You Are Not the Target

Laura Archera Huxley tells us that much of the personal unhappiness and victimization you experience is wrongly thought to be caused by a hostile person, system, or institution that is deliberately directing animosity at you specifically.

Last night I listened to Aldous Huxley "Visionary Experience" lecture which I have on CD. It's charming, but boring. His book "Brave New World" is good and appropriate for today's tech-tyrannical world.

Here's a book that is among Books I Always Have With Me, the ones that I replace as soon as possible if I loan them out permanently or lose them somehow: including Proust, Kafka, Derrida, Freud, Orwell, Mallarme, Maurice Blanchot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Allen Ginsberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, etc.

Aldous Huxley's wife, Laura Archera Huxley "You Are Not the Target." A book that I have had in my collection since my teens. It's probably one of the first new age type self-help books, with "recipes" for higher consciousness and enhanced awareness.

She takes concepts from psychology and mysticism and turns them into simple exercises and procedures to make them real in your life, on your own, just you and the instructions.

It's sort of an anti-group therapy book, empowering the individual with a book that acts like a seminar run by some self-help guru that you'd pay $15,000 to attend for a 3 day weekend behavioral training program.

Attending your own funeral, repeating emotionally charged words to trigger mental scenes, TLA (Talking Listening Acting), dismantling self-rejection, hydrotherapist tips on going to bed wet from a shower, "going with it" for things beyond our control, guided visualizations of many different imagined realms and events, with self-surveillance of morphing psychological states.

An Amazon customer review states:

It contains "recipes for living" by Laura Huxley, a force in humanistic psychology (and the widow of Aldous Huxley). The recipes work. My two favorites are "Dance Naked to Music" which taught me that wisdom is distributed throughout the body and "Questions and How to Ask Them" which convinced me that logic often doesn't lead to wisdom. These were radical ideas in 1963. She was an astonishingly wonderful woman who personally answered my letter, thanking her for writing the book.

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