The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

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.”