Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Those who vainly reason without understanding the truth are lost in the jungle of the Vijnanas (the various forms of relative knowledge), running about here and there and trying to justify their view of ego-substance.
The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb), which is not the realm of those given over to mere reasoning.., Pure in its own nature and free from the category of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled Buddha-womb, which is wrongly apprehended by sentient beings.
Lankavatara Sutra One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures, One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities. The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water, And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon.
The Dharma-body (the Absolute) of all the Buddhas enters into my own being.
And my own being is found in union with theirs...
The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame; Like space it knows no boundaries, Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness.
It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it; You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it, And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak and it is dumb; The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.
Yung-chia Ta-shih I am not competent, nor is this the place to discuss the doctrinal differences between Buddhism and Hinduism. Let it suffice to point out that, when he insisted that human beings arc by nature ‘non-Atman,’ the Buddha was evidently speaking about the personal self and not the universal Self. The Brahman controversialists, who appear in certain of the Pali scriptures, never so much as mention the Vedanta doctrine of the identity of Atman and Godhead and the non-identity of ego and Atman. What they maintain and Gautama denies is the substantial nature and eternal persistence of the individual psyche. ‘As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so docs he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed).’ About the existence of the Atman that is Brahman, as about most other metaphysical matters, the Buddha declines to speak, on the ground that such discussions do not tend to edification or spiritual progress among the members of a monastic order, such as he had founded. But though it has its dangers, though it may become the most absorbing, because the most serious and noblest, of distractions, metaphysical thinking is unavoidable and finally necessary. Even the Hinayanists found this, and the later Mahayanists were to develop, in connection with the practice of their religion, a splendid and imposing system of cosmological, ethical and psychological thought. This system was based upon the postulates of a strict idealism and professed to dispense with the idea of God. But moral and spiritual experience was too strong for philosophical theory, and under the inspiration of direct experience, the writers of the Mahayana sutras found themselves using all their ingenuity to explain why the Tathagata and the Bodhisattvas display an infinite charity towards beings that do not really exist. At the same time they stretched the framework of subjective idealism so as to make room for Universal Mind; qualified the idea of soullessness with the doctrine that, if purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind of Buddha-womb; and, while maintaining godlessness, asserted that this realizable Universal Mind is the inner consciousness of the eternal Buddha and that the Buddha-mind is associated with ‘a great compassionate heart which desires the liberation of every sentient being and bestows divine grace on all who make a serious effort to achieve man’s final end. In a word, despite their inauspicious vocabulary, the best of the Mahayana sutras contain an authentic formulation of the Perennial Philosophy - a formulation which in some respects (as we shall see when we come to the section, ‘God in the World’) is more complete than any other.
In India, as in Persia, Mohammedan thought came to be enriched by the doctrine that God is immanent as well as transcendent, while to Mohammedan practice were added the moral disciplines and ‘spiritual exercises,’ by means of which the soul is prepared for contemplation or the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. It is a significant historical fact that the poet-saint Kabir is claimed as a coreligionist both by Moslems and Hindus. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.
Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.
Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For 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. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.’ For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning ‘two’ should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys-(as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis-(as in dishonourable) are both derived from ‘duo.’ The cognate his gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (‘blunder’, literally ‘two-sight’). Traces of that ‘second which leads you astray’ can be found in ‘dubious,’
‘doubt’ and Zweifel - for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its ‘two-timers.’ Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division - a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy ‘two’ makes another decisive appearance.
Here it may be remarked that the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unification under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. But excessive privilege and power are standing temptations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty, oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive knowledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another.
Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence.
My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.
St Catherine of Genoa In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself.
St Bernard I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!’
Bayazid of Bistun Two of the recorded anecdotes about this Sufi saint deserve to be quoted here. ‘When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, “Four years.” They said, “How can that be?” He answered, “I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years. The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one’s life.”’ On another occasion someone knocked at the saint’s door and cried, ‘Is Bayazid here?’ Bayazid answered, ‘Is anybody here except God?’
To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, for the Ground of God and
the Ground of the Soul are one and the same.
Eckhart The spirit possesses God essentially in naked nature, and God the spirit.
Ruysbroeck For though she sink all sinking in the oneness of divinity, she never touches bottom. For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator. And here one cannot speak of the soul any more, for she has lost her nature vonder in the oneness of divine essence. There she is no more called soul, but is called immeasurable being.
Eckhart The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
Eckhart ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.’ Or perhaps it might be more accurate to use the verb transitively and say, I live, yet not I; for it is the Logos who lives me’ - lives me as an actor lives his part. In such a case, of course, the actor is always infinitely superior to the rôle. Where real life is concerned, there arc no Shakespearean characters, there are only Addisonian Catos or, more often, grotesque Monsieur Perrichons and Charley’s Aunts mistaking themselves for Julius Caesar or the Prince of Denmark. But by a merciful dispensation it is always in the power of every dramatis persona to get his low, stupid lines pronounced and supernaturally transfigured by the divine equivalent of a Garrick.
O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that Thou art so near and nobody feels Thee, that Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee.
Hans Denk Between the Catholic mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Quakers of the seventeenth there yawns a wide gap of time made hideous, so far as religion is concerned, with interdenominational wars and persecutions. But the gulf was bridged by a succession of men, whom Rufus Jones, in the only accessible English work devoted to their lives and teachings, has called the ‘Spiritual Reformers.’ Denk, Franck, Castellio, Weigel, Everard, the Cambridge Platonists - in spite of the murdering and the madness, the apostolic succession remains unbroken. The truths that had been spoken in the Theologia Germanica — that book which Luther professed to love so much and from which, if we may judge from his career, he learned so singularly little - were being uttered once again by Englishmen during the Civil War and under the Cromwellian dictatorship. The mystical tradition, perpetuated by the Protestant Spiritual Reformers, had become diffused, as it were, in the religious atmosphere of the time when George Fox had his first great ‘opening’ and knew by direct experience: that Every Man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ, and I saw it shine through all; And that they that believed in it came out of Condemnation and came to the Light of Life, and became the Children of it; And that they that hated it and did not believe in it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. This I saw in the pure Openings of Light, without the help of any Man, neither did I then know where to find it in the Scriptures, though afterwards, searching the Scriptures, I found it.
From Fox’s Journal The doctrine of the Inner Light achieved a clearer formulation in the writings of the second generation of Quakers. ‘There is,’ wrote William Penn, ‘something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, the Word in the heart from which all Scriptures come.’ And a little later Robert Barclay sought to explain the direct experience of lal Ivam asi in terms of an Augustinian theology that had, of course, to be considerably stretched and trimmed before it could fit the facts. Man, he declared in his famous theses, is a fallen being, incapable of good, unless united to the Divine Light. This Divine Light is Christ within the human soul, and is as universal as the seed of sin. All men, heathen as well as Christian, are endowed with the Inward Light, even though they may know nothing of the outward history of Christ’s life. Justification is for those who do not resist the Inner Light and so permit of a new birth of holiness within them.
Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived.
Theologica Germanica When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.
Sen T’sen
It is because we don’t know Who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We arc saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been. Plato speaks in the same sense when he says, in the Republic, that ‘the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine clement which always remains. And in the Theaetetus he makes the point, so frequently insisted upon by those who have practised spiritual religion, that it is only by becoming Godlike that we can know God — and to become Godlike is to identify ourselves with the divine clement which in fact constitutes our essential nature, but of which, in our mainly voluntary ignorance, we choose to remain unaware.
They are on the way to truth who apprehend God by means of the divine, Light by the light.
Philo
Philo was the exponent of the Hellenistic Mystery Religion which grew up, as Professor Good enough has shown, among the Jews of the Dispersion between about 200 B.C. and 100 A.D. Reinterpreting the Pentateuch in terms of a metaphysical system derived from Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism and Stoicism, Philo transformed the wholly transcendental and almost anthropomorphically personal God of the Old Testament into the immanent-transcendent Absolute Mind of the Perennial Philosophy. But even from the orthodox scribes and Pharisees of that momentous century which witnessed along with the dissemination of Philo’s doctrines, the first beginnings of Christianity and the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, even from the guardians of the Law we hear significantly mystical utterances. Hillel, the great rabbi whose teachings on humility and the love of God and man read like an earlier, cruder version of some of the Gospel sermons, is reported to have spoken these words to an assemblage in the courts of the Temple. ‘If I am here’ (it is Jehovah who is speaking through the mouth of his prophet), ‘everyone is here. If I am not here, no one is here.’
The Beloved is all in all; the lover merely veils Him;
The Beloved is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
There is a spirit in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, itself wholly spiritual. In this principle is God, ever verdant, ever flowering in all the joy and glory of His actual Self. Sometimes I have called this principle the Tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual Light, anon I say it is a Spark. But now I say that it is more exalted over this and that than the heavens are exalted above the earth. So now name it in a nobler fashion... It is free of all names and void of ail forms. It is one and simple, as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it. —
Eckhart
Crude formulations of some of the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy are to be found in the thought-systems of the uncivilized and so-called primitive peoples of the world. Among the Maoris, for example, every human being is regarded as a compound of four elements - a divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. Among the Oglala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and niya, or vital soul. After death the sican is reunited with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.
In regard to no twentieth-century ‘primitive’ society can we rule ou
t the possibility of influence by, or borrowing from, some higher culture. Consequently, we have no right to argue from the present to the past. Because many contemporary savages have an esoteric philosophy that is monotheistic with a monotheism that is sometimes of the ‘That art thou’ variety, were are not entitled to infer offhand that neolithic or palaeolithic men held similar views.
More legitimate and more intrinsically plausible are the inferences that may be drawn from what we know about our own physiology and psychology. We know that human minds have proved themselves capable of everything from imbecility to Quantum Theory, from Mein Kampf and sadism to the sanctity of Philip Neri, from metaphysics to crossword puzzles, power politics and the Missa Solemnis. We also know that human minds are in some way associated with human brains, and we have fairly good reasons for supposing that there have been no considerable changes in the size and conformation of human brains for a good many thousands of years. Consequently it seems justifiable to infer that human minds in the remote past were capable of as many and as various kinds and degrees of activity as are minds at the present time.
It is, however, certain that many activities undertaken by some minds at the present time were not, in the remote past, undertaken by any minds at all. For this there arc several obvious reasons. Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present. For long periods of history and prehistory it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems which their descendants found absorbingly interesting. For example, there is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horse’s foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. What happened was that men turned their attention from certain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. Our perceptions and our understanding arc directed, in large measure, by our will.