The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

If, as he had earlier observed, the central technique for man to learn is “the art of obtaining freedom from the fundamental human disability of egoism,”

His insight into human foibles is as keen as ever, but now he pities rather than despises the characters who typify values he considers false and futile.

not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice, or the other squalor of respectability,

People like their egos and do not wish to mortify them, get a bigger kick out of bullying and self-adulation than out of humility and compassion, are determined not to see why they shouldn’t “do what they like” and “have a good time.” They get their good time; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis, tyranny and alcoholism, revolution, and in default of an adequate religious hypothesis the choice between some lunatic idolatry, such as nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair. Unutterable miseries! But throughout recorded history the great majority of men and women have preferred the risk—no, the positive certainty—of such disasters to the tiresome whole-time job of seeking first the kingdom of God. In the long run, we get exactly what we ask for.

the more there is of self, the less there is of God. Our pride, our anxiety, our lusts for power and pleasure are God-eclipsing things. So too is that greedy attachment to certain creatures which passes too often for unselfishness and should be called, not altruism, but alter-egoism.

In the words of the Imitation: “All men desire peace but few indeed desire those things which make for peace.”

We either worship ourselves as such, or we project some magnified image of the self in an ideal or goal which falls short of the highest ideal or goal, and proceed to worship that.

Actually, that which causes us to be human rather than simply another of the apes is our ability to speak. This has given us the power to create a social heredity so that we can accumulate the knowledge amassed in past times; and it has given us the power to analyze experience, which comes to us in a very chaotic way, and to make sense of it for our particular biological and social purposes.

We are like icebergs, floating in a sea of immediate experience but projecting into the air of language.

The whole of life is, after all, a process of walking on a tightrope. If you do not fall one way you fall the other, and each is equally bad.

We somehow have to keep going on this knife-edge (every action of life is a knife-edge), being aware of the dangers and doing our best to keep out of them.

We have to combine these things: to walk on this tightrope, to gather the data of perception, to be able to analyze it in terms of language, at the same time to be able to drop the language and to go on into the experience.

if you examine them all, you will find that they are all illustrations of one single principle, which is, that in some way we have to combine relaxation with activity. Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity.

It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the ultimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities.

The fruits of certain less good practices and less true beliefs do not take the form of positive wrong-doings or obviously recognizable disasters. They are of a subtler, more negative kind—not sins, but failures to achieve the highest development of which the individual or group is capable; not catastrophes, but the nonattainment of the fruits of the spirit, love, joy, and peace.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

“We live forwards,” as Kierkegaard said, “but we can only understand backwards.”

recurrence and renewal,

The politics of those who regard eternity as the ultimate reality are concerned with the present and with the ways and means of organizing the present world in such a way that it will impose the fewest possible obstacles in the way of individual liberation from time and ignorance; those, on the contrary, who regard time as the ultimate reality are concerned primarily with the future and regard the present world and its inhabitants as mere rubble, cannon-fodder are potential slave-labor to be exploited, terrorized, liquidated, or blown to smithereens, in order that persons who may never be born, in a future time about which nothing can be known with the smallest degree of certainty, may have the kind of a wonderful time which present-day revolutionaries and war-makers think they ought to have. If the lunacy were not criminal, one would be tempted to laugh.

Mind, we are told, is nothing but a food-gathering mechanism; controlled by unconscious forces, either aggressive or sexual; the product of social and economic pressures; a bundle of conditioned reflexes. All this is quite true so far as it goes; quite false if it goes no further.

Man, proud man, drest in a little brief authority— Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence—like an angry ape, Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As make the angels weep.

“All men desire peace, but few there are who desire the things that make for peace.”

Things are not what they seem; or, to be more accurate, they are not only what they seem, but very much else besides. To act upon this truth, as the man of science must constantly do, is to practice a kind of intellectual mortification.

If God’s kingdom is to come, man’s must go; the old Adam has to perish in order that the new man may be born.

The most we are justified in saying is that the egoism and alter-egoism, which ascetic practices are designed to root out, automatically perpetuate the state of nonenlightenment.

Technological progress does not abolish obstacles; it merely changes their nature.

The difference between a good politico-economical arrangement and a bad one is simply this: that the good arrangement reduces the number of dangerous temptations to which the individuals and groups concerned are exposed, while the bad arrangement multiplies such temptations.

Advantages in one field have to be paid for by disadvantages in another field. Destiny only sells; it never gives. All we can do is to drive the best possible bargain.

We do not spend our time comparing present happiness with past misery; rather we accept it as our right and become bitterly resentful if we are even temporarily deprived of it.

happiness, goodness, and creativeness are the products of the individual’s philosophy of life.

Of the basic philosophies of life which can be imposed upon an individual, or which he can choose to make his own, some are favorable to the maintenance of happiness, goodness, and creativeness, others are manifestly inadequate.

Significant in this context is the Buddha’s remark that he who says he is an arhat thereby proclaims that he is not an arhat. In other words, it is fatal to boast of achievement or to take satisfaction in an experience which, if it genuinely partakes of enlightenment, is a product of grace rather than of the personal effort. Progress in spirituality brings contrition as well as joy. The enlightenment is experienced as joy; but this bright bliss illuminates all that, within the self, remains unenlightened, dispelling our normal blind complacency in regard to faults and shortcomings and causing us to regret not merely what we are, but even the very fact of our separate individuality.

We know (or to be more accurate, something within us knows) that the ground of our individual knowing is identical with the Ground of all knowing and all being;

This is liberation, this is enlightenment, this is the beatific vision, in which all things are perceived as they are “in themselves” and not as they are in relation to a craving and abhorring ego.

Without an understanding of man’s deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and of his search for some bogus liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we cannot hope to make sense of the observed and recorded facts of history, of individual and social psychology.

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there is God in the midst of them.” In the midst of two or three hundred the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into the two or three thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point.

For, far from condemning the practice of downward self-transcendence through herd-intoxication, the leaders of church and state have actively encouraged this kind of debauchery, whenever it could be used for the furtherance of their own ends.

For men and women under the influence of herd-poison, “whatever I say three times is true”—and whatever I say three hundred times is divine revelation.

Pilgrimages and political rallies, corybantic revivals and patriotic parades—these things are ethically right so long as they are our pilgrimages, our rallies, our revivals, and our parades.

Being in a crowd is the best-known antidote to independent thought.

In a word, the downward road does not lead invariably to disaster. However, it leads there often enough to make the taking of it extremely inadvisable.

God’s nature is fully comprehensible only to God Himself.

The mind is its own place, and the Kingdom of Heaven is within. In other words, heaven is another and superior mode of consciousness.

Hallowing, or making holy, is the affirmation, in words and actions, that the thing hallowed partakes of the highest, most real good. That which alone ought to be hallowed (and we must pray for strength to hallow it unceasingly) is the name of God—the God who is, and is therefore ours, the father and in heaven.

Words are not the things they stand for, but devices by means of which we are enabled to think about things.

keeping the mind one-pointed and preparing it for contemplation.

The end of man’s existence is to use his opportunities in space-time in such a way that he may come to the knowledge of God’s kingdom of timeless reality—or, to put it the other way round, that he may be fit for reality to come to manifestation in and through Him.

For the contemplative saints who are “perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect,” samsara and nirvana are one, God’s kingdom comes on earth as it is in heaven. Nor is the change merely personal and subjective. The influence of these people has power to change the world in which they live.

What the individual can and must do is to make himself fit for contact with reality and the reception of that grace by whose aid he will be enabled to achieve his true end. That we may make ourselves fit for God, we must fulfill certain conditions, which are set forth in the prayer. We must hallow God’s name, do God’s will and forgive those who have trespassed against us. If we do this, we shall be delivered from the evil of selfhood, forgiven the sin of separateness and blessed with the bread of grace, without which our contemplation will be illusory and our attempts at amendment vain.

So far as we are concerned, “doing the will of God” is doing what is necessary to fit ourselves for the grace of enlightenment.