For the last several weeks, we have been discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

Chapter 9 of Island begins with this quote from the Old Raja’s Notes on What’s What: “Patriotism is not enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.”

Now that Will has been officially welcomed into Pala for a month, and now that he is healed well enough to get around a bit, his hosts offer take him on a proper tour of the island in order to show him what “nothing short of everything” looks like in action. He arrives before they do at the Experimental Station and runs into Murugan, the soon-to-be Raja, who has his nose in the Sears catalog. Murugan shares with Will his dreams of bringing progress (and motorscooters) to Pala. He also shares his contempt for hallucinocenic moksha-medicine: “All it gives you is a lot of illusions.”

Of course, Murugan’s ideas are formed by the European education he has received, rather than by his own direct experience. “You’re like that mynah,” says Dr. Robert after arriving at the Station and getting involved in the conversation. “Trained to repeat words you don’t understand or know the reason for, ‘It isn’t real. It isn’t real.’ But if you’d experienced [this for yourself] ... you’d know better. You’d know it was much more real than what you call reality.”

As they begin their tour, Dr. Robert tells Will that Murugan’s subjects have very different views on progress and reality than does their Raja-in-waiting. “They’ve been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness. And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers. Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles. Jewels and miracles.”

How the Palanese learn to live the mundane events of everyday life as jewels and miracles is the subject of most of this next chapter, as Will is taken on a tour of the island. Dr. Robert and Vijaya show and explain many of the nuts and bolts:

• Lots of physical exercise—around 2 hours a day for most everyone.
• Awareness brought to each task. “Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.”
• Creating a context of equality and enough. Essentials are imported; scarce resources are shared; economically no one person makes all that much more than anyone else. Economic ease allows people to focus on things other than chasing dollars.
• Newspapers where different points of view get equal time and space for comment and criticism. This allows readers make up their minds without the economic motive to manipulate them to sell more newspapers.
• A job system based on intervals of different kinds of part-time work, which leaves most workers less bored and more satisfied.
• Recognition and treatment of common patterns that lead to criminal and dominating behavior, especially “muscle people,” who have extraordinary physical power and a tendency toward dominance, and “Peter Pans,” who tend to be smaller and weaker, and who often take that out on the world around them. Through treatment, muscle people and Peter Pans are able to have rich lives based on connection rather than power struggles, and Pala is able to function with minimal crime and no prisons.
• Educating children in both observation and reflection. Teach them to see and to feel and to draw connections between the two.
• Challenge adolescents with dangerous tasks like mountain-climbing, where they learn to work together.
• Meditation, which helps people see their lives in a much larger context, connected to everything.
• Judicious, respectful use of hallucinogens, “reality revealers,” “truth and beauty pills.” Moksha-medicine is first administered to teenagers in a ceremony of climbing and revelation, and is then used by many Palanese once or twice a year.

This last point on the moksha-medicine alarms some readers just as it alarms Murugan, but Huxley is very clear that hallucinogens are not just for fun. Moksha journeys, he says, are like feasts, while meditation is more like the meals you prepare and eat every day. In Pala, there is room for both.

This part of the book ends with Will sitting in on the initiation of a group of teenagers who have just done a serious climb together and who are now experiencing moksha-medicine and the expanded awareness it gives for the very first time. As they sit in the temple, Dr. Robert calls their attention to a bronze sculpture of Shiva-Nataraja and uses it to help guide their awakening:

“Look at him there on the altar. The image is man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe. Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night, follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the wild hair infinitely flying. Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also,” he added, “also at play within every living thing, every sentient creature, every child and man and woman. Play for play’s sake. But now the playground is conscious, the dance floor is capable of suffering.”

“To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult. What we would really like is a God who never destroys what he has created. Or if there must be pain and death, let them be meted out by a God of righteousness, who will punish the wicked and reward the good with everlasting happiness. But in fact the good get hurt, the innocent suffer. Then let there be a God who sympathizes and brings comfort. But Nataraja only dances. His play is a play impartially of death and of life, of all evils as well as of all goods ... Dances that way—and oh, the pain, the hideous fear, the desolation! Then hop, skip and jump. Hop into perfect health. Skip into cancer and senility. Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness, out of nothingness again into life. For Nataraja it’s all play, and the play is an end in itself, everlastingly purposeless. He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-sukha, his infinite and eternal bliss.”

“Eternal bliss,” Dr. Robert repeated and again, but questioningly, “Eternal bliss?” He shook his head. “For us there’s no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja’s dance as our pleasures, our dying as our living.”

At this, a girl in the group begins to sob, and Vijaya goes to comfort her. Then Dr. Robert continues:

“Suffering and sickness,” Dr. Robert resumed at last, “old age, decrepitude, death. I show you sorrow. But that wasn’t the only thing the Buddha showed us. He also showed us the ending of sorrow ... Liberation. The ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact.”

“For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it’s like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this timelessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that be moksha-medicine will bring you in the years to come? Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be?”

“Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? 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! Pay attention and you’ll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar.”

As I read this passage, I reflected on the people I have known and loved who have died, and wondered how different the end of their lives would have been if they’d had this kind of experience and instruction. What is it like to live and to die with full awareness and understanding of the deeply positive, impersonal, and eternal nature of this play?

In the next and last installment of this series, we will look into this question.