Moksha, by Aldous Huxley

Everyone Is Going Conscious

"It is without any question the most extraor- 
dinary and significant experience available 
to human beings this side of the Beatific 
Vision."— Aldous Huxley 

The publication of MOKSHA pre- 
sents for the first time an authorita- 
tive collection of the prophetic and 
visionary papers of Aldous Huxley— 
his writings on mind-altering drugs, 
psychology, education, politics, the 
collective imconscious and the future 
of humankind. 

In May 1953 Aldous Huxley, while 
in the company of his wife and a 
physician-friend, was administered 
four-tenths of a gram of mescalin. 
The mystical and transcendent ex- 
perience which followed became the 
basis for one of his most fascinating 
and controversial books. The Doors 
of Perception, and set him off on an 
exploratory course which was to 
produce a profound and revolution- 
ary body of work. 

MOKSHA is an engrossing narrative 
of Huxley's preoccupation with the 
mysterious inner reaches of the 
human mind, the "visionary expe- 
rience and its relation to art and the 
traditional conceptions of the other 
world." Taking its name from an 
ancient Sanskrit text, moksha spans 

Everyone Is Going Conscious

The Wonderful Paintings of Leonid Afremov

Click here for more of Leonid Afremov's artwork<-----

Quanzhen Daoism: free pdf ebooks:

Cultivating Pefection: Mysticism and Self-Transfmormation in Early Quanzhen Daoism

The Teachings and Practices of the Early Quanzhen Taoism Masters

Nobody Knows Anything

Ladies and gentlemen: Nobody knows sh%t. That's right, folks. Anyone who has ever said they know something is full of it.

You cannot know anything at all. The idea of knowing something is a linguistic illusion. It requires two things: a knower and the known.

The only true knowledge is that of simply being. What is, simply is.

There is nothing else you can say about it. You can try. But it doesn't make what is anymore than what it already is.

When people talk to me about karma, I say to them, "Well, I suppose you think the millions of people slaughtered by the Nazis had it coming then."

Karma is the way people explain away the terrifying reality of all things being a mystery.

And so is religious mythology, for that matter.

Beyond all of this is the fact that the body is going to die. Get with that truth. Stay with it. Put mind on it. Dwell there and watch what magically happens: you become nicer.

Solitude: The Straight Path

Most people are afraid of being alone for an extended period of time. Not speaking to or seeing anyone for a few days is not even an idea worth considering.

Yet solitude is a way to get to the heart of life. As our minds chat away in the world like up and down Pez dispenser heads, the reality of life is always flowing gracefully underneath, flowing as a deep and genuine intelligence at the heart of all existence. We miss it all the time because we are chat chat chatting away.

Conversations are perfect ego boosters, for they reinforce our ideas of ourselves and our ideas of the world. We look for agreement about what we are saying, so we can feel validated and feel as though we have somehow found REALITY, and that we are therefore in POSSESSION of something OTHERS don't have. The sheer ridiculousness of this process is seen quite clearly after one undertakes a block of solitude.

My first experience with solitude began in youth, as most children find moments when they are alone and have only their imaginations to play with. Then I became a farmhand for a farm in Northern California, where the owner of the farm would go away for weeks at a time and leave me alone on the remote property to caretake. And this is where I discovered the merits of being alone and not speaking with others for a large amount of time.

I went back to the city and smaller town life, and eventually the craving to experience even longer bouts of solitude overcame me, and I gave away all of my things and walked into the redwood forest for two months. I slept in a camp I set up high up on a ridge, about a 4 mile hike into the isolated woods, not a single person around to hear any shouts or screams. Just me and the woods.

This was fantastic. And two years later, I went back for a 5 month stint alone in the woods. This took me beyond thunder dome.

5 months in the woods alone is like wiping the windshield after a rain has passed. Sunny, clear, all is obvious.

Now I'm preparing to do a sabbatical of sorts and try a few years alone in the wilderness. Everything you let go in solitude makes you a greater gift to the world in general. Truth is all that matters, and this truth is life.

So, if you find yourself afraid of things like solitude or death or whatever, just go ahead and do some solitude. You'll find many things that were holding you back will fall away easily, such as the need for approval from others. You will take yourself out of the herd mind that Einstein spoke of, and no longer will you be at the mercy of public opinion and mass propaganda.

Knowing is being. But being is missed, so long as we're yap yap yapping.

I'll post more on solitude and potential places to disappear from civilization soon. Thanks for reading, now shut the fuck up and be.

It's Okay to Abandon Everything

You're never stuck.

See, stuck is a state of mind only. So is attachment. In fact, they are both the same thing.

We fear leaving our job, because we fear losing our house or our wives and husbands or our status or our career.

Yet we always have the choice to simplify our lives. We can begin to shed more and more of the outside needs and wants, and get down to the absolute essentials.

I know a young man who left behind his frozen and stuck lifestyle and gave away all of his things. He kept only what fits in a backpack, a small backpack.

His items included only 2 changes of clothes, thin and easy to roll-up and pack. He walks the Earth at this very moment, and has done so for years, living as a nomad, doing minor computer work as he roams about the planet.

He's happy. He could have remained in one place, and he'd still be happy, so long as he kept only what fits into a backpack.

None of us are stuck. But people who imagine that they are stuck sometimes end up taking their own lives, because they believe what they imagine and see no way out of it.

If you think you are stuck, let go of whatever it is that you think makes you stuck. Let go of the thought, first. Let go of the need to fit in. Let go of the society. Let go of the rules. Let go of approval from your parents. Let go of having to please others and lovers and friends. Let go of the fear of being free like a dignified animal of nature.

And just go. Go in, and move outward. Be with yourself. If you are afraid to be alone, then go off on your own into the forest for a month or two alone. If you are afraid of death, then do as Ramana Maharshi, and lay still on the ground, and think about death for the whole day. Feel your body dying. Face the psychological fears surrounding the avoidance of squarely facing your own inevitable demise.

It's too short, this life. Might as well enjoy it. Oddly enough, this is the greatest gift you can give to the world. Equally odd is the fact that only those who have simplified and released their attachments can see that this is so.

Attachments are blinders. Release them and see. Life is an adventure, and like it or not, you are an adventurer.