The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

to surrender to the obvious truth that men are not gods, that they cannot control the destiny even of their own homemade world and that the only way to the peace, happiness, and freedom they so ardently desire is through the knowledge of and obedience to the laws of the greater, nonhuman cosmos.

Things are not what they seem; or, to be more accurate, they are not only what they seem, but very much else besides.

The capacity to go higher is purchased at the expense of being able to fall lower. Only an angel of light can become the Prince of Darkness.

Enlightenment is not to be achieved by the person whose aim in life is to “have a good time,” to the puritan worshiper of repressive morality for its own sake, or to the aesthete who lives for the creation or appreciation of formal beauty. Idolatry is always fatal; and even the highest human goods cease to be goods if they are worshiped for their own sake and not used, as they are intended to be used, for the achievement of an ultimate good that transcends them.

Significant in this context is the Buddha’s remark that he who says he is an arhat thereby proclaims that he is not an arhat.

An urge to self-transcendence is almost as widespread and, at times, quite as powerful as the urge to self-assertion. Men desire to intensify their consciousness of being what they have come to regard as “themselves”; but they also desire—and desire very often with irresistible violence—the consciousness of being someone else. In a word, they long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that island universe, within which every individual finds himself confined.

Complete damnation is being one’s sweating self, but worse. Being one’s sweating self, but not worse, merely no better, is partial damnation, and this partial damnation is everyday life.

to “die” so completely that we can say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

Self-transcendence is by no means invariably upward. Indeed, in most cases, it is an escape either downward into a state lower than that of personality, or else horizontally into something wider than the ego, but not higher, not essentially other. We are forever trying to mitigate the results of the Collective Fall into insulated selfhood by another, strictly private fall into animality or mental derangement, or by some more or less creditable self-dispersion into art or science, into politics, a hobby, or a job. Needless to say, these substitutes for self-transcendence, these escapes into subhuman or merely human surrogates for grace, are unsatisfactory at the best and, at the worst, disastrous.

In western Europe, among the Celts and Teutons, and throughout medieval and early modern times, the individual intake of alcohol was probably greater than it is today. On the many occasions when we drink tea or coffee or soda pop, our ancestors refreshed themselves with wine, beer, mead, and in later centuries, with gin, brandy, and other forms of “hard liquor.” The regular drinking of water was a penance imposed on wrong-doers, or accepted by the religious, along with occasional vegetarianism, as a very severe mortification.

In Vedic mythology, Indra was the god of that now unidentifiable drug called soma. Hero, slayer of dragons, he was the magnified projection upon heaven of the strange and glorious otherness experienced by the intoxicated.

In modern times beer and the other toxic shortcuts to self-transcendence are no longer officially worshiped as gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in practice millions upon millions of civilized men and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium

In every case, of course, what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact enslavement.

For, far from condemning the practice of downward self-transcendence through herd-intoxication, the leaders of church and state have actively encouraged this kind of debauchery, whenever it could be used for the furtherance of their own ends.

There is the way, for example, of rhythmic movement, so widely employed in all primitive religions. And closely associated with the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic movement is the ecstasy-producing rite of rhythmic sound. Music is as vast as human nature and has something to say to men and women on every level of their being, from the self-regardingly sentimental to the abstractly intellectual, from the spiritual to the merely visceral. In one of its forms, music is a powerful drug, partly stimulant, partly narcotic, but wholly alterative.

Every idol, however exalted, turns out in the long run to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifices.

As St. Bernard puts it, “God who, in His simple substance is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational creatures, however, He can be comprehended by knowledge; but only by the good is He also comprehended by love”

The end of man’s existence is to use his opportunities in space-time in such a way that he may come to the knowledge of God’s kingdom of timeless reality—or, to put it the other way round, that he may be fit for reality to come to manifestation in and through Him.

That we may make ourselves fit for God, we must fulfill certain conditions, which are set forth in the prayer. We must hallow God’s name, do God’s will and forgive those who have trespassed against us. If we do this, we shall be delivered from the evil of selfhood, forgiven the sin of separateness and blessed with the bread of grace, without which our contemplation will be illusory and our attempts at amendment vain.

To pray that the will of God may be done in earth as in heaven is to pray, in other words, for the coming into time of the kingdom of eternity.

“Fight self,” says St. Catherine of Siena, “and you need fear no other foe.”

To fight self exclusively with the self serves only to enhance our selfhood.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” It is possible that the word translated as “daily” may really carry another meaning and that the phrase should read: “Give us this day our bread of the (eternal) day.” This would emphasize the fact, already sufficiently obvious to anyone familiar with the language of the gospels, that the bread referred to is a divine and spiritual nourishment—the grace of God. In the traditional translation the spiritual nature of the bread is taken for granted and an additional emphasis is laid on the thought already expressed in the words “this day.”

Both inhabit eternity; but whereas the flower’s or the bird’s eternity is the everlasting present of mindlessness, of natural processes working themselves out with little or no accompanying consciousness, the saint’s eternity is experienced in union with that pure consciousness, which is the ultimate reality. Between these two worlds lies the human universe of foresight and retrospect, of fear and craving and memory and conditioning, of hopes and plans and daydreams and remorses. It is a rich world, full of beauty and goodness as well as of much evil and ugliness—but a world which is not the world of reality; for it is our world, man-made, the product of the thoughts and actions of beings who have forgotten their true end and have turned to things which are not their highest good. This is the truth proclaimed by all the great spiritual teachers of history—the truth that enlightenment, liberation, salvation, call it what you will, can come only for those who learn to live now in the contemplation of eternal reality, no longer in the past and future of human memories and habits, desires and anxieties. Christ was especially emphatic on the urgent necessity of living in the spiritual present. He exhorted his disciples to model their life upon that of the flowers and the birds, and to take no thought for the morrow. They were to rely, not on their own anxious scheming, but upon the grace of God, which would be given in proportion as they gave up their own personal pretensions a...

We need grace in order to be able to live in such a way as to qualify ourselves to receive grace.

If one is adequately to love God, one must love one’s neighbors—and one’s neighbors include even those who have trespassed against us. Conversely, one must love God, if one is adequately to love one’s neighbors. In the spiritual life, every cause is also an effect, and every effect is at the same time a cause.

Here again the great religious teachers are unanimous. There is a law of karma; God is not mocked, and as a man sows, so shall he reap. Sometimes the reaping is extremely obvious, as when a habitual drunkard reaps bodily sickness and a failure of mental power. Very often, on the contrary, the reaping is of a nature which it is very difficult for any but enlightened eyes to detect.

That which the Scribes and Pharisees reap is the more or less total inability to know the God they fondly imagine they are serving. God does not punish them, any more than he punishes the man who inadvertently steps over the edge of a cliff.

as we abandon what the German mystics called “the I, me, mine,” we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace.

The final phrases of the prayer re-affirm its central, dominant theme, which is that God is everything and that man, as man, is nothing. Indeed, man, as man, is less than nothing; for he is a nothing capable of evil, that is to say capable of claiming as his own the things that are God’s and, by that act, cutting himself off from God. But though man, as man, is nothing and can make himself less than nothing by becoming evil, man as the knower and lover of God, man as the possessor of a latent, inalienable spark of godhead, is potentially everything.

The prayer which comes naturally to such people is the prayer of petition, the prayer for concrete advantages and immediate help in trouble. How profoundly different this is from the prayer of an enlightened being! Such a being prays not at all for himself, but only that God may be worshiped, loved, and known by him as God ought to be worshiped, loved, and known—that the latent and potential seed of reality within his own soul may become fully actualized.

It may be true that the Lord’s Prayer is generally misunderstood, or not understood at all. Nevertheless it is a good thing that it should remain the most familiar formulary used by a religion which, particularly in the more “liberal” of its contemporary manifestations, has wandered so far from the theocentrism of its founder, into an entirely heretical anthropocentrism or, as we now prefer to call it, “humanism.”

“It is true,” he said, “that you have not adequately expressed your sins; but the fact is that, in this life, it is impossible to represent them in all their hideousness. We shall never know them as they really are, until we see them in the pure light of God. In your case, God has given you an impression of the deformity of sin, by which he makes you feel it to be incomparably graver than it appears to your understanding or can be expressed by your words. Hence your anguish and distress. You must therefore conceive of your sins as faith presents them to you, in other words, as they are in themselves; but you must content yourself with describing them in such words as your mouth can form.” All that Condren says about poor Mlle. de la Roche’s no doubt very trifling sins applies with equal force to our distractions. Judged by ordinary human standards, they may seem of no account. And yet, as they are in themselves, as they are in relation to the light of God (which they are able completely to eclipse, as the sun is darkened by a dust storm or a cloud of grasshoppers) these seemingly trifling imperfections are seen to have as great a power for evil in the soul as anger, or an ugly greed, or some obsessive apprehension.

For, as ex-President Hoover pointed out not long ago, this system cannot work unless the demand for non-necessaries is not merely kept up, but continually expanded; and of course it cannot be kept up and expanded except by incessant appeals to greed, competitiveness, and love of aimless stimulation. Men have always been a prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system. Recollectedness, or the overcoming of distractions, has never been more necessary than now; it has also, we may guess, never been so difficult.

They forget that it is possible for a man or woman to achieve, during meditation, a high degree of mental concentration and even a kind of subjectively satisfying pseudo-ecstasy, while remaining at bottom an unregenerate ego. 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 reason for this is that such people make no effort to adapt to the exigencies of ordinary life those practices which they make use of during their times of formal meditation.

What the English mystic, Benet Fitch, calls “active annihilation” or the sinking of the self in God at every moment of the day, is much harder to achieve than “passive annihilation” in mental prayer.

Every enhancement of the separate personal self produces a corresponding diminution of the consciousness of divine reality. But the voluntary struggle against distractions automatically enhances the separate personal self and therefore reduces the individual’s chance of coming to an awareness of reality.

The distractions appear in the foreground of consciousness; we take notice of their presence, then lightly, without effort or tension of will, we shift the focus of attention to the reality in the background. In many cases the distractions will lose their obsessive “thereness” and gradually fade away.

indulging in unlimited sexual promiscuity, like some of the Illuminati of the West, are activities which cannot result in anything but an enhancement of the separate personal self and an eclipsing of divine reality.

Nonattachment cannot be practiced except in relation to intrinsically good or ethically neutral actions; the idea that it can be practiced in relation to bad actions is a delusion, springing from the wish of the ego to go on behaving badly, while justifying such behavior by means of a high and apparently spiritual philosophy.)

To achieve the active annihilation, by which alone the distractions of common life may be overcome, the aspirant must begin by avoiding, not merely all bad actions, but also, if possible, all unnecessary and silly ones. Listening to the average radio program, seeing the average motion picture, reading the comic strips—these are merely silly and imbecile activities; but though not wicked, they are almost as unannihi...

In either case, the present is sacrificed to dreams of no longer existent or hypothetical situations.

None can achieve eternal life who has not first learned to live, not in the past or in the future, but now—in the moment at the moment.

So wholehearted is the faith in technological idols that it is very hard to discover, in the popular thought of our time, any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doctrine of Hubris and Nemesis. To the Greeks, Hubris meant any kind of overweening and excess. When men or societies went too far, either in dominating other men and societies, or in exploiting the resources of nature to their own advantage, this overweening exhibition of pride had to be paid for. In a word, Hubris invited Nemesis. The idea is expressed very clearly and beautifully in “The Persians” of Aeschylus. Xerxes is represented as displaying inordinate Hubris, not only by trying to conquer his neighbors by force of arms, but also by trying to bend nature to his will more than it is right for mortal man to do. For Aeschylus, Xerxes’ bridging of the Hellespont is an act as full of Hubris as the invasion of Greece, and no less deserving of punishment at the hand of Nemesis. Today, our simple-hearted technological idolaters seem to imagine that they can have all the advantages of an immensely elaborate industrial civilization without having to pay for them.

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 necessary and indispensable condition of the unitive knowledge of God.

Now, in my own mind, by its natural tendency—that is, taking my mind at its best—truth and justice would be the idols I should follow; and they would be idols, for they would not supply all the food which the mind wants, and whilst worshiping them, reverence and humility and tenderness might very likely be forgotten. But Christ Himself includes at once truth and justice and all these other qualities too. . . .

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It is a noteworthy fact that, in the biographies of the great Christian mystics the period of activity has always been preceded by a preliminary stage of retirement from the world—a period during which these contemplatives learned to practice the presence of God so continuously and unwaveringly that the distractions of outward activity were powerless any longer to draw the mind away from reality.

The contemplative does not work exclusively for his own salvation. On the contrary, he has an important social function. At any given moment, as we have seen, only a few mystical, theocentric saints exist in the world. But few as they are, they can do an appreciable amount to mitigate the poisons which society generates within itself by its political and economic activities. They are the “salt of the earth,” the antiseptic which prevents society from breaking down into irremediable decay.

The theocentric saint is generally not content merely to be. He is almost always a teacher and often a man of action. Through teaching, he benefits surrounding society by multiplying the number of those who undertake the radical transformation of their character and thus increases the amount of antiseptics and antidotes in the chronically diseased body politic.