2011/15
Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy (301p.)
Everything one needs to know about life is contained in Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, as it is a digest of Eastern and Western mysticism, which is where rational thought can lead to, if it doesn’t lead to the construction of a cyclotron. Huxley didn’t only write brilliant (science) fiction.
He might have been one of the last, men who stepped across boundaries, and for whom science, the arts, religion, drugs, ecology, and mysticism had one thing in common: life, and to experience it in full – the development of the human potential. Huxley was one of the Esalen folks.
In 1919 he married a Belgian girl, Maria Nys.
He died in 1963, after having been administered two injections of 100μg LSD (intramuscular), tripping while on the great Trip.
A non-fiction classic, which I bought almost a decade ago in Chapell Hill, North-Carolina, but which I hadn’t been able to read earlier.
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May 26, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Grace
Very nice. I don’t run across many other people who have read this, but I rather enjoy the way that Huxley ties a bunch of different experiences together to create one big picture. He perceives different religions as being different ways of explaining or understanding a central experience.
May 26, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Hardie
@Grace: thanks! I will sure do a few more Huxley’s going forward – with pleasure.