The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

“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.”

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.

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.

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. When such becomes our habitual response to events, we shall discover, from the nature of their effects, that some at least of those occurrences were divine graces in the disguise sometimes of trivialities, sometimes of inconveniences or even of pains and trials. But if we fail to act upon the working hypothesis that grace exists, grace will in effect be nonexistent so far as we are concerned. We shall prove by a life of accident at the best, or, at the worst, of downright evil, that God does not help human beings, unless they first permit themselves to be helped.

The end of life in all great religious traditions is the realization that the finite manifests the Infinite in its totality. This is, of course, a complete paradox when it is stated in words; nevertheless, it is one of the facts of experience for many people—or for some people at least—and should be a fact of experience for all.

Idolatry is in fact the worship of a part—especially the self or projection of the self—as though it were the absolute totality. And as soon as this happens, general disaster occurs.

Nothing we can do will actually produce enlightenment. All we can do is to get out of our own light, use our will to will ourselves away. Eckhart has again another curious remark. He says, “God and God’s will are one, I and my will are two.” We have somehow to use our will to get rid of our will in order to collaborate with this totality of the universe, to accept events as they come in this impartial spirit, yet doing everything we can to promote the positive side of life.

In theory all the higher religions have insisted that the final end of man, the purpose of his existence upon earth, is the realization, partially in the present life, more completely in some other state, of timeless Reality. In practice, however, a majority of the adherents of these religions have always behaved as if man’s primary concern were not with eternity, but with time.

For those who live within its limits, the lights of the city are the only luminaries of the high sky. The street lamps eclipse the stars, and the glare of the whisky advertisements reduces even the moonlight to an almost invisible irrelevance. The phenomenon is symbolical, a parable in action. Mentally and physically, man is the inhabitant, during the greatest part of his life, of a purely human and, so to say, homemade universe, scooped by himself out of the immense, nonhuman cosmos which surrounds it, and without which neither it nor he could exist. Within this private catacomb we build up for ourselves a little world of our own, constructed of a strange assortment of materials—interests and “ideals,” words and technologies, cravings and day-dreams, artifacts and institutions, imaginary gods and demons. Here, among the magnified projections of our own personalities, we perform our curious antics and perpetrate our crimes and lunacies, we think the thoughts and feel the emotions appropriate to our man-made environment, we cherish the crazy ambitions that alone make sense in a madhouse. 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...

The great nonhuman world, which exists simultaneously within us and without, is governed by its own divine laws—laws which we are free to obey or disobey. Obedience leads to liberation; disobedience to a deeper enslavement to misery and evil, to a prolongation of our existence in the likeness of angry apes. Human history is a record of the conflict between two forces—on the one hand, the silly and criminal presumption that makes man ignorant of his glassy essence; on the other, the recognition that, unless he lives in conformity with the greater cosmos, he himself is utterly evil, and his world, a nightmare. In this interminable conflict, now one side gains the upper hand, and now the other. At the present time we are witnessing the temporary triumph of the specifically human side of man’s nature. For some time now we have chosen to believe, and to act on the belief, that our private world of neon tubes and incendiaries was the only real world, that the glassy essence in us did not exist. Angry apes, we have imagined ourselves, because of our simian cleverness, to be angels—to be indeed, more than angels, to be gods, creators, framers of our destiny.

Fortunately, as [Alfred Lord] Whitehead has pointed out, the moral order of the universe consists precisely in the fact that evil is self-stultifying. When evil is given free rein, either by individuals or by societies, it always ends by committing suicide. The nature of this suicide may be either physical or psychological. The evil individuals or societies may be literally killed off, or reduced to impotence through mere exhaustion; or else they may reach a condition, if the orgy of evil is too much prolonged, of such weariness and disgust that they find themselves forced, by a kind of sanguinary reductio ad absurdum, 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.

Today, after two world wars and three major revolutions, we know that there is no necessary correlation between advanced technology and advanced morality. Many primitives, whose control over their environment is rudimentary, contrive nonetheless to be happy, virtuous, and, within limits, creative. Conversely, the members of civilized societies, possessed of the technological resources to exercise considerable control over their environment, are often conspicuously unhappy, maladjusted, and uncreative; and though private morals are tolerably good, collective behavior is savage to the point of fiendishness.

Unfortunately economic security in an industrialized society has been achieved, up till now, at the expense of personal liberty. The miseries of anxiety have had to be paid for by the miseries of a dependence, which in some countries has degenerated into servitude. This is a world in which nobody ever gets anything for nothing. Advantages in one field have to be paid for by disadvantages in another field. Destiny only sells; it never gives. All we can do is to drive the best possible bargain. And if we choose to use our intelligence and good will, instead of our low cunning and our lust for power, we can make political arrangements that shall eliminate many dangerous temptations to evil and many causes of misery without, in the process, creating new troubles no less intolerable than those we have escaped. Meanwhile we must remember that the removal, by political methods, of certain dangerous temptations and certain reasons for misery will not of itself guarantee a general advance in goodness and happiness. Even under the existing political and economic dispensations there is a minority of persons whose lives are prosperous, secure, and untroubled. And yet of these fortunate few how many are profoundly unhappy and how many are actively or passively evil! Within wide limits goodness and happiness are almost independent of external circumstances. True, a starving child cannot be happy; and a child brought up among criminals is unlikely to be good. But these are extreme cases....

Four ducks on a pond, A grass-bank beyond, A blue sky in spring, White clouds on the wing; What a little thing To remember with tears— To remember for years!

The faculties that make the unitive knowledge of reality possible are the very faculties that tempt human beings to indulge in that literally insane and diabolic conduct of which man, alone of all the animals, is capable. This is a world in which nobody ever gets anything for nothing. 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. On the lower levels of evolutionary development there is no voluntary ignorance or deliberate evil-doing; but, for this very reason, there is also no enlightenment. That is why, in spite of Buchenwald and Hiroshima, we have to give thanks for having achieved a human birth.

“Not my will, but Thine, be done.” This is the essence of all religion. Free will is given that self-will may be annihilated in the spiritual equivalent of instinct.

When left to itself, a society generally manages to come to terms with its favorite poison.

“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there is God in the midst of them.” In the midst of two or three hundred the divine presence becomes more problematical. And when the numbers run into the two or three thousands, or tens of thousands, the likelihood of God being there, in the consciousness of each individual, declines almost to the vanishing point. For such is the nature of excited crowds (and every crowd is automatically self-exciting) and that where two or three thousand are gathered together, there is an absence not merely of deity but even of common humanity. The fact of being one of a multitude delivers a man from the consciousness of being an insulated self and carries him down into a less than personal realm, where there are no responsibilities, no right and wrong, no need for thought or judgment or discrimination—only a strong vague sense of togetherness, only a shared excitement, a collective alienation.

Being in a crowd is the best-known antidote to independent thought. Hence the dictator’s rooted objection to “mere psychology” and a private life. “Intellectuals of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your brains.”

In actual life a downward movement may be made the beginning of an ascent. When the shell of the ego has been cracked and there begins to be a consciousness of the subliminal and physiological otherness underlying personality, it sometimes happens that we catch a glimpse, fleeting but apocalyptic, of that other Otherness, which is the Ground of all being. So long as we are confined within our insulated selfhood, we remain unaware of the various not-selves with which we are associated—the organic not-self, the not-self of the personal subconscious, the collective not-self of the psychic medium, out of which our individualities have crystallized, and the not-self of the immanent and transcendent Spirit. Any escape, even by a descending road, out of insulated selfhood, makes possible at least a momentary awareness of the not-self at every level.

When we identify ourselves with an idea or a cause, we are in fact worshiping something homemade, something partial and parochial, something which, however noble, is all too human. “Patriotism,” as a great patriot concluded, on the eve of her execution by her country’s enemies, “patriotism is not enough.” Neither is Socialism, nor Communism, nor Capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, or any particular religious organization or church. All these are indispensable, but none of them is enough. Civilization demands from the individual self-identification with the highest of human causes. But if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upward self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing evils.

“The name of God” is a phrase which carries two principal meanings. Insofar as the Jews, like many other peoples of antiquity, regarded the name of a thing as identical with its inner principle or essence, the phrase means simply “God.” “Hallowed be Thy name” is equivalent to “hallowed be Thou.” The clause asserts that God is the highest, most real good, and that it is to the service of this good alone that we should dedicate our lives. What we pray for, when we repeat this clause, is living, experiential knowledge of this fact, and the strength unswervingly to act upon that knowledge.

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

“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.”

The Old Law is to be replaced by the New, which is the law of love, of mahakarun, of universal compassion.

The petition, “Thy Kingdom come,” has a necessary and unavoidable corollary, which is, “Our kingdom go.” The condition of complete illumination is complete purgation. Only the purified soul can realize identity with Brahman; or, to change the religious vocabulary, union with God can never be achieved by the Old Adam, who must lose the life of self-will in order to gain the life of the divine will. These principles have been accepted as fundamental and axiomatic by all mystics, of whatever country, faith, and period. When these principles are applied in practice, it is found that the personal kingdom which has to go, if the divine kingdom is to come, consists mainly of two great provinces, passions and distractions. Of the passions it is unnecessary to say much here, for the good reason that so much has been said elsewhere. Furthermore, it is, or should be, self-evident that “Thy kingdom” cannot possibly come for anyone who inhabits a homemade universe created for him by his own fear, greed, malice, and anxiety. To help men to overcome these passions is the aim of all ethical teaching; and that overcoming is an essential preliminary and accompaniment to the life of mystical spirituality. Those who imagine that they can achieve illumination without purgation are extremely mistaken.

“A man,” wrote Meister Eckhart, “has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many other things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox’s or a bear’s, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.”

We make a habit of feeling disquietude about distant evils, in regard to which we can do no good, and we think that such disquietude is a sign of our sensibility and compassion. It would probably be more nearly true to say, with St. John of the Cross, that “disquietude is always vanity, because it serves no good. Yea, even if the whole world were thrown into confusion, and all things in it, disquietude on that account would still be vanity.” What is true of things remote in space and in the future is also true of things remote in the past. We must teach ourselves not to waste our time and our opportunities to know reality by dwelling on our memories. Let the dead bury their dead. “The emptying of the memory,” says St. John of the Cross, “though the advantages of it are not so great as those of the state of union, yet merely because it delivers souls from much sorrow, grief and sadness, besides imperfections and sin, is in itself a great good.”

“Action,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas, “should be something added to the life of prayer, not something taken away from it.”

St. John of the Cross put the whole matter in a single question and answer. Those who rush headlong into good works without having acquired through contemplation the power to act well—what do they accomplish? “Poco mas que nada, y a veces nada, y aun a veces dano.” Little more than nothing, and sometimes nothing whatever, and sometimes even harm. One reason for hell being paved with good intentions is to be found in the intrinsically unsatisfactory nature of actions performed by ordinary unregenerate men and women.

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

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. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation. There can, of course, be knowledge of such an understanding, and this knowledge may be passed on in speech or writing, or by means of other symbols. Such communicable knowledge is useful as a reminder that there have been specific understandings in the past, and that understanding is at all times possible. But we must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin.

During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course. At the turn of the century 56 percent of the pupils in American high schools studied algebra; today less than a quarter of them are so much as introduced to the subject. In 1955, 11 percent of American boys and girls were studying geometry; fifty years ago the figure was 27 percent. Four percent of them now take physics, as against 19 percent in 1900. Fifty percent of American high schools offer no courses in chemistry, 53 percent no courses in physics. This headlong decline in knowledge has not been accompanied by any increases in understanding; for it goes without saying that high school courses in life adjustment do not teach understanding. They teach only conformity to current conventions of personal and collective behavior. There is no substitute for correct knowledge, and in the process of acquiring correct knowledge there is no substitute for concentration and prolonged practice. Except for the unusually gifted, learning, by whatever method, must always be hard work. Unfortunately there are many professional educationists who seem to think that children should never be required to work hard. Wherever educational methods are based on this assumption, children will not in fact acquire much knowledge; and if the methods are followed for a generation or two, the society whic...

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.

“But why do you prate of God?” Meister Eckhart asked; and out of the depth of his understanding of given reality, he added, “Whatever you say of Him is untrue.”

The nature of a conditioned reflex is such that, when the bell rings, the dog salivates, when the much worshiped image is seen, or the much repeated credo, litany, or mantram is pronounced, the heart of the believer is filled with reverence and his mind with faith. And this happens, regardless of the content of the phrase repeated, the nature of the image to which obeisance has been made. He is not responding spontaneously to given reality; he is responding to some thing, or word, or gesture, which automatically brings into play a previously installed post-hypnotic suggestion. Meister Eckhart, that acutest of religious psychologists, clearly recognized this fact. “He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts, prayers, pious offices and so forth than by the fireside or in the stall, in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle His head in a cloak and hide Him under the table. For he who seeks God in settled forms lays hold of the form, while missing the God concealed in it. But he who seeks God in no special guise lays hold of Him as He is in Himself, and such as one lives with the Son and is the life itself.”

“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. Total awareness starts, in a word, with the realization of my ignorance and my impotence.

We know very little and can achieve very little; but we are at liberty, if we so choose, to cooperate with a greater power and a completer knowledge, an unknown quantity at once immanent and transcendent, at once physical and mental, at once subjective and objective. If we cooperate, we shall be all right, even if the worst should happen. If we refuse to cooperate, we shall be all wrong, even in the most propitious of circumstances.

The masters of the spiritual life have little faith in the surface will or the utility, for their particular purposes, of rewards or punishments, and do not indulge in righteous indignation. Experience has taught them that the highest good can never, in the very nature of things, be achieved by moralizing. “Judge not that ye be not judged” is their watchword and total awareness is their method.

Spirituality is the art of achieving union with God, and consists of two branches—asceticism and mysticism, the mortification of the self and that contemplation by means of which the soul makes contact with ultimate Reality. Mortification without contemplation, and contemplation without mortification are both useless, and may even be positively harmful. That is why all genuine mystical literature is also ascetical literature, while all good ascetical literature (such as “The Imitation of Christ”) treats also, explicitly or by implication, of mystical prayer.

And when we ask whether myths are true or not, this is quite an irrelevant question; they just are not true. As I said before, they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.

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. For example, in the Old Testament we read that David sinned in making a census of his people, and was punished by a plague which killed seventy thousand of his subjects, but did not kill David. The expiation was by a substitute, and this idea was taken over in the later, post-gospel theology. In patristic times we find a profound difference between the Greek theologians and the Latin theologians. The Greek theologians were not primarily concerned with the death of Christ; they were concerned with the life. The death was thought to be a mere incident in the life. Their view of the atonement was that it existed, not to save man from guilt, but to save him from the corruption into which he had fallen after the fall of Adam and Eve. And the consequence was that the life was therefore more important than the death. Irenaeus sa...

St. John of the Cross says categorically: “All that the imagination can imagine and the reason conceive and understand in this life is not and cannot be, a proximate means of union with God.” And the same idea is expressed by the great Anglican mystic of the eighteenth century, William Law, who says, “To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God himself made manifest and self-evident in you, will never be your case, either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.”

As Eckhart says, “What is taken in by contemplation is given out in love.” And this is, as I say, the value of the experience. As for the theology of the experience—when it is felt necessary to make a theology of it—this is profoundly simple, and is summed up in the three words which are at the base of virtually all Indian religion and philosophy: “Tat tvam asi” (“thou art That”), in the sense that the deepest part of the soul is identical with the divine nature—that the Atman, the deeper Self, is the same as Brahman, the universal principle. Or in Eckhart’s words, that the Ground of the soul is the same as the Ground of the Godhead. And this idea of course has been expressed in many forms, particularly the idea of the Inner Light, the Spark of the Soul.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player. That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. The speaker is Macbeth; but Macbeth as we know him is Shakespeare’s creation, and it was Shakespeare who put the words of this summing up of the case against human life into Macbeth’s mouth. Between the thought of the dramatist and of the dramatis persona there must have been if not an identity, at least an affinity.

The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without. Eckhart