The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West

by Aldous Huxley

The Atman is the Witness of the individual mind and its operations. It is absolute knowledge…. The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and of Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity.

language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten.

The knower and the known are one.

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object.

The apparently simple act of mimicry well illustrates the extraordinary nature of the feats performed by the physiological intelligence. When a parrot (making use, let us remember, of the beak, tongue and throat of a bird) imitates the sounds produced by the lips, teeth, palate and vocal cords of a man articulating words, what precisely happens? Responding in some as yet entirely uncomprehended way to the conscious mind’s desire to imitate some remembered or immediately perceived event, the physiological intelligence sets in motion large numbers of muscles, co-ordinating their efforts with such exquisite skill that the result is a more or less perfect copy of the original. Working on its own level, the conscious mind not merely of a parrot, but of the most highly gifted of human beings, would find itself completely baffled by a problem of comparable complexity.

The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of transcendent beauty….

The world as it appears to common sense consists of an indefinite number of successive and presumably causally connected events, involving an indefinite number of separate, individual things, lives and thoughts, the whole constituting a presumably orderly cosmos. It is in order to describe, discuss and manage this common-sense universe that human languages have been developed.

IN ENGLISH, words of Latin origin tend to carry overtones of intellectual, moral and aesthetic “classiness"—overtones which are not carried, as a rule, by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.

For “selfness,” though it means precisely the same, carries none of the high-class overtones that go with “personality.”

man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is, for them, the original sin, and to die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue.

since the mind-body is capable of an enormous variety of experiences, we are free to identify ourselves with an almost infinite number of possible objects—with the pleasures of gluttony, for example, or intemperance, or sensuality; with money, power or fame; with our family, regarded as a possession or actually an extension and projection of our own selfness; with our goods and chattels, our hobbies, our collections; with our artistic or scientific talents; with some favourite branch of knowledge, some fascinating “special subject”; with our professions, our political parties, our churches; with our pains and illnesses; with our memories of success or misfortune, our hopes, fears and schemes for the future; and finally with the eternal Reality within which and by which all the rest has its being.

Sometimes crisis alone, without any preparatory training, is sufficient to make a man forget to be his customary self and become, for the time being, something quite different. Thus the most unlikely people will, under the influence of disaster, temporarily turn into heroes, martyrs, selfless labourers for the good of their fellows. Very often, too, the proximity of death produces similar results.

in critical emergencies, soldiers specifically trained to cope with that kind of thing tend to forget the inborn and acquired idiosyncrasies with which they normally identify their being and, transcending selfness, to behave in the same, one-pointed, better-than-personal way.

The biographies of the saints testify unequivocally to the fact that spiritual training leads to a transcendence of personality,

When is a man in mere understanding? I answer, “When a man sees one thing separated from another.” And when is a man above mere understanding? That I can tell you: “When a man sees All in all, then a man stands beyond mere understanding.” Eckhart

for knowledge is a function of being; but the thing known is independent of the mode and nature of the knower. What the poet and painter see, and try to record for us, is actually there, waiting to be apprehended by anyone who has the right kind of faculties.

the visible world is nothing but the Mind.

“Listen to a man of experience: thou wilt learn more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach thee more than thou canst acquire from the mouth of a magister.”

To set up what you like against what you dislike— This is the disease of the mind.

Do not strive to seek after the True, Only cease to cherish opinions.

In brief, Shu and Hu are devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you, and in the future.

hubris

nemesis.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Pascal

Of this second kind of paradox the masters of Taoism and Zen Buddhism were particularly fond. The latter, indeed, made use of paralogisms and even of nonsense as a device for “taking the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Aspirants to the life of perfection were encouraged to practice discursive meditation on some completely non-logical formula. The result was a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole self-centred and world-centred discursive process, a sudden breaking through from “reason” (in the language of scholastic philosophy) to intuitive “intellect,” capable of a genuine insight into the divine Ground of all being. This method strikes us as odd and eccentric; but the fact remains that it worked to the extent of producing in many persons the final metanoia, or transformation of consciousness and character.

Words are not facts,

For theory is not practice, and words are not the things for which they stand.

With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization. Lankavatara Sutra

It is by following, and then abandoning, the rational and emotional path of “word and discrimination” that one is enabled to enter upon the intellectual or intuitive “path of realization.”

Appearances are discriminated by the sense organs, then reified by naming, so that words are taken for things and symbols are used as the measure of reality. According to this view, language is a main source of the sense of separateness

Names, Appearances and Discrimination.

Our responses to familiar words are conditioned reflexes. By changing the stimulus, we can do something to change the response.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition. Jalal-uddin Rumi

At no period in history has cleverness been so highly valued or, in certain directions, so widely and efficiently trained as at the present time. And at no time have intellectual vision and spirituality been less esteemed, or the End to which they are proximate means less widely and less earnestly sought for.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.