Posts tagged "Aldous-Huxley"
Moksha Medicine: Powerful Excerpts from Huxley’s “Island”
One of my favorite books is Island by Aldous Huxley, a book often prized by psychonauts and others who enjoy looking at society from the outside in. In Island, Huxley lays out the structure for an ideal society while making piercing criticisms of modern Western culture. As the title indicates, Huxley’s utopia is set on a small island, far removed from modern technology and divisive global politics. Some have criticized the book’s characterization and plot, but in Island these are secondary. This book’s main strength is in elaborating a great thinker’s vision of a truly civilized society. I want to share a couple excerpts...
One Last LSD Trip The Beautiful Death of Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley was known for his incredible books and essays, among them The Doors of Perception, a 1954 book discussing his experiences with mescaline, and Island, a novel about a utopian society. In Island, the citizens inhabit a constant state of acceptance thanks to meditation and a psychedelic agent they call “moksha medicine.” A character describes moksha as “the reality reliever, the truth-and-beauty pill,” allowing users to “catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.” Huxley was an elder statesman of the psychedelic movement, one who advocated the intelligent and cautious use of...
How Psilocybin Works: Addition by Subtraction
Psychedelic Frontier gladly welcomes our first guest, Zizo! A big thanks to Zizo for today’s post about some surprising psilocybin research results. Psilocybin is the inactive precursor of psilocin, the chemical primarily responsible for the hallucinogenic effects of Psilocybe “magic mushrooms”. Though human cultures have used this entheogen for many centuries, we are only just beginning to understand the physiological mechanism by which it produces its psychedelic effects. This slow scientific progress is a result of harsh international drug policy, but I digress… The psychedelic trip is often described as profoundly mind-expanding, and the brain is popularly presumed to...
Free Book: The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley became a pioneer in the (practically nonexistent) field of modern psychedelic literature in 1954 when he published The Doors of Perception, a short but detailed book about his experience with mescaline. Many people would hesitate to publish a book about such a controversial and personal topic even today, half a century later, but Huxley staked his claim smack dab in the middle of the 1950s. The term “psychedelic” hadn’t even been coined yet (though Huxley would contribute to its creation a few years later). This book represents one of the first and best-known “trip reports”, at...