The Divine Within Quotes

“Meaningless pseudoknowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“The triumph of humanism is the defeat of humanity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“BEING God is. That is the primordial fact. It is in order that we may discover this fact for ourselves, by direct experience, that we exist. The final end and purpose of every human being is the unitive knowledge of God’s being. What is the nature of God’s being? The invocation to the Lord’s Prayer gives us the answer. “Our Father which art in heaven.” God is, and is ours—immanent in each sentient being, the life of all lives, the spirit animating every soul. But this is not all. God is also the transcendent Creator and Law-Giver, the Father who loves and, because He loves, also educates His children. And finally, God is “in heaven.” That is to say, He possesses a mode of existence which is incommensurable and incompatible with the mode of existence possessed by human beings in their natural, unspiritualized condition. Because He is ours and immanent, God is very close to us. But because He is also in heaven, most of us are very far from God. The saint is one who is as close to God as God is close to him. It is through prayer that men come to the unitive knowledge of God. But the life of prayer is also a life of mortification, of dying to self. It cannot be otherwise; for the more there is of self, the less there is of God. Our pride, our anxiety, our lusts for power and pleasure are God-eclipsing things. So too is that greedy attachment to certain creatures which passes too often for unselfishness and should be called, not altruism, but alter-egoism. And hardly less God-eclipsing is the seemingly self-sacrificing service which we give to any cause or ideal that falls short of the divine. Such service is always idolatry, and makes it impossible for us to worship God as we should, much less to know Him. God’s kingdom cannot come unless we begin by making our human kingdoms go. Not only the mad and obviously evil kingdoms, but also the respectable ones—the kingdoms of the scribes and pharisees, the good citizens and pillars of society, no less than the kingdoms of the publicans and sinners. God’s being cannot be known by us, if we choose to pay our attention and our allegiance to something else, however creditable that something else may seem in the eyes of the world.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“We cannot see the moon and the stars so long as we choose to remain within the aura of street lamps and whisky advertisements.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“We have to learn, so to speak, to get out of our own light, because with our personal self—this idolatrously worshiped self—we are continually standing in the light of this wider self—this not-self, if you like—which is associated with us and which this standing in the light prevents. We eclipse the illumination from within.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“Idolatry is in fact the worship of a part—especially the self or projection of the self—as though it were the absolute totality. And as soon as this happens, general disaster occurs. Nothing is clearer in this present mid-point of the twentieth century than that its religion is idolatrous nationalism. There are the nominal religions—Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on; but if you inquire what the actions of people mean, it is perfectly clear that the real religion is nationalism; that we worship the national state; that actually we make use of the traditional religions to buttress the national state. . . .”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“In theory, deficiencies in knowledge can be made good simply by changing the curriculum. In practice a change in the curriculum will do little good, unless there is a corresponding change in the point of view of professional educationists. For the trouble with American educationists, writes a distinguished member of their profession, Dr. H. L. Dodge, is that they “regard any subject from personal grooming to philosophy as equally important or interchangeable in furthering the process of self-realization. This anarchy of values has led to the displacement of the established disciplines of science and the humanities by these new subjects.” Whether professional educationists can be induced to change their current attitudes is uncertain. Should it prove impossible, we must fall back on the comforting thought that time never stands still and that nobody is immortal. What persuasion and the threat of national decline fail to accomplish, retirement, high blood pressure, and death will bring to pass, more slowly, it is true, but much more surely.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“given. When used with an obstinate consistency, self-will creates a private universe walled off impenetrably from the light of spiritual reality; and within these private universes the self-willed go their way, unhelped and unillumined, from accident to random accident, or from calculated evil to calculated evil. It is of such that St. Francis de Sales is speaking when he says, “God did not deprive thee of the operation of his love, but thou didst deprive His love of thy cooperation. God would never have rejected thee, if thou hadst not rejected Him.” To be clearly and constantly aware of the divine, guidance is given only to those who are already far advanced in the life of the spirit. In its earlier stages we have to work, not by the direct perception of God’s successive graces, but by faith in their existence. We have to accept as a working hypothesis that the events of our lives are not merely fortuitous, but deliberate tests of intelligence and character, specially devised occasions (if properly used) for spiritual advance.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“Belial”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“Mammon”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“parrot talking is the person himself making an utterance. The more you reflect on this, the stranger it is,”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“The politics of those who regard eternity as the ultimate reality are concerned with the present and with the ways and means of organizing the present world in such a way that it will impose the fewest possible obstacles in the way of individual liberation from time and igno-rance; those, on the contrary, who regard time as the ultimate reality are concerned primarily with the future and regard the present world and its inhab-itants as mere rubble, cannon-fodder are potential slave-labor to be exploited, terrorized, liquidated, or blown to smithereens, in order that persons who may never be born, in a future time about which nothing can be known with the smallest degree of certainty, may have the kind of a wonderful time which present-day revolutionaries and war-makers think they ought to have. If the lunacy were not criminal, one would be tempted to laugh.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment

“LOVE God is love, and there are blessed moments when even to unregenerate human beings it is granted to know Him as love. But it is only in the saints that this knowledge becomes secure and continuous. By those in the earlier stages of the spiritual life God is apprehended predominantly as law. It is through obedience to God the Law-Giver that we come at last to know God the loving Father. The law which we must obey, if we would know God as love, is itself a law of love. “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.” We cannot love God as we should, unless we love our neighbors as we should. We cannot love our neighbors as we should, unless we love God as we should. And, finally, we cannot realize God as the active, all-pervading principle of love, until we ourselves have learned to love Him and our fellow creatures. Idolatry consists in loving a creature more than we love God. There are many kinds of idolatry, but all have one thing in common: namely, self-love. The presence of self-love is obvious in the grosser forms of sensual indulgence, or the pursuit of wealth and power and praise. Less manifestly, but none the less fatally, it is present in our inordinate affections for individuals, persons, places, things, and institutions. And even in men’s most heroic sacrifices to high causes and noble ideals, self-love has its tragic place. For when we sacrifice ourselves to any cause or ideal that is lower than the highest, less than God Himself, we are merely sacrificing one part of our unregenerate being to another part which we and other people regard as more creditable. Self-love still persists, still prevents us from obeying perfectly the first of the two great commandments. God can be loved perfectly only by those who have killed out the subtlest, the most nobly sublimated forms of self-love. When this happens, when we love God as we should and therefore know God as love, the tormenting problem of evil ceases to be a problem, the world of time is seen to be an aspect of eternity, and in some inexpressible way, but no less really and certainly, the struggling, chaotic multiplicity of life is reconciled in the unity of the all-embracing divine charity.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment