The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

by Aldous Huxley

doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind, in which understanding may come to us. What is this state? Clearly it is not any state of limited consciousness. Reality as it is given moment by moment cannot be understood by a mind acting in obedience to post-hypnotic suggestion, or so conditioned by its emotionally charged memories that it responds to the living now as though it were the dead then. Nor is the mind that has been trained in concentration any better equipped to understand reality. For concentration is merely systematic exclusion, the shutting away from consciousness of all but one thought, one ideal, one image, or one negation of all thoughts, ideals, and images. But however tru...

these things can lead only to a state of ecstatic dissociation, in which one particular aspect of reality, the so-called spiritual aspect, may be apprehended. If reality is to be understood in its fullness, as it is given moment by moment, there must be an awareness which is not limited, either deliberately by piety or concent...

comes when we are totally aware—aware to the limits of our mental and physical potentialities. This, of course, is a very ancient doctrine. “Know thyself” is a piece of advice which is as old as civilization, and probably a great deal older. To follow that advice, a man must do more than indulge in introspection. If I would know myself, I must know my environment: for as a body, I am part of the environment, a natural object among other natural objects; and, as a mind, I consist to a great extent of my immediate reactions to the environment and of my secondary reactions to those primary rea...

limitations of the thing which each of us calls “I,” and the enormity, the utter absu...

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

I do not invent my best thoughts; I find them.

Total awareness, then, reveals the following facts: that I am profoundly ignorant, that I am impotent to the point of helplessness, and that the most valuable elements in my personality are unknown quantities existing “out there,” as mental objects more or less completely independent of my control. This discovery may seem at first rather humiliating and even depressing. But if I wholeheartedly accept them, the facts become a source of peace, a reason for serenity and cheerfulness. I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am—unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied, but alive and kicking. In spite of everything, I survive, I get by, sometimes I even get on. From these two sets of facts—my survival on the one hand and my ignorance and impotence on the other—I can only infer that the not-I, which looks after my body and gives me my best ideas, must be amazingly intelligent, knowledgeable, and strong. As a self-centered

ego, I do my best to interfere with the beneficent workings of this not-I. But in spite of my likes and dislikes, in spite of my malice, my infatuations, my gnawing anxieties, in spite of all my overvaluation of words, in spite of my self-stultifying insistence on living, not in present reality, but in memory and anticipation, this not-I, with whom I am associated, sustains me, preserves me, gives me a long succession of second chances. 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.

These conclusions are only the first fruits of total awareness. Yet richer harvests are to follow. In my ignorance I am sure that I am eternally I. This conviction is rooted in emotionally charg...

Cross, the memory has been emptied, can I escape from the sense of my watertight separateness and so prepare myself for the understanding, moment by moment, of reality on all its levels. But the memory cannot be emptied by an act of will, or by systematic discipline or by concentration—even by concentration on the idea of emptiness. It can be emptied only by total awareness. 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, duri...

are conditioned, verbalized reactions to primary reactions. Total awareness is a primary, choiceless, impartial response to the present situation as a whole. Ther...

to the primary reaction, to the pure cognitive apprehension of the situation. If memories of verbal formulas of praise or blame should make their appearance in consciousness, they are to be ...

“Judge not that ye be not judged” is their watchword and total awareness is their method.

Be aware impartially, realistically, without judging, without reacting in terms of remembered words to your present cognitive reactions. If you do this, the memory will be emptied, knowledge and pseudoknowledge will be relegated to their proper place, and you will have understanding—in other words, you will be in direct contact with reality at every instant. Better still, you will discover what Carl Rogers calls your “delicate and sensitive tenderness towards others.” And not only your tenderness, the cosmic tenderness, the fundamental all-rightness of the universe—in spite of death, in spite of suffering. “Though He

slay me, yet will I trust Him.” This is the utterance of someone who is totally aware. And another such utterance is, “God is love.” From the standpoint of common sense, the first is the raving of a lunatic, the second flies in the face of all experience and is obviously untrue. But common sense is not based on total awareness; it is a product of convention, or organized memories of other people’s words, of personal experiences limited by passion and value judgments, of hallowed notions and naked self-interest. Total awareness opens the way to understanding, and when any given situation is understood, the nature of all reality is made manifest, and the nonsensical utterances of the mystics are seen to be true, or at least as nearly true as it is possible for a verbal expression of the ineffable to be.

One in all and all in One; samsara and nirvana are the same; multiplicity is unity, and unity is not so much one as not-two; all things are void, and yet all things are the Dharma-Body of the Buddha—and so on. So far as conceptual knowledge is concerned, such phrases are completel...

In view of all this, the serious student should pay no attention to any descriptions of firsthand experiences, except those written by saints and by persons who show evidence of advancing toward saintliness, and to no secondhand documents except those written by sound scholars, who may be relied upon to give an accurate account of saints and their teachings.

the religion of knowledge about the Divine rather than direct acquaintance with the Divine). And these two types of religion have, of course, always existed, and we have to discuss them both.

And this insistence on the inefficacy of symbolic religion for this ultimate purpose of union with God has been stressed by all the Oriental religions too. We find it in the literature of Hinduism, the literature of Mahayana Buddhism, of Zen, of Taoism, and so on;

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.”

Very briefly, let us discuss what is the mystical experience. I take it that the mystical experience is essentially the being aware of and, while the experience lasts, being identified with a form of pure consciousness—of unstructured, transpersonal consciousness, lying, so to speak, upstream from the ordinary discursive consciousness of every day. It is a non-egotistic consciousness, a kind of formless and timeless consciousness, which seems to underlie the consciousness of the separate ego in time.

It makes possible a sense of unity, of solidarity, with the world. It brings about the possibility of a kind of universal love and compassion, that kind of ungrudging love and compassion which is stressed so much in the gospel, where Christ says, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” 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.

These phrases become comprehensible to one who has passed through this kind of experience. There is certainly an overcoming of the fear of death, a conviction that the soul has become identical with a kind of absolute principle which expresses itself every moment in its totality. There is an acceptance of suffering in the self, and a passionate desire to alleviate suffering in others. There is, in a word, a combination of what the Buddhists call prajna paramita, which is the wisdom of the other shore, with maha karuna, which is universal compassion. 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.

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...

Frank C. Laubach, has called “determined sensitiveness.” This is a very remarkable phrase. You don’t do anything, but you are determined to be sensitive to letting something be done within you. And one has this expressed by some of the great masters of the spiritual life in the West.

You must somehow combine activity with relaxation. You must let go of this clutching personal self in order to let this deeper Self within you come through and perform—one may say—its miracles, which you interfere with. And, in a certain sense, one can say that what we are doing all the time is to get into our own light. We eclipse our deeper Self by our superficial selves, and so don’t permit this life-force, this light (whatever you like to call it), which is—as we discover as we let go—an empirical fact within us, to come through. In

effect the whole of the technique of proficiency in every field, including this highest form of spiritual proficiency, is a diseclipsing process—a process of getting out of our own light and permitting this thing to come through.

The tree shall be known by its fruits.

And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must

“The more [science] discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.”

this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tuam asi (“That art thou”); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is.