Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

"Towards the end of his career, the novelist Aldous Huxley started writing a lot about ecstatic experiences and how we need to find more of a place for them in western society. Moksha is a collection of some of those writings. Huxley was one of the very few thinkers to consider how ecstasy relates to society, politics and education. He understood that transcendence could be healthy or toxic (what he called ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ transcendence). We need good cultural places, maps and guides for transcendence, so we can find it in healthy ways, rather than in unhealthy ways like addiction or violence. His final novel, Island , is a kind of blueprint for a society wherein the ecstatic is balanced with the Socratic. The young people on the island have an education which includes the rational but also the ‘non-verbal’ and ecstatic—contemplation, ecstatic dance, psychedelic rituals, tantric sex education. “Esalen helped to create the modern ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ landscape that we’re in today” His blueprint was hugely influential on Californian spirituality of the 1960s, on places like Esalen, and on the Human Potential Movement. Esalen is a sort of alternative college on the coast near Monterey, where students could study everything from Zen meditation to ecstatic dance to psychedelics to neo-Tantra and massage. The Human Potential Movement thought that transpersonal experiences—moments when we go beyond our ordinary ego and connect to something greater than us—have a very important role both in personal development and in human evolution. Places like Esalen helped to create the modern ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ landscape that we’re in today, where so many people follow practices like yoga, mindfulness, ecstatic dance, psychedelic healing, and so on. Huxley—this stiff, posh, English intellectual—helped to create that world."