Fully Human Being: Aldous Huxley’s Island, Tantra, and Human Potential

In Island (1962), Aldous Huxley presents a utopian community in which the inhabitants aim to become "fully human beings" by realizing their "potentialities." I demonstrate how Huxley's notion of the "human potentialities" have been misrepresented, both by scholars and by the founders of the Esalen Institute. Huxley's focus on human potentialities arose from a shift in his thinking from the other-worldly mysticism of The Perennial Philosophy (1945) to the life-affirming traditions of Tantra, Zen and Mahayana Buddhism. In Island,the population attempt to realize their human potentialities and engage in an experiential spirituality that celebrates the body and nature as sacred through the use of the moksha-medicine and the practice of maithuna. I argue that whereas Tantric adepts practised maithuna as a means to acquire super normalpowers (siddhis), in Island the Palanese version of maithuna is quite different and is used to valorize samsara and the acquisition of human potentialities.