Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 to November 22, 1963) was an English writer best known for the dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), and later one of the central figures linking the psychedelic counterculture, the Esalen Institute, and the Human Potential movement. He was the grandson of the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and the younger brother of Julian Huxley, the evolutionary biologist who coined the modern usage of "transhumanism." A severe eye infection in his teens left him nearly blind for almost three years and gave him a lifelong preoccupation with perception and with senses beyond the ordinary five. His mescaline experiment recorded in The Doors of Perception (1954) introduced psychedelic drugs to a wide literary audience, and his late lectures on what he called the "ultimate revolution" warned of pharmacological methods of social control. He died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1963, having asked to be injected with LSD as he died.¹²¹¹

Brave New World

Brave New World, published in 1932, projected a future World State in which human beings are mass-produced in hatcheries, sorted before birth into a rigid biological caste system from Alpha down to Epsilon, conditioned from infancy to love their assigned station, and kept docile by the pleasure drug soma and by constant consumption and casual sex. The novel satirized the application of eugenic breeding, Pavlovian conditioning, and Fordist mass production to human life, depicting a totalitarian order that secures obedience not through terror but through engineered contentment. Huxley took the title from Shakespeare's The Tempest, in which Miranda exclaims, "O brave new world, that has such people in it."¹³

Huxley returned to the book's themes in Brave New World Revisited (1958), a set of essays comparing his 1932 forecast with the world of the 1950s and judging that overpopulation, propaganda, advertising, and chemical persuasion were carrying society toward his imagined dystopia faster than he had expected. He argued there that the methods of control in a future scientific dictatorship would resemble the seductive conditioning of Brave New World more than the overt brutality of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, because a population that has been taught to enjoy its servitude requires no policing.³⁴

The Doors of Perception and Psychedelics

In 1953 Huxley wrote to the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who was researching mescaline, asking to take the drug under observation, and on May 4, 1953, in his home in Los Angeles, he swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in water. His account of the experience appeared as The Doors of Perception (1954), which described the way ordinary objects, a vase of flowers, the folds of his trousers, blazed with significance and argued that the brain acts as a "reducing valve" filtering out a wider "Mind at Large" that the drug lets through. The title comes from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."²⁵

Huxley went on to take LSD, first supplied on Christmas Eve 1955 by the businessman Al Hubbard, and explored the drugs as a route to mystical experience, a theme he had already framed in The Perennial Philosophy (1945), his anthology of the common mystical core he discerned across the world's religions. He set out his case for the controlled use of psychedelics in Heaven and Hell (1956), the sequel to The Doors of Perception. His writings gave the emerging drug culture much of its vocabulary, and the rock band the Doors took its name from his title.⁵⁶

Parapsychology and the Round Table Foundation

Huxley's interest in expanded consciousness extended to psychical research and the trance state as a possible means of perceiving unseen information about the world. In August 1955 he visited the physician and parapsychologist Andrija Puharich at the Round Table Foundation in Maine, a privately funded research group that gathered psychics and scientists to study extrasensory perception. Huxley was intrigued by the assembled circle, among them the Dutch sculptor Harry Stump, who would enter trances inside a Faraday Cage and produce automatic scripts in what was described as Egyptian hieroglyphics.¹¹

During the visit Huxley was present when Puharich attempted to drug Stump with the teonanácatl mushroom without his knowledge. Observing Stump's confused and intoxicated state, Huxley raised ethical objections and insisted that Puharich administer an antidote. The episode is recorded in Annie Jacobsen's history of the United States government's investigations into extrasensory perception.¹¹

Island, Esalen, and the Human Potential Movement

Huxley's final novel, Island (1962), was the utopian counterpart to Brave New World, depicting the fictional Pacific island of Pala where a humane society uses the consciousness-expanding "moksha-medicine," a psychedelic, together with meditation, tantric practice, and ecological living, to cultivate awareness rather than to enforce conformity. The book turned the same technologies of mind that the earlier novel had portrayed as instruments of control toward the opposite end of human liberation and growth.⁷

Huxley's lectures on "human potentialities," which he delivered in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including a 1960 lecture series, supplied the conceptual language for the Esalen Institute, founded at Big Sur, California, in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Price had been moved by hearing Huxley speak on human potentialities, and the founders drew on Huxley's phrasing in framing Esalen's program; Huxley, his wife Laura, and members of his circle such as Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, and Gregory Bateson provided early support and networking. Huxley visited Murphy and Price at Big Sur in January 1962, shortly before his death, and his ideas became part of the foundation of the Human Potential movement that grew out of Esalen.⁷⁸

The Ultimate Revolution and Pharmacological Control

On March 20, 1962, Huxley delivered a talk to the Berkeley Language Center titled "The Ultimate Revolution," in which he described a coming form of dictatorship that would secure compliance through pleasure rather than pain. He predicted "a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it." He judged that the scientific dictatorships of the future would resemble the Brave New World pattern more closely than the Nineteen Eighty-Four pattern, because conditioning and chemistry are more efficient instruments of rule than force.⁹⁴

Huxley was diagnosed with throat cancer and died at his Los Angeles home on November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Unable to speak, he wrote a request that his wife Laura administer LSD, and she injected him with one hundred micrograms, followed by a second dose, as he died in the late afternoon. Laura Huxley recounted the deathbed scene in a letter to Julian Huxley, later published as part of her memoir This Timeless Moment (1968).²¹⁰