Moksha – Aldous Huxley (1999)

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 centred 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.

In May 1953, while in the company of his wife and a physician friend, 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 centred around the use of psychedelics as stabilising forces, as well as pieces from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, his famous works on consciousness-expansion. Also included are magazine articles, interviews, letters, and scientific papers that vividly demonstrate the evolution of his ideas and offer an engrossing record of the journey.

Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer are the directors of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library in San Francisco, the only library in the world devoted exclusively to the literature of mind-altering drugs. Michael Horowitz was Timothy Leary’s archivist and is co-author of The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs. Palmer and Horowitz live in northern California.