Mainer pushing Huxley to front Biographer: Writer’s philosophies timely

ALDOUS HUXLEY, A BIOGRAPHY, by Dana Sawyer, Crossroad Publishing Co. New York, 208 pages, $19.95 paperback.

“That we are being propelled in the direction of ‘Brave New World’ is obvious. But no less obvious is the fact that we can, if we so desire, refuse to co-operate.”

“Brave New World Revisited”

Dana Sawyer has spent his adult life following Aldous Huxley’s advice.

A native of Milbridge, the 51-year-old Sawyer began reading Huxley as a college student during the Vietnam War. Over the years, Sawyer’s own philosophical journey has mirrored that of the British-born writer best known for his futuristic novel “Brave New World.”

So it seemed natural for the associate professor of religion and philosophy at the Maine College of Art and an instructor at Bangor Theological Seminary to write a biography of the man who has had such a tremendous influence in his life. Sawyer’s “Aldous Huxley: A Biography” was released earlier this month.

While many books have been published about the British author and philosopher, the majority has focused on Huxley’s novels. Of the 50 books he published, only 11 were novels, according to Sawyer. Few biographies focused on Huxley the philosopher, and no biographer had adequately explained his involvement with Eastern religion and philosophy or his use of psychedelic drugs.

Sawyer’s study of Huxley describes a writer who was a philosopher first and saw his novels as a way to express that philosophy and reach a popular audience, not the other way around. The seminary and art school professor said that he wrote the book because Huxley is “disappearing from our radar. I wanted to push him to the front because he’s so relevant still.”

“The issues plaguing us today – overpopulation, environmental degradation, the acceleration of the Westernization of other cultures, the globalization of the economy – are dangers Huxley talked about in the 1930s. When I read that, it’s like he wrote it two days ago and the ink is still drying,” Sawyer said in a phone interview last week. “In ‘Science, Liberty and Peace’ (published in 1946), he wrote about the need for solar and wind power to avoid ‘jockeying for Arab

oil.’ How contemporary is that?”

Sawyer said that the publisher is marketing his book as a textbook for college classes such as the ones he teaches in Portland and Bangor. He hopes the book will introduce students to the hopeful solutions Huxley offered and help counteract the extreme cynicism he sees in today’s young people.

“I like the specificity of his solutions,” said Sawyer. “We seem to live in extremely cynical times. I find that college-aged students have a deep cynicism about the future. I want to coach them toward hope and optimism, and Huxley really does that, outlining how we really can find solutions.”

The author and philosopher counterbalanced a similar cynicism in Sawyer, who studied Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics at the universities of Hawaii, Toronto and Iowa. Now a Buddhist, Sawyer has traveled to remote monasteries in the Himalayas to study with Tibetan monks living in exile and meditates regularly.

Huxley learned meditation techniques through the Vedanta Society, a traditional school of mysticism that advocates guidance by gurus, in the early 1940s in Southern California. While he meditated daily for the rest of his life, Huxley rejected “guruism.” He argued in “The Perennial Philosophy” that there exists a particular mystical truth which is “the Highest Common Factor underlying all the great religions and metaphysical systems of the world.”

In his book, Sawyer characterizes Huxley as a “mystical agnostic.” That aptly describes his own approach to religion, the biographer said last week. While neither man embraces the idea of a supreme being, both reject dogma and believe that mysticism’s rewards are enjoyed in the realm of everyday experience, not in an afterlife.

Huxley also experimented with mescaline and other hallucinogens as ways to enhance the mystical experience. As he lay dying of cancer, the writer minimized his intake of opiates and took LSD to make dying a more spiritual experience, according to Sawyer.

“I think there’s a bit of the New England transcendentalist in Huxley,” said Sawyer, comparing him to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. “Not only does he describe a spiritual side as essential in society, he also believed that good political, economic and agricultural systems were important for a just and egalitarian society. … He drew out extremely specific solutions to lot of problems we face today.”

Dana Sawyer will discuss and sign his book at 4 p.m. today at Bangor Theological Seminary, 300 Union St., Bangor. For information, call 942-6781.