Aldous Huxley

[E.A Rumfield]

Let's talk about my friend and mentor Aldous Huxley. Doors Of Perception was one of the first books that greatly influenced me. I read that followed by his other essay Heaven and Hell. Such great insight. I read Brave New World and I can truly understand how he see's that as the future. Here especially in America we are willingly giving up our freedom for comfort. I also read Brave New World Revisited and it is striking how he talks of the world in 1956, and the future as he predicts it if we do not change, and how the world is today. A true visionary and a remarkable soul. Please tell me someone else reads Huxley.

[The Truth]

I've read Brave New World and was thinking about reading Island as someone had recommended it to me. Brave New World is one of my favorite books ever, he was definitely a visionary.

[E.A Rumfield]

You gotta read his non-fiction. And it's not dull. Doors Of Perception is a must read if you have or plan on taking a hallucinogen. In the essay he describes his mescaline trip from T:000. He says
"It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where? - How far? How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.

And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse."

One continually changing apocalypse. Is there a better way to describe life?

[PeterL]

I agree that Huxley was visionary, and his vision of the future has arrived. I don't know the figures, but a large part of the population is routinely drugged, but there's nothing new in that. I try not to think about how the powers that be control not just government but what people see and hear in the news; thus controlling what they think. Tossing in some drugs to relax the tensest is just a little more.

Doors of Perception was one of the books that helped bring LSD into popularity. I read it quite some time ago.

[cafolini]

Huxley's brave new world & revisited were extremely narrow compared to what we have going today.
Wallace exhausted all he had to say with a few interviews. If that were to happen again, it would seem very partial and basically insane.

[E.A Rumfield]

Huxley's brave new world & revisited were extremely narrow compared to what we have going today.
Wallace exhausted all he had to say with a few interviews. If that were to happen again, it would seem very partial and basically insane.

Elaborate. I think the Brave New World Revisited contrasted Huxley's vision of a non-violent dictatorship of his future against the brutal Communist inspired dictatorship George Orwell wrote about.

He speaks of advertising, propaganda and brain washing. The worker and the deterioration of the individual.

[demonchaste]

Someone else reads Huxley... there, I've told you, but seriously, in the early 70's, he was an indispensable find and a literary guru to me. He is the reason I just registered on this site, as I'm currently referencing him in something I'm writing. He was an incredible visionary and had a large effect on the beat and hippy movements, (the "Doors" named themselves after his book "Doors of Perception"), and was the biggest influence on Timothy Leary, who was a "Huxley" groupie. Funny trivia, George Orwell was a student of his when he was a college professor. So A 40 bag to Freedom leads to Huxley, who was pretty fly for a white guy.

[bookowskee]

I'm not particularly fond of his book The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Not that I dislike hallucinogens or any of that. I love it from time to time. Jim Morrison adored that book (I'm not sure why, maybe because he loves peyote). It's an ok book and fashionable (kinda like the Twilight Saga of the mid-1900's (lol, I'm kidding)) but not something that struck me as profoundly captivating. It's not a book I would want to be "in tune with" again for sheer pleasure. Bad acid trip for me. Of course, everything is subjective (in theory, at least).

But Point Counter Point. Now that's a book by Huxley I like and will surely reread again.