The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

In his novels and essays of the 1920s, Huxley was scathingly skeptical of religion and its “life-retreating” pious aspirants. His gods were “life, love, sex.” Religion that negated this trilogy, he scorned. He abhorred the views of Swift, Pascal, Beaudelaire, Proust, and even St. Francis of Assisi! According to Huxley, they were “life-haters.” Huxley’s earliest mentors were the passionate “life-affirmers”—Robert Burns, D. H. Lawrence, and William Blake.

His gods were “life, love, sex.” Religion that negated this trilogy, he scorned.

He abhorred the views of Swift, Pascal, Beaudelaire, Proust, and even ...

Huxley’s earliest mentors were the passionate “life-affirmers”—Robert Burns, D. H. Lawrence, and William Blake. In his words, he was a “life-worshipper.” His God was the God of Life. He believed in the diversity of the human persona; all desires served but tempered by reason.

He believed in the diversity of the human persona; all desires served but tempered by reason. The moderation that Aristotle preached. The philosophy of the Golden Mean.

By the 1940s Aldous Huxley was labeled a “mystic.” It is an accurate description if one understands mysticism as William Blake defines it, “The self at one with God,” and by Plotinus’s description of spiritual ecstasy, “The flight of the alone to the Alone.”

Its celebrated array of editors were Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, John Van Druten, Gerald Heard, and Swami Prabhavananda,

But there came a rift between guru and disciple when the author began experimenting with mescaline and LSD as tools toward enlightenment. Prabhavananda was adamantly opposed to the use of drugs, and drugs used as a short cut to spiritual awareness. Huxley’s guru claimed that drugs were a deterrent to spiritual growth—if you were a fool when you entered the drug-induced visionary state, you remained a fool when you returned to normal consciousness.

He loved the desert, he told me, for its symbolic power. Its emptiness emptied his mind. “The boundlessness of its sands [I paraphrase] spreads a mantle of sameness—hence unity—over the world’s multiplicity in the way snow does.

Most obviously, it lost an encyclopedic mind. When a leading newspaper decided that the Fourteenth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica should be brought under review, no one was surprised when Huxley was asked to do the job. (He found it inferior to the Eleventh Edition.)

embattled

he wasn’t content simply to do what he could do well. His competence bored him.

“It’s rather embarassing,” he said, “to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and to find that one has little more to offer by way of advice than, Try to be a little kinder.”

perhaps his best novel, Point Counter Point (1928),

Huxley’s first book, The Burning Wheel (1916), a collection of poems, was published when he was twenty.

over thirty books—

he read voraciously. This equipped him with a vast store of knowledge to draw upon as well as a huge vocabulary, which he used with economy and precision.

In his early novels he misses few opportunities to ridicule Christianity and oriental mysticism alike, while at the same time being unable, it would seem, to get them off his mind. Antic Hay (1923) is typical here.

much as because all the rest—art, science, literature, the pleasures of thought and sensation—came to seem (as patriotism came to seem to Nurse Cavell) “not enough.” One reaches a point where one says, even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, “Is this all?”

After Eyeless in Gaza (1936), a novel dealing with the conflict between the intellectual and the sexual and its resolution through mysticism,

They know, in other words, that men’s business is to make the human world safe for animals and spirits.

Compared with Many a Summer, which contains elements of Gothic grotesqueness, Huxley’s next novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1945), is sweetness and light.

No working hypothesis means no motive for research, no reason for making one experiment rather than another, no way of bringing sense or order into the observed facts. Contrariwise, too much working hypothesis means finding only what you already know to be there and ignoring the rest. Dogma turns a man into an intellectual Procrustes. He goes about forcing things to become the signs of his word-patterns, when he ought to be adapting his word-patterns to become the signs of things.

Among other things religion is also research. Research into, leading to theories about and action in the light of, nonsensuous, nonpsychic, purely spiritual experience.

But what they believe is a hotch-potch of good, less good and even bad. Records of the infallible intuitions of great saints into the highest spiritual reality are mixed up with records of the less reliable and infinitely less valuable intuitions of psychics into the lower levels of nonsensuous reality; and to these are added mere fancies, discursive reasonings and sentimentalisms, projected into a kind of secondary objectivity and worshiped as divine facts.

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 Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.

That the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; and that the Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living Law of mortification and self-transcending awareness.

People like their egos and do not wish to mortify them, get a bigger kick out of bullying and self-adulation than out of humility and compassion, are determined not to see why they shouldn’t “do what they like” and “have a good time.” They get their good time; but also and i...

the choice between some lunatic idolatry, such as nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair. Unutterable miseries! But throughout recorded history the great majority of men and women have preferred the risk—no, the positive certainty—of such disasters to the tiresome whole-time job of se...

God is. That is the primordial fact. It is in order that we may discover this fact for ourselves, by direct experience, that we exist. The final end and purpose of every human being is the unitive knowledge of God’s being.

God’s kingdom cannot come unless we begin by making our human kingdoms go. Not only the mad and obviously evil kingdoms, but also the respectable ones—the kingdoms of the scribes and pharisees, the good citizens and pillars of society, no less than the kingdoms of the publicans and sinners. God’s being cannot be known by us, if we choose to pay our attention and our allegiance to something else, however creditable that something else may seem in the eyes of the world.

But the first principle of order is God, and God is the final, deepest meaning of all that exists. God, then, is manifest in the relationship which makes things beautiful. He resides in that lovely interval which harmonizes events on all the planes, where we discover beauty. We apprehend Him in the alternate voids and fullnesses of a cathedral; in the spaces that separate the salient features of a picture; in the living geometry of a flower, a sea shell, an animal; in the pauses and intervals between the notes of music, in their differences of tone and sonority; and finally, on the plane of conduct, in the love and gentleness, the confidence and humility, which give beauty to the relationships between human beings.

A material figure of beauty-in-itself is the cloudless evening sky, which we find inexpressibly lovely, although it possesses no orderliness of arrangement, since there are no distinguishable parts to be harmonized. We find it beautiful because it is an emblem of the infinite Clear Light of the Void. To the knowledge of this Pure Interval we shall come only when we have learned to mortify attachment to creatures, above all to ourselves.

that chaotic disorderliness which characterizes creatures when they try to live independently of God.

The law which we must obey, if we would know God as love, is itself a law of love. “Thou shalt love God with all thy soul, and with all thy heart, with all thy mind and with all thy strength. And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” We cannot love God as we should, unless we love our neighbors as we should. We cannot love our neighbors as we should, unless we love God as we should. And, finally, we cannot realize God as the active, all-pervading principle of love, until we ourselves have learned to love Him and our fellow creatures.

The presence of self-love is obvious in the grosser forms of sensual indulgence, or the pursuit of wealth and power and praise. Less manifestly, but none the less fatally, it is present in our inordinate affections for individuals, persons, places, things, and institutions. And even in men’s most heroic sacrifices to high causes and noble ideals, self-love has its tragic place. 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.

When this happens, when we love God as we should and therefore know God as love, the tormenting problem of evil ceases to be a problem, the world of time is seen to be an aspect of eternity, and in some inexpressible way, but no less really and certainly, the struggling, chaotic multiplicity of life is reconciled in the unity of the all-embracing divine charity.

In other words, peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.

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

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.

From our natural state of incompleteness to spiritual health and perfection there is no magically easy short cut. The way to holiness is laborious and long. It lies through vigilance and prayer, through an unresting guard of the heart, the mind, the will and the tongue, and through the one-pointed loving attention to God, which that guard alone makes possible.

Graces are the free gifts of help bestowed by God upon each one of us, in order that we may be assisted to achieve our final end and purpose; namely, unitive knowledge of divine reality. Such helps are very seldom so extraordinary that we are immediately aware of their true nature as God-sends. In the overwhelming majority of cases they are so inconspicuously woven into the texture of common life, that we do not know that they are graces, unless and until we respond to them as we ought, and so receive the material, moral or spiritual benefits, which they were meant to bring us.

We have to accept as a working hypothesis that the events of our lives are not merely fortuitous, but deliberate tests of intelligence and character, specially devised occasions (if properly used) for spiritual advance. Acting upon this working hypothesis, we shall treat no occurrence as intrinsically unimportant. We shall never make a response that is inconsiderate, or a mere automatic expression of our self-will, but always give ourselves time, before acting or speaking, to consider what course of behavior would seem to be most in accord with the will of God, most charitable, most conducive to the achievement of our final end.

God does not help human beings, unless they first permit themselves to be helped.

the Indian formula, sat, chit, ananda—being, knowledge, bliss. 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.

“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?

Being consistently cheerful may cost us a far greater effort than, for example, being consistently temperate; and whereas other people will often admire us for refraining from physical indulgences, they will probably attribute our cheerfulness to good digestion or a native insensibility. From the roots of such secret and unadmired self-denials there springs the tree whose fruits are the peace that passes all understanding, the love of God and of all creatures for God’s sake, and the joy of perfection, the bliss of an eternal and timeless consummation.

Thus, in the West, we have the four-fold classification of Hippocrates in terms of the “humours” (phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, and sanguine), a classification which dominated the theory and practice of medicine for more than two thousand years and whose terminology is indelibly imprinted upon every European language. Another popular system of classification, which has also left its trace in modern speech, was the seven-fold system of the astrologers. We still describe people in planetary terms—as jovial, mercurial, saturnine, martial.

Sheldon’s researches have led him to the conclusion that the most satisfactory system of classification is in terms of three types of temperament, which he calls the viscerotonic, the somatotonic and the cerebrotonic. All human beings are of mixed type. But in some the various elements are evenly mixed, while in some one element tends to predominate at the expense of the other two. In some again the mixture is well balanced, whereas in others there is a disequilibrium which results in acute internal conflict and extreme difficulty in making adaptation to life.