Showing posts with label Huxley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Huxley. Show all posts

Sunday, January 31, 2021

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."

 - Aldous Huxley

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Aldous Huxley -  In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered more profound than those detailed in The Doors of Perception. Huxley was overwhelmed to the point where he decided his previous experiments, the ones detailed in Doors and Heaven and Hell, had been nothing but "entertaining sideshows."

He wrote in a letter to Humphry Osmond, that he experienced "the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact. ... I was this fact; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this fact occupied the place where I had been. ... And the things which had entirely filled my attention on that first occasion, I now perceived to be temptations – temptations to escape from the central reality into a false, or at least imperfect and partial Nirvanas of beauty and mere knowledge."