Dissolution or Transfiguration: Huxley, McGilchrist, and the Fate of the Self
Aldous Huxley and Iain McGilchrist never met. Huxley died in November 1963, decades before The Master and His Emissary (2009), so the encounter was never chronologically possible. But they drew from the same headwaters: both were formed by a horror of mechanistic reductionism, both were devoted readers of Blake, both treated mysticism as continuous with — rather than opposed to — a rigorous account of mind. Huxley had been fascinated by Blake and Boehme since his twenties, and it is not hard to hear an echo of Blake's "world in a grain of sand" in McGilchrist's insistence that the right hemisphere alone can see the infinite in the definite. Two intellectual giants, working from strikingly similar premises and a shared canon, arrived at almost opposite conclusions about what happens to the self at the horizon of mystical experience. McGilchrist had the advantage of several more decades of neuroscience Huxley never got to read. But the disagreement was never only empirical — it was about what the evidence, once gathered, was evidence of.
Huxley's Case, Read Generously
It would be easy, and unfair, to flatten Huxley into a strawman — a Western intellectual who mistook a drug experience for enlightenment and concluded the self was an illusion to be dissolved. The real picture is more interesting, and more unresolved, than that. Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy (1945) does lean into an austere, largely Vedanta-inflected monism: a "Highest Common Factor" beneath all the world's mystical traditions, a divine Ground of Being with which the individual self seeks unitive knowledge. But by the time of his last novel, Island (1962), Huxley's thinking had visibly shifted. Scholars of his work have traced this shift directly: away from the other-worldly mysticism of the Perennial Philosophy and toward the life-affirming, body-accepting traditions of Tantra, Zen, and Mahayana Buddhism. 1 Pala, the utopian island of the novel, is Mahayanist "shot through and through with Tantra" — its citizens practice a form of tantric love-making, take a psychedelic "moksha-medicine" as a sacrament rather than an escape, and are explicitly contrasted with the soma of Brave New World , which numbs, versus moksha, which is meant to awaken. This is not a philosophy of evacuation. It is a philosophy that wants full, embodied, relational presence in the world — arguably closer to Nouwen's Selving than to any thin nondual abstraction.
Huxley's own metaphysics, articulated through Pala's "Notes on What's What," makes the same move explicitly. Reality, the text argues, is process rather than substance — tunes rather than pebbles: "Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? 'Tunes,' answer Buddhism and modern science." This is a telling image to reach for, because a tune is not a void. It is individual notes, in time, related by tension and resolution — McGilchrist's own harmonie , the lyric tone of the lyre that emerges from the tension of the wire. Erase the boundaries between the notes and you do not get a deeper music. You get silence, or noise. If Huxley really believed reality was music, his own metaphor argues against dissolution as the endpoint of the mystical path, not for it.
The Fault Line
And yet Huxley never quite lets go of the dissolution language either. Pala's doctrine holds that the assertion "I am" is close to a lie: the "I" claims a separate, abiding self; the "am" denies that all existence is relationship and change. This is not incompatible with a relational metaphysics — a self constituted by relationship rather than by fixed substance is exactly the kind of self Nouwen's Selving, or a Host/Guest account of hospitality, describes. But when Huxley actually renders the mystical climax of the novel — Will Farnaby's own moksha-medicine trip, guided by Susila late in the book 4 — the language reaches past relationality into something starker than the rest of the novel prepares you for. At its peak, the passage states flatly that there is, at bottom, no such person as Will Farnaby: presence has become absence, individuality has poured upward into an undifferentiated, unowned light. This is dissolution stated as plainly as Huxley ever states anything.
What makes the scene remarkable, though, is that Huxley does not simply endorse it. He stages the objection himself, in Susila's voice, in real time. When Will likens the experience to Nirvana, she pushes back — pure, undiluted transcendence, she tells him, is a trap serious contemplatives learn to resist; the wiser course tempers it with ordinary love and ordinary work. Moments later, with the record player running, Huxley describes the individual instrumental lines of a Bach concerto — violin, recorders, harpsichord — as distinct and separate from one another, and yet each fully itself only because of its relation to the whole they compose together. It is very close to a direct dramatization of McGilchrist's harmonie , arriving in the same scene that is simultaneously insisting the self has ceased to exist. And when Susila finally has Will open his eyes, what he sees are ordinary objects — a table, a bookcase, a wall — rendered as fully, uniquely themselves and, at the same time, caught up in something larger than themselves. Not evacuated. Transfigured.
So the tension is not something a sympathetic reader has to go looking for in Huxley — he wrote it into the scene's own architecture, gave it a voice, and let it argue with his narrator in real time. He seems to have sensed the pull toward pure dissolution and built in a counterweight without ever fully resolving which force wins.
The Neurological Pivot
This is where McGilchrist offers something more than a competing interpretation — he offers a different causal story for what Huxley's experience actually was. Huxley's own account, in The Doors of Perception , 5 is explicitly Bergsonian: the brain as a reducing valve that ordinarily filters a vaster reality down to what is survival-relevant, and mescaline as a hole punched in that valve, letting in more of what Huxley called Mind at Large. Asked directly, decades later, whether substances like ayahuasca or 5-MeO-DMT access the relational skills of the right brain, McGilchrist's answer was no. 2 What he proposes instead is that the frontal lobes — which ordinarily inhibit and thereby organize the flood of input from the more posterior cortex — are being suppressed, producing an unfiltered flood of stimuli with no particular structure imposed on it. Not more reality pouring in through a widened aperture, but a loss of the very apparatus that makes coherent, related experience possible at all.
That distinction matters enormously for how to read Huxley. A mid-century literary intellectual, handed a genuinely disorienting flood of unfiltered experience with no ready concept for it, would naturally reach for the nearest available vocabulary to describe it — and for Huxley, soaked for decades in Vedanta by way of Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, and the Vedanta Society of Southern California, that vocabulary was: the self dissolves, all is One. The experience was real. The metaphysical conclusion drawn from it may not have been licensed by what was actually happening neurologically. This is close to the exact failure McGilchrist diagnoses in his own writing on selving and union 3 : philosophers examining the life of the right hemisphere from the standpoint of the left hemisphere — taking an experience that exceeds ordinary concepts and forcing it back into a tidy, portable abstraction, the very move contemplatives themselves warn against.
Transfiguration, Not Dissolution
McGilchrist's own answer, worked out across far more evidence than Huxley had access to, is that the self does not need to be annihilated to touch a greater wholeness; following Hegel, it can be taken up — negated in its narrowness, not in its existence, and lifted into a new and larger whole. Nouwen's account of hospitality describes the same structure from the human side: the host remains the host, the stranger remains the stranger, and it is precisely the held tension between them — not its collapse — that allows something greater to emerge. Read side by side with Huxley, the contrast sharpens into something like a verdict. Where Huxley's philosophy pointed toward relationship and his experience-language kept pulling him back toward the void, McGilchrist's account is consistent all the way through: boundaries are not an obstacle to union but the precondition for it, in the psyche as much as in a chord.
It remains a strange kind of tragedy that these two never spoke. Both men spent their lives trying to say the same underlying thing — that the modern, mechanized account of mind and world is starving something real in us — and reaching for the same handful of sources to say it. One of them had the poetic instincts to sense where his own metaphor was leading him, and, in the end, could not quite follow it home.
Huxley did not end his novel on the moksha-medicine scene, and it is worth knowing where he ended it instead. In the book's final pages, Pala is invaded — a night of armored cars and gunfire, the work of a century undone in an evening, the boy-Raja's voice crackling over a loudspeaker between bursts of propaganda. And through it all, undisturbed by any of it, the island's great stone Buddha sits in the road, its face lit for a moment at a time by passing headlamps, while the mynah birds — bred for exactly this purpose — go on calling their two words into the wreckage: karuna , compassion, and attention . Huxley does not let the relational vision win the argument. He lets it survive the argument's defeat, still speaking, in the mouths of birds, after the society built around it has been destroyed. That may be the most honest ending a fault line like his could have had.
- Poller, J. (2020). "Fully Human Being: Aldous Huxley's Island , Tantra, and Human Potential." International Journal for the Study of New Religions , 10(1), 25–47. ↩
- Iain McGilchrist, interviewed by Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification , episode 85. ↩
- Iain McGilchrist, "'Selving' and Union" — paper drawing on Cynthia Bourgeault's reading of Hegelian aufgehoben in relation to right-hemisphere experience of self and union. ↩
- Aldous Huxley, Island (Chatto & Windus, 1962) — the moksha-medicine scene referenced here runs across several pages roughly two-thirds through the novel; the "Notes on What's What" installments, including the "tunes or pebbles" and "blessed experience of Not-Two" passages, appear earlier, interspersed across several chapters. ↩
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Chatto & Windus, 1954). ↩
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