The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

Mystics and theocentric saints are not always loved or invariably listened to: far from it. Prejudice and the dislike of what is unusual may blind their contemporaries to the virtues of these men and women of the margin, may cause them to be persecuted as enemies of society.

Action based upon meaningless pseudoknowledge is always inappropriate, always beside the point, and consequently always results in the kind of mess mankind has always lived in—the kind of mess that makes the angels weep and the satirists laugh aloud.

The knowers would dearly love to be understanders; but either their stock of knowledge does not include the knowledge of what to do in order to be understanders; or else they know theoretically what they ought to do, but go on doing the opposite all the same.

Over-simplification, over-generalization, and over-abstraction are three other sins closely related to the sin of imagining that knowledge and pseudoknowledge are the same as understanding. The over-generalizing over-simplifier is the man who asserts, without producing evidence, that “All X’s are Y,” or, “All A’s have a single cause, which is B.” The over-abstracter is the one who cannot be bothered to deal with Jones and Smith, with Jane and Mary, as individuals, but enjoys being eloquent on the subject of Humanity, of Progress, of God and History and the Future.

Albert Jay Nock in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

“The literatures of Greece and Rome provide the longest, the most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature Homo Sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. Hence the mind that has canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind; it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience.

But even if a completely adequate schooling in the humanities of the past, the present, and the foreseeable future could be devised and made available to all, would the aims of education, as distinct from factual and theoretical instruction, be thereby achieved? Would the recipients of such an education be any nearer to the goal of self-realization? The answer, I am afraid, is, No.

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”—

She was so deeply rooted in her culture that she came to believe that words were supremely important. Hence her love of argument and the obstinacy with which she clung to her opinions.

Dr. W. B. Fahnestock, whose book Statuvolism, or Artificial Somnambulism, was published in 1871. “When persons are desirous of entering into this state [of artificial somnambulism], I place them in a chair, where they may be at perfect ease. They are next instructed to throw their minds to some familiar place—it matters not where, so that they have been there before and seem desirous of going there again, even in thought. When they have thrown the mind to the place, or upon the desired object, I endeavor by speaking to them frequently to keep their mind upon it. . . . This must be persisted in for some time.” In the end, “clairvoyancy will be induced.” Anyone who has experimented with hypnosis, or who has watched an experienced operator inducing trance in a difficult subject, knows how effective Fahnestock’s method can be. Incidentally, the relaxing power of positively charged memory was rediscovered, in another medical context, by an oculist, Dr. W. H. Bates, who used to make his patients cover their eyes and revisit in memory the scenes of their happiest experiences. By this means muscular and mental tensions were reduced and it became possible for the patients to use their eyes and minds in a relaxed and therefore efficient way.

such indulgence may result in a condition akin to trance—a condition at the opposite pole from the wakefulness that is understanding.

“I am the master of my fate,” poor Henley wrote at the end of a celebrated morsel of rhetoric, “I am the captain of my soul.” Nothing could be further from the truth. My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger—a passenger who is not sufficiently important to sit at the captain’s table and does not know, even by report, what the soul-ship looks like, how it works, or where it is going.

How do electrochemical events in my brain turn into the perception of a quartet by Haydn or a thought, let us say, of Joan of Arc? I haven’t the faintest idea—nor has anyone else.

Can I lift my right hand? The answer is, No. I can’t. I can only give the order; the actual lifting is done by somebody else. Who? I don’t know. Why? I don’t know. And when I have eaten, who digests the bread and cheese? When I have cut myself, who heals the wound? While I am sleeping, who restores the tired body to strength,...

Thus, if I am aware of my distractions—which are mostly emotionally charged memories or fantasies based upon such memories—the mental whirligig will automatically come to a stop and the memory will be emptied, at least for a moment or two. Again, if I become totally aware of my envy, my resentment, my uncharitableness, these feelings will be replaced, during the time of my awareness, by a more realistic reaction to the events taking place around me.

The Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriarch.” That blending of Mahayana Buddhism with Taoism, which the Chinese called Ch’an and the Japanese of a later period called Zen, achieves its earliest formulation in this account

Our body may be compared to a Bodhi tree, While our mind is a mirror bright. Carefully we cleanse and watch them hour by hour, And suffer no dust to collect upon them.

By no means is Bodhi a kind of tree, Nor is the bright reflecting mind a case of mirrors, Since mind is Emptiness, Where can the dust collect?

“At the particular moment when you are thinking of neither good nor evil, what is your real self-nature?” As soon as he heard this, he became enlightened.

People under delusion are stubborn in holding to their own way of interpreting samadhi, which they define as “sitting quietly and continuously without letting any idea arise in the mind.” Such an interpretation would class us with inanimate beings. It is not thinking which blocks the Path; it is attachment to any particular thought or opinion.

“You are especially warned not to let the exercise for concentration of mind fall into mere quietism or into an effort to keep the mind in a blank state.” And again, “Do your best, each of you. Go wherever circumstances lead you.”

“According to his faith of non-ego,” he asks, “how can we act in daily life! This is one of the great questions.

the desire for success prevent us from achieving the highest proficiency not only in such complex activities as dancing, making music, playing games, doing any kind of highly skilled work, but also in such natural psycho-physical activities as seeing and hearing.

Empirically it has been found that malfunctioning of the organs can be corrected, and proficiency in acts of skill increased, by inhibition of strain and negative emotions. If the conscious mind can be trained to inhibit its own self-regarding activities, if it can be persuaded to let go and give up its straining for success,

Transplanting is generally fatal to a full-grown tree; it dies of shock. So would most men if their arms and legs were amputated without an anesthetic. Bose administered chloroform. The operation was completely successful. Waking, the anesthetized tree immediately took root in its new place and flourished.

As the poison paralyzed the “heart,” the ups and downs of the graph flattened out into a horizontal line halfway between the extremes of undulation. But so long as any life remained in the plant, this medial line did not run level, but was jagged with sharp irregular ups and downs that represented in a visible symbol the spasms of a murdered creature desperately struggling for life. After a little while, there were no more ups and downs. The line of dots was quite straight. The plant was dead. The spectacle of a dying animal affects us painfully; we can see its struggles and, sympathetically, feel something of its pain. The unseen agony of a plant leaves us indifferent. To a being with eyes a million times more sensitive than ours, the struggles of a dying plant would be visible and therefore distressing.

Sensitive souls, whom a visit to the slaughter-house has converted to vegetarianism, will be well advised, if they do not want to have their menu still further reduced, to keep clear of the Bose Institute. After watching the murder of a plant, they will probably want to confine themselves to a strictly mineral diet.

It is a significant fact that occultism and spiritualism have produced no saints.

Another great monument of French scholarship in this field is Henri Brémond’s Histoire Littéraire du Sentiment Religieux en France, a work in eight volumes, of which, so far as I know, not all have yet been translated into English.

obviously, if you give life you must necessarily give death—because life always ends in death and requires to be renewed through death.

He was speaking about what is called the Prayer of Quiet, the prayer of waiting upon the Lord in a state of alert passivity and permitting the deepest elements within the mind to come to the surface.

It lights the fires of charity and it also lights the fires of the Inquisition—lights the fire that burns Servetus in the era of Calvin. It gives birth to a St. Francis or an Elizabeth Fry, but it also gives birth to a Torquemada. It gives birth to a George Fox and also gives birth to an Archbishop Laud.

There is hardly a single large-scale crime in history which has not been committed in the name of God.

This of course was summed up many centuries ago in the hexameter of Lucretius, where he says, “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” (“Such great evils this religion is able to persuade men to commit”). But he should also have added, “Tantum religio potuit suadere bonorum” (“Such great good this religion is able to persuade men to commit”). Nevertheless, the good has clearly had to be paid for by a great deal of evil.

In the earliest period of Christianity, Christ’s death was regarded either as a covenant-sacrifice, comparable to the sacrifice of the paschal lamb in the Jewish religion (there is some gospel authority for this), or was regarded as a ransom, comparable to a price paid by a slave for his freedom or the price paid by a war prisoner to be released. Both these ideas are hinted at in the gospels. Later on, there came the notion that Christ’s death was the bloody expiation for original sin. This was based on a very ancient idea that any wrong-doing required expiation by suffering on the part of the sinner himself, or on the part of a substitute for the sinner.

Meanwhile, Yoka Daishi says, don’t be so ignorant and puerile to mistake the pointing finger for the moon at which you are pointing. The habit of imagining that the pointing finger is the moon condemns all efforts to realize oneness with Reality to total failure.

And there is a phrase which was used by St. Catherine of Siena on her deathbed, which again stresses this point with extreme significance, where with great force she said: “For no reason whatever should one judge the actions of creatures or their motives. Even when we see that it is an actual sin, we ought not to pass judgment on it, but have holy and sincere compassion and offer it up to God with humble and devout prayer.”