The author of the famous dystopian novel "Brave New World" Aldous Huxley devoted part of his life to mystical searches and searches for means of expanding consciousness. He believed that one must be able to "come to reality without a magic wand and witchcraft spells." Jim Morrison named his band Doors, inspired by Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception.
It is sometimes said that the nightmares of the twentieth century have largely spared Aldous Leonard Huxley. This offspring of two eminent and almost insured families from financial troubles and other troubles could have little to threaten. Born on July 26, 1894 in the British Empire, the child - the third of four children - was the grandson of physicist Thomas Henry Huxley, which is the traditional Russian spelling of his surname.
It turns out that the famous English writer and outstanding scientist are not only not relatives, but not even namesakes. The future mystic was the great-uncle on the mother's side of the famous English poet Matthew Arnold. Under the influence of his mother's sister Mary Augusta, who married the writer and journalist Humphry Ward, Aldous began writing prose.
The first shock Aldous experienced when he was just 14 years old - his mother died of cancer. In addition to the loss of a beloved being, the father brought another woman into the house. Huxley Jr. did not like the stepmother. Just two years later, while studying at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection (keratitis). As a result, he went blind in one eye and saw practically nothing for 18 months. Subsequently, vision was fully restored, but then the young man was very worried about his disability. When Aldous was 19 years old, his beloved elder brother Trevenin hanged himself.
Due to an eye disease, the young man was released from military service. Aldous Huxley did not fall into the trenches of the First World War, where fate mercilessly maimed and killed his peers. For the same reason, Huxley mastered Braille, and even joked that he could read secretly when the lights were off. In 1916, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Eton (1908-1913) in Berkshire and Balliol College in Oxford, where he studied literature. He taught for a time at Eton College. In 1937 he moved to the United States and settled in California.
His first book, The Burning Wheel, was published in 1916. A year earlier, Huxley had become a member of Lady Ottoline Morell's literary circle, where he met Bertrand Russell, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Elliott, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and Catherine Mansfield. In addition to their connections in literary circles, the Morells contributed to the marriage of Huxleys to their protege, 19-year-old Belgian Maria Nys.
Their marriage was very happy. Huxley survived his wife for eight years, who died in February 1955 from breast cancer. Their only child Matthew Huxley (April 19, 1920 - February 10, 2005) became a writer, anthropologist, and a prominent epidemiologist.
During his life, Huxley made many friends. While living in California, he invited Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Bertrand Russell, Paulette Godard and Christopher Isherwood for a picnic in the Krishnamurti desert. In the midst of the merriment, the sheriff came, claiming that the revelers had littered the entire desert and demanded that they give their names. Hearing the names of world celebrities, the dull-witted sheriff refused to believe, as he called them, "a crowd of tramps" and, pointing his finger at a shield with a warning inscription, asked if any of them could read!
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When Huxley began writing Brave New World in the early 1930s, he dated his dystopia to AD 3500. Time flew by with such leaps and bounds that it caught up with the author's bold imagination. The image of a completely controlled world from the first chapter with the insistent repeated refrain "obey the rules" has already sounded on television screens from the lips of politicians and other "respected people".
Huxley became interested in the surging popularity of tranquilizers like Miltown and Elavil. In his view, they were the forerunners of the true "soma" that dulls pain and misery - a side effect of the slogan "obey the rules." Huxley experimented with the then legal psychedelic LSD.
The famous American psychologist and ideologist of psychedelic culture Timothy Leary, admiring Huxley's many talents, asked a rhetorical question: “What should I call this smiling seer? Bodhisattva of the nuclear age? " When a critic in a review of Huxley's novel Island, highly acclaimed by members of the psychedelic movement, wrote that it was “fooling around with mushrooms,” Huxley in Playboy replied, “Which is better,“fooling around with mushrooms”or to be an Ideology Idiot, to unleash Wars over Words and to have Tomorrow's Errors because of Yesterday's Misunderstandings?"
Huxley advocated "using harmless psychedelics for mystical experiences." “Whoever returns from the Door in the Wall will never be the same again,” Huxley wrote in the back pages of The Doors of Perception. - He will become wiser, but less self-confident, happier, but less satisfied with himself. More humble, like a person who knows his ignorance."
At the same time, Huxley did not offer a mass pilgrimage to the Other World, he remained selective, not egalitarian. Aldous only planned to attract a certain number of educated people through "educational magazines and modern intellectual books" and at all costs to avoid television, which broadcast "Baptists, Methodists and just crazy." "If psychologists and sociologists define the meaning of the word ideal," Huxley argued, "neuropathologists and pharmacologists can discover the means by which this ideal can be realized."
Huxley's work was read by the idol of several generations of hippies, the American poet and singer Jim Morrison. Inspired by Huxley's Doors of Perception, he named his band Doors. Jim told his friends that he wants to be such a "door" for other people. The name for the group was unanimously adopted. Throughout his creative career, Morrison expanded his consciousness with the help of LSD and other psychedelics. He was found dead on July 3, 1971, in a Paris hotel room. The official version is heroin overdose.
Huxley married for the second time on March 19, 1956 to 44-year-old violinist and psychotherapist Laura Archera, who outlived her famous husband by 44 years. On the morning of November 22, 1963, the wife realized that Aldous was unlikely to make it until the next day.
Fulfilling the will of the dying person, Laura injected Huxley intramuscularly with 100 mg of LSD and, sitting next to him, reminded of the Pure Light of the Void from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. At twenty minutes past six o'clock in the evening, Aldous Huxley died. On the same day, Laura Huxley learned another great tragedy of that day: President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas …
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