In 1950, shortly after launching the dianetic movement that would eventually become known as Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard paid a visit to the house of noted English author, Aldous Huxley, who at that time was living in Los Angeles. To many, it would appear that Huxley was being rather generous with his time by meeting with such an obvious crackpot and conman. However, Huxley was very interested in fringe science and odd religious or spiritual movements, and despite an apparent distaste for Hubbard as a human being (“rather immature… and in some ways rather pathetic”) Huxley was impressed by his work and his new book, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
In the early fifties, Huxley and his first wife, Maria, were in quite poor health, and to a great extent, their fascination with pseudosciences and bizarre cult-like spiritual movements came from a desire to cure their problems [...].
Huxley is well-known for his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, in which he has an hallucinogenic experience with mescaline. A year later, just after Maria’s death, he used LSD for the first time. This experience would become the basis for the “moksha” trip in his last novel, Island. What is not mentioned by most Huxleyan scholars, however, is that while he took LSD for the first time, he was undergoing dianetic auditing by Laura [Huxley's second wife]. He wrote in a letter to Dr. Osmond, who had provided him with the LSD, that Laura “has had a good deal of experience with eliciting recalls and working off abreactions by methods of dianetics.”
Shortly after the trip, he began the long and painful process of writing Island, a utopian “fantasy” that he had been planning for decades. It would be the counterpart to his classic dystopian work, Brave New World, presenting an array of ideas that he had explored during the forties and fifties, such as Eastern religion and philosophy, hypnosis, hallucinogens, and dianetics.
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