The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

human being gives up his own self-will and abandons himself, moment by mome...

What the religious psychologist or theologian calls active life is the life of good works.

For the radical and permanent transformation of personality, only one effective method has been discovered—that of the mystic.

always concerned with small groups or individuals;

never makes use of the organized force of the state or church, but only of the noncoercive, spiritual authority which belongs to the contemplative in virtue of his contact with reality.

The business of a seer is to see;

Mystics and theocentric saints are not always loved or invariably listened

Knowledge

Understanding

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.

Understanding

comes to us, so to say, of its own accord.

All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we understand the mystery of given reality.

Understanding, on the contrary, is as rare, very nearly, as emeralds, and so is highly prized.

education should be more than a device for passing on correct knowledge. It should also teach what Dewey called life adjustment and self-realization.

Cicero

told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must for ever remain children.

The culture within which he lives is a prison—but a prison which makes it possible for any prisoner who so desires to achieve freedom, a prison to which, for this and a host of other reasons, its inmates owe an enormous debt of gratitude and loyalty. 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.

the mystic is “a son of time present.”

Law of Reversed Effort.

The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.

Spirituality is the art of achieving union with God,

two branches—

ascet...

mysti...

The combination of asceticism and mysticism is very clearly seen in Buddhist and Hindu writings.

my elementary bibliography of Western spirituality,

Christian Spirituality

Father Pourrat.

Evelyn Underhill’s

Dean Inge’s

Saudr...

Poul...

Henri Brémond’s

Augustine Baker,

Bede Frost,

Father Leen’s

A. Tillyard,

St. Augustine;

Life of St. Teresa,

John Wo...

St. François d...

St. Jeanne C...

Dionysius the Areopagite

Meister Eckhart,

anonymous English mystic

Tauler;

St. John of the Cross;

St. François de Sales;

Lallemant