The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

The making oneself fit to receive grace is effective repentance and atonement; and the bestowal of grace is the divine forgiveness of sins.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” The nature of the evil from which we pray to be delivered is defined by inference in the succeeding phrase. Evil consists in forgetting that kingdom, power, and glory are God’s and acting upon the insane and criminal belief that they are ours. So long as we remain average, sensual, unregenerate individuals, we shall constantly be tempted to think God-excluding thoughts and perform God-eclipsing actions. Nor do such temptations cease as soon as the path of enlightenment is entered. All that happens is that, with every advance achieved, the temptations become more subtle, less gross and obvious, more profoundly dangerous.

The final phrases of the prayer re-affirm its central, dominant theme, which is that God is everything and that man, as man, is nothing. Indeed, man, as man, is less than nothing; for he is a nothing capable of evil, that is to say capable of claiming as his own the things that are God’s and, by that act, cutting himself off from God. But though man, as man, is nothing and can make himself less than nothing by becoming evil, man as the knower and lover of God, man as the possessor of a latent, inalienable spark of godhead, is potentially everything.

It may be true that the Lord’s Prayer is generally misunderstood, or not understood at all. Nevertheless it is a good thing that it should remain the most familiar formulary used by a religion which, particularly in the more “liberal” of its contemporary manifestations, has wandered so far from the theocentrism of its founder, into an entirely heretical anthropocentrism or, as we now prefer to call it, “humanism.” It remains with us, a brief and enigmatic document of the most uncompromising spirituality.

It is not an uncommon thing to meet with people who spend hours of each day doing spiritual exercises and who, in the intervals, display as much spite, prejudice, jealousy, greed, and silliness as the most “unspiritual” of their neighbors. The reason for this is that such people make no effort to adapt to the exigencies of ordinary life those practices which they make use of during their times of formal meditation. This is, of course, not at all surprising. It is much easier to catch a glimpse of reality under the perfect conditions of formal meditation than to “practice the presence of God” in the midst of the boredoms, annoyances, and constant temptations of family and professional life.

What the English mystic, Benet Fitch, calls “active annihilation” or the sinking of the self in God at every moment of the day, is much harder to achieve than “passive annihilation” in mental prayer.

All teachers of the art of mental prayer concur in advising their pupils never to struggle against the distractions which arise in the mind during recollection. The reason for this is simple. “The more a man operates, the more he is and exists. And the more he is and exists, the less God is and exists within him.” Every enhancement of the separate personal self produces a corresponding diminution of the consciousness of divine reality.

“A man,” wrote Meister Eckhart, “has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many other things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox’s or a bear’s, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.” The dispassionate and scientific examination of distractions is one of the best ways of knowing the “thirty or forty skins” which constitute our personality, and discovering, beneath them, the Self, the immanent Godhead, the Kingdom of Heaven within us.

Grace is that which is given when, and to the extent to which, a human being gives up his own self-will and abandons himself, moment by moment, to the will of God. By grace our emptiness is fulfilled, our weakness reinforced, our depravity transformed.

Knowledge is always in terms of concepts and can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding, and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other symbols. Such communicable knowledge is useful as a reminder that there have been specific understandings in the past, and that understanding is at all times possible. But we must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudoknowledge; we sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalization, and over-abstraction; and we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudoknowledge are the same as understanding.

Consider a few obvious examples. The atrocities of organized religion (and organized religion, let us never forget, has done about as much harm as it has done good) are all due, in the last analysis, to “mistaking the pointing finger for the moon”—in other words to mistaking the verbalized notion for the given mystery to which it refers or, more often, only seems to refer. This, as I have said, is one of the original sins of the intellect, and it is a sin in which, with a rationalistic bumptiousness as grotesque as it is distasteful, theologians have systematically wallowed. From indulgence in this kind of delinquency there has arisen, in most of the great religious traditions of the world, a fantastic over-valuation

of words. Over-valuation of words leads all too frequently to the fabrication and idolatrous worship of dogmas, to the insistence on uniformity of belief, the demand for assent by all and sundry to a set of propositions which, though meaningless, are to be regarded as sacred. Those who do not consent to this idolatrous worship of words are to be “converted” and, if that should prove impossible, either persecuted or, if the dogmatizers lack political power, ostracized and denounced. Immediate experience of reality unites men. Conceptualized beliefs, including even the belief in a God of l...

Once more we are confronted by the great paradox of human life. It is our conditioning which develops our consciousness; but in order to make full use of this developed consciousness, we must start by getting rid of the conditioning which developed it. By adding conceptual knowledge to conceptual knowledge, we make conscious understanding possible; but this potential understanding can be actualized only when we have subtracted all that we have added.

is because we have memories that we are convinced of our self-identity as persons and as members of a given society. The child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

Emotionally charged memories cement the ties of family life (or sometimes make family life impossible!) and serve, when conceptualized and taught as a cultural tradition, to hold communities together. On the level of understanding, on the level of charity, and on the level, to some extent, of artistic expression, an individual has it in his power to transcend his social tradition, to overstep the bounds of the culture in which he has been brought up. On the level of knowledge, manners, and custom, he can never get very far away from the persona created for him by his family and his society. The culture within which he lives is a prison—

But though it is our duty to “honor our father and our mother,” it is also our duty “to hate our father and our mother, our brethren and our sisters, yea and our own life”—that socially conditioned life we take for granted. Though it is necessary for us to add to our cultural stock day by day, it is also necessary to subtract and subtract.

Know yourself in relation to your overt intentions and your hidden motives, in relation to your thinking, your physical functioning, and to those greater not-selves, who see to it that, despite all the ego’s attempts at sabotage, the thinking shall be tolerably relevant and the functioning not too abnormal. Be totally aware of what you do and think and of persons, with whom you are in relationship, the events which prompt you at every moment of your existence. Be aware impartially, realistically, without judging, without reacting in terms of remembered words to your present cognitive reactions. If you do this, the memory will be emptied, knowledge and pseudoknowledge will be relegated to their proper place, and you will have understanding—

People under delusion are stubborn in holding to their own way of interpreting samadhi, which they define as “sitting quietly and continuously without letting any idea arise in the mind.” Such an interpretation would class us with inanimate beings. It is not thinking which blocks the Path; it is attachment to any particular thought or opinion. If we free our minds from attachment on the one hand and from the practice of repressing ideas on the other, the Path will be clear and open before us. Otherwise we shall be in bondage.

Animal grace precedes self-consciousness and is something which man shares with all other living beings. Spiritual grace lies beyond self-consciousness, and only rational beings are capable of cooperating with it. Self-consciousness is the indispensable means to enlightenment; at the same time it is the greatest obstacle in the way, not only of the spiritual grace which brings enlightenment, but also of the animal grace, without which our bodies cannot function efficiently or even retain their life. The Order of Things is such that no one has ever got anything for nothing. All progress has to be paid for. Precisely because

he has advanced beyond the animal level to the point where, through self-consciousness, he can achieve enlightenment, man is also capable, through that same self-consciousness, of achieving physical degeneration and spiritual perdition.

Habits easily become a part of us. We take them for granted, as we take for granted our hands and feet, the sun, falling downstairs instead of up, colors, and sounds. To break a physical habit may be as painful as an amputation; to question

the usefulness of an old-established habit of thought is felt to be an outrage, an indecency, a horrible sacrilege.

Spirituality is the art of achieving union with God, and consists of two branches—asceticism and mysticism, the mortification of the self and that contemplation by means of which the soul makes contact with ultimate Reality. Mortification without contemplation, and contemplation without mortification are both useless, and may even be positively harmful. That is why all genuine mystical literature is also ascetical literature, while all good ascetical literature (such as “The Imitation of Christ”) treats also, explicitly or by implication, of mystical prayer.

Dionysius, in his Mystical Theology and in his other books, had constantly insisted upon the fact that in order to know God, to become directly acquainted with God rather than knowing about God, one must go beyond symbols and concepts. These are actual obstacles, according to him, to the immediate experience of the Divine. And empirically, this is found to be true by all the spiritual masters, both of the West and of the Oriental world. The religion of direct experience of the Divine is usually regarded as the privilege of a very few people. I personally don’t think this is necessarily true at all. I think that practically everybody is capable of this immediate experience, provided he sets about it in the right way and is prepared to do what is necessary about it. But, in fact, this has been taken for granted, that the mystics represent a very small minority among a huge majority who must be content with the religion of creeds and symbols and sacred books and liturgies and organizations and, of course, with beliefs. This is faith in the form of belief.

There has been published, in recent years, one of these great best sellers which is called The Power of Belief; and this is a very good title because belief is a very great source of power. It has power over the believer himself and permits the believing person to exercise power over others. It does, in a sense, move mountains. But this belief, like any other source of power, is in itself ethically neutral; it can be used just as well for evil as for good. We have in our own times this very fine spectacle of Hitler very nearly conquering the entire world through the power of belief in something which was not only manifestly untrue but also profoundly evil. We see then that this tremendous fact of belief, which is so constantly cultivated within the symbol-manipulating religions, is essentially ambivalent: it can be both good and bad. And the consequence is that religion as a system of beliefs has always, in point of history, been an ambivalent force which has given birth simultaneously to the Sister of Charity and to what the medieval poets called the Proud Prelate, the ecclesiastical tyrant.

In the earliest period of Christianity, Christ’s death was regarded either as a covenant-sacrifice, comparable to the sacrifice of the paschal lamb in the Jewish religion (there is some gospel authority for this), or was regarded as a ransom, comparable to a price paid by a slave for his freedom or the price paid by a war prisoner to be released. Both these ideas are hinted at in the gospels. Later on, there came the notion that Christ’s death was the bloody expiation for original sin. This was based on a very ancient idea that any wrong-doing required expiation by suffering on the part of the sinner himself, or on the part of a substitute for the sinner. For example, in the Old Testament we read that David sinned in making a census of his people, and was punished by a plague which killed seventy thousand of his subjects, but did not kill David.

In patristic times we find a profound difference between the Greek theologians and the Latin theologians. The Greek theologians were not primarily concerned with the death of Christ; they were concerned with the life. The death was thought to be a mere incident in the life. Their view of the atonement was that it existed, not to save man from guilt, but to save him from the corruption into which he had fallen after the fall of Adam and Eve. And the consequence was that the life was therefore more important than the death. Irenaeus says that Christ came and lived the life of man in order that man might live a life comparable to Christ’s, and that this was the saving quality of the atonement. Among the Latin fathers the stress was entirely different. There the idea was that man was being redeemed, not from corruption primarily, but from guilt. He was redeemed from the punishment which had to be inflicted upon him for the sin of Adam. And whereas the Greek theologians regarded God as, primarily, absolute Reality, absolute Spirit, the Latin theologians regarded God with the mind

of the Roman warrior, as a governor and lawgiver, and consequently their theology tends to be in legalistic terms.

Now the doctrine is developed slowly. We get in St. Augustine a continual stress upon the guilt of original sin and the fact that the guilt is fully inherited by all members of the human race, so that an unbaptized child must necessarily go directly to hell. He has a very fine passage where he says that the floor of hell is paved with infants less than a span long. This view went on and was developed over the centuries. And then there was a long period of discussion about the question of the ransom: to whom was the ransom of Christ’s death being paid? There were many theologians who insisted that the ransom was being paid to Satan, that God had handed the world over to Satan with a wish to take it back again, and therefore had to pay this enormous price to Satan for the privilege of taking it back—taking man back from the grip of Sata...

was an infinite satisfaction; consequently, that the only possible satisfaction was therefore the death of the God-man, of Christ. It was the latter view which prevailed in the more or less official doctrine which was formulated by St. Anselm in the twelfth century—that the reparation was paid for the satisfaction of God’s honor. And we may remark, incidentally, that Anselm spoke about the “over-plus” of the satisfaction. This infinite Person being killed constituted a kind of fund of merit which could be used for the absolution of sins, and it was on the basis of this doctrine that the medieval church enlarged...

Then we come to the Reformation, and we find that Calvin felt that retributive justice was an essential part of the character of God, and that Christ was actually bearing punishment which was due to man—that every sin had to be punished, and that Christ (and these were the words he used) “bore the weight of the Divine anger, was smitten and afflicted, and experienced all the signs of an angry and avenging God.” These views were modified by the Arminians and Socinians and Hugo Grotius in the six...

Very briefly, let us discuss what is the mystical experience. I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of pure consciousness—of unstructured, transpersonal consciousness, lying, so to speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of every day. It is a non-egotistic consciousness, a kind of formless and timeless consciousness, which seems to underlie the consciousness of the separate ego in time.

As for the theology of the experience—when it is felt necessary to make a theology of it—this is profoundly simple, and is summed up in the three words which are at the base of virtually all Indian religion and philosophy: “Tat tvam asi” (“thou art That”), in the sense that the deepest part of the soul is identical with the divine nature—that the Atman, the deeper Self, is the same as Brahman, the universal principle. Or in Eckhart’s words, that the Ground of the soul is the same as the Ground of the Godhead. And this idea of course has been expressed in many forms, particularly the idea of the Inner Light, the Spark of the Soul.

Now, very briefly, I must just touch on the means for reaching this state. Here, again, it has been constantly stressed that the means do not consist in mental activity and discursive reasoning. They consist in what Roger Fry, speaking about art, used to call “alert passivity,” or in what a modern American mystic, Frank C. Laubach, has called “determined sensitiveness.” This is a very remarkable phrase. You don’t do anything, but you are determined to be sensitive to letting something be done within you. And one has this expressed by some of the great masters of the spiritual life in the West.

And, in a certain sense, one can say that what we are doing all the time is to get into our own light. We eclipse our deeper Self by our superficial selves, and so don’t permit this life-force, this light (whatever you like to call it), which is—as we discover as we let go—an empirical fact within us, to come through. In effect the whole of the technique of proficiency in every field, including this highest form of spiritual proficiency, is a diseclipsing process—a process of getting out of our own light and permitting this thing to come through.

Though GOD is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. The natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of his habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity—I had almost said the infinity—of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God. William Law

God within and God without—these are two abstract notions, which can be entertained by the understanding and expressed in words. But the facts to which these notions refer cannot be realized and experienced except in “the deepest and most central part of the soul.” And this is true no less of God without than of God within.

When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious. His father said to him, “Svetaketu, my child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we perceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known?” “What is that knowledge, sir?” asked Svetaketu. His father replied, “As by knowing one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay—so, my child, is that knowledge, knowing which we know all.” “But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have imparted it to me. Do you, sir, therefore give me that knowledge.” “So be it,” said the father. . . . And he said, “Bring me a fruit of the nyagrodha tree.” “Here is one, sir.” “Break it.” “It is broken, sir.” “What do you see there?” “Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.” “Break one of these.”

“It is broken, sir.” “What do you see there?” “Nothing at all.” The father said, “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there—in that very essence stands the being of the huge nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.” “Pray, sir,” said the son, “tell me more.” “Be it so, my child,” the father replied; and he said, “Place this salt in water, and come to me tomorrow morning.” The son did as he was told. Next morning the father said, “Bring me the salt which you put in the water.” The son looked for it, but could not find it; for the salt, of course, had dissolved. The father said, “Taste some of the water from the surface of the vessel. How is it?” “Salty.” “Taste some from the bottom. How is it?” “Salty.” The father said, “Throw the water away and then come back to me again.”

The son did so; but the salt was not lost, for salt exists for ever. Then the father said, “Here likewise in this body of yours, my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.” From the Chandogya Upanishad