''Who Are We?'' is a 1955 recording of Aldous Huxley giving a lecture at the

Vedanta Society of Southern California ''Vedanta'' (; sa, वेदान्त, ), also ''Uttara Mīmāṃsā'', is one of the six (''āstika'') schools of Hindu philosophy. Literally meaning "end of the Vedas", Vedanta reflects ideas that emerged from, or were aligned with, t ...

's Hollywood temple. The lecture was originally recorded on a

wire recorder Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on a thin steel wire. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Valde ...

and digitally transferred to CD. Huxley was a student of Swami Prabhavananda, who founded the Society. Along with

Christopher Isherwood Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical ...

and other notable disciples of the Swami, Huxley would occasionally give lectures at the society's temples in Hollywood and Santa Barbara. In the lecture, Huxley goes into some depth about core issues about human existence, asking the primal question: what is our true nature. Included in the CD is a recording of a question and answer session between Huxley and the audience held after the lecture. The lecture was given just a year after the publication of Huxley's book, '' The Doors of Perception'', and he discusses the significance of the drug experience. In 1955, the same year as the lecture recording, an article with the same title based on the lecture was published in ''Vedanta and the West'', Aldous Huxley - Huxley's bio the bi-monthly magazine produced by the

. The recording was licensed by mondayMEDIA from

Vedanta Press Vedanta Press is the publishing wing of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, founded in 1930 by Swami Prabhavananda. It publishes a number of important books in Indian philosophy and the Vedanta tradition, both original works and translati ...

and released on the GemsTone label.

References

{{Authority control 2008 albums Spoken word albums by English artists Aldous Huxley albums