Aldous Huxley's final trip

[Ed Jewett]

July 12, 2010

Aldous Huxley's final trip:

This month's edition of the cancer medicine journal Lancet Oncology discusses some ongoing trials of psychedelic drug assisted psychotherapy for people dying of cancer but notes that author Aldous Huxley actually died while on LSD - by his own request.

Today, in a small handful of laboratories across the USA, an equally small handful of patients with terminal cancer are volunteering to take part in psychotherapeutic treatment for anxiety and depression brought on by their diagnosis. But this psychotherapy comes with a unique twist: it involves the controlled and supervised ingestion of a psychedelic drug. A radical approach, some might say, even shocking. But pioneering? Perhaps not.
Back in November, 1963, the author and intellectual Aldous Huxley finally succumbed to the laryngeal cancer he had been diagnosed with 3 years earlier. Huxley's life had already been touched by cancer, with the death from breast cancer of his first wife Maria in 1955. It was the experience of his first wife's death, which led Huxley to conclude that “the living can do a great deal to make the passage easier for the dying, to raise the most purely physiological act of human existence to the level of consciousness”.
This desire for consciousness and awareness at the point of death was almost certainly the motivation for his deathbed request—written, according to his second wife, Laura, because his disease had robbed him of his voice—for “LSD, 100 μg, intramuscular”. Laura later wrote that she granted his request, and he died peacefully hours later.
A week after his death, Huxley's widow ended a letter to his older brother, Julian, with this question: “is his way of dying to remain our, and only our relief and consolation, or should others also benefit from it? What do you feel?” Over 40 years later, the current mini-renaissance in the experimental study of psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin for anxiety and depression in patients with cancer looks set to answer Laura Huxley's question.

To be fair, the comparison is perhaps a little rhetorical because the current trials do not involve giving psychedelic drugs to people in their final moments, but instead during psychotherapy sessions in the weeks and months before death to assist in coming to terms with existential issues around the end of life.

Link to PubMed entry for Lancet Oncology item.


—Vaughan.

Posted at July 12, 2010 12:00 PM
Comments

Ben says:

I expect you've already seen this, but there's a very interesting (and lengthy) letter written from Laura to Julian Huxley that describes Aldous Huxley's drug assisted death on Letters of Note:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/03/mos...death.html


Comment posted at July 13, 2010 07:59 PM

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2010/07/al..._fina.html

[Keith Millea]

Thanks Ed,
I have never seen this letter by Huxleys wife before.I always thought it fascinating to say the least that Huxley left this physical world with 200 micrograms of PURE LSD in his system.I have sat and wondered a few times about this.Whatever anyone thinks of Aldous as a person,he truley was a searcher of the unknown higher aspects of consciousness.Maybe he ARRIVED.We can only sit and wonder.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BzvC2t_L...=1&index=1

(video 2:02)

[Jan Klimkowski]

There was a BBC2 Horizon documentary made about the science of psychedelics - LSD, Ayahuasca, DMT etc - over a decade ago now. It was entitled, um, "Psychedelic Science", and included a look at the use of hallucinogens by shrinks.

I was the original AP on the project but got taken off for a variety of reasons - some editorial.

The opening part can be seen at YouTube here, and I suspect the rest is discoverable online:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d74ZwkOzX...re=related

I don't endorse everything in the documentary, but imo there's some fascinating material for discussion there.

[Austin Kelley]

How enigmatic the role of Aldous Huxley in the history of psychedelic culture!

According to the LaRouchites, he was at the heart of the world's most evil conspiracy. Jim Keith's accounts seem to echo these themes, albeit in somewhat muted language.

According to other, more pro-entheogenic accounts, Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard were enlightened masters sowing the seeds of world evolution.

And the truth really is?....

[Helen Reyes]

I've noticed the same discrepancy of opinion regarding Aldous Huxley, Austin Kelley. I think I understand how people can view him as some sinister figure behind mind-control research, but having read some of his novels over the years, some essays and longer non-fiction, my opinion is he was a sincere spiritual seeker and scientific inquirer. Being more or less part of the Anglo-American aristocracy of his time, in practice if not in fact, he moved within circles that do seem suspect.

There's another thing I read about his death. He and his wife had a pact that if there were an afterlife, he would seek to provide a sign to her that he had arrived in that afterlife. Some odd coincidence or series of coincidences made her believe he did in fact contact her, I can't remember the details but it had something to do with one of his books.

[Keith Millea]

There's another thing I read about his death. He and his wife had a pact that if there were an afterlife, he would seek to provide a sign to her that he had arrived in that afterlife. Some odd coincidence or series of coincidences made her believe he did in fact contact her, I can't remember the details but it had something to do with one of his books.

Helen,
I'm not familiar with his book "Island",but Laura talks about it in her letter.She seems to make a strong connection between what he wrote in the book,and of his final passing.Maybe this is the book where Adlous talks about the afterlife?Below is from the transcribed version of the letter.

And now, after I have been alone these few days, and less bombarded by other people's feelings, the meaning of this last day becomes clearer and clearer to me and more and more important. Aldous was, I think (and certainly I am) appalled at the fact that what he wrote in ISLAND was not taken seriously. It was treated as a work of science fiction, when it was not fiction because each one of the ways of living he described in ISLAND was not a product of his fantasy, but something that had been tried in one place or another and some of them in our own everyday life. If the way Aldous died were known, it might awaken people to the awareness that not only this, but many other facts described in ISLAND are possible here and now. Aldous'asking for moksha medicine while dying is a confirmation of his work, and as such is of importance not only to us, but to the world. It is true we will have some people saying that he was a drug addict all his life and that he ended as one, but it is history that Huxleys stop ignorance before ignorance can stop Huxleys.

I am by no means a supporter of the school of thought (Leary)that one needs someone of experience to help guide a person through an LSD session.But,I must say that after reading about Huxleys death,I really think that Laura did guide him so beautifully,and in such a very high and truley sacred manner,that I can imagine this to be an ultimate path in the death experience.Of course,this can only be true for a person who is comfortable with the psychedelic experience.Or to put it plainly,(not suited for everyone).lol

Lauras' beautiful guidence:

He was very quiet now; he was very quiet and his legs were getting colder; higher and higher I could see purple areas of cynosis. Then I began to talk to him, saying, "Light and free," Some of these thing I told him at night in these last few weeks before he would go to sleep, and now I said it more convincingly, more intensely - "go, go, let go, darling; forward and up. You are going forward and up; you are going towards the light. Willing and consciously you are going, willingly and consciously, and you are doing this beautifully; you are doing this so beautifully - you are going towards the light; you are going towards a greater love; you are going forward and up. It is so easy; it is so beautiful. You are doing it so beautifully, so easily. Light and free. Forward and up. You are going towards Maria's love with my love. You are going towards a greater love than you have ever known. You are going towards the best, the greatest love, and it is easy, it is so easy, and you are doing it so beautifully."

WOW!

[Dawn Meredith]

Wow indeed. Personally I cannot imagine taking LSD while in the process of dying but I woud like to read more about this. I think it might be scary, but you never know.

John Lennon said he too would provide proof to Yoko of an after life, anyone know if this ever occured?

Interestingly Huxley died the same day as JFK: 11/22/63. As did C.S. Lewis.

Now that would be one interesting conversation in heaven!!

Dawn

[Phil Dragoo]

The letter indicates he knew where he wanted to go, and his wife was attuned to his wishes and committed to carrying them out.


New Mexico served the savage as a retreat from the technoidiocy. Certainly Carson Forest was a quiet place beyond the wars and horrors of Los Alamosity.


I took an intersabbatical sabbatical to return to my college for a talk by Anthony Burgess before some great white male herd of menschas.


He had them atwitter recounting, “I was given six months to live and, through judicious and injudicious dosages of gin and benzedrine, managed to produce six novels and a screenplay.”


One readily sees the authors using LSD, gin, Benzedrine, cocaine a seven per cent solution as a portable hole, applying it Dali-like to any bulkhead of reality through which one desires passage.


While of course the world map is continually carved up by armies providing the poppies to plant the peons row on row.


Matrix being not simply an interesting concept but an accessible descriptive.


The cartoonist of the Brave New World Order hired on to draw the ship of the sun the day it rained lead on the limousine.


Moving toward the lifting of the veil of irony, the opening of the Cat's Cradle—where's the coincidence.

[Ed Jewett]

I recently finished reading this most remarkable, eminently human, book that somehow ranges across physics, psychology, revelatory experiences and living:

http://www.amazon.com/Epiphanies-Where-Science-Miracles-Meet/dp/1582701679

There are still frontiers yet to be navigated.