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vEDik THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:...from world famous intellectual Aldous Huxley...."LAW OF REVERESED EFFECT"...... Posted by Vishva News Reporter on September 9, 2010 |
.....METAPHYSICAL LIFE THOUGHT FOR TODAY.....
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LET
UNDERSTANDING OF
YOURSELF AND EVERYTHING AROUND YOU
COME TO YOU
BY
....combining relaxed state of mind
with activity...
....let yourself go as a person at the centre of your world...
.....allow your Creator to enter you....
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The Above Knowledge Sharing is From
Aldous
Huxley
the 20th Century's leader of modern
thought and an intellectual of the highest rank,
highly regarded as one of most prominent explorers of
visual communication and sight-related theories
Aldous Huxley said in the following visionary but metaphysical thinking:
“There is a Law of Reversed Effort....
.....The harder we try with the conscious will to do something,
the less we shall succeed....
.....Proficiency and the results of proficiency
come only to those who have learned
the paradoxical art of doing and not doing...
or
....combining relaxation with activity...
....of letting go as a person....
.....in order that
the immanent and transcendent
Unknown Quantity
may take hold.....
....We cannot make ourselves understand...
....the most we can do is
to foster a state of mind
....in which understanding
may come to us....”
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.....THE vEDik TAKE ON THE ABOVE
QUOTED
ALDOUS HUXLEY'S THOUGHTS ....
(shared by
Champaklal Dajibhai Mistry,
of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)
|

.....what does Aldous Huxley mean when he says:
......“Our linguistic habits lead us into error.”.....
|
This is a profound life-Truth quote from
Aldous Huxley....
If we look around our daily life, past and present....you will find how
our race and belief based languages of the entire humanity has
created the good, bad and ugly in life at individual, family, community,
national and international level...We all have felt that we should not
have said something or said it differently or we would say we did not
mean that...it is basically or the fault of language....But what is a
human language in what
Aldous Huxley refers to as our
"Linguistic
Habits".....which he has told us that it is "leading us into error"....
The True meaning of language can be had from studies of the
GNaan
(translated
simply as "Knowledge of the Truth"
about Ourselves and Our relationship to our
Creator)... This GNaan or "Knowledge of the Truth" also can be simply stated as Sciences of
Life and
Creation, sustenance of Life and Creation for Life and Creation to
operate according to their designs and functional intents, and finally
cyclic re-creation of Life and Creation that we observed in all the
cycles of nature such as seasons, seasonal farming, economy, human
behaviors, cosmic
phenomenon that we understand and are trying to understand as
ontology and metaphysics....and all of the preceding, in
sNskRUt language, is called
vED.(transliterated
without sNskRUt phonetics in English language as veda)..Creation in
vED refers to all that we humans can see and not see
but know that it is there in some form around us on this planet Earth
and beyond in cosmos...Life in vED refers to what animates all Creations
to do what it does at macro as in universe as well as micro as in up to
sub-atomic and/or non-cognitive human perception levels....
...And language and its structure empowers Life and Creation to expresses
in thoughts , speech and
kARm in terms of place of expression, time of expression and reason
for expression. The knowledge and power thereof in language for
these expressions is provided through what is called
v`yaakrAN,
cchNDs
and
nirtuk`t....
The meaning of v`yaakrAN
will take a book itself to translate into
English language...but simply put it means what current humanity understands
vaguely is called "GRAMMAR"...The science of
v`yaakrAN is then
interactively and holistically uses the mechanism of the science called
cchNDs, which again simply translated in English can be vaguely what is
meant by the English words
"Prosody/Metrical Sciences"...Both
v`yaakrAN
and cchNDs then uses
niruk`t which is the
sNskRUt language compilation of founding words of
sNskRUt
language......v'yaakrAN, cchNDs and
niruk`t are grouped under the label
of
vEDNg in
vED meaning a part of the whole
vED.....parts similar to hand,
legs, head and other organs are part of a human body without which the
human body cannot function fully as per the Creator's design to
sustain and maintain itself to operate as per the Creator's design and
functional intent but also allowing personal intents....
If one looks at our linguistic habits carefully without personal bias
and egoism...one would find that the majority of the current humanity
has vague understanding of the above noted 3 components which makes a
language whether good, bad or ugly.....A proof of this is seen even in
human leadership at highest national levels... as made famous by media
are USA President Bush, USA Vice President Dan Quayle, President Nixon
and many non-English speaking national leaders who conversed with
English speaking national leaders....many brilliant scientists some who
could never speak, economists like Greenspan, name brand entertainers
and media talkers who thrive on foul language...and most importantly at
base human level of a family where increasingly parent and children are
heading towards not understanding what each other say in every race and
culture.....
And known history shows that this LACK OF LINGUISTIC PROFICIENCY
linguistic proficiency has created major human life disasters of one
kind or another through ERROS of human behaviour.....and most of the
time these human life disasters have impacted to a degree negatively the
rest of the Creation and Life.....
(The above is quite a complex presentation in itself but presented
as a simplified overview of part of vED connected with today's news/Knowledge
offering by PVAF...Any one who wish to expand their understanding of the
above overview presentation may contact by email directly
Champaklal Mistry
by clicking
here...The
above is
from Chmapaklal Mistry's vED
library and continuing learning life sciences of
vED
there-from through daily svaaDH`yaay and
stsNg....
The
sNskRUt
language words in the sharing are in bold italics blue and
transliterated in English language to realize the phonetics of
sNskRUt
language....
Wikipedia has increasing amount of vEDik
knowledge and PVAF in its mandate to expand human
knowledge has started recently to hyperlink
vEDik
words/concepts in PVAF publishing to Wikipedia where
available...but the accuracy of this linked Wikipedia info is suspect
and/or incompete and/or misrepresentation due to partisan belief
systems...all these from a vEDik perspective of Champak Mistry to know
vED as is in the entire corpus of vED texts in original vEDik sNskRUt
language....please contact Champak Mistry directly as noted above for this discussion ...
Also for increasing your English
language power, key English words are also being hyperlinked to Wikpedia
and /or other dictionary sources....just click on the hyperlinked words
to go to Wikipedia ) .)
|
Today's news/knowledge sharing with humanity is on this
knowledge-sharing PVAF website to serve the primary PVAF
mandate of sharing all the kli-yug available GNaan (Knowledge) that
exists in our world today....
"to make
your tomorrow happier than today".... simply because
today you are increasing life knowledge.... which in turn will empower
you to live the lifestyle you may wish today and tomorrow......without
hurting yourself or any other creations because you did not know you are
hurting yourself and others....and you do not know this because you
simply lack life sciences Knowledge.... ) |
Please click on the last line to go to the next webpage of this
sharing today....to read a sample of the profound
thoughts of Aldous Huxley and clarity of those thoughts in his
English language and his expressions in English language...
This
Huxley phenomenon was very vEDik in nature and thus is still evergreen
even today....Sadly from the fact that majority of the current humanity
does not care about the Huxley phenomenon and/or appears to be difficult to
be understood by those who do not daily live by the
life sciences of vED of which
DHARm....
(transliterated without sNskRUt
phonetics in English language as
Dharma)...
But vEDikly,
DHARm is the operating system of Life and
Creation....similar to
what Microsoft is the 80 percent of computers in the world today.....and
just imagine what will happen to the computer world of today if
Microsoft disappears...same is happening in living daily life without
DHARm.....
You
can also read in brief the life history of Aldous Huxley at the end of
the above noted sampling to the end of next webpage.... |
|
....PLEASE
SCROLL ON FOR REALIZING
HUXLEY PHENOMENON
AND
THE MAN HIMSELF....
|
  
MOKSHA: Aldous
Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience.
ISLAND:
This was Huxley's last novel, first published in 1962. While Island is a
work of fiction, it is the vehicle Huxley used to communicate his ideas
about how people in a good society would interact with each other and
their environment.
BRAVE NEW WORLD: Aldous Huxley's
1932 classic before advent of Star Trek's futuristic sci-fi story
telling is ingenious fantasy of the future sheds a blazing light on the
present and is considered to be his most enduring masterpiece....even
selling today in reprints and unavilabe readily in library because of
holds and in-circulation..... Far in the future, the World Controllers
have created the ideal society in Savage Reservations. Through clever
use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs,
all its members are happy ....except for a renegade desiring to break
free...
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SAMPLING OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
PHENOMENON strong>
(From: Internet)
|
“If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials
hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the
self-conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least
as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you
invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A
man cannot control them. All he can do is to go to the mental equivalent
of Australia and look around him.”
“From the point of view of an inhabitant of the Old World, marsupials
are exceedingly odd. But oddity is not the same as randomness. Kangaroos
and wallabies may lack verisimilitude; but their improbability repeats
itself and obeys recognizable laws. The same is true of the
psychological creatures inhabiting the remoter regions of our minds.”
“What is good enough for the waking consciousness is evidently good
enough for the personal subconscious which finds it possible to express
its meanings through uncolored symbols. Color turns out to be a kind of
touchstone of reality. That which is given is colored; that which our
symbol-creating intellect and fancy put together is uncolored/.../(It is
worth remarking that, in most people’s experience, the most brightly
colored dreams are those of landscapes, in which there is no drama, no
symbolic reference to conflict, merely the presentation to consciousness
of a given, non-human fact.)”
“The non-symbolic inhabitants of the mind’s antipodes exist in their own
right, and like the given facts of the external world are colored.
Indeed, they are far more intensely colored than external data. This may
be explained, at least in part, by the fact that our perceptions of the
external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of
which we do our thinking. We are forever attempting to convert things
into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention.
But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native
thinghood.”
“For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems
rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair number
occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills
over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is
transfigured. Though still recognizably itself, the Old World takes on
the quality of the mind’s antipodes/.../then suddenly my consciousness
was lighted up from within and I saw in a vivid way how the whole
universe was made up of particles of material which, no matter how dull
and lifeless they might seem, were nevertheless filled with this intense
and vital beauty. For a second or two the whole world appeared as a
blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have
never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up
in every minute speck of material around us.br />
SSimilarly, George Russel writes of seeing the world illumined by ‘an
intolerable lustre of light’; of finding himself looking at ‘landscapes
as lovely as a lost Eden’; of beholding a world where the ‘colors were
brighter and purer, and yet made a softer harmony.’ Again, ‘the winds
were sparkling and diamond clear, and yet full of color as an opal, as
they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all
about me, and it was we who had been blind to it, but that it had never
passed away from the world.’”
“Preternatural light and color are common to all visionary experiences.
And along with light and color there goes, in every case, a recognition
of heightened significance. The self-luminous objects which we see in
the mind’s antipodes possess a meaning, and this meaning is, in some
sort, as intense as their color. Significance here is identical with
being; for, at the mind’s antipodes, objects do not stand for anything
but themselves. The images which appear in the nearer reaches of the
collective subconscious have meaning in relation to the basic facts of
human experience; but here, at the limits of the visionary world, we are
confronted by facts which, like the facts of external nature, are
independent of man, both individually and collectively, and exist in
their own right. And their meaning consists precisely in this, that they
are intensely themselves and, being intensely themselves, are
manifestations of the essential givenness, the non-human otherness of
the universe.”
“The landscapes, the architectures, the clustering gems, the brilliant
and intricate patterns--these, in their atmosphere of preternatural
light, preternatural color and preternaturalbr />
|
Aldous Huxley
(from
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)This
Wikipedia webpage was last modified on 7 September 2010 at 18:58.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963)
was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the
famous
Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United
States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963.
Best known for his novels including
Brave New World and wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley
also edited the magazine
Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel
writing, and film stories and scripts.
Aldous Huxley was a
humanist and
pacifist, and he was latterly interested in spiritual subjects
such as
parapsychology and philosophical
mysticism. He is also well known for advocating and taking
psychedelics.
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, and highly regarded as one of the most prominent
explorers of visual communication and sight-related theories as
well.[1]
[edit]
Life and career
[edit]
Early years
Aldous Huxley was born in
Godalming, Surrey, UK in 1894. He was the third son of the
writer and school-master
Leonard Huxley and first wife, Julia Arnold who founded Prior's
Field School. Julia was the niece of
Matthew Arnold and the sister of
Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Aldous was the grandson of
Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, agnostic and
controversialist ("Darwin's Bulldog"). His brother
Julian Huxley and half-brother
Andrew Huxley also became outstanding biologists. Huxley had
another brother Noel Trevenen (1891–1914) who committed suicide
after a period of clinical depression.[2]

Huxley began his learning in his father's well-equipped botanical
laboratory, then continued in a school named Hillside. His teacher
was his mother who supervised him for several years until she became
terminally ill. After Hillside, he was educated at
Eton College. Huxley's mother died in 1908, when he was
fourteen. In 1911, he suffered an illness (keratitis
punctata) which "left [him] practically blind for two to three
years".[3]
Aldous's near-blindness disqualified him from service in the First
World War. Once his eyesight recovered sufficiently, he was able to
study English literature at
Balliol College,
Oxford. In 1916 he edited
Oxford Poetry and later graduated with first class honours.
- "I believe his blindness was a blessing in disguise. For one
thing, it put paid to his idea of taking up medicine as a
career...His uniqueness lay in his universalism. He was able to
take all knowledge for his province."
[4]
Following his education at Balliol, 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) and
Stephen Runciman were among his pupils, but was remembered as an
incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline.
Nevertheless, Blair and others were impressed by his use of words.[5]
For a short while in 1918, he was employed acquiring provisions at
the
Air Ministry.
Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the
technologically-advanced
Brunner and Mond chemical plant in
Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his
famous science fiction novel
Brave New World (1932) states that this experience of "an
ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence" was one source
for the novel.[6]
Huxley completed his first (unpublished) novel at the age of
seventeen and began writing seriously in his early twenties. His
first published novels were social satires, beginning with Crome
Yellow (1921).
[edit]
Middle years
During the First World War, 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
Bertrand Russell and
Clive Bell. Later, in
Crome Yellow (1921) he caricatured the Garsington lifestyle.
In 1919 he married Maria Nys (10 September 1899 – 12 February 1955),
a Belgian woman he met at Garsington. They had one child,
Matthew Huxley (19 April 1920 – 10 February 2005), who had a
career as an
epidemiologist. The family lived in Italy part of the time in
the 1920s, where Huxley would visit his friend
D. H. Lawrence. Following Lawrence's death in 1930, Huxley
edited Lawrence's letters (1933).
Works of this period included important novels on the
dehumanizing aspects of scientific progress, most famously
Brave New World, and on pacifist themes (for example,
Eyeless in Gaza). In Brave New World Huxley portrays
a society operating on the principles of mass production and
Pavlovian conditioning. Huxley was strongly influenced by
F. Matthias Alexander and included him as a character in
Eyeless in Gaza.
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, until 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 (Veda-Centric Hinduism), meditation, and vegetarianism
through the principle of
ahimsa.
In 1938 Huxley befriended
J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He also
became a Vedantist in the circle of Hindu
Swami
Prabhavananda, and introduced
Christopher Isherwood to this circle. 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's book affirmed a sensibility
that insists there are realities beyond the generally accepted "five
senses" and that there is genuine meaning for humans beyond both
sensual satisfactions and sentimentalities.
Huxley became a close friend of Remsen Bird, president of
Occidental College. He spent much time at the college, which is
in the
Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. The college appears as
"Tarzana College" in his satirical novel
After Many a Summer (1939). The novel won Huxley that year's
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.[7]
Huxley also incorporated Bird into the novel.
During this period Huxley earned some Hollywood income as a
writer. In March 1938, his friend
Anita Loos, a novelist and screenwriter, put him in touch with
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer who hired Huxley for
Madame Curie which was originally to star
Greta Garbo and be directed by
George Cukor. (The film was eventually filmed by MGM in 1943
with a different director and stars.) Huxley received screen credit
for
Pride and Prejudice (1940) and was paid for his work on a
number of other films, including
Jane Eyre (1944).
However, his experience in Hollywood was not a success. When he
wrote a synopsis of
Alice in Wonderland,
Walt Disney rejected it on the grounds that "he could only
understand every third word".[8]
Huxley's leisurely development of ideas, it seemed, was not suitable
for the movie moguls, who demanded fast, dynamic dialogue above all
else. For Dick Huemer, during the 1940s, Huxley went to the first of
a five meetings' session to elaborate the script of Alice in
Wonderland but never came again.[9]
For author John Grant, although the movie's character the
Caterpillar displays some characteristics familiar from Huxley's
discussion of his experiments with hallucinogens, Huxley's
contribution to the movie is nonexistent.[10]
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:
"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."[11]
[edit]
Post-war
After the Second World War Huxley applied for United States
citizenship. His application was continuously deferred on the
grounds that he would not say he would take up arms to defend the
U.S. He claimed a philosophical, rather than a religious objection,
and therefore was not exempt under the
McCarran Act.[12]
So, he withdrew his application. Nevertheless, he remained in the
country, and in 1959 he turned down an offer of a
Knight Bachelor by the
Macmillan government. 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 psychedelic
drugs.
In October 1930, the English occultist
Aleister Crowley dined with Huxley in Berlin, and to this day
rumours persist that Crowley introduced Huxley to
peyote
on that occasion. He was introduced to
mescaline (considered to be the key active ingredient of peyote)
by the psychiatrist
Humphry Osmond in 1953.[13]
Through Dr. Osmond, Huxley met millionaire
Alfred Matthew Hubbard who would deal with LSD on a wholesale
basis.[14]
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 (the title deriving from some lines
in the book
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by
William Blake), and
Heaven and Hell. Some of his writings on psychedelics became
frequent reading among early
hippies[citation
needed]. While living in Los Angeles, Huxley was a
friend of
Ray Bradbury. According to Sam Weller's biography of Bradbury,
the latter was dissatisfied with Huxley, especially after Huxley
encouraged Bradbury to take psychedelic drugs.
In 1955, Huxley's wife, Maria, died of breast cancer. In 1956 he
married
Laura Archera (1911–2007), also an author. She wrote This
Timeless Moment, a biography of Huxley. In 1960 Huxley himself
was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, and in the years that followed,
with his health deteriorating, he wrote the Utopian novel
Island,[15]
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 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. Huxley's
ashes were interred in the family grave at the Watts Cemetery, home
of the
Watts Mortuary Chapel in Compton, a village near
Guildford, Surrey, England.[16]
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. This coincidence was the inspiration for
Peter Kreeft's book
Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John
F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.
Huxley's only child,
Matthew Huxley, was also an author, as well as an educator,
anthropologist, and prominent
epidemiologist. Aldous Huxley is also survived by two
grandchildren.
[edit]
Association
with Vedanta
Beginning in 1939 and continuing until his death in 1963, Huxley
had an extensive association with the
Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded and headed by
Swami Prabhavananda. Together with
Gerald Heard,
Christopher Isherwood, and other followers he was initiated by
the Swami and was taught meditation and spiritual practices.
In 1944 Huxley wrote the introduction to the "Bhagavad Gita: The
Song of God",[17]
translated by Swami Prabhavanada and Christopher Isherwood, which
was published by The Vedanta Society of Southern California.
From 1941 through 1960 Huxley contributed 48 articles to
Vedanta and the West, published by the Society. He also served
on the editorial board with Isherwood, Heard, and playwright John
van Druten from 1951 through 1962.
Huxley also occasionally lectured at the Hollywood and Santa
Barbara Vedanta temples. Two of those lectures have been released on
CD: Knowledge and Understanding and Who Are We from
1955.
After the publication of
The Doors of Perception, Huxley and the Swami disagreed
about the meaning and importance of the LSD drug experience, which
may have caused the relationship to cool, but Huxley continued to
write articles for the Society's journal, lecture at the temple, and
attend social functions.
[edit]
Literary themes
Crome Yellow (1921) attacks
Victorian and
Edwardian social principles, which led to World War I and its
terrible aftermath. Together with Huxley's second novel,
Antic Hay (1923), the book expresses much of the mood of
disenchantment of the early 1920s. It was intended to reflect, as
Huxley stated in a letter to his father, "the life and opinions of
an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the
standards, conventions and values current in the present epoch."[18]
Huxley's reputation for iconoclasm and emancipation grew. He was
condemned for his explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his
fiction. Antic Hay, for example, was burned in Cairo and in
the years that followed many of Huxley's books were received with
disapproval or banned at one time or another.
Huxley, however, said that a novel should be full of interesting
opinions and arresting ideas, describing his aim as a novelist as
being 'to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and
the essay'; and with Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley wrote
his first true 'novel
of ideas', the type of thought-provoking fiction with which he
is now associated.
One of his main ideas was pessimism about the cultural future of
society, a pessimism which sprang largely from his visit to the
United States between September 1925 and June 1926. He recounted his
experiences in Jesting Pilate (1926): "The thing which is
happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical
alteration (for the worse) of established standards", and it was
soon after this visit that he conceived the idea of writing a satire
of what he had encountered.[19]
Brave New World (1932) as well as Island (1962)
form the cornerstone of Huxley's damning indictment of commercialism
based upon goods generally manufactured from other countries. Indeed
also, Brave New World (along with Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty-Four and
Yevgeni Zamyatin's
We) helped form the anti-utopian or
dystopian tradition in literature and has become synonymous with
a future world in which the human spirit is subject to conditioning
and control. Island acts as an antonym to Brave New World;
it is described as "one of the truly great philosophical novels".[20]
He devoted his time at his small house at Llano in the
Mojave Desert to a life of contemplation, mysticism, and
experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs. His suggestions in
The Doors of Perception (1954) that
mescaline and
lysergic acid were 'drugs of unique distinction' which should be
exploited for the 'supernaturally brilliant' visionary experience
they offered provoked even more outrage than his passionate defense
of the
Bates method in The Art of Seeing (1942). The book went
on to become a cult text in the psychedelic 1960s, and inspire the
name of the rock band
The Doors (it was originally derived from William Blake's "The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell" ). Huxley appears on the sleeve of
The Beatles' landmark 1967 album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
[edit]
Eyesight
With respect to details about the true quality of Huxley’s
eyesight at specific points in his life, there are differing
accounts. Around 1939, Huxley encountered the
Bates Method for better eyesight, and a teacher,
Margaret Corbett, who was able to teach him in the method. In
1940, Huxley relocated from Hollywood to a 40-acre (160,000 m2)
ranchito in the high desert hamlet of
Llano,
California in northernmost Los Angeles County. Huxley then said that
his sight improved dramatically with the Bates Method and the
extreme and pure natural lighting of the southwestern American
desert. He reported that for the first time in over 25 years, he was
able to read without glasses and without strain. He even tried
driving a car along the dirt road beside the ranch. He wrote a book
about his successes with the Bates Method,
The Art of Seeing which was published in 1942 (US), 1943
(UK). It was from this period, with the publication of the generally
disputed theories contained in the latter book, that a growing
degree of popular controversy arose over the subject of Huxley’s
eyesight.
It was, and to a noticeable extent, still is widely held that,
for most of his life, since the illness in his teens which left
Huxley nearly blind, that his eyesight was exceedingly poor (despite
the partial recovery which had enabled him to study at Oxford). For
instance, some ten years after publication of
The Art of Seeing, in 1952,
Bennett Cerf was present when Huxley spoke at a Hollywood
banquet, wearing no glasses and apparently reading his paper from
the lectern without difficulty: "Then suddenly he faltered—and the
disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at
all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought
the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or
so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying
glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an
agonizing moment."[21]
On the other hand, Huxley's second wife,
Laura Archera Huxley, would later emphasize in her biographical
account, This Timeless Moment: "One of the great achievements
of his life: that of having regained his sight." Here, she portrays
the accomplishment as both metaphorical and considerably
physiological in nature, attributing that which she cites
J. Krishnamurti as naming the spirit of "freedom from the
known", which she suggests that Huxley applied, non-exhaustively, in
writing
The Art of Seeing and utilizing the
Bates Method. After revealing a letter she wrote to the Los
Angeles Times disclaiming the label of Huxley as a "poor fellow
who can hardly see" by
Walter C. Alvarez, she tempers this:" Although I feel it
was an injustice to treat Aldous as though he were blind, it is true
there were many indications of his impaired vision. For instance,
although Aldous did not wear glasses, he would quite often use a
magnifying lens."[22]
Laura Huxley proceeds to elaborate a few nuances of inconsistency
peculiar to Huxley's vision. Her account, in this respect, is
discernibly congruent with the following sample of Huxley's own
words from
The Art of Seeing. "The most characteristic fact about the
functioning of the total organism, or any part of the organism, is
that it is not constant, but highly variable."
Nevertheless, the
topic of Huxley’s eyesight continues to endure similar, significant
controversy, regardless of how trivial a subject matter it might
initially appear.[23]
[edit]
Awards
[edit]
Others' film adaptations of Huxley's work
[edit]
Selected works
[edit]
Novels
[edit]
Short
stories collections
[edit]
Poetry
collections
-
Oxford Poetry (magazine editor) (1916)
- The Burning Wheel (1916)
- Jonah (1917)
- The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918)
- Leda (1920)
- Selected Poems (1925)
- Arabia Infelix and Other Poems (1929)
- The Cicadas and Other Poems (1931)
- Collected Poems (1971, posthumous)
[edit]
Essay
collections
- On the Margin (1923)
- Along the Road (1925)
- Essays New and Old (1926)
- Proper Studies (1927)
- Do What You Will (1929)
- Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
-
Music at Night (1931)
- Texts and Pretexts (1932)
- The Olive Tree and other essays (1936)
-
Ends and Means (1937)
- Words and their Meanings (1940)
-
The Art of Seeing (1942)
-
The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
- Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
- Themes and Variations (1950)
-
The Doors of Perception (1954)
-
Heaven and Hell (1956)
- Adonis and the Alphabet (U.S. title: Tomorrow
and Tomorrow and Tomorrow) (1956)
- Collected Essays (1958)
-
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
- Literature and Science (1963)
- Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary
Experience 1931-63 (1977)
- The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959
(1977)
[edit]
Screenplays
[edit]
Travel books
- Along The Road: Notes and essays of a tourist
(1925)
- Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (1926)
- Beyond the Mexique Bay: A traveller's Journey
(1934)
[edit]
Children's
fiction
- The Discovery (adapted from Francis Sheridan,
1924)
- The World of Light (1931)
- Mortal Coils - A Play. (Stage version of The
Gioconda Smile, 1948)
- The Genius and the Goddess (stage version,
co-written with Betty Wendel, 1958)
- The Ambassador of Captripedia (1967)
[edit]
Articles written for Vedanta and the West
- Distractions (1941)
- Distractions II (1941)
- Action and Contemplation (1941)
- An Appreciation (1941)
- The Yellow Mustard (1941)
- Lines (1941)
- Some Replections of the Lord's Prayer (1941)
- Reflections of the Lord's Prayer (1942)
- Reflections of the Lord's Prayer II (1942)
- Words and Reality (1942)
- Readings in Mysticism (1942)
- Man and Reality (1942)
- The Magical and the Spiritual (1942)
- Religion and Time (1943)
- Idolatry (1943)
- Religion and Temperament (1943)
- A Note on the Bhagavatam (1943)
- Seven Meditations (1943)
- On a Sentence From Shakespeare (1944)
- The Minimum Working Hypothesis (1944)
- From a Notebook (1944)
- The Philosophy of the Saints (1944)
- That Art Thou (1945)
- That Art Thou II (1945)
- The Nature of the Ground (1945)
- The Nature of the Ground II (1945)
- God In the World (1945)
- Origins and Consequences of Some Contemporary
Thought-Patterns (1946)
- The Sixth Patriarch (1946)
- Some Reflections on Time (1946)
- Reflections on Progress (1947)
- Further Reflections on Progress (1947)
- William Law (1947)
- Notes on Zen (1947)
- Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (1948)
- A Note on Gandhi (1948)
- Art and Religion (1949)
- Foreword to an Essay on the Indian Philosophy of Peace
(1950)
- A Note on Enlightenment (1952)
- Substitutes for Liberation (1952)
- The Desert (1954)
- A Note on Patanjali (1954)
- Who Are We? (1955)
- Foreword to the Supreme Doctrine (1956)
- Knowledge and Understanding (1956)
- The "Inanimate" is Alive (1957)
- Symbol and Immediate Experience (1960)
[edit]
Bibliography
- Charles J. Rolo (ed.),The World of Aldous Huxley,
Grosset Universal Library, 1947.
- John Atkins, Aldous Huxley: A Literary Study, J.
Calder, 1956
- Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley, Macmillan, 2003,
ISBN 0312302375
- Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment, Celestial
Arts, 2001,
ISBN 0890879689
-
Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, Harper
and Row, 1974, rev. ed., Ivan R. Dee, 2002
ISBN 1566634547
- James Sexton (ed.), Aldous Huxley: Selected Letters,
Ivan R. Dee, 2007,
ISBN 1566636292
-
David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood,
HarperCollins 1990,
ISBN 0385415915
- Aldous Huxley, The Human Situation: Aldous Huxley
Lectures at Santa Barbara 1959, Flamingo Modern Classic,
1994,
ISBN 0006547327
- Conrad Watt (ed.), Aldous Huxley, Routledge, 1997,
ISBN 0415159159
- Dana Sawyer, Aldous Huxley, Crossroad Publishing Co.,
2002,
ISBN 0824519872
- Jerome Meckier, Aldous Huxley: modern satirical novelist
of ideas, Firchow and Nugel editors, LIT Verlag
Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006,
ISBN 3825896683
[edit]
References
- ^
Thody, Philipe (1973). Huxley: A Biographical
Introduction. Scribner.
ISBN 0289701880.
- ^
Holmes, Charles Mason (1978) Aldous Huxley and the way to
reality p.5. Greewwood Press, 1978
- ^
Huxley, Aldous (1939). "biography and bibliography
(appendix)". After Many A Summer Dies The Swan (1st
Perennial Classic Ed.). Harper & Row, Publishers.
p. 243.
- ^
Julian Huxley 1965. Aldous Huxley 1894–1963: a memorial
volume. Chatto & Windus, London. p22
-
^
Crick, Bernard (1992). George Orwell: A Life. London:
Penguin Books.
ISBN 014014563X.
- ^
Baggini, Julian (2009)
Atheism, A Brief insight Sterling Publishing
Company, Inc., 2009
- ^
Haugrud Reiff, Raychel (2003) Aldous Huxley: Brave New
World p.103. Marshall Cavendish, 2009
-
^
Clark, Ronald William (1968). The Huxleys. New York:
McGraw-Hill. p. 295.
-
^
(English) David Koenig,
Mouse Under Glass, p.82
-
^
(English) John Grant,
The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney's Animated Characters,
p.233.
-
^
Huxley, Aldous (1969). Grover Smith. ed. Letters of
Aldous Huxley. London: Chatto & Windus.
ISBN 070111312X.
- ^
What Happened to Aldous Huxley?author=J Derbyshire.
The New Criterion. 2003.
http://www.charlestonvt.com/Holly/BCL/MCV%20Aldous%20Huxley/Originals/Derbyshire_WhatHappened.ORG.pdf
- ^
Martin, Douglas. Friday, 22 August 2008 "Humphry Osmond, 86,
Who Sought Medicinal Value in Psychedelic Drugs, Dies". New
York: New York Times
- ^
Stevens, Jay (1998).
Storming heaven: LSD and the American dream.
Grove Press. pp. 47–64.
ISBN 0802135872.
http://books.google.com/?id=rKlGAdNUDAkC&pg=PA47&dq=Storming+heaven+Noonday+Sun#v=onepage&q=.
"All sorts of crazy things started happening..."
- ^
Peter Bowering Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels,
p. 197, Oxford University Press, 1969 ASIN B0006CDQZ8
- ^
"Aldous Huxley".
Find a Grave.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8707127.
-
^
Isherwood, Christopher; Swami Prabhavananda; Aldous, Huxley
(1987). Bhagavad Gita: The Song of God. Hollywood,
Calif: Vedanta Press.
ISBN 978-0-87481-043-1.
- ^
Ronald T.Sion (2010)
Aldous Huxley and the Search for Meaning: A Study of the
Eleven Novels McFarland, 2010
- ^
Huxley, Aldous (2003). "British Literature (1918–1945)".
Words Words Words. La Spiga Languages. pp. 217–218.
- ^
The Times
-
^ From Bennet
Cerf’s column in The Saturday Review, 12 April 1952,
quoted in
Gardner, Martin (1957). Fads and Fallacies in the Name of
Science. Dover Publications.
ISBN 0-486-20394-8.
-
^
Huxley, Laura (1968). This Timeless Moment. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
ISBN 0890879680.
- ^
Rolfe, Lionel (1981) Literary L.A. p.50. Chronicle
Books, 1981. University of California
- ^
Chevalier, Tracy (1997). Encyclopedia of the Essay.
Routldge. p. 416.
ISBN 1-57958-342-3.
- ^
"Brave move for DiCaprio and Scott".
BBC Online. 6 August 2009.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8187942.stm.
Retrieved 1 April 2010.
- ^
Bradshaw, David (1993). "Introduction". Aldous Huxley's
"Those Barren Leaves" (Vintage Classics Edn., 2005).
Vintage, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Brigade Road, London.
xii.
- ^
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346956/combined
[edit]
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