In his legendary 1932 novel Brave New World, Huxley treated sex and drugs as potential instruments of social control, warned about the social castes that biology could create with the help of the State, and distrusted universal ideologies that destroyed diversity. cultural and religious and claimed the need and commitment to be oneself, even if the price was, many times, frustration and helplessness.
Feeling insufficient, for Huxley, was essential to feeling uniquely human, and, therefore, the rulers had convinced the population of his book of the need to take drugs with a psychotropic called soma every time they were attacked by anxiety. They wanted happy slaves. And happy slaves have no anxiety, only inner peace.
His dystopian fiction was a warning against the danger of totalitarian movements and the incipient mass society. And that, in short, was very different from what Huxley attempted in 1962 with another novel, titled The Island. If Plato used the formula of dialogue in The Republic to propose an ideal political and social organization, in The Island Huxley used the guise of a best-selling novel to propose a roadmap and a manifesto towards a world where it was worth living.
The author's own wife at the time, Laura Huxley, acknowledged that her husband had based his new fiction on previous social experiences that had worked. And that she had done so in the hope that millions of readers would use them to draw inspiration from both her private life and his public life. That is precisely what happened with many young people who participated in the counterculture.
In The Island, Aldous Huxley claims sex as something liberating, although certainly not just any sex. We are talking about a mix between tantric sex and that practiced by the Oneida community in the United States in the 19th century, which revolved around prolonged intercourse that delayed ejaculation. Thus, Huxley believed that a combination of erotic energy, contemplative attitude and masculine self-control could be achieved. In addition, it could also be used to control birth rates and natural selection.
Obviously, Huxley was less concerned at the time with the use and manipulation of selection and biology by political authorities to create an ideal society. At the same time, sex seemed to him more like a path of liberation than of servitude.
Perhaps that is why on The Island not only is a peculiar variety of tantric sex celebrated, but any ascetic form of spirituality is also linked to sexual repression, militarism and the unbearable sense of guilt that some homosexuals would carry. Maybe the parents did a lot of war because they did little love, and, furthermore, what little they did do they were doing it wrong. The children would have to teach them the path of love and peace in the sixties.
The inhabitants of the island that Huxley draws as an ideal society reject and ridicule any religion organized around a hierarchy and a church, but they embrace without major problems a curious mix between Zen, Taoism and Tantra. And they follow that religion because it is the only one in which they are educated.
This single confession is very similar to the universal tradition common to all the great religions that Huxley believed he had identified in 1944 in an essay entitled The Perennial Philosophy. And it also draws on the later teachings of Swami Prabhavananda, the charismatic leader of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.
That society was key to the rather arbitrary adaptation of Eastern spirituality to the reality of American society in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Huxley, Christopher Isherwood (author of Goodbye to Berlin or A Single Man) and Gerald Heard collaborated intensively in its dissemination.
The counterculture, which would recognize the value of organizing itself in small ideologically homogeneous communities, like that of The Island, would eagerly drink from Huxley's positions against any organized religion and in favor of an Eastern spirituality that would end the traditional separation between sex and transcendence. However, to become a pioneer of the counterculture, the British author had to distance himself from another of the main concerns that Brave New World reflected: the threat of a universal ideology encouraged by authorities that exclude cultural and religious diversity.
Another of the pillars of the ideal society in Aldous Huxley's Island is that the education of the population provides, in addition to the teaching of a specific sexual practice and religion, the consumption of a hallucinogenic mushroom that allows the islanders to access a higher knowledge.
The mushroom is called “moksha,” which means “spiritual liberation” in Sanskrit, and higher knowledge would involve understanding, according to Rice University professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, that individual consciousness is just a mirage and that we all form part of a cosmic superconsciousness and, one can imagine, divine.
Huxley admitted that he was not comfortable with this suppression or dilution of individual consciousness, but that he could accept it as one of the truths contained in that religion of religions that he believed he had discovered in The Perennial Philosophy and, later, in the Vedanta Society.
Beyond that discomfort, what is certain is that neither the dilution of individual conscience dictated and revealed by a universal religion nor drugs as a path to liberation and wisdom were similar to the recommendations of Brave New World. What they did resemble is the recipes that we would later see in the counterculture.
Huxley's relationship with drugs had evolved greatly since the 1930s. And one of the reasons was his disappointment with different therapies that he had imagined would help calm his psychological difficulties, which affected each of the members of his family in a different way. Of Aldous' three brothers, two were hospitalized for disabling depressive outbreaks and one of them, Trevenen, ended up committing suicide. Today it is known that this type of disorder has a genetic component.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley published The Doors of Perception, an autobiographical account of his experience with mescaline the previous year, and in 1956, he presented Heaven and Hell, which is usually understood as its continuation, to the point that it has been decades since. are included in the same volume. Huxley tested mescaline at the hands of a psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, in what he saw as a spiritual and scientific experiment.
He liked what would later be one of the main psychedelic drugs that would mark the counterculture. It came from the peyote cactus, used by American Indians in their ritual ceremonies, and did not appear to be addictive or cause substantial side effects. Furthermore, Huxley hoped that it would allow latent capacities in human beings to emerge and finally enjoy a higher consciousness that transcended mere individual consciousness. He wanted to stop being himself for a few hours.
It is worth insisting: Huxley, who in Brave New World had considered drugs as an instrument of social control aimed at making the population unaware of their individuality and insufficiency, now believed that substances such as mescaline could liberate us, making us aware that we had never been truly individuals and helping us develop unsuspected capabilities.
In his later years, Aldous Huxley also saw drugs and these new abilities from the perspective of a life in which he had not stopped experimenting with alternative therapies to overcome his vision problems and psychological difficulties, and to spur his creativity. He blindly believed in the unexplored potential of the human being and, furthermore, he thought that they could never emerge in the normal circumstances of everyday life.
It was necessary either to be or to create an island similar to the one he had outlined in his last novel. And that island of Eastern mysticism adapted to Western needs, pacifying and liberating sex and drugs that brought out new abilities in extraordinary environments..., that island, equal and different at the same time, was the one that Michael Murphy and Dick Price tried to create with the conferences, seminars, concerts and publications from the Esalen Institute, which became one of the authentic intellectual lungs of that California of the counterculture.
