This is the last installment of our book club examining Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.

Will’s month in Pala passes peacefully. He spends time with Vijaya’s family and sees a Mutual Adoption Club in action. He spends time at the school and watches how the Palanese educate their children in how to live in both the internal and external worlds they inhabit. And, finally, he witnesses the death of Lakshmi, the wife of Doctor Robert, who is losing her long battle with cancer.

Lakshmi isn’t pumped full of opiates or encouraged to go to sleep. While young nurse Radha sits in meditation to set the tone, Susila encourages Lakshmi to stay awake, to witness her own dying the same way she has witnessed every moment in her life:

“Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply ... I was so preposterously serious is those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi ... Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic ... Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly ... On tiptoes ... Completely unencumbered.”

Lakshmi’s pain doesn’t succeed in distracting her from her goal of full awareness, and once her husband arrives, they are able to say goodbye with appreciation and gratitude for all they have shared together over the decades. And then Lakshmi consciously passes into the Clear Light.

Will contrasts this with his experiences of death, which he calls the Essential Horror—his childhood dog Tiger who became a “piece of meat with a bone inside” while four-year-old Will held him, his lovely Aunt Mary transformed by sickness and suffering into a “packet of garbage,” and, of course, Molly, his wife, whose death he still carries as a guilty burden.

But Will is changed by watching the Palanese experience of death, seeing the sweetness and dignity present when loved ones gather to remind the dying person who they really are—an expression of the eternal being that underlies everything in the universe. A wall within him crumbles as he faces his dark interpretation of the world and sees that it is not necessarily true. He decides that tonight is the night that he will try the Moksha medicine.

The hours of his trip unfold in discovery—his senses are enlivened, and he experiences both luminous bliss and the Essential Horror. He sees the fundamental fabric of being, the Clear Light, that holds them together. “Not seeing it,” he says. “Being it.”

When Will finally opens his eyes and looks at Susila, he sees the dance of life in her face, half hidden in shadow, half suffused with golden light. He watches her carefully as they speak, as she dives into memories of the time she spent with Dugald, slips into feelings of sadness, and fights her way back out of them into the present moment. He sees how it is possible to live.

They stand together looking out over the garden, the palms, the hibiscus, the insects and the glossy leaves, and he cries, overcome: “‘I can’t help it,’ he apologized. He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it.”

As this long night has passed, Murugan and his mother, the Rani, have been plotting. At dawn, they roar through the streets with Colonel Dipa’s soldiers, announcing that changes are afoot. “Progress ... truth ... values ... genuine spirituality ... oil.” They stop at Dr. Robert’s bungalow and kill him with a single rifle shot. Then they proceed through Pala, repeating the same speech. As Huxley puts it: “The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night.”

The first time I read Island 13 years ago, I was horrified by this ending. How could Huxley create such a beautiful place and then destroy it? I cried bitterly, as much for my own lost potential as for the loss of Pala. What would be possible if we lived like the Palanese? Is Huxley saying that we will never know?

But this time around, I think I understand what Huxley is saying a bit more clearly. Even though Pala doesn’t exist, even with cowardice and ignorance and evil running rampant through the world, the facts of existence remain. Some contexts, like Pala, make it easier to see these facts, and some make it more difficult, but it doesn’t change the facts themselves—“the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.”

Integral theorist Ken Wilber tells a story that illustrates the purpose and power of peak experiences of consciousness, like Will’s Moksha journey or a deep state of meditation. He says that life is normally like sitting in a dark room, seeing the outline of a coiled snake in the corner, and living in fear that it will strike at any moment.

Experiences of the true non-dual, divine, deathless nature of ourselves are like someone walking in and turning on the light in that dark room. When the light is on, we can see that the snake we feared is just a rope on the floor, and our fear goes away. Even when the experience passes, as all eventually do, and the room goes dark again, we will be unafraid, because we know the rope to be a harmless rope and not a snake. Seeing what we are afraid of for what it really is gives us confidence and courage in the face of whatever comes our way. We know that, fundamentally, we can’t be harmed.

I think this is what Huxley is getting at with the somewhat somber ending of his beautiful utopian novel. Once we know what life is—a transient, impersonal, beautiful dance between light and dark—we are freed from fear and empowered to act, no matter what our circumstances.

Even when the idea of Pala has been destroyed by the actions of the new Raja, the birds continue their chanting. “Karuna, compassion,” they say, unfazed by the chaos around them. “Attention.”