fascist political
control? Obviously, part of the answer is because Brave New World was so
incredibly accurate. But Huxley did more than diagnose the disease; he
also provided what he thought of as a realistic treatment in Island.
I interviewed Laura Huxley about Island a few years ago (she died last
year at the age of 96). She described the novel to me as "the last will
and testament" of her late husband. Island, she suggested, is where he
left his most sincere convictions and deepest thoughts about what human
beings are capable of at their best. He was very careful, she pointed
out, not to include anything in the novel that was not possible, that
had not been practiced somewhere before and found useful. So he was
quite upset when Island was received as a piece of fantasy rather than a
practical program for translating his abstract philosophy of
consciousness and existential mysticism into effective social,
educational, and contemplative experiments. Island was no fantasy for
Aldous Huxley. It was, as Laura said, his "ultimate legacy."
This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous
Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as
important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read
together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of
religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In
religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book
declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's
grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky
(the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of
Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from
Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God
the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to
scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that
it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."
Huxley in fact had already said much the same thing eight years before,
in a foreword to the first book of one of his closest friend's, the
Indian philosopher and education reformer Krishnamurti. In that foreword
to The First and Last Freedom (1954), Huxley wrote that a man who has
resolved his relation to the domains of science and religion - to "the
two worlds of data and symbols" - is "a man who has no beliefs." He
adopts beliefs merely as tools with which to address practical problems,
and he holds them lightly. There are many ways, Huxley taught us, to be
religious without being religious: Religious identity, after all, is
just another muddy filter through which the clear light of the Void
shines.
Of course, writers and thinkers have been discussing the fusion of
science and mysticism for years; "neural Buddhism," by other names, was
an element of the human-potential movement that began in the early 60s
at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., partly inspired by Huxley and
his lectures on "human potentialities." I sometimes wonder if the
counterculture of the 1960s, which arose in tandem with the
human-potential movement, in a much more ecstatic and decidedly less
intellectual mode, had the unfortunate effect of delegitimizing the
mystically inclined Huxley in the broader culture. Certainly many of the
counterculture's shortcomings and casualties arose not from following
Huxley through the doors of perception, but from not following him
closely enough. In particular, the counterculture lacked Huxley's
intellectual discipline and his high regard for the arts of reading and
writing.
Huxley was an accomplished British-American literary figure, a gifted
intellectual product of Eton and Oxford, and a member of England's
cultural aristocracy. And he remained so, even in his psychedelic
explorations, which were neither casual entertainments nor public
parties but profound and private philosophical considerations. Moreover,
he rejected the idea that such powerful substances should be made
available to everyone. Quite the contrary. At one point, he complained
of his good friend Timothy Leary, whom he feared was messing it up for
everyone: "I am very fond of Tim - but why, oh why, does he have to be
such an ass?" He told Leary to "go about your business quietly." Never
was advice more spectacularly ignored.
In his 2002 biography of Huxley, which finally gets the writer's
worldview right, Dana Sawyer suggests that Huxley's work can fruitfully
be read as a life-long attempt to answer his grandfather's call to
agnosticism. "I remain an agnostic," Huxley wrote, "who aspires to be a
Gnostic - but a gnostic only on the mystical level, a gnostic without
symbols, cosmologies or a pantheon."
And what are we? As a culture, we are in the midst of a vast,
decades-long repression and forgetting of Huxley's utopian island Pala,
where consciousness is literally cosmic, where the body is mystically
erotic, where consumerism is dead and the earth is alive. Until now, we
have chosen to enact his "brave new world" instead, a mechanical world
of advanced science, unsustainable consumerism, looming nuclear
apocalypse, and pending ecological disaster. It seems a good time to
bring Aldous Huxley back - but the whole Huxley this time, not just the
dystopian one. Yes, we desperately need our literary prophets and social
critics. But we also need our intellectual mystics, agnostic gnostics,
and Buddhist neurotheologians.
Jeffrey J. Kripal is professor and chair of religious studies at Rice
University and author, most recently, of Esalen: America and the
Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=6c7qhqnj6thps2p38zg30zsbgk28zxm6
From the issue dated December 12, 2008
Brave New Worldview
The Return of Aldous Huxley
Article tools
By JEFFREY J. KRIPAL
Was that a peace-sign flag I saw waving in Grant Park before
President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech? Despite all the talk of
Obama's being next generation, 21st century, post everything, and of the
divisive culture wars bred in the 60s finally being put to rest, on
election night I couldn't help but think of that distant decade that
brought us the peace sign and how some of its dreams might now be
realized. What's next?
Spiritual exploration and the debunking of religion were other features
of the 60s that people have tended to either ridicule or denounce, but
we seem to be revisiting those themes as well. Before the presidential
campaigns kicked into high gear, David Brooks, a conservative columnist
for The New York Times, wrote an essay called "The Neural Buddhists." In
it he called arguments defending the existence of God against atheists
like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins easy, and predicted that
the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the
sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural
artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In
unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing
each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize
self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."
The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions
of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices
developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical
conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate
nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego. Such ideas,
of course, are part of a much broader interest in "mysticism" and
"spirituality," themselves, perhaps ironically, markers of that
quintessentially modern and eminently democratic turn to the individual
as the most reliable source of religious authority and insight.
Significantly, the modern, Western use of those terms - mysticism and
spirituality - arose in the middle of the 19th century at the exact
moment that science, in the form of an ascending Darwinism, was first
seriously challenging institutional religion. This, of course, is a
cultural war that is still very much with us in the present debates
around religion and science, belief and atheism, creationism and
evolution. Add to that volatile mix the violent terrorism of radical
Islam, the likely role of modern technology and carbon-burning fuels in
global warming and the environmental crisis, and the ability of
institutions and governments to monitor our thoughts and words in
extraordinarily precise and effective ways, and you have all the
ingredients for ... what?
What do neural Buddhists, individualist spiritualities, cultural wars
over science and religion and creationism and evolution, a nature-hating
technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and potentially
omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were all
core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley
(1894-1963).
Perhaps not coincidentally, a kind of Huxley renaissance is under way.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Brave New World is being made into a
film, to be directed by Ridley Scott and produced by George DiCaprio,
starring his son, Leonardo. New editions of Huxley's books are in the
works, and serious global interest in his writing is on the rise,
particularly in Eastern Europe. It is worth returning to Huxley, then,
not as he has been for us in the past - the author of the prophetic,
dystopian Brave New World - but as he might be for us in the future.
Huxley was an iconic literary figure who embodied many of the tensions
and coincidences of our contemporary intellectual scene, particularly
those orbiting around those warring twin Titans, science and religion.
On the scientific side, Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley,
the great English defender of Charles Darwin - winner of the first great
cultural war over religion and science - and the man who, in 1869,
coined the word "agnosticism." Other than Darwin himself, T.H. Huxley, a
biologist, probably did more than anyone else to lay the cultural
foundation for our present scientific worldview. The results, as is well
known but not always admitted, were devastating for traditional
religious belief. W.H. Mallock captured the tone in 1878: "It is said
that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing," he
wrote. "One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying."
One can only guess what Mallock would say now.
Aldous's older brother was Sir Julian Huxley, a well-known evolutionary
biologist. Sir Julian thought that there is "one world stuff" that
manifests both material and mental properties, depending upon whether it
is viewed from without (matter) or from within (mind). The mental and
the material aspects of reality, in other words, are two sides of the
same cosmic coin. Aldous would arrive at a nearly identical position,
drawn not from science but from comparative mysticism, and described in
his still popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). His primary
inspiration seems to have been Advaita Vedanta, a classical Indian
philosophy that captured much of elite Hindu thought and practice in the
19th century and subsequently influenced the reception of Hinduism among
American intellectuals and artists in the 20th.
But Huxley was suspicious of gurus and gods of any sort, and he finally
aligned himself with a deep stream of unorthodox doctrine and practice
that he found running through all the Asian religions, which, he
proclaimed in Island (his last novel, published in 1962), was a "new
conscious Wisdom ... prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and
Tantra." That worldview - which Huxley also linked to ancient fertility
cults, the study of sexuality in the modern West, and Darwinian biology
- emerges from the refusal of all traditional dualisms; that is, it
rejects any religious or moral system that separates the world and the
divine, matter and mind, sex and spirit, purity and pollution (and
that's rejecting a lot). Put more positively, Huxley's new Wisdom
focuses on the embodied particularities of moment-to-moment experience,
including sexual experience, as the place of "luminous bliss."
Science, particularly what would become neuroscience, was a key part of
that mature vision. Very late in life, Huxley would drift further and
further into an oddly prescient fusion of Tantric Buddhism and
neurophysiology, a worldview captured in the "neurotheologian" of
Island, identified there as someone "who thinks about people in terms,
simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative
nervous system." This Buddhist neurotheologian was in fact a fictional
embodiment of Huxley's own philosophy, which we might frame as "the
filter thesis." Following the philosophers Henri-Louis Bergson and C.D.
Broad, Huxley consistently argued that consciousness was filtered and
translated by the brain through incredibly complex neurophysiological,
linguistic, psychological, and cultural processes, but not finally
produced by it. We are not who we think we are. Or better, who we think
we are is only a temporary mask (persona) that a greater Consciousness
wears for a time and a season in order to "speak through" (per-sona).
That old English bard had it just right, then: The world really is a
stage.
Huxley also became profoundly interested in psychical research (J.B.
Rhine, founder of the parapsychology lab at Duke University, was a good
friend), in animal magnetism (which he would sometimes practice at home,
even on an occasional baffled guest), various alternative therapeutic
practices (which he was driven to because he was half-blind), and,
perhaps most famously, the spiritual potentials of mind-altering plants
and drugs. Here, too, Huxley was a pioneer. His correspondence with his
psychiatrist friend Humphrey Osmond produced the English neologism
"psychedelic" (literally, "mind-manifesting"), and, of course, he wrote
one of the earliest, and probably the best, pieces of literature on the
mind-manifesting potentials of psychotropic plants and chemicals - that
beautiful little Blakean book The Doors of Perception (1954).
Here again Huxley was thinking along neuroscientific lines, if in highly
unorthodox ways. In Doors Huxley used his filter thesis to explain how
the mystical states so often reported during psychedelic sessions could
be related to the obvious chemical catalysts in an associative but
noncausal way: Essentially, something like mescaline, Huxley speculated,
could suppress the brain's filter, thus allowing what he called "Mind at
Large" to bleed through into the individual's experience. Psychotropic
substances do not cause Mind at Large; they allow us to become aware of
it.
This was no whim or passing phase for Huxley. He was so committed to the
sacramental potential of psychedelic substances that he literally ended
his life on LSD. Huxley's second wife, Laura, in her lovely biography of
her husband, This Timeless Moment (1975), published a facsimile of the
very last sentence Aldous shakily wrote a few hours before he died of
cancer: a self-prescription for 100 micrograms of LSD to be delivered
intramuscularly. That is the door through which he departed the stage.
In what Huxley called Mind at Large lies the deepest secret of his
work's significance for us today, caught as we have been for so long in
a conflicted world of historically constructed political, ethnic, and
religious roles, or masks.
Huxley's vision was not yet in place in 1932, when he published what
remains his most famous work, Brave New World. The story revolves around
a future civilization that produces happiness through a regime of high
biotechnology in which humans are genetically engineered in test tubes
on a conveyor belt and then socialized into a rigid caste system. The
regime includes abolition of the nuclear family, establishment of a free
sexuality decoupled from procreation, systematic hatred of nature, and a
constant government supply of "soma tablets" - named after the
mysterious ambrosia of ancient Indian Vedic seers - that deliver
mindless happiness or, in higher doses, sound sleep. Motherhood is
obscene in this brave new world, and all genuine individuality is
socialized away. The novel depicts a scientifically savvy but
superficial monoculture that accomplishes its day-to-day tasks through
social stratification, the systematic suppression of individualism, and
an unlimited supply of free sex and drugs. Constant distraction makes
the system work.
Brave New World was the mirror opposite or photographic negative of the
world Huxley described 30 years later in Island. That novel, the
author's utopian answer to his own dystopian legacy, revolves around a
jaded Western journalist, Will Farnaby, who finds himself shipwrecked on
the island of Pala. Founded by an Indian Tantric Buddhist (the Old Raja)
and a Scottish doctor who had become friends, Palanian culture is a
synthesis of East and West that answers the authoritarian monoculture of
Brave New World point by point.
Biotechnology is present, but as a kind of ecologically wise
agricultural system. Family planning is in place too, but through
genetically gifted frozen sperm and the disciplined practice of
maithuna, a kind of coitus reservatus inspired by the American Oneida
community and Asian Tantric practices that allows Palanians as much sex
as they wish without the constant burden of pregnancy (maithuna is a
Sanskrit term for "ritual sexual intercourse"). The nuclear family has
been abolished on Pala, but only to increase human attachment among all
its inhabitants and share the responsibilities of child rearing among
multiple couples and families. Soma tablets have been replaced by
"moksha medicine," a sacred mushroom named after the Sanskrit word for
spiritual liberation, which initiates the taker into a direct experience
of cosmic consciousness - that is, Mind at Large. Finally, just as Brave
New World ends with the despairing suicide of the rare and true
individual, Island ends with the political murder of the enlightened
island doctor, as Pala is invaded by a foreign power hungry for the
island's oil reserves and morally supported by a fundamentalist
religion.
Things do not quite end there, though. The novel really ends, exactly as
it began, with the island's mynah birds repeating the mantra they have
been trained to mimic over and over again: "Attention." Constant
attention to the here and now is the key to the island's contemplative
culture, even and especially when it is being invaded by a military
power bent on oil, with God on its side.
I find it strange, and more than a little depressing, that, despite all
of this well-known biographical and metaphysical material, Aldous Huxley
is best known today for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Why is a
man who had so much to say about the synthesis of science and
spirituality and the deeper dimensions of human consciousness known
primarily for a novel about the authoritarian horrors and technological
dead-ends of the modern consumer state? Why is this consummate
individualist, intrigued by the potential for spiritual ecstasy, still
mostly identified with a story of moral despair and fascist political
control? Obviously, part of the answer is because Brave New World was so
incredibly accurate. But Huxley did more than diagnose the disease; he
also provided what he thought of as a realistic treatment in Island.
I interviewed Laura Huxley about Island a few years ago (she died last
year at the age of 96). She described the novel to me as "the last will
and testament" of her late husband. Island, she suggested, is where he
left his most sincere convictions and deepest thoughts about what human
beings are capable of at their best. He was very careful, she pointed
out, not to include anything in the novel that was not possible, that
had not been practiced somewhere before and found useful. So he was
quite upset when Island was received as a piece of fantasy rather than a
practical program for translating his abstract philosophy of
consciousness and existential mysticism into effective social,
educational, and contemplative experiments. Island was no fantasy for
Aldous Huxley. It was, as Laura said, his "ultimate legacy."
This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous
Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as
important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read
together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of
religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In
religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book
declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's
grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky
(the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of
Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from
Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God
the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to
scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that
it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."
Huxley in fact had already said much the same thing eight years before,
in a foreword to the first book of one of his closest friend's, the
Indian philosopher and education reformer Krishnamurti. In that foreword
to The First and Last Freedom (1954), Huxley wrote that a man who has
resolved his relation to the domains of science and religion - to "the
two worlds of data and symbols" - is "a man who has no beliefs." He
adopts beliefs merely as tools with which to address practical problems,
and he holds them lightly. There are many ways, Huxley taught us, to be
religious without being religious: Religious identity, after all, is
just another muddy filter through which the clear light of the Void
shines.
Of course, writers and thinkers have been discussing the fusion of
science and mysticism for years; "neural Buddhism," by other names, was
an element of the human-potential movement that began in the early 60s
at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., partly inspired by Huxley and
his lectures on "human potentialities." I sometimes wonder if the
counterculture of the 1960s, which arose in tandem with the
human-potential movement, in a much more ecstatic and decidedly less
intellectual mode, had the unfortunate effect of delegitimizing the
mystically inclined Huxley in the broader culture. Certainly many of the
counterculture's shortcomings and casualties arose not from following
Huxley through the doors of perception, but from not following him
closely enough. In particular, the counterculture lacked Huxley's
intellectual discipline and his high regard for the arts of reading and
writing.
Huxley was an accomplished British-American literary figure, a gifted
intellectual product of Eton and Oxford, and a member of England's
cultural aristocracy. And he remained so, even in his psychedelic
explorations, which were neither casual entertainments nor public
parties but profound and private philosophical considerations. Moreover,
he rejected the idea that such powerful substances should be made
available to everyone. Quite the contrary. At one point, he complained
of his good friend Timothy Leary, whom he feared was messing it up for
everyone: "I am very fond of Tim - but why, oh why, does he have to be
such an ass?" He told Leary to "go about your business quietly." Never
was advice more spectacularly ignored.
In his 2002 biography of Huxley, which finally gets the writer's
worldview right, Dana Sawyer suggests that Huxley's work can fruitfully
be read as a life-long attempt to answer his grandfather's call to
agnosticism. "I remain an agnostic," Huxley wrote, "who aspires to be a
Gnostic - but a gnostic only on the mystical level, a gnostic without
symbols, cosmologies or a pantheon."
And what are we? As a culture, we are in the midst of a vast,
decades-long repression and forgetting of Huxley's utopian island Pala,
where consciousness is literally cosmic, where the body is mystically
erotic, where consumerism is dead and the earth is alive. Until now, we
have chosen to enact his "brave new world" instead, a mechanical world
of advanced science, unsustainable consumerism, looming nuclear
apocalypse, and pending ecological disaster. It seems a good time to
bring Aldous Huxley back - but the whole Huxley this time, not just the
dystopian one. Yes, we desperately need our literary prophets and social
critics. But we also need our intellectual mystics, agnostic gnostics,
and Buddhist neurotheologians.
Jeffrey J. Kripal is professor and chair of religious studies at Rice
University and author, most recently, of Esalen: America and the
Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007).