Brave New World or Island  - The World Must Decide

by Ram Dass

These remarks are in honor of Aldous Huxley and also of Laura Huxley.

When she asked me to speak about Aldous, to say I was intimidated was a mild statement. I'm at a party in the Hollywood Hills, and I have never met Aldous, and in the corner chatting are Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, two giants of the intellect. I'm a young brash Turk from Harvard, recently psychedelicized, fast becoming one of the darlings of the Hollywood set. So I sidle over in order to listen, and I hear them discussing walking through the labyrinths of abbeys, of abbey gardens, and the feelings that it generates. My relationship to Aldous is one of awe and deep respect, and for me to even presume to speak about him and about his work humbles me. What I've gotten from readings of some of Aldous' work is a very provocative experience, forcing me to the edge of my consciousness time and again, to explore the issues that he was exploring...

I was connected, maybe 20 years ago, with a Tibetan lama. In a response to this question about despair, he said, "One has to stand half-way between hope and hopelessness." If one is afraid of looking at the hopeless part, one is no longer free to act because one's anxiety about the outcome colors one's perception so deeply that one won't let oneself experience the gestalt out of which an appropriate response occurs.

Gandhi said, "What you do may seem insignificant, but it's very important that you do it." Edmund Burke said, "The worst mistake is to do nothing because you can only do a little."

It's interesting that the purer one's heart becomes, the more the tiniest act is that which resonates in an appropriate fashion to bring a deeper harmony, a deeper way back into the Tao (as if one ever left it).

Aldous was often referred to as a dispassionate person. We also know he was very passionate about what he believed in, but he was a dispassionate person.

Now, Ashley spoke last night about the "cold fish" style that came out of the English educational system.

So I've been entertaining whether Aldous' dispassion was a kind of caring cold-fishness, a kind of the neurosis of a culture, the kind of fear of intimacy, the fear of distancing himself. Was it reserve and psychological defense, because that would be a reasonable argument, who then in the course of his life was brought into a deep, deep, intimate relationship with the mystery, and if that is that story of his life then it is an incredible hero's myth of somebody that starts out within the intellect and then tames the intellect until he is that wisdom heart out of which intellect speaks. And that is a hero's journey that any of us would love to emulate, to get out of being caught in our own minds.

But I've entertained another speculation. I've considered the possibility that he is just a very old soul, he's sort of like an old lama who took birth in a certain culture with a certain style. And that as his life went on, he was just looking through culture and then moving for the proper métier to express the wisdom he had all along. At first he did it within that kind of skeptical social satire with incredible erudition, his wit with its innocent mockery, his esthetic sensitivity and moral charm, his basic kindness. In the 20's, this was Aldous. And this was the darling of the avant-garde of the intelligentsia of Europe. They couldn't wait for his next book.

He said the problem with arts back then was that they disrupt the social systems. And all the avant-garde said, Yeah, viva l'art, viva the arts! But then what happened is, as Aldous started to go deeper into mysticism,and finding there were people who could hear a different route, he started to change. And many of the followers weren't ready to go with him because now he was ready to say that the arts might be a problem because they trapped one in dualism. Therefore, he was suggesting that non-dualism was to be valued, and most people in the arts weren't ready to go that route. They started to refer to Aldous as a lay preacher with little to say which he went on saying. Someone who had lost his genius into fuzzy, confused mysticism. I love it! I love what happens when you turn and you leave behind the mainstream. And once you have opened to the joy of sharing the unsharable, the endless delight of speaking the unspeakable, you do sound like a preacher saying it over and over again. But each time it's fresh, because it's always pointing at the silence.

Aldous went through these stages, perhaps as an old being finding his form, because he said at one point "I always knew of my inner being." It seemed as if Aldous was in that space of awareness that was delighting in the forms arising, existing and passing away. The word I remember most in being with Aldous was "Extraordinary!" Another one was "How odd!" and another one was "Curious!"

I remember feeling like I was sort of a butterfly on the end of a needle, that we were all interesting exhibits in the museum of Aldous' perceptual universe. And that quality of equanimity and delight in the way the forms exist. If you can hear this possibility. the ending to Island and Brave New World are themselves just another part of the dance. And in all parts of the dance, your heart is breaking. And in all parts of the dance, there is joy.

There's one more preface that I'd like to talk about. Many of us grew up in a very coercive cultural context, about what was real, and then had the initiation of a psychedelic, or trauma, or some mystical experience, that took us out of that. We saw in a moment how deeply enmeshed and trapped we had become in the cultural structure.

When I was at Harvard before I took psilocybin, I lived in a time where I was a scientist and science was the high priest of the society. I lived in a time of philosophical materialism, when God was seen as an anthropological curiosity. I lived at a time where the intellect was the ultimate arbiter of truth, and I was so sure of that and I transmitted that belief so vehemently that I was rewarded by society again and again. I was a member of the team.

Then I took psilocybin and I realized I'd been had, that the universe was infinitely richer than my petty conceptual structure, and everything my parents had said was just who they thought they were and how they thought it was and what they thought I was. I had bought what they thought I was. That's who I thought I was, with a set of neuroses I had picked up along the way.

It was so hard in 1961 for me to break out of that model because it was trained in me so heavily. What conditions would I change in the education and caring for a new being into the species, to make it possible for that moment of transition to occur more easily into the wisdom world? Because the experience I had with the psychedelics was a violent, discontinuous moment from where I had been looking at the universe. In a way, all of our work in thinking about the development of the child - Aldous was deeply involved in this work - was an attempt to find the way in which a child passes through the phase of necessary dualism that is a proper preparation for them to once again entertain non-dualism to ultimately integrate the two. Because for a child to learn the terrain, there seems to be the requirement that they become somebody before they can become nobody being a somebody. They start out in that spaciousness, but then, as Aldous points out in Island, the dualism is necessary for the socialization process to work. So I look at all of this in terms of how a culture would prepare people to be able to have commerce with the mystery, to balance the life of their expectations and hopes and desires and fears and suffering or how to integrate formless and form.

The way in which Brave New World is provocative to me is because so many things have crept up in our culture that I would hardly notice were it not for a presentation of such a dark mirror as Brave New World against which to see this. There are so many ways in which television, technology, transportation, ecological shifts, have blended into the terrain so much. Then I read Brave New World and I say, it couldn't happen now. Then I look and it has happened. Or it's happening.

Brave New World opens at the hatchery, because the concept of mother is now an obscene term. We don't need mothers, because we have given fertile women six months bonus in their salary, to donate their ovaries to the state. These ovaries we keep in a hatchery, where we can speed up the process of producing eggs. Then as the eggs are produced and fertilized the eggs enter a process of gestation during which they are treated in assembly lines according to Bokanovsky's process, and the babies are decanted, they're not born.

This comes out of the natural following of Ford's creation of the assembly line and the realization that now we can control nature and the only chaotic element in that is the human individuals that have to push the buttons and change them because they may get unhappy at their jobs or something. So we have to socially engineer them to play their part so we have perfect production machines. Because the purpose of the children in Brave New World is for production and consumption, it is an economic model for an efficient and stable society in which the individual has been sacrificed into the society.

Once these eggs are fertilized, then some of them are defined as Alpha plusses and they are enriched and then others are epsilons and deltas and betas who will play different parts in the caste system. Therefore they are denied oxygen at different stages so that they will not have the desire to do the things that the other castes do, and they are even conditioned to avoid hot if we want them to work in a cold region or avoid cold if they want to work in a hot region. It's all done with negative conditioning in the womb, or through hard x-rays and alcohol. Every time they use the x-ray to stop the egg, it buds, so that ultimately they can get 96 buds from one egg. That means 96 identical twins. From a perspective of wanting to stabilize society, having 96 of the same thing is much better than just having two or one. In fact they have worked it out by getting the ovary to produce more eggs faster, of getting to the point where one donor ovary can, in the course of about two years, produce 11,000 genetically similar organisms. You can have whole assembly lines made up of identical twins.

I want you to feel the horror of this. When they are born they go into a state conditioning nursery, in which they start to have negative conditioning, start to be subjected to hypnopaedia, to sleep learning. Aldous was fascinated with mesmerism, hypnosis, sleep learning, with all these wonderful little edges - the relationship of consciousness to awareness, to awakeness, to normal waking consciousness. In the conditioning, messages were fed to the child during sleep that created the citizen that they wanted in the society. Like they realize that if they let everybody have as much sex as they wanted, nobody would get frustrated, desires wouldn't build, and everybody wouldn't get neurotic. So they started with erotic play very early on, encouraging the children to go play in the bushes, which is different than most of us grew up with . . .

You end up with a group of conditioned consciousnesses in which they get what they want and they never want what they can't get. They're safe, they're not afraid of death, they are ignorant of passion and old age and they never feel strongly about anything.

In the story, the alpha-plusses are the beings who are controllers of the system. Their minds are so open that they realize there is history and literature, but anything like history or literature or arts is a threat to the system, so it's kept in locked vaults. In one alpha-plus, Bernard, is one that got into this sick problem of thinking for himself. What you're seeing in Brave New World now is where community consciousness snuffs out individual consciousness, or attempts to.

Aldous' writings are always dealing with the tension between the need for community - because a child must develop in community, and our creativity comes out of the strength and support of community - and at the same moment realizing how quickly community can be coercive, oppressive, and limiting. That's the tension we all are working with. We say small villages are beautiful, and then if I got your histories, those of you coming from the middle west from small villages, you would be hard-pressed to support that thesis.

Bernard is unhappy and so he decides to take a vacation. He goes to a reservation where they have some primitive people. It's in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by the way, which I'm sure comes into Aldous' consciousness through his relationship with D.H. Lawrence. He and this girl who is very conditioned go to this reservation.

There are a couple of other things I must tell you about. They have monthly adrenal stimulation - they give you a violent passion surrogate to keep you from getting too violent. That is, instead of all of your adrenalin building up, they flush it out once a month in this wonderful culture. So you're pretty calm. And for relief and time off, you get a dose of SOMA.

Now the meaning of SOMA is strange, I don't really think I can go into it, in the presence of Jean Houston, who could tell you what it is in at least 40 languages. In this book Aldous uses it as a pleasure-giving device, as an escape device. And in that sense, it's more like the way in which things like cocaine and crack are used in our society, as releases from unbearable situations, for some people. Cocaine for the middle class, and crack for the lower classes that are oppressed.

So there is SOMA. It's not SOMA that's going to liberate your consciousness. It's a chemical given to alter consciousness, but it's given in a setting that keeps bringing you back more clearly into the same game you were playing before. It's not a supportive setting for expansion.

So, Bernard goes off with his lady of the moment, Lanina. They meet all these primitive people, a penitent religious group that flogged themselves, and they see all of the things they don't see in their society - age and sickness, and so on. And they meet a young man named John who was the child of a woman who got lost on a previous trip to the reservation by somebody from the Brave New World. So his mother grew up with SOMA and with wanting new things, and then she ends up having been left behind by the party in this penitent religious group. Bernard is so impressed with this fellow, he decides to bring him back as sort of an anthropological curiosity, to study him. And he brings him back to the reservation, and there the savage meets Mustapha Monde, who is one of the 10 world controllers, one of the great Alpha plusses. And there they have a dialogue, a man in a chair, "with his arm around a girl's waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing gum, and looking at the feelies." How bizarre.

The average American family looks at now, five hours of television a day? They spend 31% of their spare time looking at television. It emerges America in large-time fantasy, designed to entertain, not to inform. It's a serious addiction. It's a sedative, not really a satisfaction. One feels angry with oneself for watching so much, miserable when one can't. It's a twilight sleep in which they dream professionally produced dreams. Early conditioning of BNW bizarre? 75% of children between five and eight watch television, they draw themselves close, smiling, with blankets and pillows and dolls and pets, up to the television. They watch 20,000 commercials a year, and don't even understand the concept of commercial. How else would you get a population to value the act of acquisition itself? How far have we come, from what Aldous predicted in 1931? That was the year I was born. That was the time of the American Dream. That was the time in which we thought we had, through our democratic system, that tension between community and individuality beat. The freedom of the individual and a stable social system.

But physical science and technology ran away with us. We got enamored of progress, of what our minds could create, we got attached to the siddhi, the power of our intellect, untempered by wisdom. We didn't anticipate, in the creation of the automobile, the smog over Los Angeles. Nothing was bad about progress. Only the bomb finally woke us up, and even now the result is that we are dealing with a strangulation of our system by nuclear waste which we don't know what to do with. That is a killing agent to anything it contaminates, and has a half-life of 250,000 years. And we don't know where to put it where we're safe, because there was no wisdom in the way in which we let technology run. We only saw the good because we were conditioned: Progress is Good, Progress is Good, Progress is Good . . . as surely as if we had been sleep-conditioned.

By the `30s and the `40s, Aldous obviously had changed. He was still seeing the dark shadow embracing the culture, but he was beginning to whisper in his writings of another alternative. As he got deeper into the deeper qualities of mind, he began to imagine the healthy marriage of intellect and non-conceptual awareness; he began to see that a reasonable plan, people reasoning together using the intellect in a reasonable way, along with a connection to the mystery behind form, might allow people to create a social system in which they could grow into beings that would both be free as individuals and would choose voluntarily to enter into community, and the spiritual dimension.

He was then an out-and-out mystic. In The Perennial Philosophy, in his Brave New World Revisited, he's still pointing to the dark picture, but in his preface to the 1945 edition of Brave New World, he is suggesting this very subtle possibility. But he is implying how vulnerable it is, and anybody that wants to question how vulnerable a reasonable, spiritually connected society is in the middle of the mainstream need only look in the newspapers about Tibet in the presence of China. We are seeing it lived out right at this moment, how a society dedicated to peace, with all of its failings (not wanting to romanticize it), committed to peace and non-violence, is being swallowed up by the machine of industrial, free-market economy, military-industrial blech! And everyone's afraid to scream-most everyone.

I've asked myself about Tibet, do I think that the high lamas whom I have had the grace to know, have siddhis or powers. The answer is yes, I think they have them. The second question I ask myself is, do I think the high lamas are clearer and wiser than the Chinese leaders? And I have to answer yes, I think that. Otherwise why am I studying with Tibetans, and not with Chinese leaders? (I'm not talking about the Chinese people now, I'm talking about the political system of China.) And then I say, well if the Tibetans are more powerful and wiser, how could the Chinese take over Tibet unless the Tibetans wanted them to? I mean, who's in control here, anyway? That plunked me right up against the mystery. Could it be that the Tibetans used the Chinese to force the Tibetans to go out as refugees into the world, to take the dharma out into the world at a time when it was needed and to proliferate in a non-threatening way into all social systems? See, it's all in the viewing, all in the vector view. I don't say that's the scenario, I just say it's worth keeping in mind, to balance it.

And maybe this is a moment when I can digress for one moment to tell you a story. When I saw the pain and heard the pain in one of the questioner's last night, that said, when it's so dark and overwhelming, what can we do? I remembered a story that I'd like to share with you.

When I came back from India, I was in a very high state. Light was pouring out of my head, and I was out of time and living in a cabin and cooking my kidri in a pot and washing out of a pail. I was holding onto my high as high as I could. I had my beard, and my beads, and my dress. And at one point I was going out to teach I think at Esalen, and I had acquired a 1938 Buick Limousine. So, I started out in this limousine, and I had opened the trunk inside so I could sleep in the back part, so I made it into a camper. It was this 6,000 lb. automobile that drove like a tank, and I was driving it across the country. So I started out on the New York throughway, and I was just galumphing along in such a high state that I was hanging out with various forms of the Divine, and I was doing my mantra, which I usually am doing one way or another, to remember that this isn't the only game in town. So I'm holding onto the steering wheel and I'm keeping enough consciousness to keep the car on the road, but at another part I'm singing to Krishna, who is blue, is radiant, plays the flute, is the seducer of the beloved all of whom we are back into the merging with God, back into the formless. I am in ecstasy hanging out with blue Krishna driving along the New York freeway, when I noticed in my rear view mirror a blue flashing light. Now, there is enough of me down, so I knew it was a state trooper. I pulled over the car, and this man got out of the car and he came up to the window, and I opened the window and he said, "May I see your license and registration?" I was in such a state that when I looked at him, I saw that it was Krishna who had come to give me darshan. How would Krishna come in 1970? Why not as a state trooper? Christ came as a carpenter.

So Krishna comes up and asks for my license. He can have anything, he can have my life, all he wants is my license and registration! So I give him my license and registration, and it's like throwing flowers at the feet of God, and I am looking at him with absolute love, so he goes back to the car and he calls home, and then he comes back and he walks around the car and he says, what's in that box on the seat? I said, they're mints, would you like one? He said, well the problem is you were driving too slow on the freeway, and you'll have to drive off the freeway if you're going to drive this slowly. I said, yes, absolutely, and I'm just looking at him with such love. Now, if you put yourself in the role of a state trooper, how often do you suppose they are looked at with unconditional love? Especially when they're in their uniform. So after he had finished all the deliberations, he didn't want to leave. But he had run out of state trooper-ness. So he stood there a minute, and then he said, Great car you've got here! That allowed me to get out, and we could kick and spit and hit the fenders and say, they don't make `em now like they used to, and tell old car stories, and then we ran out of that. And I could feel he still didn't want to leave, I mean why would you want to leave if you're being unconditionally loved? Where are you going to go? You've already got what you wanted, what are you going to do, that takes care of your power needs, all of it. So finally he runs out, he knows he's got to come clean that he's Krishna, so he says, "Be gone with you," which isn't state trooper talk, but what the hell? And as I get into the car and I start to drive away, he's standing by his cruiser and I look in the mirror and he's waving at me. Now you tell me, do you think that was a state trooper, or was that Krishna? I don't know.

The reason I love that story is because I didn't have an intention to do anything to that state trooper. I was what I was at that moment, and the nature of that space allowed him to open up and touch a place in himself that's usually locked away in the game that he's trapped in. I could imagine that his tasting that would affect how he is with his wife, his children, his dog, what he would talk about. I could feel the way the web worked.

I started to imagine when we say "What can we do?" the more interesting question is"How can we be?" Because I see with the information age, everybody is like a microsecond away from everybody else. And therefore I come away from this understanding with the realization that the gift I can offer into bringing a harmony and beauty into system is the work I do on myself, to free me from the identification of my awareness with models, expectations and such. So I can be an environment in which you can become what you need to become, by my standing out of the way, in sharing with you just presence, which is another way of looking at love from other than a behaviorist point of view. We think in terms of vast numbers because we bought Ford's mind. But the game is one by one by one by one.

In Island, there is a large island of which one part is called Pala, and the other part is called Rendang-Lobo. Rendang-Lobo is run by Colonel Dipa. He's a dictator very interested in oil, and becoming part of the military-industrial, Western concept of progress and happiness. Pala, the other part of the Island, has been closed off to the outside world some 200 years back through an advantageous meeting of two beings: Andrew McPhail, a surgeon from Scotland and the Raja of Pala, who is a Mahayana Buddhist. The two of them, because they were both wise, each in their own way from their own culture, merged Western and Eastern, merged true science, the excitement in looking for oneself, with the Mahayana Buddhism Tantrism to create a culture in Pala. Into this culture comes Will Farnaby, an English journalist who is shipwrecked and finds himself plunk in the middle of this forbidden culture. And Will Farnaby first meets this ten-year-old girl, Mary Sarojini, who finds him frightened and pained because he's just met a snake and feared falling off the cliff, and she immediately uses the most sophisticated psychotherapeutic ways to decathect his locked libido in fear. She's ten years old, she sounds like a little old lady, and she takes him through the trauma to free him of it immediately.

And she sends her little brother for Dr. McPhail, who is the great grandson of the founder of Pala. And then he meets the cast of characters in this wonderful story. Murugan is a 16-year old handsome young boy, the present Raja, about to come of age to take over from his mother who has been holding the throne for him, she is the Rani, the worst of the new age Ranis, she is channeling Master Koothoomi, and carrying out a world tour crusade of the spirit. She seems like a TV evangelist, and she and Murugan are supposedly running the island. But it's a constitutional monarchy so the people are really running it. They are very discontent with the way the people are running this island, and right early on, Will meets with Murugan and the Rani and he meets with the Ambassador from Rendang-Lobo, Bahoo, and there is a very sweet and provocative conversation that goes on between Will, who is new to this island and has just tasted the beauty of the island, and Bahoo, who is the ambassador from the other part of the island that is trying to get Pala into the oil business.

Island is more familiar, because it fits in with the values that most of us hold dear. Things like the mutual adoption club, where a child, once it has gotten to the toddling stage where it no longer needs to be totally dependent on its functional mother, who has loved it into that point, is free to go out into the village to other families when things get a little hot at home, because people marry and it doesn't mean that they are going to be the most conscious environment every moment for the child. When it gets too hot, the child can go to one of the other families. There's usually about 20 families in a mutual adoption club, so that everybody in those things are everybody's child, and everybody's parent, and everybody's uncle and everybody's grandfather, so you have the warmth and support of the extended family, which most of us are hungry for, believe me, hungry indeed.

So that's one of the ways in which Aldous is showing how community and as you get older into your teens you then can leave that community and start to create other communities together, all voluntary communities which people are choosing to come together rather than being brainwashed or coerced into community.

Early on they define children in terms of their unique biochemistry, their unique predispositions, so that a child who loved visualization would be steered into geometry, and a child who didn't visualize well might go the route of algebra. They were introduced to sciences through ecology, so they came in looking at how erosion was an imbalance of the moral issue of giving and receiving. In other words, they integrated all the different components of their education in the whole process and were invited and encouraged to experiment, to look, to try. This was all in the stage up to about 15 or 16.

Then came a very critical part of Aldous' model, which was the ritual of initiation in which these young people went through an ordeal of climbing a mountain, coming down a dangerous courting with death, a very risky, demanding situation, which pulled them out of themselves into the action, and then when they had been softened through this process they were brought into the open spaciousness of the meditation space and they had the moksha medicine experience, in which the medicine allowed them to extricate themselves from the conceptual structures they had developed through their education thus far, not to deny them but to get a balance between them and that which surrounds them, the silence out of which words arise, the formless out of which the form dances.

So there are all those years up to 16 where a preparation for them comes into the balance that Aldous himself came into, between the formless and the form in which one understands that compassion arises out of emptiness.

And after that, at various stages of their lives that were significant, they would have this ritual to keep re-balancing. Because the parents had also had this experience, the way in which they taught their children, the sciences and the arts and the socialization processes were all done with the kind of consciousness that embraced the space around it as well as the form...

As part of that ritual of initiation, they were brought into the presence of Shiva, the Nataraj, the Dancing Shiva, and with their moksha-opened eyes they got a chance to taste through that the process of the universe of creation and decay, of darkness and of light, they were able to have the experience that prepared them when Pala at the end is overrun by Rendang-Lobo, to be ready as the Tibetans, to go out into the world, to meet the state trooper, and to convey the unconditional love to another person, who knows how that web works? Who knows?

So what I find in Island is an optimistic statement, because in it Aldous is showing us the possibility that when the reasonableness of our minds meets the wisdom of our deepest understanding, there comes in the application or manifestation of that, social forms that are habitable by free people, and I think it is incredibly valuable for us to hold that possibility in mind - remember, "half-way between hope and hopelessness.
" Ah, so? Ah, so! Ah . . ."

Ram Dass has written numerous books, including Be Here Now, The Only Dance There Is and a forthcoming book on the spiritual aspects of growing old.

He is a former faculty member of Harvard University as well as the traveling lecture partner of Timothy Leary during the heyday of the psychedelic movement of the `60s. More recently, he has been involved in a number of non-profit efforts including the Hanuman Foundation, the Seva Foundation and the Shanti Project.