Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

By Aldous Huxley

Book Overview

Selected writings from the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception on the role of psychedelics in society.

- Includes letters and lectures by Huxley never published elsewhere.

In May 1953 Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline. The mystical and transcendent experience that followed set him off on an exploration that was to produce a revolutionary body of work about the inner reaches of the human mind. Huxley was decades ahead of his time in his anticipation of the dangers modern culture was creating through explosive population increase, headlong technological advance, and militant nationalism, and he saw psychedelics as the greatest means at our disposal to "remind adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen universe they have created for themselves by means of their culture-conditioned prejudices." Much of Huxley's writings following his 1953 mescaline experiment can be seen as his attempt to reveal the power of these substances to awaken a sense of the sacred in people living in a technological society hostile to mystical revelations.

Moksha, a Sanskrit word meaning "liberation," is a collection of the prophetic and visionary writings of Aldous Huxley. It includes selections from his acclaimed novels Brave New World and Island, both of which envision societies centered around the use of psychedelics as stabilizing forces, as well as pieces from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, his famous works on consciousness expansion.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0892817585
• ISBN13: 9780892817580
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Park Street Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Highly Educational

New Age, Self Help, Cults. While you might think that some of these things are 'new'. you can find through this book that the human condition appears to have established itself quite a long time ago and has not changed a great deal in aggregate over time. It is really unfortunate that so little is understood about the workings of the human mind and that so little of our collective time is spent in pursuit of a deeper cognition. Well worth the investment in both time and money for anyone interested in knowing more about themselves.

This book has truly opened up my mind

Alduos Huxley is a brilliant man. This book has made me think about things in a whole new way. I love the letters he writes. The book is divided into 40 chapters. I read it slowly, a chapter or two at a time over a period of a few months. It wasn't one of those books you, like his novels, that you'd want to read in a week or a day. It is something you want to read and then think about it for a while. His ideas on psychedelics are very enlightening. I am thankful for this work.

Food For Thought

Aldous Huxley was clearly a man ahead of his time: imagine an English intellectual in the 1940's writing about mecaline and LSD, how they relate to psychology, sociology and religion in modern times. This was not a cult leader or an Edgar Cayce/Aleister Crowley sort of philosopher: his essays were published in periodicals as varied as the Saturday Evening Post and Playboy Magazine (!). He was one of the ultimate explorers of the mind. Many of his thoughts from the 40's and the 50's still sound as relevant today as the day they were written. His timeless thoughts are his genius. I recommend this book highly.

AN INFORMATIVE AND POIGNANT READ

This volume brings together selections from Huxley's Brave New World, Doors Of Perception, Heaven And Hell and Island, as well as magazine articles, letters, lectures and scientific papers. It also includes writings by Timothy Leary, Laura Huxley and Dr. Humphry Osmond. Leary's interesting account of a 1960 meeting with Huxley at Cambridge is titled Mushrooms For Lunch, whilst the same year's Harvard Sessions is a report of a psylocybin session where Huxley took part in a group experiment. Other very thought provoking chapters include Dr. Humphry Osmond's May Morning In Hollywood and Huxley's own Disregarded In The Darkness, Doors, Mescalin, Heaven And Hell and Brave New World Revisited. But the highlights of the book are Laura Huxley's 1962 account of her husband in a psychedelic state and especially her moving account of his illness and death, titled Nobly Born. The appendix is titled Instruments For Use During A Psychedelic Experience and the book concludes with an index. This is a brilliant collection of this refined author's best work and an insightful investigation into the use of entheogenic substances for the expansion of consciousness. I also recommend Huston Smith's Cleansing The Doors Of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogentic Plants and Chemicals, William James' Varieties Of Religious Experience the title Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness by Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

Articulate Investigation of Entheogens

Entheogens (psychedelics) through the eyes of an articulate and cultured man of letters. We get to see through this series of essays why Huxley turned to psychedelics as a tool for spiritual exploration. It also raises important questions that need to be addressed by those of us using entheogens (psychedelics) as a means of expanding consciousness.Thomas Seay