Thursday 16 June 2011
Sunday 10 January 2010
Author Don Lattin Recalls His Introduction to Aldous Huxley, Psychedelics (Essay)
Don Lattin was formerly the religion writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s the author of a new book about the pioneers of the psychedelic movement,“The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America” (Harper). Lattin wrote an essay for Speakeasy about his own experience with altered states of conscious.
My long and somewhat strange trip began in high school with Aldous Huxley. It was the late 1960s. I was probably fifteen or sixteen years old when I read “Island,” Huxley’s final novel, the one about a cynical reporter who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious Pacific island where the natives live in cosmic harmony with all and everything.
As a novel, “Island” does not fare well with the passage of time, but it led me to “The Doors of Perception,” a book Huxley published in 1954. It describes Huxley’s first experience with psychedelics, a word the writer would later coin with an assist from Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the British researcher who guided Huxley on a mescaline trip in the spring of 1953.
I was in utero in New Jersey when Huxley had his baptismal trip in his home in the Hollywood hills. He later wrote of how he was amazed at the “is-ness” of his gray flannel trousers, how they showed him all he needed to know about “the miraculous fact of sheer existence.”
“The Doors of Perception” gave birth to the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s, and it also sparked something in me –- a desire to alter my consciousness in another way, not just with beer and pot at high school parties, but to take a deeper journey into my own heart and mind.
There would be many such journeys in the 1970s, ecstasies and agonies. Some trips were filled with profound, joyous revelation. One kicked off a terrifying psychotic break and hallucinogenic flashbacks that lasted for weeks.
Both the joyous revelation and the bad trip from central casting unfurled in the fall of 1972, shortly after I arrived in Berkeley to begin undergraduate studies at the University of California. The bad trip scared the hell out of me. I swore I’d never do psychedelics again, but, of course, I was back at it in a few months.
I fell in with an older crowd in their mid-thirties. They’d been in San Francisco in the early and mid-’60s, and experienced what I always imagined were the best years of the scene. I’d missed most of the fun, and became the kid who always wanted to keep the party going, a role I played out for more than a few years.
My love and fear of psychedelic drugs eventually led me to discover some kinder, gentler ways to look into my own heart and soul. It also sparked an interest in religious mysticism and a long career as a religion reporter for the secular press. In the end, I realized that it’s not about the drugs. It’s about remembering all the life-affirming moments along the way -– those glimpses of wonder and awe, empathy and interconnectedness -– and finding a place for all of that in the rest of our lives.
My long and somewhat strange trip began in high school with Aldous Huxley. It was the late 1960s. I was probably fifteen or sixteen years old when I read “Island,” Huxley’s final novel, the one about a cynical reporter who gets shipwrecked on a mysterious Pacific island where the natives live in cosmic harmony with all and everything.
As a novel, “Island” does not fare well with the passage of time, but it led me to “The Doors of Perception,” a book Huxley published in 1954. It describes Huxley’s first experience with psychedelics, a word the writer would later coin with an assist from Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the British researcher who guided Huxley on a mescaline trip in the spring of 1953.
I was in utero in New Jersey when Huxley had his baptismal trip in his home in the Hollywood hills. He later wrote of how he was amazed at the “is-ness” of his gray flannel trousers, how they showed him all he needed to know about “the miraculous fact of sheer existence.”
“The Doors of Perception” gave birth to the psychedelic drug culture of the 1960s, and it also sparked something in me –- a desire to alter my consciousness in another way, not just with beer and pot at high school parties, but to take a deeper journey into my own heart and mind.
There would be many such journeys in the 1970s, ecstasies and agonies. Some trips were filled with profound, joyous revelation. One kicked off a terrifying psychotic break and hallucinogenic flashbacks that lasted for weeks.
Both the joyous revelation and the bad trip from central casting unfurled in the fall of 1972, shortly after I arrived in Berkeley to begin undergraduate studies at the University of California. The bad trip scared the hell out of me. I swore I’d never do psychedelics again, but, of course, I was back at it in a few months.
I fell in with an older crowd in their mid-thirties. They’d been in San Francisco in the early and mid-’60s, and experienced what I always imagined were the best years of the scene. I’d missed most of the fun, and became the kid who always wanted to keep the party going, a role I played out for more than a few years.
My love and fear of psychedelic drugs eventually led me to discover some kinder, gentler ways to look into my own heart and soul. It also sparked an interest in religious mysticism and a long career as a religion reporter for the secular press. In the end, I realized that it’s not about the drugs. It’s about remembering all the life-affirming moments along the way -– those glimpses of wonder and awe, empathy and interconnectedness -– and finding a place for all of that in the rest of our lives.
Sunday 28 June 2009
Quotations of Huxley from life
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Quotations of Huxley from life
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.
Quotations of Huxley from life
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.
Quotations of Huxley from life
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Quotations of Huxley from life
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