Gerald Heard

Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality offers an incisive analysis of the full range of Huxley’s spiritual interests, spanning both mysticism (neo-Advaita, Taoism, Mahayana and Zen Buddhism) and Western esotericism (mesmerism, spiritualism, the paranormal). Jake Poller examines how Huxley’s shifting spiritual convictions influenced his fiction, such as his depiction of the body and sex, and reveals how Huxley’s use of psychedelic substances affected his spiritual convictions, resulting in a Tantric turn in his work. Poller demonstrates how Huxley’s vision of a new alternative spirituality in Island, in which the Palanese select their beliefs from different religious traditions, anticipates the New Age spiritual supermarket and traces the profound influence of Huxley’s ideas on the spiritual seekers of the twentieth century and beyond.

Aldous Huxley was one of the twentieth century’s most prescient thinkers. This new biography is a rich and lucid account that charts the different phases of Huxley’s career: from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the postwar generation, to the committed pacifist of the 1930s, the spiritual seeker of the 1940s, the psychedelic sage of the 1950s – who affirmed the spiritual potential of mescaline and LSD – to the New Age prophet of Island. While Huxley is still best known as the author of Brave New World, Poller argues that it is The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception and Island – Huxley’s blueprint for a utopian society – that have had the most cultural impact.

There has been a welcome emphasis in the last decade on the importance of mysticism in the work of Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) from several scholars, including Dana Sawyer, Jeffrey Kripal and K.S. Gill. Less attention has been paid to Huxley's interest in the paranormal and his contacts with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). While Huxley did not join the SPR until 1956, he closely followed its Journal and Proceedings, and wrote a number of essays on the subject of psychical research. I examine his treatment of spiritualism in the play The World of Light (1931) and in the novel Time Must Have a Stop (1944). In his experiments with mescaline and LSD, Huxley also drew on key thinkers from psychical research, namely Henri Bergson, C.D. Broad and William James. In this article, I examine Huxley's links with the SPR and the role of psychical research in his work.

This  paper was presented in the Sayings of Jesus Consultation at the 2014 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. It argues that in order to understand ancient texts  we must pay attention not only the  Sitz im Leben ([motivating] life situation) of the ancient writer or writers of the text but also tthat of the current interpreters of the text. The failure to recognize this has lead to a great deal of confusion in current Biblical Insterpretation do to the fact that interpreters tend to uncritically attribute their own motives and concerns to ancient writers.  In the case of Jesus this has meant recreating Jesus in the image of the ideal human being of our own imagination. In this paper we describe three dominating Sitzen affecting interpreters of our time, in terms of their own spiritual formations and with special reference to the influence of Eastern Thought:

(1) Mainline Protestantism’s Scientistic Monism with its implicit debt to India,

(2) Psychedelic Questers’ Anti-Scientistic Monism, with their explicit embrace of India, and

(3) Third Great Awakening Christians with their explicit rejection of India.