My analysis of Aldous Huxley's strongest idea and greatest value:

Huxley strongly rejected the idea that the absolute, reliable, ultimate truth about the nature of reality must be beyond or apart from actual experience and perception. Like Nietzsche, he distrusted the 'backworldsmen': those who regard physicality, one's bodily organism, or phenomena in the here-and-now, as corrupt, distorted versions of the 'real truth'. He didn't trust the idea of an ethereal, disembodied, pure spirit or dimension of real forms somewhere else, and I think this was his strongest contribution to humanity.

Huxley's loss of eyesight for several years in his late teens, and his mother's death just prior, were two major causes to consider in his explorations in the solitary world of perception and thought. It's highly likely that he developed a very deep psychological attachment to his inner worlds and his powerful imagination, which could explain why he later valued hallucinogenic drugs so greatly. Many would say that Huxley's advocacy of drug use for bringing about insights about perception, at a time when it was beyond the pale, was his greatest contribution, but I differ. In a way, it contradicts his other idea about reality, because it tries to set up another kind of purer, blissful world only accessed through altered states of consciousness — rather than accepting that reality is wherever it is, whatever it is. None of this 'here it is', 'there it isn't'.

I tie his attachment to these altered states to his attachment to women, because it's pretty obvious that he was deeply entranced by women. In the same way that he enjoyed the mystical 'spiritual' experiences of trance states, he was probably also captivated by the psychological interplay between the sexes and the promise of finding a soulmate in a woman through such an interplay. Possibly he believed that the deepest psychological satisfaction open to human beings was the love of a soulmate, which is very common to people who suffer from ego-consciousness.

But overall, I was glad to have encountered Huxley's Island in my early twenties, because it was inspiring to find, finally, someone who valued the individual over the herd, who didn't want the individual to succumb to being branded a commercial product or clone-like entity, and who obviously had some degree of love for the philosophical pursuit of truth through thought and self-awareness.