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Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience

aldous huxley michael horowitz cynthia palmer

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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 centered 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.

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1977

This edition

Format
304 pages, Paperback
Published
April 1, 1999 by Park Street Press
ISBN
9780892817580
ASIN
0892817585
Language
English

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About the author

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aldous huxley

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Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

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Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 29 votes)
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29 reviews All reviews
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Nibel
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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If you like and/or are interested in psychedelic drug experience, this book is for you. At times it comes apart (fuck, I mean the guy was high, give him a break!), and can be more quotable than cohesive, but other pieces like "Propaganda And Pharmacology", "The Doors Of Perception" and "Mescaline And the 'Other World'" will make you want to trip out.
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Esporeno
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I really liked the subject matter, but I didn't love the repetitive nature of the lectures. My favorite chapters were written by his wife Laura Archera Huxley. She was there for a mescaline trip, a psilocybin trip, and administered his deathbed LSD. It was kind of hilarious to see a relationship develop with Timothy Leary, who I'm pretty sure viewed the use of mind-altering drugs very differently than Huxley, but I guess they both wanted people to use them, so that's common ground.
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mimikyustyle
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Most would put this book down, if they even pick it up, thinking it merely about a famous person dabbling in illicit drugs. However this volume brings together letters, speeches, and written excerpts which contain a lot of wisdom. Huxley stood against the World System, making this book quite valuable in its lessons.
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Rekushisu
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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i found this in my house. only its a first edition from 1977 with albert hoffman and alexander shulgin.
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_ryanchalker
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Psychedelics in itself is obscuring and liberating, concomitantly: This contrast is ironically subtle depending upon one's collective experiences preceding to consuming LSD and ilk. Huxley had association with Vedanta in California; and then disagreement with his guru on use of psychedelics in attainment of Moksha was the genesis of this Novel.

In this novel he tried to make a point, at times even atonement with teachings of his guru or moksha and spiritual practices.

Its a book that would take you the kaleidoscope of after effects of consumption of psychedelic substances. At times raising pertinent question, its a satirical take on meaning of life, spiritualism and psychotropic substance consumption: a prior experience in similar things would help you instantly connect with the book. Worth reading once !
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zaraku
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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all of Huxley's major (and some of his minor) writings on psychedelia. wonderful stuff.
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Geyorge
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in experiences of altered consciousness. Moksha is Sanskrit for enlightenment. When Huxley wrote Doors of Perception, he had only taken one dose of mescaline, the active ingredient of a particular Mexican cactus. He had far more experience of mescaline, LSD and psilosybin, the active ingredient of psychoactive mushrooms, when he wrote these letters, articles and lectures.

Huxley is a superbly eloquent writer yet even he emphasizes the indescribable quality of these experiences, though he gives it his best shot. He outlines three levels of experience that may be induced: aesthetic, visionary and mystical, with each taking the subject further from the bonds of everyday, ordinary consciousness. He uses several phrases repeatedly, such as "the dissolution of the subject-object experience" – the 'at-oneness' that often marks numinous experience. In spite of the inherent tragedy within human life, he also frequently refers to “the essential All Rightness of the universe”. He acknowledges that, prior to his psychedelic experiments, he dismissed the phrase “God is love” as some vague salve offered by religious types but, having taken these drugs, came to fully understand its meaning. Huxley also recognised evidence of similar experiences in the work of Wordsworth, Blake and others, especially Blake’s insight that “gratitude is heaven.”

Nevertheless, Huxley had the occasional ‘bad trip’ and was aware that others had experiences that were truly hellish. He believed this was a reflection of their extant state of mind and thought that the drugs in some way remove the barriers – “the reducing valve” - that ordinarily restrict both the ability to experience ecstasy and the descent into the darkest recesses of the psyche. He warns against trying these drugs without proper supervision.

In his lectures and articles, Huxley describes various historical and contemporary methods of achieving these altered states. The chemical route, he argues, is as old as humanity itself and lists many of the plants used by shamans across time. But he also refers to various mortifications of the flesh - methods favoured by religious ascetics over the centuries such as extreme fasting, sleep deprivation, self-flagellation and so forth. Finally, and more comfortably one must assume, are the various types of meditation that are meant to focus the mind on one physical point to such an extent that the ego, or the reducing valve as Huxley calls it, disintegrates.

Huxley died of cancer in 1963, writing right up to the last days of his life. He sincerely believed that everyone, particularly adolescents, should receive regular doses of these psychedelics, seeing this as the best chance humanity had of achieving happiness and world peace. He would have been dismayed; to the best of my knowledge, these drugs are still illegal in most countries. Interestingly, recent research in the USA indicates that psilosybin may dramatically resolve the symptoms of depression, including chronic depression, in the long term after only one or two doses. Trials continue. Huxley may yet be proved right.
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elementaryschool
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Huxley's psychedelic books include Island, Heaven & Hell and The Doors of Perception. This collection includes excerpts from them as well as other writings on the same subject. Also included is an essay by his wife describing her administration of LSD to him on his deathbed on 22 November, 1963.

Huxley, virtually blind from childhood, found the psychedelics to be, quite literally, eye-opening both perceptually and philosophically. First taken just before his sixtieth birthday, they changed his life.

As should be expected, Huxley did not take such psychotropics lightly. His decade-long use of them was during the period when they were legally available from pharmaceutical companies and increasingly used in psychiatry and psychotherapeutics. Beyond their medical use, however, Huxley, already much influenced by mystical religious traditions, believed them to have profound spiritual implications.

I tend to agree, despite having grown up in a culture where such drugs had become illegal, very widely available and often used without serious intent. Fortunately, I was too neurotic and bookish as a teen to simply have fun with drugs. Feel-good chemicals have never held much interest for me and the psychedelics, in my early years certainly, were only very rarely pleasurable. Instead, they forced me to think about, often to quite literally see, those things I least wanted to confront, acknowledge and accept. So doing, they helped me quite a lot, psychologically speaking. In addition, the couple of occasions when ample doses caused me to cross over to other worlds (by which I mean that I had no contact, except perhaps through memory, with this intersubjective, consensual reality), caused me not only to reformulate my sense of the real, but also gave me heightened powers of imagination and sympathy for others. Like Huxley, these psychotropics changed my life and, like Huxley, I recommend they be taken seriously and with intention.
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