Aldous Huxley (2)

Hello, part two of Brave New World coming up, aswell as a insightful speech Huxley held march 62, in which he further explores the Brave New World scenario.. followed by a 10 min video about the ongoing application of chemicals to control and dumb down the populace...

Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, but was also latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank.He was also well known for advocating and taking hallucinogens.

Aldous Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, England on 26 July 1894. He was the third son of the writer and professional herbalist Leonard Huxley and first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's Field School. He was grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the most prominent English naturalists of the 19th century, a man known as "Darwin's Bulldog." Following his education at Oxford, Huxley was financially indebted to his father and had to earn a living. He taught French for a year at Eton, where Eric Blair (later known by the pen name George Orwell) was among his pupils, but was remembered by another as an incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline.

Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. His earlier work includes important novels on the dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example, Eyeless in Gaza). During World War I, Huxley spent much of his time at Garsington Manor, home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, working as a farm labourer. Here he met several Bloomsbury figures including D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. Later, in Crome Yellow (1921 age 27) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, a Belgian woman he had met at Garsington. They had one child, Matthew Huxley (1920 – 2005)

In 1937, Huxley moved to Hollywood, California with his wife Maria, son Matthew, and friend Gerald Heard. He lived in the U.S., mainly in southern California, till his death, but also for a time in Taos, New Mexico, where he wrote Ends and Means (published in 1937). In this work he examines the fact that although most people in modern civilization agree that they want a world of 'liberty, peace, justice, and brotherly love', they have not been able to agree on how to achieve it. Heard introduced Huxley to Vedanta, meditation, and vegetarianism through the principle of ahimsa. In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed the teachings of renowned mystics of the world.

Huxley spent much time at the Occidental college, it appears as "Tarzana College" in his prized satirical novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). For most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left Huxley nearly blind, his eyesight was poor . On 21 October 1949 Huxley wrote to George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, congratulating Orwell on "how fine and how profoundly important the book is." In his letter to Orwell, he predicted that "Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.

During the 1950s Huxley's interest in the field of psychical research grew keener, and his later works are strongly influenced by both mysticism and his experiences with the psychedelic drugs. He was introduced to mescaline by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. On 24 December 1955 Huxley took his first dose of LSD. Indeed, Huxley was a pioneer of self-directed psychedelic drug use "in a search for enlightenment", famously taking 100 micrograms of LSD as he lay dying. His psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception, and Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies. 

In 1955 Huxley's wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. In 1956 he married Laura Archera (1911-2007), also an author, she wrote a biography of Huxley. In 1960 Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer, and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen institute, which were fundamental to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. On his deathbed, unable to speak, Huxley made a written request to his wife for "LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.". According to her account of his death (in her book This Timeless Moment), she obliged with an injection at 11:45 am and another a couple of hours later. He died at 5:21 pm on 22 November 1963, aged 69. Media coverage of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, as was the death of the Irish author C. S. Lewis.

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Aldous Huxley - Brave New World pt 2 23mb


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Aldous Huxley - 'The Ultimate Revolution' 39mb

"Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows. We are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy, who have always existed and presumably will always exist, to get people to love their servitude. This is the, it seems to me, the ultimate in malevolent revolutions."

A talk about psychological conditioning, the development of new behavioural controls which operate directly upon the psycho/fysicals organisms of man, replacing external constraint.

Aldous Huxley presentation March 62- 'The Ultimate Revolution' (44:08)
Aldous Huxley presentation March 62- 'The Ultimate Revolution' Q & A (28:50)

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In the light od the talk by Aldous Huxley you may find it rewarding to view the following 10 min video and then do a little thinking about what is really going on in the U.S. today...

Chemical Dumbing Down of America



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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !