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Aldous Huxley was a leader of the cultural degeneration which came to fruition with the 68ers, who happily jumped into their hippie buses and danced in the grape vines. His main contribution to this 68er phenomenon was the creation of the Esalen Institute, a place of 'spiritual rebirth' through the power of LSD and orgasmic enlightenment, otherwise known as Tantra; "a rigorous spiritual discipline and a vast field of study, with the sexual aspect being an important part of it. Mystical experiences and altered states of consciousness result from many of the processes, especially the ones with sexual energy at their core."¹

At the end of his life Huxley wrote his last novel, where he brought together the orgasmic Tantra with Gestalt therapy or group togetherness; a sad, but very explicit characteristic of the 68ers. Jeffrey J. Kripal, an Esalen boy, wrote, in regards to Huxley's final contribution to the counter culture center:

"Even more relevant to the history of Esalen—indeed, prophetic of that future story—was Huxley's very last novel, Island, which appeared in March of 1962, just one month after he had introduced a still unknown Timothy Leary to 'the ultimate yoga' of Tantra, and just two months after he met Michael Murphy and Richard Price in Big Sur. The novel's pragmatic celebration of Tantric eroticism and its harsh criticism of ascetic forms of spirituality (which the novel links to sexual repression, a guilt-ridden homosexuality, and aggressive militarism) marks a significant shift in Huxley's spiritual worldview, at least as he was expressing it in print. After all, if in 1942 he could write a carefully diplomatic foreword to a book about a Hindu saint who considered all women to be aspects of the Mother Goddess and so would have sex with none of them (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), now he was suggesting openly in 1962 that "to think of Woman as essentially Holy" was an expression of a conflicted male homosexuality anxious to avoid any and all heterosexual contact. It is much better, the novel now suggests, to think of the erotic union of man and woman as holy, that is, to see the sacred in the sexual and the sexual in the sacred. Hence 'the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.' Late in life Huxley appears to have been moving away from his earlier ascetic Vedanta, so prominently featured in The Perennial Philosophy, toward a new psychologically inflected Tantra.

"Laura Huxley considers Island to be her husband's final legacy, the place where he put everything he had learned. When I asked her about the novel's obvious focus on Tantra, she was quick to point out that Aldous was not particularly friendly to traditional religion, and that he considered Tantra to be a technique, not a religion. Everything written in Island, she insisted, had been tried somewhere. The novel thus laid down a real and practical path to follow, not just a dream or another impossible religious claim. The novel was Aldous's blueprint for a good society, even, Laura pointed out, if that "island" is one's own home or private inner world. It can be done. That is the point.

"The story itself involves a jaded journalist, Will Farnaby, who lands by accident on a forbidden island called Pala. Pala culture had been formed a few generations earlier by two men—a pious Indian adept in Tantric forms of Buddhism and Hinduism and by a scientifically enlightened Scottish doctor. The culture thus embodied both a literal friendship between and a consequent synthesis of Tantric Asia, with its lingams, deities, and yogas, and Western rationalism, with its humanism, psychology and science."²

The Esalen Institute became not only the sexual inspiration for the 68ers, but was heavily involved with the LSD experiments of psychologist, who trancended from Esalen baths. Bands, like the Greatful Dead, who disributed LSD to their audiences, where also products of Esalen.