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Novelist, essayist, spiritual seeker, intellectual, humanist, and advocate for careful experimentation with psychedelic drugs.

Aldous Huxley loved California.

He enjoyed the open-mindedness, interest in Eastern religions, and cultural curiosity he encountered in America, along with the companionship of colleagues like Alan Watts, Christopher Wood, and Esalen founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Alan Watts and Felix Greene called Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Christopher Isherwood – all passionately interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Swami Prabhavananda – “the British mystical expatriates of southern California.”

On March 20, 1962 Huxley gave a lecture, “The Ultimate Revolution,” at the University of California at Berkeley. He warned his listeners about totalitarianism and how future oligarchs will ensure that people enjoy their servitude. Maybe we should add “prophet” to his list of accomplishments.

Huxley, “The Ultimate Revolution,” full lecture: