The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

Christ is to be thanked for having voluntarily taken upon himself the appalling humiliation of being a baby.

So are the extremer forms of asceticism, and the whole stoic and puritanic temper.

So is the preoccupation with active good works, as opposed to the viscerotonic’s preoccupation with sacraments and ritual and the cerebrotonic’s with private devotion and meditation.

Religious conversion is no longer common in educated circles; but its place has been taken, as Dr. Sheldon points out, by psychological conversion.

Very different is the case with the cerebrotonic, who habitually lives in contact with his inner being, and for whom the revelations of religion and psychiatry are not startlingly novel. For this reason, and because of his emotional restraint, he is little subject to violent conversion. For him, change of heart and life tends to come gradually.

great cerebrotonic contribution to religion is mysticism, the worship of God in contemplative solitude without the aid of ritual or sacraments. Because he feels no need of it, the cerebrotonic is sometimes moved, with the Buddha, to denounce ritualistic worship as one of the fetters holding back the soul from liberation.

When he becomes religious, he gives up “nice things” for himself, but wants them in his church or temple. Not so the cerebrotonic. To him the life of voluntary poverty seems not only tolerable, but often supremely desirable; and he likes to worship in a shrine as austerely naked as his cell. When the cerebrotonic love of bareness and poverty becomes associated with somatotonic proselytizing zeal, we have iconoclasm.

Confucianism would seem to be predominantly viscerotonic—a religion of forms and ceremonials, in which the cult of the family is centrally important. Mohammedanism is decidedly more somatotonic than any of the religions native to India and China. In its primitive form it is hard, militant and puritanical; it encourages the spirit of martyrdom, is eager to make proselytes and has no qualms about levying “holy wars” and conducting persecutions. Some centuries after the prophet’s death it developed the Sufi school of mysticism—a school whose strict Islamic orthodoxy its theologians have always had some difficulty in defending.

The two key words of contemporary Western religion are respectively viscerotonic and somatotonic, namely “fellowship” and “social service.” The things which these words stand for are good and precious; but their full value can be realized only when the contemplation of ultimate Reality gives meaning to the emotional warmth of fellowship and direction to the activity of service.

As far back as the sixteenth century, Henry VIII made himself, in Bishop Stubb’s words, “the Pope, the whole Pope and something more than the Pope.” Since that time his example has been followed in every part of Christendom, until now there is no organized temporal power which acknowledges even theoretically the supremacy of any kind of spiritual authority. The triumph of unrestrained somatotonia is now complete.

The testimony of these men and women is unmistakable. It is in pure contemplation that human beings come nearest, in the present life, to the beatific vision of God.

some kind of psychically objective crystallization of the devotional feeling experienced by the long succession of worshipers who have used the same ceremonial in the past—

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

All I know is that I expressed a wish for my hand to be raised, whereupon something within myself set to work, pulled the switches of a most elaborate nervous system, and made thirty or forty muscles—some of which contract and some of which relax at the same instant—function in perfect harmony so as to produce this extremely simple gesture. And of course, when we ask ourselves, how does my heart beat? how do we breathe? how do I digest my food?—we do not have the faintest idea.

In the West you go back as far as Leibnitz with his conception that every monad was potentially omniscient. And in modern times you have the same conception in Bergson and in William James, both of whom were of the opinion that the consciousness that we have is simply a kind of filtering down of some form of universal or cosmic consciousness, narrowed down for the purpose of helping us to survive biologically on the surface of this particular planet.

omniscient, or anyhow much more widely knowing than we normally think we are.

When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.

We cannot help living to a very large extent in terms of concepts. We have to do so, because immediate experience is so chaotic and so immensely rich that in mere self-preservation we have to use the machinery of language to sort out what is of utility for us, what in any given context is of importance, and at the same time to try to understand—because it is only in terms of language that we can understand what is happening.

It is very significant that if we have to talk about the universe as the continuum which it is, we cannot do so in terms of any of the ordinarily existing languages, which deceive us all the time; it has to be done in terms of calculus, a special language invented for the express purpose of talking about the world as a continuum.

In the terms of Zen Buddhism, we have to be constantly aware that the finger which points at the moon is not the moon. In general, we think that the pointing finger—the word—is the thing we point at. And if you look at almost any literature of philosophy or religion, you will find this again and again, this obsession with words as though they were things, this mania.

Jesus is word

They got to a point of saying that if you could not in terms of language make a sentence which was logically foolproof, then the question asked was meaningless. But this is not true.

And I do think that the logical positivists have evaded many difficulties simply by saying that questions which in fact have a meaning do not, just because they have no meaning merely in terms of words. They have a meaning on another level. And one of the problems of any kind of spiritual, intellectual, or moral development is to get beyond the merely verbal level to this level of immediate experience.

We must briefly consider contemporary education—in fact, education as it has always been, as far as I can see—which is, of course, predominantly verbal. Children are taught an enormous number of things in terms of words. Practically all teaching is verbal.

and even music was not too nonverbal because it was regarded as a science and not as a pleasure.

And one of the strangest facts about education is that although for hundreds of years we have been talking about mens sana in corpore sano, we really have not paid any serious attention to the problem of training the mind-body, the instrument which has to do with the learning, which has to do with the living. We give children compulsory games, a little drill, and so on, but this really does not amount in any sense to a training of the mind-body.

proper mental and physical functioning could not take place unless there was a certain normal and natural relationship between the trunk, and the neck, and head.

think one of the reasons for the lack of attention to the training of the mind-body is that this particular kind of teaching does not fall into any academic pigeonhole. This is one of the great problems in education: Everything takes place in a pigeonhole.

And if you examine them all, you will find that they are all illustrations of one single principle, which is, that in some way we have to combine relaxation with activity. Take the piano teacher, for example. He always says, Relax, relax. But how can you relax while your fingers are rushing over the keys? Yet they have to relax. The singing teacher and the golf pro say exactly the same thing. And in the realm of spiritual exercises we find that the person who teaches mental prayer does too. We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity.

I recommend F. W. H. Myers’s Human Personality,

In the Chinese conception the universe is perceived as the Yin and the Yang, the negative and the positive principles, which are equally valid in the world. You have the same conception in the Indian philosophy too: The goddess of creation is also the goddess of destruction; the negative is correlative to the positive; but the two are reconciled then in this fundamental principle, the Tao. And this, I think, is at the basis of all mystical religions.

If I am desperately preoccupied with myself, it means that I am ignoring the immense majority of all the events in the universe. Naturally, we cannot know all the events in the universe, but we must be aware that this totality of things exists, and that our partial view is totally warped and self-stultifying. We try to help ourselves in this way, but “he that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life . . . shall find it.” All these paradoxical sayings, which keep cropping up in every religion, refer to this same thing—this necessity of getting rid of the essentially partial, limited, and ego-centered view of the world.

It is no good saying you can work without any theology. You have to have some theology, and it is rather important it should be correct.

We say, “A thought came to me; this flashed upon me.” We do not say, “I invented this thought.” We accept what comes to us. And we have to learn how to take what is given by something which is not ourselves in any sense that we think of ourselves. And

To put the matter more succinctly, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet, Jalalud’din Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: “The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.”1

Shankara’s

Smriti

In recent years a number of attempts have been made to work out a system of empirical theology. But in spite of the subtlety and intellectual powers of such writers as Sorley, Oman, and Tennant, the effort has met with only a partial success.

But it is a fact, confirmed and reconfirmed during two or three thousand years of religious history, 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.

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);

That the mind has extensive powers over and above those which are ordinarily used in everyday life has been known from time immemorial; and at all periods and in all countries these powers have been exploited, for good and for evil, by mediums, healers, prophets, medicine men, magicians, hatha yogis, and the other queer fish who exist and have always existed on the fringes of every society.

In all the traditional philosophies and religions of the world, time is regarded as the enemy and the deceiver, the prison and the torture chamber.

Aesthetic goods are precious because they are symbolic of, and analogous to, the unitive knowledge of timeless Reality.

In all the arts whose raw material is of a temporal nature, the primary aim of the artist is to spatialize time. The poet, the dramatist, the novelist, the musician—each takes a fragment of the perpetual perishing, in which we are doomed to undertake our one-way journey toward death, and tries to endow it with some of the qualities of space: namely, symmetry, balance, and orderliness (the Beauty-producing characteristics of a space containing material bodies), together with multidimensionality and the quality of permitting free movement in all directions.

The belief (which is based on obvious and self-evident facts) that Humanity is represented at any given moment by the persons who constitute the mass, and that all the values of Humanity reside in those persons, is regarded as absurdly shallow by these philosophers of history.

Those, on the contrary, who like to be “deep” in the manner of Hegel and Marx, who think that “History” deals with Humanity-in-the-Mass and Humanity-as-successive-generations, not with individual men and women here and now, are indifferent to human life and personal values, worship the Molochs which they call the State and Society, and are cheerfully prepared to sacrifice successive generations of real, concrete persons for the sake of the entirely hypothetical happiness which, on no grounds whatsoever, they think will be the lot of Humanity in the distant future.

those, on the contrary, who regard time as the ultimate reality are concerned primarily with the future and regard the present world and its inhabitants as mere rubble, cannon-fodder are potential slave-labor to be exploited, terrorized, liquidated, or blown to smithereens, in order that persons who may never be born, in a future time about which nothing can be known with the smallest degree of certainty, may have the kind of a wonderful time which present-day revolutionaries and war-makers think they ought to have. If the lunacy were not criminal, one would be tempted to laugh.

the plays are the equivalent of a great theological Summa. And

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.

But all the time, in spite of the radio noises and the neon tubes, night and the stars are there—just beyond the last bus stop, just above the canopy of illuminated smoke. This is a fact which the inhabitants of the human catacomb find it all too easy to forget; but whether they forget or remember, a fact it always remains. Night and the stars are always there; the other, nonhuman world, of which the stars and night are but the symbols, persists and is the real world.

When we think presumptuously that we are, or shall become in some future utopian state, “men like gods,” then in fact we are in mortal danger of becoming devils, capable only (however exalted our “ideals” may be, however beautifully worked out our plans and blue-prints) of ruining our world and destroying ourselves. The triumph of humanism is the defeat of humanity.