Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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In oriental discussions of the subject, that which survives death is not the personality. Buddhism accepts the doctrine of reincarnation; but it is not a soul that passes on (Buddhism denies the existence of a soul); it is the character. What we choose to make our mental and physical constitution in the course of our life on earth affects the psychic medium within which individual minds lead a part at least of their amphibious existence, and this modification of the medium results, after the body’s death, in the initiation of a new existence either in a heaven, or a purgatory, or another body.
In the Vedanta cosmology there is, over and above the Atman or spiritual Self, identical with the divine Ground, something in the nature of a soul that reincarnates in a gross or subtle body, or manifests itself in some incorporeal state. This soul is not the personality of the defunct, but rather the particularized I-consciousness out of which a personality arises.
Either one of these conceptions of survival is logically self-consistent and can be made to ‘save the appearances’ - in other words, to fit the odd and obscure facts of psychical research. The only personalities with which we have any direct acquaintance are incarnate beings, compounds of a body and some unknown x. But if x plus a body equals a personality, then, obviously, it is impossible for x minus a body to equal the same thing. The apparently personal entities which psychical research sometimes seems to discover can only be regarded as temporary pseudopersonalities compounded of x and the medium’s body.
These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, and survival may be the joint product of a persistent consciousness and a modification of the psychic medium. If this is so, it is possible for a given human being to survive in more than one posthumous form. His ‘soul’ - the nonpersonal ground and principle of past and future personalities - may go marching on in one mode of being, while the traces left by his thoughts and volitions in the psychic medium may become the origin of new individualized existences, having quite other modes of being.
15. Silence
THE FATHER UTTERED one Word; that Word is His Son, and He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence; and in silence the soul has to hear it.
St John of the Cross
The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will be often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us... Rhetoric and fine language about the things of the spirit is a vainer babble than in other matters; and he that thinks to grow in true goodness by hearing or speaking flaming words or striking expressions, as is now much the way of the world, may have a great deal of talk, but will have little of his conversation in heaven.
William Law
He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.
Lao Tzu
Unrestrained and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous. ‘But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.’ This may seem a very hard saying. And yet if we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads: words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours; words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love; words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, but merely for the sake of making a distracting noise. These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind’s endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large.
All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light. The guard of the tongue (which is also, of course, a guard of the mind) is not only one of the most difficult and searching of all mortifications; it is also the most fruitful.
When the hen has laid, she must needs cackle. And what does she get by it? Straightway comes the chough and robs her of her eggs, and devours all that of which she should have brought forth her live birds. And just so that wicked chough, the devil, beareth away from the cackling anchoresses, and swalloweth up all the goods they have brought forth, and which ought, as birds, to bear them up towards heaven, if it had not been cackled.
Modernized from the Ancren Riwle You cannot practise too rigid a fast from the charms of worldly talk.
Fénelon
What need of so much news from abroad, when all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within us?
William Law
My dear Mother, heed well the precepts of the saints, who have all warned those who would become holy to speak little of themselves and their own affairs.
St François de Sales (in a letter to St Jeanne de Chantai)
A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker.
A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.
Chuang Tzu
The dog barks; the Caravan passes.
Arabic Proverb
It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is needful, and that what is wanting (if indeed anything be wanting) is not writing or speaking - whereof ordinarily there is more than enough - but silence and work. For whereas speaking distracts, silence and work collect thoughts and strengthen the spirit. As soon therefore as a person understands what has been said to him for his good, there is no further need to hear or to discuss; but to set himself in earnest to practise what he has learnt with silence and attention, in humility, charity and contempt of self.
St John of the Cross
Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence - silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire - we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions - news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose - to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass-production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving - to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground.
16. Prayer
THE WORD ‘PRAYER’ is appl
ied to at least four distinct procedures - petition, intercession, adoration, contemplation. Petition is the asking of something for ourselves. Intercession is the asking of something for other people. Adoration is the use of intellect, feeling, will and imagination in making acts of devotion directed towards God in his personal aspect or as incarnated in human form. Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.
Psychologically, it is all but impossible for a human being to practise contemplation without preparing for it by some kind of adoration and without feeling the need to revert at more or less frequent intervals to intercession and some form at least of petition. On the other hand, it is both possible and easy to practise petition apart not only from contemplation, but also from adoration and, in rare cases of extreme and unmitigated egotism, even from intercession. Petitionary and intercessory prayer may be used - and used, what is more, with what would ordinarily be regarded as success - without any but the most perfunctory and superficial reference to God in any of his aspects. To acquire the knack of getting his petitions answered, a man does not have to know or love God, or even to know or love the image of God in his own mind. All that he requires is a burning sense of the importance of his own ego and its desires, coupled with a firm conviction that there exists, out there in the universe, something not himself which can be wheedled or dragooned into satisfying those desires. If I repeat ‘My will be done,’ with the necessary degree of faith and persistency, the chances are that, sooner or later and somehow or other, I shall get what I want. Whether my will coincides with the will of God, and whether in getting what I want I shall get what is spiritually, morally or even materially good for me, are questions which I cannot answer in advance. Only time and eternity will show. Meanwhile we shall be well advised to heed the warnings of folk-lore. Those anonymous realists who wrote the world’s fairy stories knew a great deal about wishes and their fulfilment. They knew, first of all, that in certain circumstances petitions actually get themselves answered; but they also knew that God is not the only answerer and that if one asks for something in the wrong spirit, it may in effect be given - but given with a vengeance and not by a divine Giver. Getting what one wants by means of self-regarding petition is a form of hubris, which invites its condign and appropriate nemesis. Thus, the folk-lore of the North American Indian is full of stories about people who fast and pray egotistically, in order to get more than a reasonable man ought to have, and who, receiving what they ask for, thereby bring about their own downfall. From the other side of the world come all the tales of the men and women who make use of some kind of magic to get their petitions answered - always with farcical or catastrophic consequence. Hardly ever do the Three Wishes of our traditional fairy lore lead to anything but a bad end for the successful wisher.
Picture God as saying to you, ‘My son, why is it that day by day you rise and pray, and genuflect, and even strike the ground with your forehead, nay, sometimes even shed tears, while you say to Me: “My Father, my God, give me wealth!” If I were to give it to you, you would think yourself of some importance, you would fancy you had gained something very great. Because you asked for it, you have it. But take care to make good use of it. Before you had it you were humble; now that you have begun to be rich you despise the poor. What kind of a good is that which only makes you worse? For worse you are, since you were bad already. And that it would make you worse you knew not; hence you asked it of Me. I gave it you and I proved you; you have found - and you are found out! Ask of Me better things than these, greater things than these. Ask of Me spiritual things. Ask of Me Myself.’
St Augustine
O Lord, I, a beggar, ask of Thee more than a thousand kings may ask of Thee. Each one has something he needs to ask of Thee; I have come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.
Ansari of Herat
In the words of Aquinas, it is legitimate for us to pray for anything which it is legitimate for us to desire. There are some things that nobody has the right to desire — such as the fruits of crime or wrong-doing. Other things may be legitimately desired by people on one level of spiritual development, but should not be desired (and indeed cease to be desired) by those on another, higher level. Thus, St François de Sales had reached a point where he could say, ‘I have hardly any desires, but if I were to be born again I should have none at all. We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.’ But meanwhile the third clause of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions, who have not the slightest intention of letting any will be done, except their own.
The savour of wandering in the ocean of deathless life has rid me of all my asking; As the tree is in the seed, so all diseases are in this asking.
Kabir
Lord, I know not what to ask of thee. Thou only knowest what I need. Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. Father, give to thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. Smite or heal, depress me or raise me up: I adore all thy purposes without knowing them. I am silent; I offer myself up in a sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.
Fénelon
(A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, ‘Here am I.’ The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.)
Was it not I who summoned thee to my service?
Was it not I who made thee busy with my name?
Thy calling ‘Allah!’ was my ‘Here am I.’
Jalal-uddin Rumi
I pray God the Omnipotent to place us in the ranks of his chosen, among the number of those whom He directs to the path of safety; in whom He inspires fervour lest they forget Him; whom He cleanses from all defilement, that nothing may remain in them except Himself; yea, of those whom He indwells completely, that they may adore none beside Him.
Al-Ghazzali
About intercession, as about so many other subjects, it is William Law who writes most clearly, simply and to the point.
By considering yourself as an advocate with God for your neighbours and acquaintances, you would never find it hard to be at peace with them yourself. It would be easy for you to bear with and forgive those, for whom you particularly implored the divine mercy and forgiveness.
William Law
Intercession is the best arbitrator of all differences, the best promoter of true friendship, the best cure and preservative against all unkind tempers, all angry and haughty passions.
William Law
You cannot possibly have any ill-temper, or show any unkind behaviour to a man for whose welfare you are so much concerned, as to be his advocate with God in private. For you cannot possibly despise and ridicule that man whom your private prayers recommend to the love and favour of God.
William Law
Intercession, then, is at once the means to, and the expression of, the love of one’s neighbour. And in the same way adoration is the means to, and the expression of, the love of God - a love that finds its consummation in the unitive knowledge of the Godhead which is the fruit of contemplation. It is to these higher forms of communion with God that the authors of the following extracts refer whenever they use the word ‘prayer.’
The aim and end of prayer is to revere, to recognize and to adore the sovereign majesty of God, through what He is in Himself rather than what He is in regard to us, and rather to love his goodness by the love of that goodness itself than for what it sends us.
Bourgoing
In prayer he (Charles de Condren) did not stop at the frontiers of his knowledge and his reasoning. He adored God and his mysteries as they are in themselves and not as he understood them.
Amelote
‘What God is in Himself,’
‘God and his mysteries as they ar
e in themselves’ — the phrases have a Kantian ring. But if Kant was right and the Thing in itself is unknowable, Bourgoing, De Condren and all the other masters of the spiritual life were engaged in a wild-goose chase. But Kant was right only as regards minds that have not yet come to enlightenment and deliverance. To such minds Reality, whether material, psychic or spiritual, presents itself as it is darkened, tinged and refracted by the medium of their own individual natures. But in those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit there is no distortion of Reality, because there is no separate selfhood to obscure or refract, no painted lantern slide of intellectual beliefs and hallowed imagery to give a personal and historical colouring to the ‘white radiance of Eternity.’ For such minds, as Olier says, ‘even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in his purity.’ The Thing in itself can be perceived - but only by one who, in himself, is no-thing.
By prayer I do not understand petition or supplication which, according to the doctrines of the schools, is exercised principally by the understanding, being a signification of what the person desires to receive from God. But prayer here specially meant is an offering and giving to God whatsoever He may justly require from us.
Now prayer, in its general notion, may be defined to be an elevation of the mind to God, or more largely and expressly thus: prayer is an actuation of an intellective soul towards God, expressing, or at least implying, an entire dependence on Him as the author and fountain of all good, a will and readiness to give Him his due, which is no less than all love, all obedience, adoration, glory and worship, by humbling and annihilating the self and all creatures in his presence; and lastly, a desire and intention to aspire to an union of spirit with Him.