“It is without any question the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision.”

In May 1953 Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline. The mystical and transcendent experience that followed set him off on an exploration that was to produce a revolutionary body of work about the inner reaches of human experience. Written largely in his last decade, Moksha explores the brave new dawn—and then it was a quiet and brave dawn indeed—of psychedelics, primarily mescaline and LSD. With the lucid appraisal of the philosopher, the reverent curiosity of the mystic and the clinical detachment of the scientist, he discusses their political, medical and ethical implications; and with the eloquence of the poet and the power of a visionary, he describes his own experience with them, in the fullness of life and at the hour of his death.

Moksha (a Sanskrit word meaning “liberation”) includes selections from acclaimed Aldous Huxley’s novels Brave New World and Island, both of which envision societies centered around the use of psychedelics as stabilizing forces, as well as pieces from The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, his famous works on consciousness-expansion. It also includes many letters and lectures by Huxley never published elsewhere.

In a foreword to the first (1977) edition of Moksha, Albert Hofmann wrote:

In Huxley’s view, the use of psychedelics should be part of a technique of “applied mysticism,” which he described to me in a letter of February 29, 1962 as “a technique for helping individuals to get the most out of their transcendental experience and to make use of their insights from the ‘other world’ in the affairs of ‘this world.’ Meister Eckhart wrote that ‘what is taken in by contemplation must be given out in love.’ Essentially this is what must be developed—the art of giving out in love and intelligence what is taken in from vision and the experience of self-transcendence and solidarity with the universe.”

“Moksha is more than a book about psychedelics—although it may well be the most intelligent, well-rounded one of its kind. It is also another chance to spend hours in Huxley’s fascinating company as he talks about art, literature, religion, psychology, and ecology.”—
L.A. Times