![]() ![]() But they were forced to abandon the settlement after it burned down due to a fire at their makeshift church. “Instead of dropping out of society, they created their own version of it”, says Nicholas Schou, author of a book on the Brotherhood. At Modjeska Canyon in Orange County, the group grew their own crops, wove their own clothes, built their own houses, and even learnt how to deliver babies. It was agreed that the Brotherhood would thrive only if they could survive in isolation, and so they began to experiment in communal self-sufficiency. The novel is a celebration of living in the moment, and, unlike in Brave New World, drugs are a source of enlightenment and compassion rather than pacification. The inhabitants of Pala are enriched by their experiences with psychedelic mushrooms, and they create a society that reflects Huxley’s ideals: pacifist, cerebral, sexually experimental, spiritual yet anti-clerical. It takes place on a fictional island called Pala, named after a town near Mount Palomar in southern California, where Huxley’s friend Edwin Hubble watched the skies and where members of the Brotherhood took acid. Island is a utopian counterpoint to Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World. As the Tibetan Book of the Dead had prepared monks for mortality and reincarnation, so The Psychedelic Experience would teach them how to handle the experience of ‘ego death’ and rebirth. The book was dedicated to Huxley and cites his 1954 essay The Doors of Perception, which explored the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline, a psychedelic substance found in plants indigenous to Mexico. The community was located on the coast of south-west Mexico, and it was here that they began writing The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Island had inspired Leary and Alpert to launch the Zihuatanejo Project, a psychedelic training centre under the umbrella of their International Federation for Internal Freedom. ![]()
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