At Home with Moksha

or, tripping in the ebb of time

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Upon delving back into Aldous Huxley’s novel Island (1962), I was repeatedly reminded of a Herman Hesse quote. ‘One never reaches home,’ he wrote. ‘But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.’

Island is deeply riddled with the notion of nostos, the voyage home, but like Hesse there is no final arrival, no Homeric return to Ithaca. One’s home potentially being in every present yet ever-passing moment, I realized, lies at the heart of Huxley’s story—just as it lies at the heart of every psychedelic trip.

Hestia, Greek Goddess of hearth and home, kept the fire burning whatever mischief the other gods were away making. It was permanent, yet—as is the nature of fire—also transient. This is the quandary Huxley so beautifully explores. In Island, home is equivalent to the present, it is shifting, elusive but permanently bound to the conditions of past and future.

The question then that Huxley explores throughout the novel is: if we are unable to wholly escape these conditions, how can one most freely experience the present time as home?

Island’s answer is multifocal; an alchemical ‘as above, so below’. After all, a great deal of Huxley’s writing, especially his journalism, is in pursuit of answers, relentlessly interrogating the conundrum of individual and social harmony. This, his final novel, takes the same course—and vitally, of course, it follows from his psychedelic turn a decade before.

The internal relationship of time, I suggest, is crucial to his narrative. At every turn, of event and page, there is a potential passage home—calls to be present against the ever-tugging conditions of past and future. And it is in the disquieting ways that the present is jarringly disrupted that some characters appear homeless, while others live in near-continual nostos.

As we shall see, the book’s fictional magic mushroom, moksha-medicine, itself embodies this time aspect of homeliness; both personally and culturally. As such, it is of course one fractal message that permeates throughout the whole book, but one which is undoubtedly rooted in the author’s own psychedelic experiences.

The story opens with the protagonist, a British journalist named Will Farnaby, semi-conscious on the shoreline of the forbidden island nation of Pala, after being engulfed by a storm while sailing. Laid out, discombobulated, he swims erratically in his memory.

Half-awake, Farnaby at first believes himself to be in his own bedroom in London. Yet this domestic dream is no psychological retreat into comfort, it is a space haunted by guilt-ridden memory; the death of his wife following a dreadful car crash, having sped away in fierce rain after Farnaby revealed an infidelity, and his desire to leave her and their troubled marriage.

From the very outset, therefore, his home is present, but is depicted as a psychological space possessed by disturbing memories of the past. We, the reader, step into the novel’s journey sharing in Farnaby’s confusion, his false and illusory nostos.

The translucent veil of his memory, however, is repeatedly punctured by ‘attention’, which some of the island’s mynah birds are trained to call out—along with ‘here and now, boys’ and ‘karuna’ (compassion). These summonses undulate throughout the narrative, reminding characters not to lose their way, to maintain their presence.

From here, beginning with the help of the mynah and two Palanese children, the shipwrecked man slowly returns to his senses over a book-length odyssey.

Farnaby’s personal microcosm is also mirrored in the duplicity (and, given the circumstances, the serendipity) of his presence on the island. Ostensibly a journalist making contacts in the neighbouring military dictatorship of Rendang, his industrialist boss also tasked him with secretly investigating Pala; an island rich in natural resources that has staved off mechanization, remaining passivist and isolationist, but which powerful forces plot to exploit.

Here, therefore, is the double-bind in which Farnaby finds himself. Haunted by the past and chained by the future, his whole character arc is a slow-burning revelation of the present. Not only through the techniques and practices of the island culture which help him live with his own ghosts, but the realization that, as he falls in love with Pala, the chains of ever-receding futures aim to strangulate it.

This dynamic, geared through Farnaby’s eyes, cleverly plays out throughout the novel. Pala itself, reformed in the mid-nineteenth century by its king and a Western doctor, was founded on such a principle: ‘To make the best of all worlds—the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentials.’ Often described as a synthesis between East and West, it is equally a careful balance of time.

As the novel progresses, Farnaby, and the reader (vicariously), receives a tour of Pala’s culture: holistic medicine, ‘Mutual Adoption Clubs’, education practices, religious observance, and much else. Throughout these, which closely mirror Huxley’s own reading and interests, the text is also peppered with extracts from a book by Pala’s Old Raja called Notes on What’s What, and on What it Might be Reasonable to Do About What’s What.

What’s What acts as a sort of philosophical guide for the reader’s growing understanding of the philosophy and practices of Palanese culture since its reformation.

In one passage: ‘Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow.’ Adding that one third of sorrow is unavoidable, ‘It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature,’ but ‘The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.’

The notion that they are ‘home-made’ is telling. It brings to mind the idea that the sorrows are analogues with the three-fold reading of time, wherein the two-thirds sorrow are characterized by the present hauntings of past and future. With this in mind, the practices of Pala are unified in their goals to exorcise these sorrowful spectres.

Take, for instance, Farnaby’s visit to a school, where students undertake visualization practices. He asks what the point is, and is told, ‘to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory [past] and our phantasies [future].’ It can ‘help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future.’ These are tools, Farnaby realizes, ‘rites of imaginative exorcism’.

In the penultimate, heart-wrenching, chapter of Island, Farnaby witnesses the death of a character named Lakshmi (revealingly, in Sanskrit, ‘she who leads to one’s goal’). As he walks alone down a hospital corridor towards her room, he feels anxious, thinking about the death of his wife, and realized that ‘the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous.’ Here, nearing the end—of the novel, the corridor, Lakchmi’s life—the present presents itself to him as a timeless resolution.

However, it would be a mistake to see Huxley’s Pala as some dry, utopian idealization. The author is nothing if not a realist. If the island is in some sense ever-present, it necessarily remains haunted in various ways by time’s dynamic, which is embodied in various characters who stalk the margins and interstices of the culture.

The characters of Colonel Dipa, the industrialist Lord Aldehyde, the young soon-to-be-crowned Raja, Muruhan, and his mother the Rani, all skew the present in some ideological sense. All have ideas about inescapable industrial progress, or reviving ancient kingdoms, or a globalized religion, and each treats the present as an unfortunate impediment.

Muruhan in particular, under the influence of Dipa and his mother, saw himself continuing Pala’s ‘revolution’. Educated in Switzerland, he thought the Palanese regency too conservative, ‘they refuse to change any of the old bad revolutionary ideas that ought to be changed. They won’t reform the reforms,’ he states. Revolution for revolution’s sake.

With his impending coronation, Muruhan prepares to let the floodgates to modernity open, to treat the past with contempt, and regarding the present as merely an empty vessel to be filled; neglecting, wasting, ruining the very carefully prepared concoction that is already there.

The young Raja’s dissociation from Palanese culture is encapsulated in his attitude to moksha-medicine. ‘No progress,’ he says, ‘only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.’ Describing the little yellow mushrooms that grow in Pala’s mountains as dope, differs sharply from the island names of ‘moksha-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill.’

His unwillingness to try it, reflects his own unwillingness to engage with what’s what. Thus he calls it a ‘false samadhi’ that ‘gives you a lot of illusions’. Conversely, the Palanese study moksha, and use wider personal techniques to help produce a ‘full blown mystical experience… boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.’ They ask of him to at least try it. He refuses.

Moksha is a sort of treatment or therapy, acting as a lubricant for the present. The word itself means ‘liberation’, which underpins it role as a kind of gateway to homeliness. On the island, it is safely cultivated in a lab and is made use of by punctuating the existing rhythms of life, working in harmony with them—but also as a therapeutic jolt for the haunted.

For instance, Farnaby witnesses a group coming-of-age ritual. It begins with a sublime ordeal of rock climbing, and afterward the children embark on their first moksha experience. Undertaken in a thousand-year-old temple, the ceremony gives them a firsthand experience of reality, ‘from which they can derive a very good idea of what’s what.’

As the children come up, the character Dr Robert gives a sermon of sorts, and asks them to look at a stature of Shiva, ‘Look at it with these new eyes that the moksha-medicine has given you… Dancing through time and out of time, dancing everlastingly and in the eternal now.’ Later, he adds:

All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you’ll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that’s for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird’s advice: Attention!

Note the respect for older wisdom, the hope for the future, but ultimately the presence of ‘Here and now’ and ‘Attention’. The children, through moksha and other techniques, are given a fleeting, undiluted affinity with the Timelessness of the present. In other words, they are given a way to their own home.

The stamp of Huxley’s own psychedelic experiences is deeply impressed into the text. Not only through discussions of mind-at-large, and the brain as a filter of consciousness, but through Farnaby’s own trip at the story’s finale. He is cautioned that it, ‘can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell’. And indeed, like Huxley had earlier suggested in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956), for Farnaby it does.

The protagonist sees, ‘a cosmic Woolworth stocked with mass-produced horrors. Horrors of pain, of cruelty and tastelessness, of imbecility and deliberate malice,’ but he also experiences a ‘timeless present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.’

As dawn approached, he felt ‘Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.’ Farnaby finds his home at the end, in a state of liberation, thanks to the affinity he found in crossing the paths of other characters. No longer haunted by memory, he is also decidedly free of his duties to the future.

Yet, the realist author still lurks behind Island’s narrative. As Farnaby experiences his state of nostos, Pala is simultaneously being invaded by hostile forces.

Murugan begins repeating words over a loudspeaker, punctuating Farnaby’s consciousness like the Mynah bird at the beginning: ‘Progress… modern life… Truth… values… genuine spirituality… oil’. There are gunshots, and ‘The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained—the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.’

Huxley offers protean answers to our earlier question about how to experience home while living under the conditions of time. The novel explores pedagogical techniques and practices that continually aim at guiding the inhabitants to the present, developing healthy relationships with not only one another, but with past and future. The use of the moksha-medicine exemplifies this, and is a reminder of the important role psychedelics might play in society.

Yet, as Huxley makes clear in the conclusion, the present is never allowed to become solipsistic, the home never allowed to be static. The psychedelic nostos is not an end in itself. Home is thus also a tragedy, the one third sorrow about which we can apparently do nothing.