This is apparent in some passages of The Perennial Philosophy , which was written during the war:. Most people are in thrall to various forms of idolatry and ersatz-religion — worship of progress, worship of technology, and above all worship of the nation-state. Abrahamic religions are also, largely, religions of time he argues which is why they have led to so much bloodshed. This looked an unlikely prospect, so Huxley withdrew to the Mojave Desert to try to become a saint. Alas, total selflessness turned out to be hard to achieve.
I t was only in May that Huxley felt he finally had a mystical experience. And that was when he took mescaline, a psychedelic drug found in the peyote cactus. He discovered a ski lift up the mystical mountain. Psychedelics, he believed, gave ordinary people a glimpse of experiences once confined to saints, and helped intellectuals like him go beyond conceptual thinking.
He also got out of his head through somatic practices such as Tantra , Gestalt therapy, the Alexander technique. He even celebrated ecstatic dance. He seemed to relax and become more at peace with himself in the s — friends such as Isaiah Berlin came away struck by a sense of his goodness. With this relaxation came an optimism that civilisation might not be headed for collapse. Perhaps the perennial philosophy might become popular after all.
It was promoted in places such as the Esalen Institute in California and celebrated in pop culture by everyone from John Coltrane to the Beatles. Before he died in , Huxley became a hit on US campuses, lecturing on mystical experience to thousands of fascinated students. Like Huxley, this group practises spiritual techniques from many different religions — yoga, mindfulness, plant medicine — and seeks to test out these methods with empirical science.
A majority of American Christians, again according to Pew, now believe other faiths can lead to heaven. Katz pointed out that mystical traditions are actually very different. Christian mystics have Christian mystical experiences, Buddhists have Buddhist mystical experiences, and so on. It is true that Huxley equates ideas that are, on closer inspection, often quite different. At the same time, Katz suggests that we can never escape our cultural conditioning, and should all just stay in our lane.
Katz ignores the extent to which mystical traditions can be shaped by our common neuropsychology mystics were the great psychologists of their day, Huxley suggested. Many mystical practices are based on the cognitive theory of the emotions — the idea that our ordinary self is constituted by habitual automatic beliefs, which we can notice, explore and change.
The second major critique of perennialism came in , with the book Revisioning Transpersonal Theory by the Spanish-born psychologist Jorge Ferrer. HT Open Culture. The Marginalian participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.
In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from any link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.
Huxley then turns to how drugs have attempted to address this human urge and the interplay of those attempts with religion: Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made no radical discoveries.
He then turns to how these psychopharmacological tendencies might be exploited in a political context: The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. Rather ironically given the context of subsequent geopolitical history of despots, from Putin to Yanukovych, Huxley considers the fruits of these experiments an assurance against despotism: Let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture.
Huxley ties this back to religion and the parallel artificiality of the transcendent experience: Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications — fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture — inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular.
He concludes by reminding us of the deeper spiritual and psychoemotional roots of both drug-induced and religious experiences: That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. He once again peers into the future: For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols.
Share Article Tweet. View Full Site. Brill MyBook. Ordering from Brill. Author Newsletter. Piracy Reporting Form. How to Manage your Online Holdings. Sales Managers and Sales Contacts. Ordering From Brill. LibLynx for Selected Online Resources. Discovery Services. Online User and Order Help. MARC Records. Titles No Longer Published by Brill. Latest Key Figures. Latest Financial Press Releases and Reports. Annual General Meeting of Shareholders. Share Information. Huxley was intrigued by examples of socially and spiritually mandated forms of sexual promiscuity, and his ideal politics would make the world safe for mystical experience.
Mysticism as defined by William James and Rudolf Otto is not esotericism a Renaissance synthesis and polemic Other to Enlightenment discourse which is not occultism like Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The late 19th-century and early 20th-century cultic milieu was strongly determined by three inspirations: The Secret Doctrine by Madame Helena P. It was imagined as an undogmatic, nonhierarchical, nondenominational club for mystics and rest center for social workers.
It was open to maladjusted youth seeking to regain control of themselves and return to an integrated life in the world. Heard was interested in the regeneration of the individual , but he also believed the only hope for our derelict civilization is in the emergence of Neo-Brahmins who have attained the next stage of evolution and assumed leadership of humanity Huxley visited six times, once with Jiddu Krishnamurti who was disturbed and declined to return.
Heard judged his attempt to be a failure and donated the compound to Swami Prabhavananda. Huxley believed human progress results not from an evolutionary leap or paranormal training, but through cultivating existing potential aided by pharmacology.
Heard also promoted LSD as an educational tool to right-wing Libertarian groups and introduced the drug to the engineers at the Sequoia Seminars who were in pursuit of a man-machine symbiosis through computer-augmented and artificial intelligence.
0コメント