The Divine Within

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was one of the great minds of the 20^th century. His grandfather was Darwin's bulldog, T.H. Huxley, and his brother the evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley who was the first director-general of UNESCO. Many readers will be familiar with Huxley's volume The Perennial Philosophy, and will find that this book of 26 essays published in the magazine Vedanta and the West covers this ground but much more. There are brilliant essays on time, Shakespeare, progress, liberation, distractions, idolatry, action and contemplation, Zen and symbolism. Some readers may remember that I reviewed his Santa Barbara lectures a couple of years ago under the title The Human Situation. His famous work, Brave New World has come to the fore during the pandemic – and while this dystopian vision is based on enslavement, nearly his last book was Island, where he envisages a new system based on freedom. I read this book more than 30 years ago with my pupils at Winchester.

The introduction by Huston Smith is illuminating in revealing Huxley's personality and wit. He remarked on meeting Alan Watts that he was a curious man, 'Half monk, half racetrack operator.' Smith describes Huxley's evolution as a writer and mystic, which makes good prelude to the first essay on 'the minimum working hypothesis', with which I have to say I agree – see what you think:

There is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations.

The Ground is at once transcendent and immanent.

It is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground.

To achieve this union with the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence.

There is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end.

The more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; the Tao is a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living Law of mortification and self-transcending awareness.

He goes on to say that most people prefer their egos and do not wish to mortify them. They may have a good time, 'but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis, tyranny and alcoholism, revolution, and in default of an adequate religious hypothesis the choice between some lunatic idolatry, such as nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair… throughout recorded history the great majority of men and women have preferred the risk – no, the positive certainty – of such disasters to the tiresome whole-time job of seeking first the kingdom of God. In the long run, we get exactly what we ask for.' (p. 16) My own life experience and the current world situation seem to me to confirm Huxley's diagnosis.

Despite this pessimistic realism, there many inspiring and instructive passages, and Huxley himself maintained a position of idealistic realism in relation to human prospects. The following chapter consists of seven profound meditations on being, beauty, love, peace, holiness, grace and joy. He shows how different temperaments correspond to religious orientations, although in each case the danger of dogma and idolatry lurks, especially if we prioritise ideas over experience. This leads into a discussion of the predominantly verbal nature of education and the lack of training of the mind-body where the art is to combine relaxation with activity. His guidance on the spiritual life is drawn from the great saints and sages where 'knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.' (p. 66)

He delves more deeply into this issue in a chapter on knowledge and understanding where he characterises knowledge as conceptual, meaning that it can be passed on by means of words or other symbols. Understanding, however, is not conceptual and cannot therefore be passed on. It is an immediate experience, which can only be talked about rather than shared. In this sense, understanding corresponds to insight and has the potential to take us beyond cultural conditioning as well as 'over-simplification, over-generalisation, and over-abstraction.' Beliefs can become propositional, removed from the core of direct spiritual experience. We can also learn about human nature from great literature – Greek tragedies and great novels like those of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The process, however, involves first acquiring cultural knowledge (and an ego) before going beyond it.

Another interesting essay discusses substitutes for liberation, in which he himself indulged in the 1920s. Real transcendence arises in this way: 'when the phenomenal ego transcends itself, the essential Self is free to realise, in terms of finite consciousness, the fact of its own eternity, together with the correlative fact that every particular in the world of experience partakes of the timeless and infinite.' (p. 127) Being anchored in the timeless enables a fullness of life. Huxley notes that we all feel the radical inadequacy of our personal existence and ordinary quality of consciousness, so we may go for what he calls (a neutral) horizontal self-transcendence in identifying with art, science, law – without which there would be no civilisation. Then there is 'downward self-transcendence' represented by hedonistic overindulgence, for instance in sex, intoxicants or even crowd behaviour. These are only temporary escapes that bring one right back to the ego and the need for the horizontal to be transmuted into the vertical.

Action and contemplation are ideally rhythmical and complementary, but for Huxley our primary allegiance belongs to the timeless, eternity, which in Christian terms means seeking first the Kingdom of God to which all things can then be added. Secular utopias are ultimately illusory, and Jesus himself maintained that his kingdom was not of this world: radical transformation can only be spiritual and not exclusively political, and in this respect poetry and music can play an important role in giving form to the essentially formless by spatialising time and representing space 'as a symbol of that timeless state, towards which, through all the impediments of ignorance, the human spirit consciously or unconsciously aspires.' (p. 85) There is much food for reflection as well as spiritual nourishment in these essays.