The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

“The self at one with God,” and by Plotinus’s description

of spiritual ecstasy, “The flight of the alone to the Alone.”

“intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation and love.”

That Aldous Huxley intuitively knew the reality of God—or “The Divine Ground of Our Being” or J. D. Salinger’s “Fat Lady” or George Lucas’s “The Force” or Bill Wilson’s “Higher Power” or Emerson’s “Divine Spark”—is beautifully expressed in these essays.

“Now there is approaching that clear white light of the Void. Do not

be

afraid. Do not be afraid. It is your friend. Go fearlessly into that Light o...

“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.” If, as he had earlier observed, the central technique for man to learn is “the art of obtaining freedom from the fundamental human disability of egoism,” Huxley achieved that freedom.

“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.”

Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces

bestowed upon us;

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.

terms

We have somehow to combine relaxation with activity.

This is what in theological terms is called “cooperating with grace.” And let us not forget, grace exists on every level. There is what may be called animal-grace, which is

F. W. H. Myers’s Human Personality,

what may be called spiritual grace: the awareness of the total universal consciousness, the awareness of God, the awareness of the finite

as in some sort a manifestation of the total Infinite.

Professor Renshaw of the University of Ohio, who has immensely increased both the powers of perception and the powers of memory by applying Gestalt psychology in a perfectly sensible and simple way.

How can we open ourselves up to the grace of seeing God, to use Eckhart’s words, “seeing God with the same eye that God sees us”?

On general principles, I would say that the means employed for this purpose should resemble the end envisaged. For example, the end envisaged is a form of consciousness entirely free from the partiality of individual ego-consciousness.

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.

that the minute in itself is essentially neutral; that both the positive and the negative—both life and death—go on in it; that God sends his rain upon the just and unjust; that there is an essentially equal view of the world. Although as biological creatures we cannot accept our own destruction, we have as intellectual creatures to admit that the negative powers have exactly the same right to exist as the positive powers; yet of course (another paradox), we have to do our best to preserve the positive powers, the positive aspects of the world, in every way we can. But intellectually we must be aware

that every moment is a “quiet watershed whence equally the seas of life and death are fed.” And this is a sort of reminder we have to go on making. It will not necessarily console us in moments of grief or crisis, but it is a preparation. It prepares the ground for what is the final end—this seeing of the world with the impartial eye of the divine intelligence.

“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.

that we as we think of ourselves are a very small part even of the physiological and subconscious life immediately available to us; that we do not control our bodies and we do not even control our thoughts. After all, the popular language is very clear on that subject. 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 this, as I say, applies to every level of activity from the simplest physiological acts to acts of psychophysical skill, going up to the most complicated ones like playing the violin, playing the piano, and so on. And finally, it is exactly the same principle which holds good in the religious life, where the aim is somehow to get out of the light—what the Quakers call the Inner Light. We have to get out of the light and let it shine. (And most of our lives, of course, are spent in eclipsing this light with all possible means at our disposal.)

And the methods of doing this are fairly clear: We have to live a life where, with the minimum of negative emotions, the minimum of malice, the obvious moral commandments have to be fulfilled. And then there is this intellectual preparation of perceiving that the nature of the universe is such that our pretensions to be absolute and separate are ridiculous—not only ridiculous but fatal. We have to remember this all the time, as often as we can, and, I think, we have to prepare the mind in one way or another, to accept this uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater not-self, which we can also spell as Self with a large “S,” the Atman-Brahman. This, I think, is as much as I can say at the present time.

As the individual grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously increased. But these gains are offset by a certain deterioration in the quality of immediate apprehension, a blunting and loss of intuitive power.

For the theocentric mystics both of East and West, it is axiomatic that one must “seek first the kingdom of God” (the timeless kingdom of an eternal God) “and his righteousness” (the righteousness of eternity over and above the righteousness of life in time); and that, only if one does this, is there any prospect of “all the rest being added.”

Spiritual phenomena, on the

other hand, belong to the timeless and eternal order, within which the temporal order has its less real existence. The mystics’ attitude to “miracles” is one of intellectual acceptance, and emotional and volitional detachment.

Death is wholly transcended only when time is transcended; immortality

is for the consciousness that has broken through the temporal into the timeless.

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.

time provides the embodied soul with opportunities for transcending

time; every instant of every temporal sequence is potentially the door through which we can, if we so desire, break through into the eternal.

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

But all these patternings and symmetries and recurrences are characteristic, not of time as it is in itself, but of space and matter as they are associated with time in our consciousness.

Now, space is a symbol of eternity; for in space there is freedom, there is reversibility of movement, and there is nothing in the nature of a space, as there is in that of time, which condemns those involved in it to inevitable death and dissolution. Moreover, when space contains material bodies, the possibility of orderliness, balance, symmetry, and pattern arises—the possibility, in a word, of that Beauty which, along with Goodness and Truth, takes its place in the trinity of manifested Godhead.

all the evidence points to the fact that it is the individual soul, incarnated at a particular moment of time, which alone can establish contact with the Divine, to say nothing of other souls. The belief (which is based on obvious and self-evident facts) that Humanity is represented at

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.

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.

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.

alter-egoism

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

The most we are justified in saying is that the egoism and alter-egoism, which ascetic practices are designed to root out, automatically perpetuate the state of nonenlightenment.

awareness has reached the point where any given individual can (if he so desires, knows how, and is prepared to fulfill certain conditions), open himself up to the unitive knowledge of spiritual reality.