Moksha: Letters of Huxley & Osmond
5 companion texts
The letters exist in a specific historical moment, 1953-1963, and make specific arguments about consciousness, therapy, and the naming of experience. These readings place those arguments in context, challenge them, and extend them.
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The Doors of Perception
The book Huxley wrote immediately after his first mescaline session, the public version of what the private letters contain. Read the letters first for the unedited account; read Doors to see what he chose to publish.
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Psychedelic Agents and Mysticism
The most rigorous theological critique of the Huxley-Osmond claim that drug experience can be mystical. Moraczewski read Huxley carefully and argues from inside Catholic theology that what Huxley describes is real but not what he thinks it is.
paper
Entheogens & Education
The most interesting extension of the Huxley-Osmond framework into educational theory. Uses Kieran Egan's five types of understanding to argue that psychedelics address a gap in how modern education treats somatic and mythic ways of knowing.
book
Island
Huxley's last novel, written while the correspondence was ongoing. The moksha-medicine in Island is the fictional elaboration of what he and Osmond were working out in the letters. The novel ends with the island invaded.
book
The Hallucinogens
Osmond and Hoffer's scientific summary of everything they learned from the Saskatchewan trials, the clinical literature behind the correspondence. Shows what the letters were actually being used to build.