"An outstanding book."-James Sexton "A welcome and necessary update of the life of one of the twentieth century's most provocative intellectuals."-Dana Sawyer A rich and lucid account of Aldous ...Huxley's life and work. Aldous Huxley was one of the twentieth century's most prescient thinkers. This new biography is a rich and lucid account that charts the different phases of Huxley's career: from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the postwar generation, to the committed pacifist of the 1930s, the spiritual seeker of the 1940s, the psychedelic sage of the 1950s-who affirmed the spiritual potential of mescaline and LSD-to the New Age prophet of Island. While Huxley is still best known as the author of Brave New World, Jake Poller argues that it is The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, and Island-Huxley's blueprint for a utopian society-that have had the most cultural impact.
Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality offers an analysis of Huxley's spiritual interests, spanning both mysticism and Western esotericism. With this methodology, Jake Poller generates new ...insights into Huxley's work and draws revealing parallels between Huxley's ideas and the New Age.
Sigmund Freud discovered that in the unconscious a both-and dream logic prevailed. In his critique of the either-or binary oppositions of Western philosophy, Jacques Derrida appropriated this ...oneirologic, e.g. arguing that the incest prohibition derived from both nature and culture. In this article, I adopt a deconstructive approach to analyse this both-and oneirologic in a selection of New Weird fiction, namely The City & The City (2009) by China Miéville, the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) by M. John Harrison. Not only do these New Weird fictions embrace the dream logic of both-and, they deconstruct the binary opposition proposed by Miéville between the Weird and the hauntological in that they combine the uncanny with what Miéville terms the 'abcanny'. In other words, they are both Weird and hauntological. Furthermore, I argue that the 'real externality' H.P. Lovecraft associated with Weird fiction is always already inside, marked with the oneirologic trace of the unconscious.
Fully Human Being Poller, Jake
International journal for the study of new religions,
01/2019, Letnik:
10, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In Island (1962), Aldous Huxley presents a utopian community in which theinhabitants aim to become "fully human beings" by realizing their "potentialities."I demonstrate how Huxley's notion of the ..."human potentialities" havebeen misrepresented, both by scholars and by the founders of the Esalen Institute.Huxley's focus on human potentialities arose from a shift in his thinkingfrom the other-worldly mysticism of The Perennial Philosophy (1945) to thelife-affirming traditions of Tantra, Zen and Mahayana Buddhism. In Island,the population attempt to realize their human potentialities and engage in anexperiential spirituality that celebrates the body and nature as sacred throughthe use of the moksha-medicine and the practice of maithuna. I argue thatwhereas Tantric adepts practised maithuna as a means to acquire supernormalpowers (siddhis), in Island the Palanese version of maithuna is quite differentand is used to valorize samsara and the acquisition of human potentialities.
...the völkisch thinkers cleaved to racist beliefs, such as the alleged biological inferiority of Jews, and social Darwinism, proclaiming that the Aryan race was the fittest to survive and linking ...the putative physical characteristics of Aryans (blond hair, blue eyes, and so on) with moral qualities, such as courage and honesty (Goodrick-Clarke 4-5). If, indeed, Lawrence was a chest-thumping Teutonic supremacist, it seems strange that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Gerald Crich in Women in Love (1920) should die at the end of novel, largely as a result of his inorganic mechanism; if Lawrence was so influenced by völkisch thinkers, surely the industrial magnate in the novel would have been Jewish, while Birkin, who achieves a more Lawrentian balance between mind and body and establishes an organic connection between himself and Ursula, would have taken the role of the Teutonic Übermensch. Given the demonstrable distinction between the law and love and the law and grace, it is frankly incredible to imagine that Lawrence was influenced by Chamberlain in this respect. ...as Delavenay himself admits, for Chamberlain the "Jewish spirit was the masculine principle, the generative element, the will" (qtd. in Delavenay 311), whereas Lawrence associates Jews with the feminine principle and Christians with the male. The Jew "kept his body always like the body of a bride ready to serve the bridegroom"; he "had become the servant of his God, the female, passive" whose "conscious element was a resistance to the male or active principle" (STH 62).
In their biography of Arthur Machen, Reynolds and Charlton note the influence of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan on his work and assert that Helen Vaughan is transformed into first matter in 'The Great ...God Pan' (1894). The influence of alchemy on Machen's work was eclipsed in the 1990s by the tendency of scholars to map degeneration theory onto Machen's work. In this article, I unpack key alchemical concepts and demonstrate how they relate to the transmutations of Machen's characters. I argue that not only had Machen never heard of degeneration in the pseudo-scientific sense of the word, but also the animosity he displayed towards scientific materialism makes it highly unlikely that he would have knowingly incorporated the concept in his work.
...the extravert who 'explains' religion in terms of the observable facts of physiology and instinctive psychology is doing something which, for me, is perfectly comprehensible and natural. Lawrence, ...he objected, confused wife and mother. ...Linda in Brave New World is linked with both Frieda Lawrence and Mrs Morel" in Sons and Lovers (1913). ...the fact that Hammond's opinions in Lady Chatterley 's Lover are nothing like Huxley's reinforces Meckier's conviction that Lawrence is here exacting his revenge for Huxley's portrait of Rampion, whereas it could equally be argued that the manifest differences between Hammond and Huxley indicate that Lawrence was not committed to a full-scale character assassination of the kind he had perpetrated on, for example, Ottoline Morrell as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. ...there is no question of Lawrence seeking revenge for Huxley's portrait of Rampion, since he completed the final version of Lady Chatterley on 8 January 1 928 (FLC xii) and did not read Point Counter Point until October of that year (6L 600). ...in his final novel Island, sex has become a means of mystical contemplation, rather than, as in his previous novels, mystical contemplation being a means to transcend the body in order to seek union with the unmanifested aspect of the godhead, Brahman.
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