Aldous Huxley — The Perennial Philosophy

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VEUILLEZ NOTER: En faisant la publicité de ces pensées, le rédacteur de ce site n'endosse en aucune façon la signification de leur contenu. Si elles sont présentées ici, c'est qu'elles nous semblent offrir une matière importante à réflexion, par la pertinence de leur thématique ainsi que par la clarté de leur énonciation et des implications qui peuvent en découler. Par ailleurs, nous encourageons ceux qui y seront exposés à l'esprit de critique et de discernement le plus développé, afin d'en retirer non seulement la «substantifique moëlle», selon l'expression de Rabelais, mais encore la vérité la plus haute qu'elles pourraient celer, en relevant le défi de retrouver la vérité suprême, là où elle veut bien se révéler, y compris dans son expérience de vie immédiate, à l'esprit qui la recherche avec engagement, conviction et passion.

  «The cultivated and the mentally active have an insatiable appetite for novelty, diversity, and distraction. But the saints, however commanding their talents and whatever the nature of their professional activities, are all incessantkly preoccupied with only one subject — spiritual Reality and the means by which they and their fellows can come to the unitive knowledge of that Reality. And as for their actions — these are as monotonously uniform as their thoughts; for in all circunstances they behave selflessly, patiently and with indefatigable charity.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 46.

 «The religious experience of sacramentalists and image worshippers may be perfectly genuine and objective; but it is not always or necessarily an experience of God or the Godhead.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 60.

 «... the disciplining of the will must have as its accompaniment a no less thorough disciplining of the consciousness. There has to be a conversion, sudden or otherwise, not merely of the heart, but also of the senses and of the the perceiving mind.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 72.

 «This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucrats or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration — and of course, the coercive and essentially loveless nature of the control remains the same, whether the bosses call themselves «company directors» or «civil servants». The only difference between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from position within a conventionally respected hierarchy, while the second derive more power from position than from wealth. Upon this fairly uniform ground work of loveless relationships are imposed others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 94.

 «Mistaking the means for the end, the Puritan has fancied himself holy because he is stoically austere. But stoical austerity is merely the exaltation of the more creditable side of the ego at the expense of the less creditable. Holiness, on the contrary, is the total denial of the separative self, in its creditable no less than its deiscreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God. To the extent that there is attachment to «I», «me», «mine», there is no attachment to, and therefore no unitive knowledge of, the divine Ground.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 98.

 «Sometimes the Taoist philosophers write as though they believed in Rousseau's Noble Savage, and (being Chinese and tehrefore much more concerned with the concrete and practical than with the merely speculative) they are fond of prescribing methods by which rulers may reduce the complexity of civilization and so preserve their subjects from the corrupting influences of man-made and therefore Tao-eclipsing conventions of thought, feeling and action. But the rulers who are to perform this task for the masses must themselves be sages; and to become a sage,one must get rid of all the rigidities of unregenerate adulthood and become again as a little child. For only that which is soft and docile is truly alive; that which conquers and outlives everything is that which adapts itself to everything, that which always seeks the lowest place — not the hard rock, but the water that wears away the everlasting hills. The simplicity and spontaneity of the perfect sage are the fruits of mortification — mortification of the will and, by recollectedness and  meditation, of the mind.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 115.

 «Effective poverty (possessing no money) is by no means always affective poverty (being indifferent to money). One man may be poor but desperately concerned with what money can buy, full of cravings, envy and bitter self-pity. Another may have money, but no attachment to money or the things, power or privileges that money can buy. «Evangelical poverty» is a combination of effective with affective poverty; but a genuine poverty of spirit is possible even in those who are not effectively poor.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 120.

 «In actual practice how many great men have ever fulfilled, or are ever likely to fulfil, the conditions which alone render power innocuous to the ruler as well as to the ruled ? Obviously, very few. Except by siants, the problem of power is finally insoluble. But since genuine self-government is possible only in very small groups, societies on a national or super-national scale will always be rueld by oligarchical minorities, whose members come to power because they have a lust for power. This means that the problem of power will always arise and, since it cannot be solved except by people like François de Sales, will always make trouble. And this, in its turn, means that we cannot expect the large-scale societies of the future to be much better than were the societies of the past during the brief periods when they were at their best.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 124-125.

 «There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Fact — selflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 132.

 «Among the trinities in which the ineffable One makes itself manifest is the trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole. In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically defined as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated and harmonized within the totality.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 137.

«The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift, if he persists in worshipping teh beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater. True, his idolatry is among the highest of which human beings are capable; but an idolatry, none the less, it remains.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 138.  

 «Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostaligically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things, finds himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence, and, on a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egosim and dawning spirituality. But this «wearisome condition of humanity» is the indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and deliverance. Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spiritual level; he must be conscious f himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower seelf in order that he may become identified with that higher Selfwithin him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 141.

 «All knowledge [...] is a function of being. Or to phrase the same idea in scholastic terms, the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 146.

 «The Sanskrit dharma — one of the key words in Indian formulations of the Perennial Philosophy — has two principal meanings. The dharma of an individual is, first of all, his essential nature, the intrinsic law of his being and development. But dharma also signifies the law of righteousness and piety. The implication s of this double meaning are clear: a man's duty, how he ought to live, what he ought to believe and what he ought to do about his beliefs — these things are conditioned by his essential nature, his constitution and temperament. Going a good deal further than do the Cathlics, with their doctrine of vocations, the Indians admit the right of individuals with different dharmas to worship different aspects or conceptions of the divine. Hence the almost total absence, among Hindus and Buddhists, of bloody persecutions, religious wars and proselytizing imperialism.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 153-154.

 «To worship polytheistically may be one's dharma; nevertheless the fact remains that man's final end is the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, and all the historical formulations of the Perennial Philosophy are agreed that every human being ought, and perhaps in one way or other actually will, achieve that end.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 154.

«If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. As for the consequences of such ignorance, these are bad by every criterion, from the utilitarian to the transcendental. Bad because self ignorance leads to unrealistic behaviour and so causes every kind of trouble for everyone concerned; and bad because, without self-knowledge, there can be no true humility, therefore no successful self-naughting, therefore no unitive knowledge of the divine Ground underlying the self and ordinarily eclipsed by it.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 161-162.

«Spiritual progress is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing and of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 163.

«Fear cannot be got rid of by personal effort, but only by the ego's absorption in a cause greater than its own interests. Absorption in any cause will rid the mind of some of its fears; but only absorption in the loving and knowing of the divine Ground can rid of all fear. For when the cause is less than the highest, the sens of fear and anxiety is transferred from the self to the cause — as when heroic self-sacrifice for a loved individual or institution is accompanied by anxiety in regaqrd to that for which the sacrifice is made. Whereas if the sacrifice is made for God, and for others for God's sake, there can be no fear or abiding anxiety, since nothing can be a menace to the divine Ground and even failure and disaster are to be accepted as being in accord with the divine will.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 163-164.

«The reward of being thus in harmony with Tao or the Logos in its physical and physiological aspects is a sense of well-being, in awareness of life as good, not for any reason, but just because it is life. There is no question, when we are in a condition of animal grace, of propter vitam vivendi perdere causas [to destroy the reasons for living because of life itself]; for in this state there is no distinction between the reasons for living and life itself. Life, like virtue, is then its own reward. But, of course, the fulness of animal grace is reserved for animals. Man's nature is such that he must live a self-conscious life in time, not in a blissful sub-rational eternity on the hither side of good and evil. Consequently animal grace is something that he knwos only spasmodically in an occasional holiday from self-consciousness, as an accompaniment to other states, in which life is not its own reward but has to be lived for a reasons outside itself.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 166-167.

«Spiritual grace cannot be received continuously or in its fulness, except by those who have wlled away their self-will to the point of being able truthfully to say, «Not I, but God in me.» There are, however, few people so irremediably self-condemned to imprisonment within their own personality as to be wholly incapable of receiving the graces which are from instant ot instant being offered to every soul. By fits and starts most of us contrive to forget, if only poartially, our preoccupations with «I», «me», «mine», ans do become capable of receiving, if only partially, the graces which, in that moment, are being offered us.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 167-168.

«Granted that the ground of the individual soul is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground of all existence, and granted that this divine Ground is an ineffable Godhead that manifests itself as personal God or even as the incarnate Logos, what is the ultimate nature of good and evil, and what the true purpose and last end of human life ?» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 177.

«Pain and evil are inseparable from individual existence in a world of time; and, for human beings, there is an intensification of this inevitable pain and evil when the desire is turned towards the self and the many, rather than towards the divine Ground.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 182-183.

«Knowledge of what is happening now does not determine the event. What is ordinarily called God's foreknowledge is in reality a timeless now-knowledge, which is compatible with the freedom of the human creature's will in time.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 185.

«To achieve complete deliverance, conversion from sin is not enough; there must also be a conversion of the mind, a paravritti, as the Mahayanists call it, or revulsion in the very depths of consciousness. As the result of this revulsion, the habit-energies of accumulated memory are destroyed and, along with them, the sens of being a separate ego. Reality is no longer perceived quoad nos (for the good reason that there is no longer a nos to perceive it) but as it is in itself.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 189.

«It is not quite true to say that all theologies and philosophies whose primary concern is withtime, rather than eternity, are necessarily revolutionary. the aim of all revolutions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past. But some time-obsessed hilosophies are pirmarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. But tue retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 192-193.

«It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world — in a future where everyone will be happy because all are doing and thinking something something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, something old, traditional and hallowed. And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it. [...]. § Fro those whose philosophy does not complet them to take time with an excessive seriousness the ultimate good is to be sought neither in the revolutionary's progressive social apocalypse, nor in the reactionary's revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine now which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 193-194.

«The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of liberation into eternity; but in its ordinary everyday form peace is also the root of liberation. For where there are violent passions and compelling distractions, this ultimate good can never be realized. That is one of the reasons why the policy correlated with eternity-philosophers is tolerant and non-violent. The other reason is that the eternity, whose realization is the ultimate good, is a kingdom of heaven within. Thou art That; and though That is immortal and impassible, the killing and torturing of individual «thous» is a matter of cosmic significance, inasmuch as it interferes with the normal and natural relationship between individual souls and the divine eternal Ground of all being. Every violence is, over and above everything else, a sacrilegious rebellion against the divine order.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 194.

«Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 194.

«In the West the good old rule, the simple plan, was the glorification of one's own sect, disparagement and even persecution of all others. Recently, however, governments have changed their policy. Proselytizing and persecuting zeal is reserved for the political pseudo-religions, such as Communism, Fascism and nationalism; and unless they are thought to stand in the way of advance towards the temporal and professed by such pseudo-religions, the various manifestations of the Perennial Philosophy are treated with a contemptuously tolerant indifference.» A. HUXLEY. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Perennial. Paris, 2009. p. 199.