The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

end

is knowledge of the unalterable ...

m...

relative to the heredity and social upbringing of those ...

we have no right to proceed to a quasi-deification of Church and a dogma of infallibility.

Experience shows that such states of mind as pride, anger, covetousness and lust are totally incompatible with the knowledge of ultimate Reality;

exists for persons of every variety of temperament and upbringing.

This chapter is a tough chew. Needs my brightest concentration and sufficient time for reflective integration.

What are we in relation to this total organism in which we live?

Most of our diseases (as doctors are coming to see now) are caused by ourselves—

there is also another kind of indwelling self,

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.

Idolatry is in fact the worship of a part—especially the self or projection of the self—as though it were the absolute totality.

How do we get ourselves into a position where we can collaborate with grace?

Eckhart

“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.

We have to get out of the light and let it shine.

Philosophia Perennis—

coined by Leibnitz;

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of thi...

the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial and universal.

knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously increased.

But

blunting and loss of intui...

What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves. “Practice,”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

The Perennial Philosophy

those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.

that the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.

failures to achieve the highest development of which the individual or group is capable;

The truer forms of religion are those in which God is conceived, not only as one and loving, but also as eternal (that is to say, outside time);

the better forms of religious practice are those which aim at creating in the mind a condition approximating to timelessness.

Time destroys all that it creates,

the end of every temporal sequence is, for the entity involved in it, some form of death.

immor...

is for the consciousness that has broken through the temporal...

time provides the embodied soul with opportunities for transcending time;

Material goods

support the body

Moral...

their highest and ultimate value consists in the fact that they are means to that selflessness, which is the pre-condition...

goods of the i...

are t...

they remove God-eclipsing delusions a...

Aesthetic...

are symbolic of, and analogous to, the unitive know...

To regard any of these temporal goods as self-sufficient and final ends is to commit idolatry. And idolatry, which is fundamentally unrealistic and inappropriate to the facts of the universe, results at the b...

the flux of duration is indefinite and inconclusive, a perpetual lapse possessing in itself no pattern, no possibility of balance of symmetry.

space is a symbol of eternity;

give a form to the essentially formless,

to impose symmetry and order upon what is actually an indefinite flux toward death.