Belief in Mysticism: Aldous Huxley, from Grey Eminence to Island

Abstract

When Aldous Huxley became interested in mysticism in the second half of his career, his concern for science also deepened. He became less a literary man and more a man of ideas, writing, among other things, on a variety of issues connected with science in the modern world. To Huxley it seemed increasingly clear that unless man rediscovered the Absolute he would be destroyed by his own technology. The only adequate guide, he kept repeating, lay in the perennial philosophy, that core of mystical teaching described through the ages in strikingly similar terms by the world’s great religions.