Island

by Aldous Huxley

The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.” “And the children?” “The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups.” “And so must be told to run along and play.” “Exactly.”

And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behaviour.”

“One has no right,” her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, “one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept . .

Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.

But life among the merchants and officials of the Presidency was oppressively boring. It was an exile, but an exile without any of the compensations of exile, an exile without adventure or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical equivalent of Swansea or Huddersfield.

Adopting English as our stepmother tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and certainly the widest of presents. We gave ourselves a background, a spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being creative in a field where we had never been creative before. Thanks to the Raja and my great-grandfather, there’s an Anglo-Palanese literature—of which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light.”

Patriotism is not enough. But neither is anything else. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.’

“It’s last year’s,” said Murugan apologetically. “But I don’t suppose there’s been much change since then.” “There,” Will assured him, “you’re mistaken. If the styles weren’t completely changed every year, there’d be no reason for buying new things before the old ones are worn out. You don’t understand the first principles of modern consumerism.”

Murugan has had neither. Or rather he’s had the opposite of both. He’s had miseducation in Europe—Swiss governesses, English tutors, American movies, everybody’s advertisements— and he’s had reality eclipsed for him by his mother’s brand of spirituality.

I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don’t use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict.” “With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks,” said Dr Robert. “Or rather with everything—but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts.

Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism.

Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty.

Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, tot...

“Solving them wasn’t difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being over-populated, we have plenty. But although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to over-consume.

Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars —that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf’s retarded maturation.

Perfume, women and prayer—those were the three things that Mohammed loved above all others.

‘Pebbles’, say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music. The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West, is a figure in a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica.

A century of research on the moksha-medicine has clearly shown that quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences.

Dualism . . .Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. “I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance, “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words; but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously minded dualist calls home-made spirits from the vasty deep: The non-dualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

What kind of religion is she supposed to be practising?” “She’s practising,” Vijaya explained, “the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side.” “And do you high-brows encourage this kind of thing?” “We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making flytraps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium.

“In theological terms,” said Vijaya, “the moksha-medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces—pre-mystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces.”

“Time even in this place of timeless meditation. Time for dinner breaking incorrigibly into eternity.” He laughed. Never take yes for an answer. The nature of things is always no.

“which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”

“Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens.”

Food plus caress plus contact plus ‘good’ equals love. And love equals pleasure, love equals satisfaction.”

“But Pavlov purely for a good purpose. Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion. Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brain washing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals, and tycoons.”

“That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.”

For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest—just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there’s a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long-range rockets. And in China it’s the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West—for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East that it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they’re for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that’s for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive.”

How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a non-visualizer?

“And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty per cent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.” “Dangerous?” “Because these people are the propagandist’s predestine victims. In an oldfashioned, pre-scientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty per cent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to re-organize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”

“And the principle,” said Mrs Narayan, “is explicitly taught as well as progressively applied. In the lower forms we do the teaching in terms of analogies with familiar animals. Cats like to be by themselves. Sheep like being together. Martens are fierce and can’t be tamed. Guinea-pigs are gentle and friendly. Are you a cat person or a sheep person, a guinea-pig person or a marten person? Talk about it in animal parables, and even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness.” “And later on,” said Mr Menon, “when they come to read the Gita, we tell them about the link between constitution and religion. Sheep-people and guinea-pig-people love ritual and public ceremonies and revivalistic emotion; their temperamental preferences can be directed into the Way of Devotion. Cat-people like to be alone, and their private broodings can become the Way of Self-Knowledge. Marten-people want to do things, and the problem is how to transform their driving aggressiveness into the Way of Disinterested Action.”

Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol-manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude. Hence all those pathetic and repulsive creatures that so astonished me on my first trip abroad.”

We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet.

We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind. If the politicians in the newly independent countries had any sense,” he added, “they’d do the same. But they want to throw their weight around; they want to have armies, they want to catch up with the motorized television-addicts of America and Europe. You people have no choice,” he went on. “You’re irretrievably committed to applied physics and chemistry, with all their dismal consequences, military, political and social. But the underdeveloped countries aren’t committed. They don’t have to follow your example. They’re still free to take the road we’ve taken—the road of applied biology, the road of fertility control and the limited production and selective industrialization which fertility control make possible, the road that leads towards happiness from the inside out, through health, through awareness, through a change in one’s attitude towards the world; not towards the mirage of happiness from the outside in, through toys and pills and non-stop distractions. They

The group of the visualizers, who thought in geometrical terms, like the ancient Greeks, and the group of the non-visualizers who preferred algebra and imageless abstractions.

“Symbols are public,” the young man at the blackboard was saying as Will and Mrs Narayan entered the room. He drew a row of little circles, numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4, n. “These are people,” he explained. Then from each of the little circles he drew a line that connected it with a square at the left of the board. S he wrote in the centre of the square. “S is the system of symbols that the people use when they want to talk to one another. They all speak the same language—English, Palanese, Eskimo, it depends where they happen to live. Words are public; they belong to all the speakers of a given language: they’re listed in dictionaries. And now let’s look at the things that happen out there.” He pointed through the open window. Gaudy against a white cloud, half a dozen parrots came sailing into view, passed behind a tree and were gone. The teacher drew a second square at the opposite side of the board, labelled it E for ‘events’ and connected it by lines to the circles. “What happens out there is public—or at least fairly public,” he qualified. “And what happens when somebody speaks or writes words—that’s also public. But the things that go on inside these little circles are private. Private.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Private.” He rubbed his forehead. “Private.” He touched his eyelids and the tip of his nose with a brown forefinger. “Now let’s make a simple experiment. Say the word ‘pinch.’ ” “Pinch,” said the class in ragged unison. “Pinch . . .” “P-I-N-C-H—pinch. That’s...

‘Don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labelling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the other shore.’ ”

conceptualize

“The Greeks,” said Mrs Narayan, “were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them, it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads. Without those tension-reducing hornpipes, the moral philosophy would have been impotent, and without the moral philosophy the horn-pipers wouldn’t have known where to go next. All we’ve done is to take a leaf out of the old Greek book.”

“How can anyone take yes for an answer?” he countered. “Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!”

“And yet,” said Susila, “in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying—three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don’t live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks and in due course he dies—but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”

Soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. Da mi basia mille.

“I’d put it another way. We help them to go on practising the art of living even while they’re dying. Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us—that’s the art of living, and that’s what one can help the dying to go on practising.

Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. “It’s what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they’re crazy—just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies.”

“Well, yes—it did,” she said after a moment of silence. “So what did you do about it?” “I did what they teach you to do—tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened.”

handkerchief

One, two, three, four . . . The clock in the kitchen struck twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.

It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with oneness.

“What’s so funny?” she asked. “Eternity,” he answered. “Believe it or not, it’s as real as shit.” “Excellent!” she said approvingly.

Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker.