The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

evolutionary theories,

that even God is emergent—

timeless witness of time, transcendent to it and, because of that transcendence, capable of immanence within it.

Those who believe in the primacy of persons and who think that the Final End of all persons is to transcend time and realize that which is eternal and timeless, are always, like the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Taoists, the primitive Christians, advocates of nonviolence, gentleness, peace, and tolerance.

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;

But thought’s the slave of life, and life’s time’s fool, And time that takes survey of all the world Must have a stop.

By merely elapsing, time makes nonsense of all that life consciously schemes for in the temporal order.

And yet the only faith of a majority of twentieth-century Americans and Europeans is faith in the Future—the bigger and better Future which they know that Progress is going to produce for them, like white rabbits out of a hat.

men are prepared to sacrifice their only tangible possession, the Present.

nationalists and revolutionaries all give the same answer. “In order that the great-great-grandchildren of those who are now being liquidated may have an absolutely wonderful time in A.D. 2043.”

Just as our Victorian great-great-grandfathers solemnly visualized and described the sort of wonderful time we were going to have in the middle years of the twentieth century.

True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless.

time can never be worshiped with impunity.

It is only by taking the fact of eternity into account that we can deliver thought from its slavery to life.

Brahman,

the Ground,

Clear Light of t...

Kingdom ...

all one timeless ...

Liberation cannot come unless we take no thought for tomorrow and live in the eternal present.

methods which have been found useful in overcoming these obstacles,

circumventing the tricks of the imbecile whom we carry about with us as a secondary personality.

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 practice of the unitive life, the laboratory work of formal meditation must be supplemented by what may be called “applied mysticism” during the hours of everyday activity.

“A man,”

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...

We now come to the problem of dealing with distractions in common life—in the field rather than in the laboratory.

Nonattachment cannot be practiced except in relation to intrinsically good or ethically neutral actions;

John of the Cross,

“disquietude is always vanity, because it serves no good.

We must teach ourselves not to waste our time and our opportunities to know reality by dwelling on our memories. Let the dead bury their dead.

The higher idolatry may be defined as the belief in, and worship of, human creation as though it were

God.

In academic circles, mystics are almost as rare as fetishists; but the enthusiastic devotees of some form of political or social idealism are as common as blackberries.

higher idolatry

three main headings,

technolo...

polit...

m...

political idolaters.

Impose the right kind of organizations on human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to sewage disposal and war, will be automatically solved.

moral idolaters

Their mistake is to worship their own ethical ideals instead of worshiping God, to treat the acquisition of virtue as an end in itself and not as a means—

the setting up of some idea which is most kindred to our own minds, and the putting it in the place of Christ,

truth and justice would be the idols

reverence and humility and tenderness might very likely be forgotten. But

Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness, because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature and the neglect fosters the growth of wickedness in the parts so neglected.”

Grace

is given