BRITISH MYSTICAL EXPATRIATES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It was through novelist Aldous Huxley that Alan Watts became aware of a group he went on to call the "British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California."  It included Huxley, Gerald Heard, Felix Greene, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were associated at various times with Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society.  Gerald Heard's ashram at Trabuco Canyon (Trabuco College) in the Santa Ana mountains below Los Angeles they were also interested in.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was one of the 20th Century's foremost novelists whose works included most notably Crome [sic] Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1928), and Point Counter Point (1928).  His Brave New World (1932) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936) became classics.  His essay "The Perennial Philosophy" (1946) evidenced his interest in mysticism.  In 1947 he moved to Southern California where he lived most of the rest of his life.  It was there that, through Gerald Heard, he first met Swami Prabhavananda.  Prabhavananda initiated him into the Ramakrishna Mission in Hollywood, home of the Vedanta Society of Southern California.  Among Huxley’s later works were The Devils of Loudon (1952), and The Doors of Perception (1954) written following his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and Island (1962).

Gerald Heard (1889-1971) was an historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher.  He wrote many articles, and over 35 books.  He was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans including Clare Boothe Luce, and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.  His work was a forerunner of, and an influence on, the consciousness-development movement that spread in the Western world in the 1960s.  In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria, and their son Matthew Huxley.  He had been invited to lecture at Duke University.  However, he subsequently turned down the offer at Duke, settling instead in California.  In 1942 he founded Trabuco College as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued.  

But the Trabuco College project was short lived and in 1949 Heard donated the campus to Swami Prabhavananda and his Vedanta Society.  Actually, Heard was the first among a group of literati friends to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta.  Like Huxley, Heard became an initiate.  As with Huxley, the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can "effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness,"as he put it.  He himself maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years.  In the 1950s he tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to "enlarge Man's mind."  It allowed a person to see beyond his ego, he said.  Heard had a radio program on the BBC when he was a young man which may have inspired Alan Watts, twenty years later, to do the same on KPFA in San Francisco.

Felix Greene (1909—1985) was a British-American journalist and a cousin of both the well-known British author Graham Greene, and novelist/playwright Christopher Isherwood.  At one point he had an executive job with the Friends Service Committee (Quakers) in Philadelphia.  Later, however, he joined Gerald Heard in California where he was hands-on in the preparation of Heard's Trabuco College.  He is best known for chronicling several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s.  He first visited China for the BBC in 1957.  He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, and Inside North Viet Nam.  But these films give a rosy and one-sided view of the communist society.  It is best to view him as a “Fellow Traveler” so-called, a person sympathetic to a particular philosophy but not a card-carrying member of a representative institution.  He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960's.  He lived in the San Francisco area for twenty years.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was an English-born novelist and playwright who settled in the U.S. in 1939.  His best-known novels are Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), set in the decaying Germany of the 1930's.  These were later adapted into plays and films (I Am a Camera, and Cabaret).  He collaborated with poet W. H. Auden on three plays, the best-known being The Ascent of F-6 (1936).  Greatly influenced by Aldous Huxley, Isherwood turned to Eastern religions.  

Much of Isherwood's subsequent writing was devoted to popularizing aspects of Vedanta.  He wrote a biography of Ramakrishna entitled Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1959) and with Swami Prabhavananda translated the Bhagavad-Gita and other Hindu scriptures.  In 1969 he published Essentials of Vedanta, and in 1979, My Guru and His Disciple. Vedanta and the West was the official publication of the Vedanta Society of which Isherwood was managing editor from 1943 until 1945.  Together with Huxley and Heard, he was on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962. Many of the essays in this publication are found in the book Vedanta for the Western World (1960) edited by Isherwood.

Alan Watts did not really consider himself one of the “British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California” despite similarities he had with them.  To start with, he was younger than the others, which is to say, in 1955, when his career as a freelance writer and speaker was taking root, he was a mere 40 years old.  Huxley was 61, Heard 66, Greene 46, and Isherwood 51.  On the other hand, he, like the others, was a transplant from England, setting up shop, like Greene, in the San Francisco area, and he had the same interests as the others.  He certainly knew the rest of them, some of them, like Huxley, quite well.  He was not, however, connected with the Vedanta Society, even though on many occasions he had discussions with Swami Prabhavananda. There were ideas in Vedanta that he quite liked, though.