Escaping Huxley’s Island: Psychedelics, Scientific Paganism and the Changing Images of Man

 

In Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, the guru of Ultimate Revolution and predictive programming presents a subtly different and more nuanced version of the original “soma” culture depicted in his Brave New World. While Huxley’s earlier novel presented a culture in which a magical drug called “soma” was used to chemically regulate people’s inner worlds to keep them “happy,” Huxley’s last novel presents a more mature vision in which the earlier system of psycho-chemical control evolves into a much subtler system of psycho-spiritual manipulation.

 While Brave New World’s “soma” culture dulled the pain of an unfulfilled and innate longing within human beings—which the true philosophers, saints, poets and theologians across the ages have always embodied—the novel Island offers a clever imitation in the form of a magical substance called “moksha” (the name is appropriated from Hinduism). Huxley’s Island thus presents a “spiritual” medicine capable of meeting a human being’s most innate and deepest desires for transcendence.

 Not surprisingly, the invariant in both Huxley novels is a culture of diverse eugenic practices, sex cults and mass drug use. In the case of the latter novel, the essence of control is based on offering something which imitates genuine transcendence and gives people the feeling of having attained their higher self-actualized self.

 As we approach a new critical juncture in the history of Western civilization, which involves regularly priming individuals with the idea of an end to the “age of abundance” and constant doomsday predictions warning of biblical floods and fires unless mankind repents for its sins against “Mother Nature”, we should give careful consideration to the latest fad of psychedelic-infused “spirituality” currently being presented to Western audiences.

 Perhaps there’s more than meets the eye?  (more...)

Escaping Huxley’s Island: Psychedelics, Scientific Paganism and the Changing Images of Man

David Gosselin discusses Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' and 'The Island,' visions of a system of psycho-spiritual manipulation. For elites the real problem has become the Promethean and Judeo-Christian image of man itself, the Classical and religious Western heritage, where the Renaissance idea of man as endowed with a divine creative spark allows him to master knowledge of “fire.” They seek to move from a post-Renaissance Western paradigm towards a new more sustainable Gaia-centric “ecological ethic” and a more efficient system of control.