Aldous Huxley
Aldous.
August 2, 2016
“In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctrines in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honoured. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored.”
-Aldous Huxley
Doors to perception.
July 29, 2016
Esalen
Non-verbal Humanities
‘New Huxley Opens its Doors (to Perception)’
July 2016
Construction on the Lodge’s Huxley meeting room, built upon the foundation of the original Huxley and elevated to a new second floor, is completed this month in time for its namesake’s July birthday. Aldous Huxley was a seminal inspiration to Esalen co-founders Dick Price and Michael Murphy; his belief in “human potentialities” infused the very foundation of Esalen. The writer and philosopher, known for such works as A Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, passed away in 1963.
Jeff Kripal, chair of Esalen’s Board of Trustees and author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, writes of Huxley’s Esalen connection: “…his call for an institution that could teach the ‘nonverbal humanities’ and the development of the ‘human potentialities’ functioned as the working mission statement of early Esalen.”
Regular workshops in Huxley will begin in August.