The high intelligence of
genius always has an inclination to grow towards mysticism. This is in
the nature of things and less astounding than it may seem. For the
higher levels of rational development border closely upon the
transrational and the omega pull in rational development drives the man
of genius to topple this border. One day she or he will cross the line.
Then the mystical aspect of life will be accepted and understood.
Simply because the man of genius has an open intellect. He wants to
understand. He is curious about all phenomena. And the mystical is a
phenomenon of life itself.
We see this high level of
rational development and its inclination towards mysticism beautifully
illustrated in existential philosophers like Kierkegaard and Camus.
Their intelligence did not want to exclude the subjective from their
philosophical inquiries. They were not content with looking at life in
an objective and detached way, but they also wanted to
investigate what the relation was between life and the self. They had
come to understand that philosophical inquiries only made sense if the
self was somehow included in the picture of life presented. In their
eyes there is no such thing as a loose consciousness floating around
in space, grabbing on to an object in the abstract. Consciousness is
always connected to a subject. And the subject is in need of
explanation if we want to understand the object -in the case of
philosophy: life in its totality.
But this led to a crisis in
existential philosophy. For once the self became an object of study,
all of its characteristics were laid bare. Though they had wanted to
make progress in the field of philosophy, they had in fact opened up a
Pandora box. As the existentialists discovered, and they discovered it
the hard way, the self is a very dangerous object of study. It can
really drive you mad if you do not find the right solutions to the
problem of self. Kierkegaard and Camus did not find such a solution.
Eventually madness made an end to all of their suffering. But they had
moments that their genius was rewarded with true mystical insights. If
you skip aside all the humbug and the lunacy in the writings of
Kierkegaard you will find some pearls of deep mystical truth, never so
beautifully phrased in the whole history of philosophy. Camus in his
finest moments crossed also the border of transrationality on occasion.
In his le malentendu Caligula,
for instance, the mad main character of
the play tries to sketch out for himself what a world beyond
rationality would look like. The result is sheer mysticism and mystical
thought.
So a man of genius, brave
enough to investigate everything that can be an object of study, does
not only have to have openness of mind, sincerity and curiosity, she
also needs to have the guts and the healthy bowels to proceed in very
dangerous territory. For deep awareness and high intelligence can
really drive you mad. But if these conditions are met, then something
very beautiful may emerge, something of extreme value. Then rationality
will take the dive into the ocean of transrationality. A wider vista
may open up. A deeper intelligence and happiness may be the result. But
before the jump occurs, there is always the risk of rationality
slipping back into the madness of prerationality. This kind of
regression may easily happen with unbalanced and very tensed minds,
like it happened to Kierkegaard and Camus. With them it was paradise
lost, the asylum regained.
But in a number of exceptional
cases the border is crossed. In these cases a high intelligence is
coupled with a sound mind and a healthy complexion. Then the organic
conditions to give the intelligence a firm physiological base and
structure are met. Such an intelligence is not so easily upset, because
it is rooted in a strong and healthy nervous system. Thinking in these
cases does not weaken the organism, but instead strengthens it. It is
opened up, instead of closed down. It happens only rarely. But in these
cases thinking and intelligence support life.
Such was the case with Aldous
Huxley. From childhood on his intelligence had always been bright and
sharp. He had a drive to understand the world. He wanted to know what
it all meant. So he read all that he could lay a hand on. He surely
wasn´t a born mystic. In his twenties and thirties he was even an
avowed rationalist, more of the extravert than the introvert type, as
he described himself in his Proper
Studies (1927). In an article in Vanity Fair of the same year
he compared his type of reasoning with
Goethe and Bergson and concluded:
I
have a non-mystical mind; hence their
arguments leave me entirely unconvinced. Goethe´s remark about
the magical properties and symbolic virtues of triangle strike me as
being pure nonsense.
And in a letter to a reader in
1929 he described his own stance, when he wrote the essays of Do What
You Will (1929):
...Being
an unmetaphysically-minded person
preoccupied with phenomenal appearances, not ultimate reality, I think
mostly of the diverse Many and not much of the final One. My essay
(`One and Many´) in Do What
You Will is a statement of the
observable facts of diversity so stupidly overlooked by contemporary
science and contemporary religion. (...) Any tentative solutions of the
problems raised are never (...) metaphysical solutions, only practical,
ethical, sociological and psychological solutions.
But Huxley disliked
prejudices. He was one of those very few with the openness of mind to
accept other ways of thinking. It intrigued him. Already as a boy at
Eton he read Jacob Boehme, the famous Medieval German mystic, and
refused to close the book. It was interesting indeed, he said, though
not congenial. But learning comes from what is different and not from
what´s the same. So already at that time he tried to understand
what the mystics learned. Though not being very religious himself, he
considered it an intellectual challenge to understand religion.
At age 17 he contracted a
severe eye disease which left him almost blind at the time. He had to
learn braille. This near blindness not only sharpened his intelligence,
but also, by being forced to look inwards, kindled a small
mystical flame, that did not become ablaze right away, but remained
always there, smouldering, waiting for the fuel of his more riper
years. For Huxley in his later days became little short of a mystic.
But already in his more positivistic and rationalistic twenties and
thirties we can detect this mystical flame in his writings. In one of
his first novels Antic Hay
(1923) there is a passage that is written
with inspired mysticism. It is worth quoting at large:
`There
are quiet places also in the
mind´, he [Gumbril] said meditatively. ´But we build
bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately -to put a stop to the
quietness. (...) All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head
-round and round, continually (...) What´s it for? What´s
it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it,
to pretend at any cost that it isn´t there. Ah, but it is; it is
there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake
at night -not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep- the quiet
re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits (...)
we´ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes
itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It
fills one, it grows -a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It
grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying (.....)
For one´s alone in the crystal, and there´s no support from
the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external
and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on (...) There is nothing to
laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows.
Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something
approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something
inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal,
nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to
touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you´d die; all
the regular, habitual daily part of you would die (....) one would have
to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange,
unheard of manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can´t
face the advancing thing. One daren´t .....
....The quiet....the beautiful
crystal....terrifying...you´d die...... These words of
mysticism
were written in the early twenties of the last century. They were
written by a Huxley who was at that time famous for his iconoclastic
and agnostic rationalism. But already then we meet another Huxley: a
deeply religious and mystical man and writer. Had the Jacob Boehme of
his schooldays somehow managed to nestle himself in his mind and heart?
Whatever the explanation may be, the quotation above is immensely
beautiful and of great mystical importance. It shows that Huxley was
already at an early age aware of the mystical dimension of life.
The theme of mysticism recurs
two years later in his novel Those
Barren Leaves (1925). One of the
main characters of the book, Calamy, has gone to live by himself in the
mountains, to sort out the problems of his life. As one of the reasons
he gives:
`The
mind must be open, unperturbed, empty
of irrelevant things, quiet. There´s no room for thoughts in a
half shut, cluttered mind....`
Calamy wants to find the same
solutions as Gautama the Buddha did. He wants to make a
`breakthrough´ in his mode of thinking and cross the line, the
line between ordinary modes of thinking and enhanced forms of
consciousness.
`Perhaps
you really do get, in some queer
sort of way, beyond the limitations of ordinary existence. And you may
see that everything that seems reel is in fact illusory -maya, in fact,
the cosmic illusion. Behind it you catch a glimpse of reality.`
In the light of later
developments it is not far fetched to conclude that we can detect in
these words the voice of Huxley himself. Already at an early age he
wondered about the line between rationality and postrationality. He was
intrigued by the utter mysteriousness of life. He knew the limitations
of rationality. His intuition whispered that there must be something
more, a farther reach for mankind. Later in life he devoted much time
and energy in mapping out these reaches.
But it is one of the purposes
of this article to show that mysticism had always been something of a
counterpoint in the life of Huxley. Behind the `unmetaphysically-minded
person preoccupied with phenomenal appearances` there was always that
other Huxley, who was interested in the One more than the Many. Even in such a
rationalistic, detached, almost cynical book like his famous Point
Counter Point (1928), that became celebrated with the young for
its
Nietzschian revolt and iconoclastic breaking of taboos, a different
tone is heard. In the beginning of the book listening to the Sarabande
of Bach´s B minor suite for flute leads to the following
mesmerizing thoughts:
(....)
a slow and lovely meditation
on the beauty (in spite of the squalor), the oneness (in spite of such
bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a
unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis
dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly
and overwhelmingly convinced.
The
turning point
Though Huxley, as said, was
interested in religion and mysticism for the greater part of his early
life, the final breakthrough, the ultimate shift from rationality to
postrationality occurred in the three years before his migration to the
US in 1937. In 1935 he was by then forty two years of age and entered
into, what we now call, his midlife crisis. The crisis, in a way
reflective of the crisis the whole of Europe had to face in those
years, was a severe one. It was accompanied by months of insomnia,
which left him utterly paralyzed with fatigue and lack of
concentration. He became extremely worried not to be able to work
again. He had always prided himself in being able to support his family
with his plume. Now his whole future became uncertain. He tried
anything from extra vitamins to hypnotism. In the end the instructions
his friend Gerald Heard gave him, along
with the physical exercises of
the then famous Alexander-technique, benefited him the most. Gerald had
taught him some yogic breathing. In a natural way these techniques
developed in the course of 1935 into a form of meditation. This
crisis, together with the probed solutions, eventually caused the
counterpoint of mysticism to become more prominent, both in his
personal life and in his writings. His novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) can
be seen as the outcome of this crisis. It is of key interest in the
development of Huxley´s mysticism.
In the book the main
character, Anthony Beavis (probably short for ´beata
visio´), suffers, just like Huxley himself, from a deep
existential crisis, following a murderous attack on his life. In the
end, after his whole life is put upside down, Anthony finds comfort and
strength in a religious answer to his problems. But it is not any
religious answer. It is a very personal one, reaching out to him in his
solitude and loneliness. The solution to the riddle of life must be
found in that one four letter word, that is so frequently misused:
`It
begins,` he answered, `with trying to
cultivate the difficult art of loving people`.
´But
most people are detestable.`
`They´re
detestable, because we detest them. If we like them, they´d be
likeable.`
´Do
you think that´s true?`
`I´m
sure it´s true.`
`And
what do you do after that?`
`There
is no after´, he replied. `Because it´s a lifetime´s
job.`
(Eyeless
in Gaza: last chapter)
Anthony Beavis, just like
Calamy in Those Barren Leaves
a decade earlier, wants to make the
mystical breakthrough, a breakthrough that so heavily preoccupied
Huxley´s mind during his crisis. The thoughts of Anthony reflect
Huxley´s own pondering at the time:
Some
way, Anthony was thinking, of getting
beyond the books, beyond the perfumed and resilient flesh of women,
beyond fear and sloth, beyond the painful but secretly flattering
vision of the world as menagerie and asylum....
'the
contemplative life': it can be made a kind of highbrow substitute for
Marlene Dietrich: a subject for erotic musing in the twilight.
Meditation -valuable (.....) only as a mean of effecting desirable
changes in the personality and mode of existence. To live
contemplatively is not to live in some deliciously voluptuous or
flattering Poona; it is to live in London, but to live there in a
non-cockney style.
(Anthony´s
diary, 17 sept. 1934)
The
American years
In 1937 Gerald Heard and the
Huxley family set off for a lecture tour around the US. Because of the
impending doom in Europe they were not to return till after the war. By
that time Heard and Huxley were so content with living in California
that they chose to remain there for the rest of their lives. California proved also beneficial for a further
development of their spiritual life. It was here that Heard founded his
Trabuco College, a combination of university and monastery in one. It
was here that Huxley got acquainted with Jiddu
Krishnamurti.
They
remained close friends for the rest of their lives. Huxley also got
involved with the legacy of Vivekananda, the Vedanta Movement of
California, and got initiated by Swami Prahbavananda. All these
meetings and acquaintances gave another impetus to his study of
mysticism, both from the East and the West. His contributions to the
periodical `Vedanta and the Western World` belong to the most beautiful
essays in mystical literature.
In 1945 Huxley surprised
friend and fiend with the publication of a textbook on religion the
Perennial Philosophy, just like his Texts and Praetexts a combination
of quotations from men of genius together with his own commentary
thereon. It was the outcome of his devotion to mysticism in the years
following his crisis in the late thirties. To some readers who more
appreciated the extravert rationalist Huxley, the book was a
disappointment. They thought he had gone hazy and wacky and had
deserted the cause of clear empirical thinking. But they failed to see
that there had always been an undertone of mysticism in his writings.
It was only now, in the liberal climate of California and prompted by
his own inner development, that the religious colors on his pallet
became more prominent.
In retrospect the writing of the
Perennial Philosophy is but a
logical continuation of much that
preoccupied Huxley at an earlier date. He had always been concerned
with the state the world was in. He always thought it the duty of a
writer to warn and educate mankind, in order to create a better world.
Even the purpose of his rather cynical Brave New World (1931) was a
positive one: he wanted to warn against some negative traits in the
prevailing modernism of his time, to make a stop as long as it was
possible. Some ten years later, with the writing of the Perennial
Philosophy and Grey Eminence,
he had come to the conclusion that the
solution to the problem was a religious one:
A
totally unmystical world would be a world
totally blind and insane. (Grey Eminence)
So the mystical element became
more and more prominent in the work of Aldous Huxley. He devoted more
and more time in discussing the theory and the implications, both
individual and social, of mysticism in his books. But how was the
person Huxley effected by all this? Was Huxley merely philosophically
interested in the study of mysticism -like any curious intellectual is-
or was his interest existential? Was mysticism of vital importance to
himself, or was it merely one of the numerous of subjects his mind got
interested in in the course of his life? To get a glimpse of Huxley the
man, behind Huxley the intellectual, a telling letter from his wife
Maria to her sister Jeanne has fortunately (for much of the Huxley
correspondence has been destroyed by fire) survived. The year is 1952.
Huxley is now an older man of fifty eight:
You
know for how many years we´ve
loved Aldous and known his goodness and his sweetness and his honesty
-but you also know how tiring, in spite of all this, he was to live
with - sad to live with. Well now, he is transformed, transfigured.
What I mean to say is that this change has been working in an
intangible way and for a very, very long time, but that the
result suddenly exploded - and I say exploded.
Aldous no longer looks
the same, his attitude is not the same, his moral and intellectual
attitude, his attitude to animals, to people, the clouds, to the
telephone ringing (and that´s going very far) - no let´s go
further and say that he even decides his own decisions- (.....) At last
he has reached the point of putting into daily practice everything he
wants to practise, and this even without realizing it. (....) His
search for this road, we know, did not only come out of his
philosophical interests; he helped himself by psychological
experiments, by spiritual exercises.
And in a letter to her son
Matthew she wrote:
Aldous
in fact
is being spontaneous. (...) Aldous who could never say the right thing
(I mean in the psychological sense and strains), now cannot say the
wrong thing -and what is more, bubbles with the right things at the
right moments and with the most difficult people and in the most
difficult circumstances and in the most unaccountable positions.
(.....) In fact he lets his E or super-conscious run him. There is no
more a blockage between him and his super-conscious.
The
experiment
In 1953 Huxley met dr.
Humphrey Osmond, an English psychiatrist from Canada, who had done some
experiments
with the drug mescaline to find a cure for certain forms of mental
disease. This drug, used by the native Americans in their religious
rites, was in later years to be artificially and chemically reproduced
under the name of LSD. According to dr. Osmond the drug provoked
certain changes in the mind, that could be compared to the experiences
certain mystics had described in their literature. Huxley was very much
interested. For here he could perhaps directly experience what the
source of religion and mysticism was. He knew in a way what to expect
because of his own mystical training. But he also wanted to know the
workings of this very ancient and, for native Americans, holy drug. So
he decided to take the drug as an experiment.
He knew well that the mystical
experience was an integral part of the human psyche. It is part of us
being human. We have been born with this inclination towards mysticism
and religion. We are all homines
religiosi by birthright. So the
mystical experience is not something that is or can be
artificially implanted into the human psyche. It is there
already. So he clearly understood that it was not the drug that called
for these experiences to originate. All it did was to remove certain
internal neurological blockades, so the original faculties of the mind
would come to light. In a letter to dr. Osmond he wrote:
Disease,
mescaline, emotional shock,
aesthetic experience and mystical enlightenment have the power, each in
its different way and in varying degrees, to inhibit the functions of
the normal self and its ordinary brain activity, thus permitting the
`other world` to rise into consciousness (...)
Under the supervision of dr.
Osmond and his wife Maria also in the room, Huxley took the drug. Its
workings lasted for some fourty eight hours. He described the mystical
transformation of consciousness, provoked by the taking of the drug, in
detail in his perhaps most famous, but also most controversial book the
Doors of Perception (1954). What is most significant in
Huxley´s
description of the mystical experience is the fact that he didn´t
see another, a dreamlike, reality, but that he saw normal waking time
reality, but now totally transformed in revealing its innate divine
splendor. So it was not a fanciful dreamworld he chemically conjured,
so he said, but finally the very essentiality of the world was
disclosed to his mind´s eye.
(...)
I was seeing what Adam has seen on
the morning of creation -the miracle, moment by moment, of naked
existence (...) flowers shining with their own inner light and all but
quivering under the pressure of the significance with wich they were
charged (....) Words like ´grace´ and
´transfiguration´ came to my mind (...)
Being-Awareness-Bliss -for the first time I understood, not on the
verbal level, not by inchoate hints (...) but precisely and completely
what those prodigious syllabes referred to (...)
But there were more fearful
moments also in the experience, shivers of awe, that made one feel
small and humble:
The
fear, as I analyse it in retrospect,
was of being overwhelmed, of disintegration under a pressure of reality
greater than a mind, accostumend to living 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 (...)
But, though oscillating also
to the tremendum side of
reality, the total outcome of the experience
was positive and meaningful. Finally Huxley felt that he had seen the
deeper meaning of reality. All the questions of his long intellectual
life of learning finally were answered. He came to see that the
mystical experience was the one true answer to the riddle of life.
`This is how one ought to see. This is how things really are,` he said.
Huxley was well aware that the
taking of drugs was only a poor substitute for a real and everlasting
life of mysticism. All it meant was taking a shortcut for something
that took a lot more pains and efforts to accomplish. Perhaps that was
the great danger of the drug: it afforded too easy means for something
that was worth struggling for. Still he thought that the drug could be
benificial:
Most
men an women lead lives at the worst
so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge
to escape, the longing to transcend themselves (...) is and has always
been one of the principle appetites of the soul. Art and religion,
carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory -all these
have served, in H.G. Wells´s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And
for the private, for everyday use there have always been chemical
intoxicants. All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the
euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries
(...) all (...) have been used by human beings from times immemorial.
And to these natural modifiers of consciousness modern science has
added its quota of synthetics -chloral, for example and benzedrine, the
bromides and the barbiturates.
Most of these (...) cannot now be taken except on doctor´s
orders, or else illigally and at considerable risk. For unrestricted
use the West has permitted only alcohol and tabacco. All the other
chemical Doors in the Wall are labelled Dope and their unauthorized
takers are Fiends.
criticism: Huxley was right in
saying that it was unrealistic to make a policy of banishing all drugs
for ever. People will always take resort to an easy escape from mundane
reality. They want that shortcut. Nobody can wait years on end to
realize that final Paradise one is so desperately longing for. But the
point of criticism one can raise against the Doors of Perception is the
fact that there are no substantial chapters in the book devoted to real
alternatives for the shortcut. Huxley warned enough against drugs and
he also wrote:
I
am not so foolish as to equate what
happens under the influence of mescaline or any other drug (...) with
the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life:
enlightentment, the beatific vision. All I am suggesting is that the
mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a `gratuitous
grace`, not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be
accepted thankfully (...)
But the 'to be accepted
thankfully` is taken too literally after the publication of the Doors
of Perception. In a way the book contributed to the emergence of
a drug
culture in the sixties and seventies (a lot of youngsters were inspired
by the book in taking their first drugs) and it is even possible that
the book was of influence in shaping our modern day chemicalization of
happiness. For nowadays we want Paradise instantaneously, without
wondering about the causes of our unhappiness. Drugs and chemicals
reward our impatience. And there´s no inhibition as long as our
doctors are willing to prescribe. It would have been better if Huxley
had adressed this impatience of ours in a few chapters devoted to the
means and techniques of real and healthy mysticism. For the workings of
meditation and other spiritual techniques are rather slow compared to
the giant leap of drugs, but meditation in the end is far more
effective and far more healthy. We must never forget that all true
Masters have warned against the taking of drugs, though they knew well
their potentialties in offering these shortcuts.
But in defense of Huxley it
must be said that at other times and places he did describe the
techniques of mysticism and their implications. And also did he address
our impatience on number of occasions. So it is better to regard the
Doors for what it actually is: a curious, informative, almost
journalistic account of what it is like to take a mind altering
drug like mescaline. So we may say that the book has some
phenomenological significance. But it was not the way to promote
mysticism.
The
London interview
In 1961, at the end of his
life, Huxley
now being sixty seven, a review of his life and works were given in a
famous interview with John Chandos on BBC radio. In this long interview
all the major topics of his life long intellectual labor were being
discussed and revaluated. They also talked about religion and
mysticism. What I like the most about the London interview is the fact
that it is one of the scarce occasions we hear a mystic talk about the
physical implications of
spirituality. Huxley was aware that tensions
in the body were the major impediment for enlightenment to occur.
Let´s quote him in full:
We
didn`t have to say that when the Quakers
quaked or the Shakers shook, this was necessarily the operation of the
Holy Ghost. (...) They were getting
rid of tensions [my italics]. (...) I think we
can talk about this in realistic terms without invoking supernatural
explanations. But at the same time, what we may call the sort of basic
supernaturalism, what we may call the life force, are of value in so
far as they permit basic sources of energy and enlightenment to flow
freely through an organism which is constantly blocking itself up and
obstructing itself by the operation of the conscious ego. There are
ways of getting rid of the conscious ego, of getting out of our own
light.
Huxley agreed with Bergson in
stating that the light in man was already given. The science of
mysticism should therefore have as its main goal the removal of
blockades, the taking away of all impediments, be it physiological,
psychological, neurological or even chemical, that stand in the way of
this light coming through. The taking of drugs could also be such a
mean for removing the blockades. With Huxley it was the same as the
quaking of the Quakers: just a mean ´of getting out of our own
light´.
Conclusion
I think that looking back in
retrospect we can say that Huxley failed to assess the danger of his
promoting drugs as a mean for getting spiritual revelations. I think he
was swept away by the initial euphoria that followed the first
mescaline and LSD testing. I´m not speaking of the sociological
and medical consequences of a wide scale promotion of drugs (even if
only administered in a sacred and ritual context).
History itself has and will show what these consequences are. But as
far as mysticism is concerned I think that Huxley´s promotion of
drugs has widely missed the mark. Serious mysticism will always warn
against taking shortcuts. For shortcuts are gratifying to our ego and
help our self to keep up its status quo, instead of looking for deeper
transformations in the verticality of our existence. For the
laziness and the cocksureness of our ego says: ´well, then I can
have the best of both worlds. I can go on in this world with my old
ways of self assessment and be the self kicker I have always been. But
once in a while I can taste the blissfulness of that other world also
by taking some dope. Then I can lay my head to rest and feel my primal
oneness with existence again. But not to long. For there is work to do
and dreaming is for children.` Huxley has I think underestimated the
tricks the ego plays with our mind. And with pleasure and drugs these
tricks tend to be of the worst kind. The flesh is weak etc.
But this can and must not be
our final verdict when talking about Aldous Huxley. For his
intelligence was too sharp not to foresee these dangers. He knew about
the tricks of the ego. But his was not the advantage of seeing the
recent developments in pharmacology and the use of drugs. Perhaps
nowadays he would have concluded otherwise. Taking of drugs is now the
major problem in our national health care. I think nowadays he would
have been more hesitant in advocating the use of drugs, even when
restricted only to a liturgical environment.
His genuine and true mysticism
compel us to end on a more positive note. He showed with the
example of his life that growth towards liberation was possible. In the
end of his life both Huxley the man and Huxley the writer were
remarkable indeed. The warnings of Brave
New World and the hopes and prophecies of his latest novelIsland were no
abstractions as Huxley himself was concerned. He did all he can to live
up to the ideals he preached. He knew that all the ideals of
spirituality had to be realized, as not to end with empty words and
empty promises. The individual should try to transform itself, if we
want a better and more peaceful world. It was the work of a life time,
he said. But in the end he himself showed that it was feasible. He was
a man of genius. There is always something of a mystic in a man of
genius.
Such was the case with Aldous
Huxley. From childhood on his intelligence had always been bright and
sharp. He had a drive to understand the world. He wanted to know what
it all meant. So he read all that he could lay a hand on. He surely
wasn´t a born mystic. In his twenties and thirties he was even an
avowed rationalist, more of the extravert than the introvert type, as
he described himself in his Proper
Studies (1927). In an article in Vanity Fair of the same year
he compared his type of reasoning with
Goethe and Bergson and concluded:
inwards, kindled a small
mystical flame, that did not become ablaze right away, but remained
always there, smouldering, waiting for the fuel of his more riper
years. For Huxley in his later days became little short of a mystic.
But already in his more positivistic and rationalistic twenties and
thirties we can detect this mystical flame in his writings. In one of
his first novels Antic Hay
(1923) there is a passage that is written
with inspired mysticism. It is worth quoting at large:
the Many. Even in such a
rationalistic, detached, almost cynical book like his famous Point
Counter Point (1928), that became celebrated with the young for
its
Nietzschian revolt and iconoclastic breaking of taboos, a different
tone is heard. In the beginning of the book listening to the Sarabande
of Bach´s B minor suite for flute leads to the following
mesmerizing thoughts:
California proved also beneficial for a further
development of their spiritual life. It was here that Heard founded his
Trabuco College, a combination of university and monastery in one. It
was here that Huxley got acquainted with Jiddu
Krishnamurti.
They
remained close friends for the rest of their lives. Huxley also got
involved with the legacy of Vivekananda, the Vedanta Movement of
California, and got initiated by Swami Prahbavananda. All these
meetings and acquaintances gave another impetus to his study of
mysticism, both from the East and the West. His contributions to the
periodical `Vedanta and the Western World` belong to the most beautiful
essays in mystical literature. 
compared to the experiences
certain mystics had described in their literature. Huxley was very much
interested. For here he could perhaps directly experience what the
source of religion and mysticism was. He knew in a way what to expect
because of his own mystical training. But he also wanted to know the
workings of this very ancient and, for native Americans, holy drug. So
he decided to take the drug as an experiment.
prophecies of his latest novelIsland were no
abstractions as Huxley himself was concerned. He did all he can to live
up to the ideals he preached. He knew that all the ideals of
spirituality had to be realized, as not to end with empty words and
empty promises. The individual should try to transform itself, if we
want a better and more peaceful world. It was the work of a life time,
he said. But in the end he himself showed that it was feasible. He was
a man of genius. There is always something of a mystic in a man of
genius. 
