ALDOUS HUXLEY

More than any other author of his generation, Huxley deepened the novel, took it away from literary realism towards a metaphysical idealism, and exploited it as a vehicle from which to explore the paradoxical pathways of alternative religion, particularly, from approximately Eyeless in Gaza onwards, those which led to a Buddhist nirvana. He could in some sense be described as an English Kerouac, though his interest in oriental mysticism was rather more theoretical than practical, in deference to his intensely intellectual temperament, and he never bothered to venture to the East in search of enlightenment or spiritual fulfilment. Evidently there was enough scope for such enlightenment in the Far West, as California might be termed, and also the freedom to experiment with a variety of hallucinogenic drugs like mescaline and LSD, in the hope of discovering an alternative, uniquely Western path to Heaven.

Writing about such drug-taking experiments in The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell, Huxley does not dismiss the 'Artificial Paradises' obtained - as the great French poet Baudelaire would probably have done under similar circumstances or, indeed, as Koestler actually did do - but, on the contrary, sees in their otherworldly intimations a necessary reprieve from naturalism and the attainment of expanded consciousness made easy - a not-unattractive proposition in an age of technological expansion and artificial culture, and preferable, by far, to continued recourse to such mind-contracting drugs as alcohol and tobacco!

Despite his English origins and very English cultivation, Huxley was no puritan, condemning drugs wholesale, but flexible and realistic enough to perceive in the sensible use of certain kinds of synthetic hallucinogens an alternative to pure religion, which, whilst ultimately inadequate for spiritual salvation, was within the reach of most people and of some benefit in the short term, if only as a means to combating traditional dependence on the more sensual, because naturalistic, drugs, and leading people towards a higher possibility - namely, self-realization achieved independently of visionary experience through transcendental meditation. For whilst artificially-induced visionary experience is preferable to alcoholic somnolence, true enlightenment lies in a realm of pure mind necessarily beyond and above all appearances, a realm corresponding to the utmost spiritual essence.

So Huxley was aware of the two approaches to religious enlightenment, what in previous works I have called 'the romantic' and 'the classic', or the indirect approach and the direct approach, which of course find traditional parallels in the Christian distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism (with especial reference to Puritanism), and he very wisely dismissed neither the one nor the other, as, in their opposite ways, both Koestler and Jung were to do. America was moving towards artificial appearances when Huxley experimented with hallucinogens, gradually abandoning its puritan roots under pressure from various contemporary phenomena, some ethnic, some technological, others social, and it is a trend that will doubtless continue into the next civilization - the transcendental civilization of what I have called Centrism ... in countries destined, in the short term, for supertheocratic transformation. Appearances precede essences, and no less on the transcendent level of artificial religion than on lower or naturalistic levels - Social Transcendentalism the antithetical equivalent to Roman Catholicism.

So Huxley to some extent participated in alternative civilization within the decadence of puritan civilization, when oriental mysticism was on the increase, and his findings were by no means negative. On the contrary, they indicate a strong sympathy for an alternative approach to religion, and Huxley is now better known for writings concerned with mind-expanding drugs than as an advocate of transcendental meditation - great though his interest was in all aspects of oriental religion. Even Island, his last and in some ways most radical novel, has its own variant on LSD called 'soma', and since his death an anthology of his writings on drugs entitled Moksha has appeared, as though in confirmation of this alternative bias.

Certainly, I would never have taken to Huxley had he been a typical, instead of highly untypical, Englishman, and although he lived abroad - first in France and then in the United States - on account of his eyes requiring a drier and brighter climate, one is never given the impression that this was in any way an inconvenience to him, but, on the contrary, can well believe that those countries were more congenial to his intellectual temperament than England, with its deadpan academicism and philistine conservatism. Doubtless Huxley would never have achieved the spiritual standing he did, had it not been for this exile abroad, which not only encouraged him to deepen the novel, but to expand essayistically towards imaginative horizons transcending the narrow parochialism of British letters. In the first if not the second respect, he resembles Lawrence Durrell.