Aldous Huxley on Psychedelics and Creativity (Interview)

Aldous Huxley on Psychedelics and Creativity (Interview) | Third Monk image 1

Huxley_Visionary Huxley on Psychedelics

Aldous Huxley interviewed for The Paris Review (1960), reprinted in Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer (Park Street Press, 1999)

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Huxley on Psychedelics and Creativity

Huxley_on_psychedelics_contemplation

Interviewers: Do you see any relation between the creative process and the use of such drugs as lysergic acid [diethylamide]?

Huxley: I don’t think there is any generalization one can make on this. Experience has shown that there’s an enormous variation in the way people respond to lysergic acid. Some people probably could get direct aesthetic inspiration for painting or poetry out of it. Others I don’t think could. For most people it’s an extremely significant experience, and I suppose in an indirect way it could help the creative process. But I don’t think one can sit down and say, “I want to write a magnificent poem, and so I’m going to take lysergic acid [diethylamide].” I don’t think it’s by any means certain that you would get the result you wanted — you might get almost any result.

Interviewers: Would the drug give more help to the lyric poet than the novelist?

Huxley: Well, the poet would certainly get an extraordinary view of life which he wouldn’t have had in any other way, and this might help him a great deal. But you see (and this is the most significant thing about the experience), during the experience you’re really not interested in doing anything practical — even writing lyric poetry. If you were having a love affair with a woman, would you be interested in writing about it? Of course not. And during the experience you’re not particularly in words, because the experience transcends words and is quite inexpressible in terms of words. So the whole notion of conceptualizing what is happening seems very silly. After the event, it seems to me quite possible that it might be of great assistance: people would see the universe around them in a very different way and would be inspired, possibly, to write about it.

Interviewers: But is there much carry-over from the experience?

Huxley: Well, there’s always a complete memory of the experience. You remember something extraordinary having happened. And to some extent you can relive the experience, particularly the transformation of the outside world. You get hints of this, you see the world in this transfigured way now and then — not to the same pitch of intensity, but something of the kind. It does help you to look at the world in a new way. And you come to understand very clearly the way that certain specially gifted people have seen the world. You are actually introduced into the kind of world that Van Gogh lived in, or the kind of world that Blake lived in. You begin to have a direct experience of this kind of world while you’re under the drug, and afterwards you can remember and to some slight extent recapture this kind of world, which certain privileged people have moved in and out of, as Blake obviously did all the time.

Interviewers: But the artist’s talents won’t be any different from what they were before he took the drug?

Huxley: I don’t see why they should be different. Some experiments have been made to see what painters can do under the influence of the drug, but most of the examples I have seen are very uninteresting. You could never hope to reproduce to the full extent the quite incredible intensity of color that you get under the influence of the drug. Most of the things I have seen are just rather tiresome bits of expressionism, which correspond hardly at all, I would think, to the actual experience. Maybe an immensely gifted artist — someone like Odilon Redon (who probably saw the world like this all the time anyhow) — maybe such a man could profit by the lysergic acid [diethylamide] experience, could use his visions as models, could reproduce on canvas the external world as it is transfigured by the drug.

Interviewers: Here this afternoon, as in your book, The Doors of Perception, you’ve been talking chiefly about the visual experience under the drug, and about painting. Is there any similar gain in psychological insight?

Huxley: Yes, I think there is. While one is under the drug one has penetrating insights into the people around one, and also into one’s own life. Many people get tremendous recalls of buried material. A process which may take six years of psychoanalysis happens in an hour — and considerably cheaper! And the experience can be very liberating and widening in other ways. It shows that the world one habitually lives in is merely a creation of this conventional, closely conditioned being which one is, and that there are quite other kinds of worlds outside. It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people should have this experience.

> Huxley on LSD and Creativity | MAPS Org

Jacque Fresco Interview on Larry King Live 1974 (Video)

Jacque Fresco Interview on Larry King Live 1974 (Video) | Third Monk

Back in 1974 Jacque Fresco was told he was a man before his time. Observe this Larry King interview and see for yourself. See that he is not a man before his time but a man trying to change the social culture of his time (and for good reason).

This is a new science: socio-cyberneering. And this is its inventor, the extraordinary Jacque Fresco. He’s my guest this weekend on News Weekend. My guest is an extraordinary Miamian: Dr. Jacque Fresco. I could go through all the things that Dr. Fresco has done. He’s a social engineer, industrial engineer, designer, inventor, was a consultant for Rotorcraft Helicopter, Director of Scientific Research Laboratories, Los Angeles, designed and copyrighted various items, ranging from drafting instruments to X-ray units, has had works published in the Architectural Record, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Review, and has been a technical and psychological consultant to the motion picture industry, member of the Air Force design and development unit at Wright Field, developed the electrostatic anti-icing systems, designed prefabricated aluminum houses.

1950’s Housewife Experiments with LSD (Video)

1950's Housewife Experiments with LSD (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Interview footage of a housewife taking a dose of LSD with Sidney Cohen in 1956.

“How do you feel inside?” 

“Inside? I don’t have any inside.”

“I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life.”

“I wish I could talk in technicolor.”

“I can’t tell you about it. If you can’t see it, then you’ll just never know it.

How Drugs Helped Invent The Internet – Jason Silva Interview (Video)

How Drugs Helped Invent The Internet - Jason Silva Interview (Video) | Third Monk

Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller Interview with Jason Silva

Biological and Technological Convergence

When the internet does is it connects all of our minds together. And we sort of transcend the limitations of time and distance, so now we move into a post geographical world where we can come together and self organize, and have unexpected relevancy, and serendipity based on shared passions, not bounded by the skin bag.  Amber Case, the Cyborg Anthropologist says that every time we make a telephone call, we’re actually creating a techno social wormhole. It’s technological mediated telepathy. Andy Clarke (Natural Born Cyborgs) says “We should stop thinking of the mental apparatus as bound by the skin bag because the reality is the mental apparatus is dance between brains, their environment, their technology, and their tools.” The extended mind thesis talks about how our iphone is not just a tool but its actually outsourcing our cognition, storing parts of our memories. Just like we have a neocortex, the iphone is part of the extended man.

Psychedelics and Technology

It’s interesting to draw the analogy between psychedelics and computers. Timothy Leary used to say you take psychedelics to get rid of your mental filters, to get rid of your preconceptions,  to expand your sphere of  possibility, to unbound…to free your mind. When he saw the potential of the computers and the internet, he came out in the 90s as a techno optimist and said the computers are the LSDs of the 90s. A lot of the engineers who invented the personal computer and the microprocessor, they were all tripping when they had those realizations of extending the mind with technology.

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