Prof Dana Sawyer – What if Aldous Huxley was spot on? Current psychedelic research supports Huxley’s ‘Perennial Philosophy’ as deeply relevant.
Based on the collaborative theory of Huxley and Humphry Osmond that psychedelic substances sometimes trigger genuine mystical experiences (including experiences of what Huxley termed the “unitive knowledge” of our essential oneness with reality), the first wave of enthusiasm for psychedelics as tools for self-actualization was born in modern western culture. As a result, a whole cadre of psychologists, philosophers, literati, and scholars of religious studies—including Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, Frances Vaughan, Abraham Maslow, Ram Dass, and others—explored Huxley’s “perennial philosophy” and endorsed it. But in the late 1970s, the position came under fire by such postmodernist scholars as Steven Katz and Wayne Proudfoot, who dismissed the perennial philosophy as another presumptuous “meta-narrative.”
However, today, forty years later—and during this time of the “psychedelic renaissance,” there is a renewed interest in Huxley’s position based on substantial evidence from the academic community that psychedelics not only reliably trigger experiences with the same phenomenological characteristics as mystical experiences that occur naturally (including the experience of profound unity), but result in similar improvements in attitude and behavior afterwards. This talk outlines those findings and their support for Huxley’s perennialist position.
DANA SAWYER is professor emeritus of philosophy and religious studies at the Maine College of Art & Design, from where he also twice led students on the study abroad program to India. His work initially focused on the history and philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, but during the past 25 years, he has expanded his academic interests to include neo-Hindu movements in America, comparative mysticism and theories of the perennial philosophy. Regarding the latter, he has written numerous academic articles along with biographies of Aldous Huxley (2002) and Huston Smith (the authorized biography, in 2014), as well as editing a volume of essays titled Aldous Huxley and Self-Realization (2020), and, most recently, an updated overview of the perennial philosophy itself, titled The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded (2024). On the subject of neo-Hindu movements, he has, with co-author Cynthia Humes, most recently published The Transcendental Meditation Movement for Cambridge University Press’ “Elements Series” on new religious movements (2023).
Speaker
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Dana SawyerProf Emeritus of Philosophy and Religious Studies
