And Aldous Huxley

Just as Aldous Huxley began the counterculture subversion of the United States 30 years before its consequences became evident to the public, Lord Bertrand Russell began laying the foundations for the antiwar movement of the 1960s before the 1930s expired. Lord Russell and Aldous Huxley cofounded the Peace Pledge Union in 1937 — just before both went to the United States for the duration of World War II. (21)... 

How, we wonder, would a PET scan of Aldous Huxley s brain in deep reflection compare with the images collected in outwardly attentive waking, deep sleep, and that most easily obtained altered state of consciousness, REM sleep dreaming My guess is that it would look more like REM than deep sleep or waking. 

In my case, none of these uninvited image people promised salvation. They didn t even reveal scientific secrets. But they did, by their presence, make one thing clear that sleep deprivation alone can open wide the Doors of Perception that Huxley celebrated. Had I prepared my mind for specific communications from the beyond, I have no doubt that my visionary visitors would have articulated whatever words I wanted to hear. The point is that you don t need a drug, you don t need a medium, and you certainly don t need a spirit world to have them. Those exotic ginger flowers and that tumultuous ski run spoke so clearly to the shade of Aldous Huxley You are wrong about dreams. They can be both pre-ternaturally colorful and ecstatically animated. Even without mescaline or LSD, and certainly without cocaine, a drug that will almost certainly counteract psychedelic dreaming. 

Beyond the perception of the body itself, the enhanced sensory experience has called attention to the pleasures and insights that can be obtained directly from sensory experience. Light shows and modern rock music reflect some of the visual and auditory experiences produced by psychedelics. Aldous Huxley (1956) has pointed out the luminous intensity of colors found in "the antipodes of the mind," and this is mimicked by Day-Glo paints and the eerie glow of... 

In the middle 1950s Aldous Huxley published his influential The Doors of Perception, describing an experience with mescaline and advocating it as a means of vitalizing the... 

Erikson, M. H. "A Special Inquiry with Aldous Huxley into the Nature and Character of Various States of Consciousness," American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 8,14-33, t965. 

A few famous proponents of LSD during this time period included author Ken Kesey, author and philosopher Aldous Huxley, poet Allen Ginsberg, and The Beatles, a famous musical group. 

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hallucinogenic substances were viewed as possible tools for understanding and treating psychiatric and other mental disorders. Tribal medicine men, or shamans, have always maintained it was an effective medicine to treat a number of ailments including alcoholism. However, peyote did not really catch on as a drug to be explored in the recreational arena until 1953 when the English novelist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote The Doors of Perception where he recounted his experiences with the peyote. 

This version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is dedicated to ALDOUS HUXLEY (July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963) with profound admiration and gratitude. 

Reading books about mystical experience is a standard orientation procedure. Reading the accounts of others experiences is another possibility (Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Gordon Wasson have written powerful accounts). 

The "case officer" for Britain s Opium War was Aldous Huxley, the grandson of Thomas H. Huxley, a founder of the Rhodes Round Table group and a lifelong collaborator of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee himself sat on the RIIA council for nearly 50 years, headed the Research Division of British intelligence... 

Trained at Toynbee s Oxford, Aldous Huxley was one of the initiates in the "Children of the Sun," a dionysian cult comprised of the children of Britain s Round Table elite. (4) Among the other initiates were T.S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Sir Oswald Moseley, and D. H. Lawrence, Huxley s homosexual lover. It was Huxley, furthermore, who would launch the legal battle in the 1950s to have Lawrence s pornographic novel Lady Chatterley s Lover allowed into the United States on the ground that it was a misunderstood "work of art." (5)... 

Crowley in turn initiated Aldous Huxley into the Isis-Golden Dawn Temple and introduced him to psychedelic drags in... 

Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley A Biography (New York Alfred A. Knopf and Harper Row, 1974). 

In the early 1950s, researchers Humphry Osmond and John Smythies wrote a paper about the mental effects of mescaline that came to the attention of Aldous Huxley, who invited Osmond to visit him if he should be in the Los Angeles area. Huxley s wife, Maria, was initially apprehensive about such a meeting, fearing that Osmond "might wear a beard." When Osmond did go to L.A. for a psychological conference, Maria was satisfied that he was not a Bohemian or a mad scientist (he didn t have a beard), and he stayed with the Huxleys. Maria, ironically, finally asked about getting some mescaline for Aldous. Osmond s reaction to the proposal was favorable, with one reservation ... 

The setting could hardly have been better, Aldous seemed an ideal subject, Maria eminently sensible, and we had all taken to each other, which was very important for a good experience, but I did not relish the possibility, however remote, of being the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad... 

Aldous Huxley had a similar point of view. After writing about how use of psychedelics had deepened his feeling for the spiritual, he received a letter from Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and noted poet. Questioning the validity of drug-induced mystical experience. Merton asked about distinctions that might be drawn between mystical and aesthetic aspects. In January 1959, Huxley responded with his evaluation of the "deeper aspects... 

Aldous Huxley had told me about LSD back in 1957. And I tried to get it in 1959- I stood in line in a clinic in San Francisco, after Herb Caen had run an announcement in his column in the Chronicle that if anybody wanted to take a new experimental drug called LSD-25, he would be paid 150 for his effort. Jesus, that emptied Berkeley I got up about six in the morning, but I was about 1,500 in line. .. so I didn t get it until 19 65. 

---