From The Maze Where Realities Converge
Aldous Huxley was a writer, satirist and an extraordinarily clear-minded thinker.
He was fascinated with mystical experience and explored consciousness through hypnosis and psychedelics like mescaline and LSD. 'The Doors of Perception', for which Jim Morrison named his band, is a marvellous description of the mescaline experience.
Here are his "Notes on What's What".
When he was about to die, he asked his daughter to inject him with LSD-25 so he could experience death on acid. What a heroic bohemian death-on-acid guy!
"It's a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give is to be a little nicer to each other."
"The point that interests me is that whereas the ordinary everyday experience is of course absolutely essential most of the time, it's not the only possible experience. There are also other types of consciousness - I mean the artist's type, the mystic's type and so on - which have, empirically, an enormous value and may help people to live less self-centred and more charitable lives, and more understanding lives."
Links
- Analysis of 'Brave New World' from the point of view of transhumanist paradise-engineering.
- You can get most of Huxley's books here