The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice, or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this:

That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.

For when we sacrifice ourselves to any cause or ideal that is lower than the highest, less than God Himself, we are merely sacrificing one part of our unregenerate being to another part which we and other people regard as more creditable. Self-love still persists, still prevents us from obeying perfectly the first of the two great commandments.

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

HOLINESS Whole, hale, holy—the three words derive from the same root. By etymology no less than in fact holiness is spiritual health, and health is wholeness, completeness, perfection. God’s holiness is the same as His unity; and a man is holy to the extent to which he has become single-minded, one-pointed, perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. Because each of us possesses only one body, we tend to believe that we are one being. But in reality our name is Legion. In our unregenerate condition we are divided beings, half-hearted and double-minded, creatures of many moods and multiple personalities. And not only are we divided against our unregenerate selves; we are also incomplete. As well as our multitudinous soul, we possess a spirit that is one with the universal spirit.

Unholiness arises when we give consent to any rebellion or self-assertion by any part of our being against that totality which it is possible for us to become through union with God. For example, there is the unholiness of indulged sensuality, of unchecked avarice, envy, and anger, of the wantonness of pride and worldly ambition. Even the negative sensuality of ill health may constitute unholiness, if the mind be permitted to dwell upon the sufferings of its body more than is absolutely necessary or unavoidable. And on the plane of the intellect there is the imbecile unholiness of distractions, and the busy, purposeful unholiness of curiosity about matters concerning which we are powerless to act in any constructive or remedial way.

Peace is the manifestation of unified being. Love is the mode of divine knowledge. And bliss, the concomitant of perfection, is the same as joy. Like peace, joy is not only a fruit of the spirit, but also a root. If we would know God, we must do everything to cultivate that lower equivalent of joy, which it is within our power to feel and to express.

“Sloth” is the ordinary translation of that acedia, which ranks among the seven deadly sins of our Western tradition. It is an inadequate translation, for acedia is more than sloth; it is also depression and self-pity; it is also that dull world-weariness which causes us, in Dante’s words, to be “sad in the sweet air that rejoiceth in the sun.” To grieve, to repine, to feel sorry for oneself, to despair—these are the manifestations of self-willing and of rebellion against the will of God. And that special and characteristic discouragement we experience on account of the slowness of our spiritual advance—what is it but a symptom of wounded vanity, a tribute paid to our high opinion of our own merits?

But, as many people have experienced and as all the teachers of the great religions have insisted should be the case, we can and ought to open ourselves up and become what in fact we have always been from the beginning, that is to say, omniscient, or anyhow much more widely knowing than we normally think we are. We should realize our identity with what James called the cosmic consciousness and what in the East is called the Atman-Brahman. The end of life in all great religious traditions is the realization that the finite manifests the Infinite in its totality. This is, of course, a complete paradox when it is stated in words; nevertheless, it is one of the facts of experience for many people—or for some people at least—and should be a fact of experience for all.

Now, let us consider a little more this problem of how we are related to this deeper self. The superficial self—the self which we call ourselves, which answers to our names and which goes about its business—has a terrible habit of imagining itself to be absolute in some sense. If we look at it from the metaphysical

point of view, I think we may say this is a mistaken placement of the Absolute. We know in an obscure and profound way that in the depths of our being—in what Eckhart calls “the ground of our being”—we are identical with the divine Ground. And we wish to realize this identity. But unfortunately, owing to the ignorance in which we live—partly a cultural product, partly a biological and voluntary product—we tend to look at ourselves, at this wretched little self, as being absolute. We either worship ourselves as such, or we p...

To return to the individual: he of course worships himself; or if he thinks he is altruistic, he is what may be called an alter-egoist—he worships some projection of himself. And in this absolutization of himself he is, I think, assisted by the fact that he is a creature with a language. Now, we can never overestimate the importance of language in the life of human beings. 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. This is the greatest gift which man has ever received or given himself, the gift of language.

But language has its limitations and its traps. To start with, every language has been developed for specifically biological purposes in order to help man to cope with life on the surface of this planet. And most languages are

remarkably poor, above all, in terms expressing the inner life of man, and also in terms which would describe the continuousness of experience.

We have this mania, so frequently stressed in all the Oriental texts, of thinking of ourselves and of every object in the world as being separate and self-subsistent, when, in fact, all are parts of a universal One. And unfortunately, the nature of language being what it is, we cannot get around this without making ourselves carefully aware of what we are doing and thinking when we use language. This is the only way of by-passing its intrinsic defects.

Added to the intrinsic defects, there are all kinds of traps which we lead ourselves into by taking language too seriously. We have been constantly warned against this.

If we take the letter too seriously, we actually prevent ourselves from having certain types of direct experience which St. Paul was describing in terms of the word “spirit,” so that what we have to do is to be profoundly aware of the language we are using—not to mistake the word for the thing. In the terms of Zen Buddhism, we have to be constantly aware that the finger which points at the moon is not the moon. In general, we think that the pointing finger—the word—is the thing we point at.

As I say, most education is predominantly verbal and suffers therefore from the defects which great religious teachers like St. Paul have pointed out: that the letter killeth, that this is a stultifying and dangerous thing.

we really have not paid any serious attention to the problem of training the mind-body, the instrument which has to do with the learning, which has to do with the living. We give children compulsory games, a little drill, and so on, but this really does not amount in any sense to a training of the mind-body. We pour this verbal stuff into them without in any way preparing the organism for life or for understanding its position in the world—who it is, where it stands, how it is related to the universe. This is one of the oddest things.

I think one of the reasons for the lack of attention to the training of the mind-body is that this particular kind of teaching does not fall into any academic pigeonhole. This is one of the great problems in education: Everything takes place in a pigeonhole.

I do not think I can go into any other examples of the methods of training the mind-body, but I think I can risk a generalization. Many such methods, of course, have been empirically devised for particular purposes. And 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.

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.

Now we come to the final problem, the problem of becoming aware of what James called the cosmic consciousness, of the Atman-Brahman, of the unifying principle. In the Chinese

conception the universe is perceived as the Yin and the Yang, the negative and the positive principles, which are equally valid in the world. You have the same conception in the Indian philosophy too: The goddess of creation is also the goddess of destruction; the negative is correlative to the positive; but the two are reconciled then in this fundamental principle, the Tao. And this, I think, is at the basis of all mystical religions. You see it very clearly in the writings of Eckhart just as you do in Oriental philosophy. And the practical problem arises: How do we get ourselves into a position where we can collaborate with grace? How can we open ourselves up to the grace of seeing God, to use Eckhart’s words, “seeing God with the same eye that God sees us”?

How do we do this? It is an immense problem, and, I think, innumerable ways have been developed to help people to achieve this final end of man. Some are sat...

If I am desperately preoccupied with myself, it means that I am ignoring the immense majority of all the events in the universe. Naturally, we cannot know all the events in the universe, but we must be aware that this totality of things exists, and that our partial view is totally warped and self-stultifying. We try to help ourselves in this way, but “he that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life . . . shall find it.” All these paradoxical sayings, which keep cropping up in every religion, refer to this same thing—this necessity of getting rid of the essentially partial, limited, and ego-centered view of the world.

But intellectually we must be aware that every moment is a “quiet watershed whence equally the seas of life and death are fed.” And this is a sort of reminder we have to go on making. It will not necessarily console us in moments of grief or crisis, but it is a preparation. It prepares the ground for what is the final end—this seeing of the world with the impartial eye of the divine intelligence.

We cannot, of course, press this thing. Nothing we can do will actually produce enlightenment. All we can do is to get out of our own light, use our will to will ourselves away. Eckhart has again another curious remark. He says, “God and God’s will are one, I and my will are two.” We have somehow to use our will to get rid of our will in order to collaborate with this totality of the universe, to accept events as they come in this impartial spirit, yet doing everything we can to promote the positive side of life.

the principles, at any rate, are simple; that we as we think of ourselves are a very small part even of the physiological and subconscious life immediately available to us; that we do not control our bodies and we do not even control our thoughts. After all, the popular language is very clear on that subject. We say, “A thought came to me; this flashed upon me.” We do not say, “I invented this thought.” We accept what comes to us. And we have to learn how to take what is given by something which is not ourselves in any sense that we think of ourselves.

Jesus denounces those who ask for “signs,” but Himself performs many miracles of healing and the like. The explanation of this apparent inconsistency can probably be found in the passage, in which He asks His critics which is easier, to tell the sick man to rise and walk, or to tell him that his sins are forgiven him. The implication seems to be that physical “signs” are legitimate, if the person who performs them is so completely united with eternal Reality that he is able, by the very quality of his being, to modify the inner being of those, for whose sake the “signs” are performed. But this enormously important qualification has been generally neglected, and the adherents of

the less true forms of the Christian religion attach enormous importance to such purely “psychic” phenomena as healing and the answer to petitionary prayer. By doing this they positively guarantee themselves against attaining that degree of union with timeless Reality which alone might render the performance of a “miracle” innocuous to the doer and permanently beneficial to the person on whom, or for whom, it is done.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. This “hedonistic paradox” may be generalized to cover our whole life in time. Temporal conditions will be accepted as satisfactory only by those whose first concern is not with time, but with eternal Reality and with that state of virtually timeless consciousness, in which alone the awareness of Reality is possible.

When we pass from the realm of the manifested and embodied aspects of reality to that of reality itself, we shall find that there must be an intensification of detachment, a widening and deepening of mortification. The symbol of death and rebirth recurs incessantly in the sayings and writings of the masters of the spiritual life. 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. In other words, ascetical self-mortification, at once physical, emotional, ethical, and intellectual, is one of the indispensable conditions of enlightenment, of the realization of divine immanence and transcendence.

When we identify ourselves with an idea or a cause, we are in fact worshiping something homemade, something partial and parochial, something which, however noble, is all too human. “Patriotism,” as a great patriot concluded, on the eve of her execution by her country’s enemies, “patriotism is not enough.” Neither is Socialism, nor Communism, nor Capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, or any particular religious organization or church. All these are indispensable, but none of them is enough. Civilization demands from the individual self-identification with the highest of human causes. But if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upward self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing evils.

“Our Father which art in heaven.” God is ours in the sense that He is the universal source and principle, the being of all beings, the life of all that lives, the spirit of every soul. He is present in all creatures; but all creatures are not equally aware of His presence. The degree of this awareness varies with the quality of that which is aware, for knowledge is always a function of being. God’s nature is fully comprehensible only to God Himself. Among creatures, knowledge of God’s nature expands and becomes more adequate in proportion as the knower becomes more God-like. As St. Bernard puts it, “God who, in His simple substance is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational creatures, however, He can be comprehended by knowledge; but only by the good is He also comprehended by love” and, we might add, by contemplation, which is the highest expression of man’s love of God.

The final end of man’s existence is this: to make himself fit to realize God’s presence in himself and in other beings. The value of all that he thinks and does is to be measured in terms of his capacity for God. Thoughts and actions are good, when they make us, morally and spiritually, more capable of realizing the God who is ours, immanently in every soul and transcendently as that universal principle in which we live and move and have our being. They are bad when they tend to reinforce the barriers which stand between God and our souls, or the souls of other beings.

God as He is in Himself cannot be known except by those who are “perfect as their father in heaven is perfect.” Consequently, the intrinsic nature of God’s love for the world must remain, for the overwhelming majority of human beings, a mystery.

“Our Father which art in heaven.” Throughout the prayer, heaven is contrasted with earth, as something different from it in kind. The terms have, of course, no spatial significance. The mind is its own place, and the Kingdom of Heaven is within.

In other words, heaven is another and superior mode of consciousness.

“Hallowed be Thy name.” Applied to human being, the word “holiness” signifies the voluntary service of, and self-abandonment to, the highest, most real good. Hallowing, or making holy, is the affirmation, in words and actions, that the thing hallowed partakes of the highest, most real good.

“The name of God” is a phrase which carries two principal meanings. Insofar as the Jews, like many other peoples of antiquity, regarded the name of a thing as identical with its inner

principle or essence, the phrase means simply “God.” “Hallowed be Thy name” is equivalent to “hallowed be Thou.” The clause asserts that God is the highest, most real good, and that it is to the service of this good alone that we should dedicate our lives.

For us, the name of something is essentially different from that which is named. Words are not the things they stand for, but devices by means of which we are enabled to think about things. To one who considers the matter from the modern standpoint “the name of God” is not the equivalent of “God.” Rather, it stands for those verbal concepts, in terms of which we think about God. These concepts are to be hallowed, not of course in and for themselves (for that would be mere magic), but inasmuch as they contribute to the effective and continuous hallowing of God in our lives.

Conversely, the better we succeed, through liberation, forgiveness, and grace, in doing God’s will and realizing His kingdom, the more adequately shall we be enabled to hallow God’s name and God Himself.

The end of human life cannot be achieved by the efforts of the unaided individual. 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.

Earth is incommensurable with heaven, time with eternity, the ego with the spirit. The kingdom of God can come only to the extent to which the kingdom of the natural man has been made to go. If we would gain the life of union, we must lose the life of passion, idle curiosity, and distractions, which is the ordinary life of human selves. “Fight self,” says St. Catherine of Siena, “and you need fear no other foe.”

In the ascending spiral of being, the contemplative saint stands at a point exactly corresponding, on his higher level, to the position of a flower or a bird. Both inhabit eternity; but whereas the flower’s or the bird’s eternity is the everlasting present of mindlessness, of natural processes working themselves out with little or no accompanying consciousness, the saint’s eternity is experienced in union with that pure consciousness, which is the ultimate reality. Between these two worlds lies the human universe of foresight and retrospect, of fear and craving and memory and conditioning, of hopes and plans and daydreams and remorses. It is a rich world, full of beauty and goodness as well as of much evil and ugliness—but a world which is not the world of reality; for it is our world, man-made, the product of the thoughts and actions of beings who have forgotten their true end and have turned to things which are not their highest good.

For example, Jesus was constantly inveighing against the Scribes and Pharisees. But the Scribes and Pharisees were models of austere respectability and good citizenship. The only trouble with them was that their virtues were only the virtues of unregenerate men—and such righteousness is as “filthy rags” in the sight of God; for even the virtues of the unregenerate are God-eclipsing and prevent those who have them from advancing toward that knowledge of ultimate Reality, which is the end and purpose of life. That which the Scribes and Pharisees reap is the more or less total inability to know the God they fondly imagine they are serving. God does not punish them, any more than he punishes the man who inadvertently steps over the edge of a cliff. The nature of the world is such that, if anyone fails to conform to its laws, whether of matter or mind or spirit, he will have to take the consequences, which may be immediate and spectacular, as in the case of the man who steps over the edge of the cliff, or remote, subtle and very far from obvious, as in the case of the virtuous man who is virtuous only in the manner of the Scribes and Pharisees.

By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood—and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration. We become different from what we were and, being different, cease to be at the mercy of the destiny which, as “natural,” unregenerate

beings, we had forged for ourselves by our evil thoughts and actions.