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Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics & the Visionary Experience 1931-63
Selected writings from the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception on the role of psychedelics in society.Â
â Includes letters and lectures by Huxley never published elsewhere.Â
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.Â
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.
â Includes letters and lectures by Huxley never published elsewhere.Â
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.Â
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.
314 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
92 people are currently reading
3108 people want to read
About the author
Aldous Huxley
962 books13.7k followersAldous 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.
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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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 3, 2019
Huxley's writings, otherwise, find a deep connect within any reader and offer many things new. This one, when I read, brought many things new. Huxley's own experiences with himself and the material he used to 'awaken' his senses are pretty new, unsystematic and busy. A curious reader will certainly like them.
December 31, 2012
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.
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.
January 17, 2013
Aldous Huxley was clearly a man ahead of his time: imagine an English intellectual in the 1940's writing about mescaline and LSD, how they relate to psychology, sociology and religion in modern times.
This was not a cult leader or an Edgar Cayce/Aleister Crowley sort of philosopher: his essays were published in periodicals as varied as the Saturday Evening Post and Playboy Magazine (!). He was one of the ultimate explorers of the mind. Many of his thoughts from the 40's and the 50's still sound as relevant today as the day they were written.
His timeless thoughts are his genius. I recommend this book highly.
This was not a cult leader or an Edgar Cayce/Aleister Crowley sort of philosopher: his essays were published in periodicals as varied as the Saturday Evening Post and Playboy Magazine (!). He was one of the ultimate explorers of the mind. Many of his thoughts from the 40's and the 50's still sound as relevant today as the day they were written.
His timeless thoughts are his genius. I recommend this book highly.
August 24, 2023
“Preparation for ultimate death is to be aware that your highest and most intense form of life is accompanied by, and conditional upon, a series of small deaths all the time. We have to be dying to these obsessive memories.”
― Aldous Huxley
I read some of Huxley's books, and he was quite influential. After reading this book, and having the opportunity to read cognitive science of religion and evolutionary medicine, there's nothing more to say, he was in fact, way ahead of his time. He really was. We now have, thanks to the advances in neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience, under the scope of evolutionary medicine, that the brain behaves in such a way that could be described as the "visionary experiences" detailed by Huxley. We now have books such as "Ritual", "Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion", and "Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved", that explain many things mentioned by Huxley, more than 50 years ago concerning the use of drugs and why the human species have always done that.
He would have been happy to know that science managed to explain some of his insights concerning effects such as placebo, nocebo, drug use, schizophrenia and religion leadership, and many other themes that go way back, to the origins of human life and the creation of symbolic meaning and ritual.
The book contains mostly letters between doctors, and the transcription of lectures that Huxley shared because he was invited. The last chapters are all about his death. He was an advocate to the meaning of afterlife, talking a lot about Eastern tradition, and he died of cancer the same day that John F. Kennedy got a bullet is his head. On the other hand, Huxley was given a shot of LSD and he crossed the bridge between life and death without any pain, making it his last visionary experience.
He may have sinned of being ahead of his time, people sometimes considering him as a nutjob, a wackjob, a new age ridicule, and a drug user (he only took LSD 4 times in a controlled environment), but he understood something that anyone did not, and that could be understood way after: the thin line between the mechanistic world and the symbolic meaning that only the human species can achieve.
― Aldous Huxley
I read some of Huxley's books, and he was quite influential. After reading this book, and having the opportunity to read cognitive science of religion and evolutionary medicine, there's nothing more to say, he was in fact, way ahead of his time. He really was. We now have, thanks to the advances in neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience, under the scope of evolutionary medicine, that the brain behaves in such a way that could be described as the "visionary experiences" detailed by Huxley. We now have books such as "Ritual", "Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion", and "Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved", that explain many things mentioned by Huxley, more than 50 years ago concerning the use of drugs and why the human species have always done that.
He would have been happy to know that science managed to explain some of his insights concerning effects such as placebo, nocebo, drug use, schizophrenia and religion leadership, and many other themes that go way back, to the origins of human life and the creation of symbolic meaning and ritual.
The book contains mostly letters between doctors, and the transcription of lectures that Huxley shared because he was invited. The last chapters are all about his death. He was an advocate to the meaning of afterlife, talking a lot about Eastern tradition, and he died of cancer the same day that John F. Kennedy got a bullet is his head. On the other hand, Huxley was given a shot of LSD and he crossed the bridge between life and death without any pain, making it his last visionary experience.
He may have sinned of being ahead of his time, people sometimes considering him as a nutjob, a wackjob, a new age ridicule, and a drug user (he only took LSD 4 times in a controlled environment), but he understood something that anyone did not, and that could be understood way after: the thin line between the mechanistic world and the symbolic meaning that only the human species can achieve.
April 30, 2014
I am a big fan of Aldous Huxley's work from what I know of this author. A friend in the music business recommended that I try Moksha and I thoroughly appreciated reading it. It is perhaps the logical follow-on read to the infamous 'Doors of Perception' as the book covers the period during which Huxley's great mind was subjected to hallucinogenic drugs. His groundbreaking work with (and indeed coining of the phrase) the hallucinogens, was important for science as a whole. So often drug use can be tainted in today's society. Huxley demonstrates that he was acting in a responsible fashion and he was exceptionally keen on expanding his consciousness. He saw in the substances he used a visionary future for mankind and Moksha gives us an insight into that world. I found the most enthralling part of this book to be the interspersed personal correspondence between chapters. These letters showed Huxley's devotion to his cause and gave valuable insight into his personal manners. I felt Moksha to be an intimate portrait of a man with immense brainpower, a true literary shaman and a genius. Huxley's work should long be remembered and his life celebrated more so than it actually is. I plan to go on to read his novel 'Island' next as that has so far eluded me.
June 24, 2023
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.
December 24, 2022
Huxley’s writings on psychedelics are an absolute joy to read.
November 19, 2016
Huxley was so ahead of his time. Contained here are letters, lectures, and essays about his experiments with visionary substances and how they could be used as healing agents, which the current psychedelic renaissance has as its cause celebre over 50 years after Huxley thought the same thing. Also included (and much appreciated) are Laura Huxley's excellent observations on using psychedelics with Aldous--her account of his dying moments when she administered LSD to him are deeply moving.
April 30, 2014
"El opio es la religión del pueblo."
Alucinantes testimonios de primera mano sobre los experimentos artísticos y filosóficos de Huxley con el LSD y sus reflexiones sobre la legalización de la droga en sociedades utópicas / distópicas.
Alucinantes testimonios de primera mano sobre los experimentos artísticos y filosóficos de Huxley con el LSD y sus reflexiones sobre la legalización de la droga en sociedades utópicas / distópicas.
December 31, 2018
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.
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.
December 19, 2025
“Preparation for ultimate death is to be aware that your highest and most intense form of life is accompanied by, and conditional upon, a series of small deaths all the time. We have to be dying to these obsessive memories.”
― Aldous Huxley
I read some of Huxley's books, and he was quite influential. After reading this book, and having the opportunity to read cognitive science of religion and evolutionary medicine, there's nothing more to say, he was in fact, way ahead of his time. He really was. We now have, thanks to the advances in neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience, under the scope of evolutionary medicine, evidence that the brain behaves in such a way that could be described as the "visionary experiences" detailed by Huxley. We now have books such as "Ritual", "Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion", and "Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved", that explain many things mentioned by Huxley, more than 50 years ago concerning the use of drugs and why the human species have always done that.
He would have been happy to know that science managed to explain some of his insights concerning effects such as placebo, nocebo, drug use, schizophrenia and religion leadership, and many other themes that go way back, to the origins of human life and the creation of symbolic meaning and ritual.
The book contains mostly letters between doctors, and the transcription of lectures that Huxley shared because he was invited. The last chapters are all about his death. He was an advocate to the meaning of afterlife, talking a lot about Eastern tradition, and he died of cancer the same day that John F. Kennedy got a bullet is his head. On the other hand, Huxley was given a shot of LSD and he crossed the bridge between life and death without any pain, making it his last visionary experience.
He may have sinned of being ahead of his time, people sometimes considering him as a nutjob, a wackjob, a new age ridicule, and a drug user (he only took LSD 4 times in a controlled environment), but he understood something that anyone did not, and that could be understood way after: the thin line between the mechanistic world and the symbolic meaning that only the human species can achieve.
― Aldous Huxley
I read some of Huxley's books, and he was quite influential. After reading this book, and having the opportunity to read cognitive science of religion and evolutionary medicine, there's nothing more to say, he was in fact, way ahead of his time. He really was. We now have, thanks to the advances in neurobiology, and cognitive neuroscience, under the scope of evolutionary medicine, evidence that the brain behaves in such a way that could be described as the "visionary experiences" detailed by Huxley. We now have books such as "Ritual", "Ritual in Human Evolution and Religion", and "Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved", that explain many things mentioned by Huxley, more than 50 years ago concerning the use of drugs and why the human species have always done that.
He would have been happy to know that science managed to explain some of his insights concerning effects such as placebo, nocebo, drug use, schizophrenia and religion leadership, and many other themes that go way back, to the origins of human life and the creation of symbolic meaning and ritual.
The book contains mostly letters between doctors, and the transcription of lectures that Huxley shared because he was invited. The last chapters are all about his death. He was an advocate to the meaning of afterlife, talking a lot about Eastern tradition, and he died of cancer the same day that John F. Kennedy got a bullet is his head. On the other hand, Huxley was given a shot of LSD and he crossed the bridge between life and death without any pain, making it his last visionary experience.
He may have sinned of being ahead of his time, people sometimes considering him as a nutjob, a wackjob, a new age ridicule, and a drug user (he only took LSD 4 times in a controlled environment), but he understood something that anyone did not, and that could be understood way after: the thin line between the mechanistic world and the symbolic meaning that only the human species can achieve.
April 10, 2018
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 !
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 !
December 19, 2020
I can only agree with the review by the Los Angeles Times:
„Moksha is more than a book about psychedelics - although it may well be the most intelligent, well rounded one of its kind. It is also another chance to spend hours in Huxley’s fascinating company as he talks about art, literature, religion, psychology and ecology [and philosophy, culture, history, and a bit of pharmacology]”.
Those who are interested in the topic should read his, in my opinion greatest work, “The Perennial Philosophy” as well.
„Moksha is more than a book about psychedelics - although it may well be the most intelligent, well rounded one of its kind. It is also another chance to spend hours in Huxley’s fascinating company as he talks about art, literature, religion, psychology and ecology [and philosophy, culture, history, and a bit of pharmacology]”.
Those who are interested in the topic should read his, in my opinion greatest work, “The Perennial Philosophy” as well.
August 6, 2020
Great book to speed read, truly shows the development of the view of the man who'd later write Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell towards drug use, especially Psychedelics. From seemingly, and and not surprisingly for an upperclassman in the 1930s, wary of them, up till the post-Mescaline era. Enjoyed reading it, though it would have been dull to read carefully; speed reading until you find articles that interest you is the way to go.
December 5, 2020
Great book, this collection of writings tracks the development of Aldous Huxley's thought relating to psychedelics and spirituality. Mostly letters and seminal essays written by Huxley, the book lays bare the tragedy that is the prohibition of psychedelic sacraments and the restricting of psychedelic therapy. Ends with a moving piece by Laura Huxley about Aldous's final moments on LSD.
September 18, 2022
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.
February 27, 2023
Una visión del mundo a través del consumo de psicodélicos, esto como catalizador de experiencias espirituales asociadas xon prácticas ancestrales, tanto en comunidades prehispánicas como del lejano oriente.
March 17, 2025
Reading this collection of deep thoughts about nature of reality, society, spirituality and of course, use of psychedelics, raises an important and harrowing question: Where have great people like Aldous Huxley, with their beautiful mind, vision and understanding, disappeared from our modern world?
May 18, 2025
¡Qué librazo! Para leer con un lápiz en la mano. Para mí también abrió todo un mundo cuando leí Las Puertas de la Percepción por primera vez. Acá estamos expuestos a los primeros acercamientos y pensamientos de Huxley con respecto a los psicodélicos a través de cartas, textos académicos, conferencias, y más. Súper recomendado.
September 21, 2021
Essential reading for anyone who wants to transcend into a state of greater happiness, openmindedeness, peace and creativity.
December 7, 2021
Letters, deeper reflections on psychedelics, letters from others as well.
November 21, 2023
Había escrito una reseña de puta madre pero se ha perdido, si quieres saber de que va pregúntame
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2024
Muy bueno!
Read
January 31, 2025there is a light that never goes out
March 6, 2025
Volveré una y otra vez a esta obra fundacional del pensamiento psicodélico
January 8, 2009
As the title suggests, this book is a collection of Huxley's writings on his psychedelic experiences and what he perceived about the drugs being used for the benefit of humans (which led to his last novel, "Island"). Included are his letters to Humphrey Osmond, the British ex-pat psychologist experimenting with psychedelic therapy in Canada, Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD in 1943 and, of course, Timothy Leary, no introduction needed.
Huxley, an English intellectual to the end, communicated his perceptions of the psychedelic state of mind very eloquently in his texts (especially "The Doors Of Perception", from which a snippet is provided in 'Moksha') and lectures given to various groups of congregated scientists at various conferences. His letters seem most interesting though. An almost behind-the-scenes look at the very early psychedelic movement, before the wave crested in 'the Sixties'.
The final chapter, written by Huxley's second wife Laura, sees Aldous off into the bardos--with two small injections of LSD at his request. One of the first great 20th century psychonauts given his own gentle version of a Viking funeral.
Huxley, an English intellectual to the end, communicated his perceptions of the psychedelic state of mind very eloquently in his texts (especially "The Doors Of Perception", from which a snippet is provided in 'Moksha') and lectures given to various groups of congregated scientists at various conferences. His letters seem most interesting though. An almost behind-the-scenes look at the very early psychedelic movement, before the wave crested in 'the Sixties'.
The final chapter, written by Huxley's second wife Laura, sees Aldous off into the bardos--with two small injections of LSD at his request. One of the first great 20th century psychonauts given his own gentle version of a Viking funeral.
August 29, 2013
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.
August 20, 2016
These writings provide some insight into Huxley's experiences with psychedelics, as well as some of the socio-cultural institutions that were experimenting with psychedelics in the fifties and early sixties. This book is important for understanding some of the intellectual trends, in and outside of the government, academia, private foundations, etc., that led to "The Sixties" a few years later.
June 27, 2007
Have not finished reading this. There must be some value in that book and that anthology of stories that i have yet to discover!
March 3, 2014
i found this in my house. only its a first edition from 1977 with albert hoffman and alexander shulgin.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews