Non-dualism: A. Huxley's "After Many a Summer"

Mary and I have very different ways of approaching a book. While she pays attention to characters, plot developments and story lines, I try to filter out the author’s philosophy and belief system. The rest is mostly filler to me, a way of dressing up and presenting the author’s ideas in a more palatable way than a dry essay would be.

For this reason Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s not because of its silly story - about achieving eternal life by shooting yourself up with ancient fish cells which accidentally also cause a reversal in evolution, transforming the immortal humans into immortal apes that throw around their excrement and copulate at will in their own filth -  but because the book is a summary of Huxley’s deepest beliefs, which are a very good reflection of my own. It shows his deep understanding of Advaita Vedanta and how pervasive non-duality becomes in some of his later works, culminating in his book The Island where the story arc represents the process of enlightenment as described by the Bhagavad-Gita. The death of the main character at the end represents ego death, or complete self abnegation, the final step before enlightenment can occur. Huxley later said in interviews that The Island was also an attempt at providing practical steps for building a better society, something which he also touches upon in After Many a Summer when discussing how to create (economic) self-sufficiency among like-minded individuals working for a better world.

After Many a Summer is Huxley’s clearest written exposition of his beliefs, and by stripping away all non-essential parts of the book the following essay remains. There are a few references to the story left in there, but not understanding these is not important. I also left the page number as reference, and added some comments with a * to explain obscure references. ‘His’ in the following paragraph refers to the main character, but also to humanity and should be read as ‘Man’s greatest offence':

P80 His gravest offense had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right. Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.

P81 For if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being’s efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good-will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence. Many are called, but few are chosen - because few even know in what salvation consists.

P82 All the same, there must surely be something to be done for the vast majority of people, something that didn’t entail telling harmful untruths about the nature of things. The untruth, for example, that there is a person up aloft, or the other more modern untruth to the effect that human values are absolute and that God is the nation or the party or the human race as a whole. Surely, there was something to be done for such people.

Little by little it might be possible to make them think a bit more realistically, at least about the world of everyday life, the outside world of appearances. And when they had done that, then it might not be so overwhelmingly difficult for them to think a bit more realistically about themselves - to conceive of that all-important ego of theirs as a fiction, a kind of nightmare, a frantically agitated nothingness capable, when once its frenzy had been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and experienced as a more than personal consciousness, as a free power, a pure working, a being withdrawn…

He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud, like sea-birds rising from their nesting place to darken and eclipse the sun. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant.

P83 It wasn’t a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing; but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling - and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.

‘A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent of God, capable of God and filled with God if man so desires. And what is God? A being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.’

His vigilance gradually ceased to be an act of the will, a deliberate thrusting back of irrelevant personal thoughts and wishes and feelings. For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive - an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for the vigilance which was now an effortless awareness - what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking?

And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself - a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality were realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation.

The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsion and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality…

P84 Some day, perhaps, the boy would learn to use his gold. He would have to wish to learn first - and wish to also unlearn a lot of the things he now regarded as self-evident and right. It would be hard for him.

P91 Liberation from what? Liberation from time, from craving and revulsions. Liberation from personality.

The more you respect a personality, the better its chance of discovering that all personality is a prison. Potential good is anything that helps you to get out of prison. Actualized good lies outside the prison, in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness.

Good is if it facilitates liberation; indifferent if it neither helps nor hinders; bad if it makes liberation more difficult by intensifying the obsession with personality. And, remember, the apparent selflessness of the scientist, or the artist, is not necessarily a genuine freedom from the bondage of personality. Scientists and artists are men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal. But what is an ideal? An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

P92 And that’s true, of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation - liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God, if you don’t object to the word. Many people do. It’s one of the words that the Mrs Grundys* of the intellect find peculiarly shocking. I always try to spare their sensibilities, if I can.

(*Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person. The name comes from a character in the play Speed the Plough by Thomas Morton. Mrs Grundy is known for her zeal for proper conduct. The term is used to describe a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety.)

If he serves any ideal except the highest - whether it’s the artist’s ideal of beauty, or the scientist’s ideal of truth, or the humanitarian’s ideal of what currently passes for goodness - he’s not serving God; he’s serving a magnified aspect of himself. He may be completely devoted; but in the last analysis his devotion turns out to be directed towards an aspect of his own personality. His apparent selflessness is really not a liberation from his ego, but merely another form of bondage. This means that science may be bad for scientists, even when it appears to be a deliverer. And the same holds good of art, of scholarship, of humanitarianism.

Science has increased this bondage more than it has diminished it - and will tend to go on increasing it, progressively, through its applications. Applications to warfare, first of all. Better planes, better explosives, better guns and gases - every improvement increases the sum of fear and hatred, every improvement in armaments makes it more difficult for people to escape from their egos, more difficult to forget those horrible projections of themselves they call their ideals of patriotism, heroism, glory and all the rest. 

P93 And even the less destructive applications of science aren’t really much more satisfactory. For what do such applications result in? The multiplication of possessable objects; the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the dissemination of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possessions with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness. But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so is the preoccupation with possessions. And now you’re threatening to prolong our lives, so that we can go on being stimulated, go on desiring possessions, go on waving flags and hating our enemies and being afraid of air attack - go on and on, generation after generation, sinking deeper and deeper into the stinking slough of our personality.

What about social justice? Take the French Revolution. Napoleon came out of the French Revolution. German nationalism came out of Napoleon. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 came out of German nationalism. The war of 1914 came out of the war of 1870. Hitler came out of the war of 1914. Those are the bad results of the French revolution. The good results were the enfranchisement of the French peasants and the spread of political democracy. Put the good results in one scale of your balance and the bad ones in the other, and try which set is the heavier. 

P94 Then perform the same operation with Russia. Put the abolition of tsardom and capitalism in one scale; and in the other put Stalin, the secret police, the famines, 20 years of hardship for 150 million people, the liquidation of intellectuals and kulaks and old bolsheviks, hordes of slaves in prison camps, military conscription of everybody, and the revolutionary propaganda which spurred the bourgeoisie to invent fascism. Rational prognosis can only be based on past experience.

P96 Fighting for something bigger than yourself is the same if you’re a fascist or an anti-fascist, and the same applies to feelings about eternity. The feeling in question is a non-personal experience of timeless peace. Accordingly, non-personality, timelessness and peace are what it means. That’s the difference with the fascist and anti-fascist fighting for something bigger, those are all personal feelings, evoked by temporal situations, and characterized by a sense of excitement. Intensification of the ego within the world of time and craving - that’s that those feelings meant.

Self-sacrifice to any of the highest causes is sacrifice to an ideal, which is simply a projection of the ego. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set - as when the feelings connected with money or sex are sacrificed in order that the ego may have the feelings of the superiority, solidarity, and hatred which are associated with patriotism, or any kind of political or religious fanaticism.

P97 It’s good to be cynical, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we’re all taught to respect and reverence - they don’t deserve anything but cynicism.

Take your own case. You’ve been taught to worship ideals like patriotism, social justice, science, romantic love. You’ve been told that such virtues as loyalty, temperance, courage, and prudence are good in themselves, in any circumstances. You’ve been assured that self-sacrifice is always splendid and fine feelings invariably good. And it’s all nonsense, all a pack of lies that people have made up in order to justify themselves in continuing to deny God and wallow in their own egotism. Unless you’re steadily and unflaggingly cynical about the solemn twaddle that’s talked by bishops and bankers and professors and politicians and all the rest of them, you’re lost. Utterly lost. Doomed to perpetual imprisonment in your ego - doomed to be a personality in a world of personalities. 

And a world of personalities is this world, the world of greed and fear and hatred, of war and capitalism and dictatorship and slavery. You’ve got to be cynical, especially about all the actions and feelings you’ve been taught to suppose were good. Most of them are not good. They’re merely evils which happen to be regarded as creditable. Unfortunately, creditable evil is just as bad as discreditable evil.

Scribes and Pharisees* (*Both groups played significant roles in the religious and social life of the time, frequently appearing in the New Testament. While Scribes focused on legal interpretation, Pharisees were more concerned with the application of the law in daily life) aren’t any better, in this context, than publicans* (*tax collectors) and sinners. Indeed, they’re often much worse, for several reasons. Being well taught by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself. In the next place, publicans and sinners are generally just human animals, without enough energy or self-control to do much harm. Whereas the Scribes and Pharisees have all the virtues, except the only two which count, and enough intelligence to understand everything except the real nature of the world. Publicans and sinners merely fornicate and overeat, and get drunk. 

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people - these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

‘So what it all boils down to, is that there just isn’t anything you can do. Is that it?’

P98 ‘Yes and no. On the strictly human level, the level of time and craving, I should say that it’s quite true: in the last resort, there isn’t anything you can do.’

‘But that’s just defeatism!’

‘Why is it defeatism to be realistic?’

‘There must be something to do!’

‘I see no “must” about it.’

‘Then what about the reformers and all those people? If you’re right, they’re just wasting their time.’

‘It depends on what they think they’re doing. If they think they’re just temporarily palliating particular distresses, if they see themselves as people engaged in laboriously deflecting evil from old channels into new and slightly different channels, then they can justifiably claim to be successful. But if they think they’re making good appear where evil was before, why, then, all history clearly shows that they are wasting their time.’

‘But why can’t they make good appear where evil was before?’

‘The nature of things is such that, on the strictly human level of time and craving, you can’t achieve anything but evil. If you choose to work exclusively on that level, and exclusively for the ideals and causes that are characteristic of it, then you’re insane if you expect to transform evil into good. You’re insane, because experience should have shown you that, on that level, there doesn’t happen to be any good. There are only different degrees and different kinds of evil.’

‘Then what do you want people to do?’

‘Well, if they want fresh varieties of evil, let them go on with what they’re doing now. But if they want good, they’ll have to change their tactics. And the encouraging thing is that there are tactics which will produce good. We’ve seen that there’s nothing to be done on the strictly human level - or rather there are millions of things to be done, only none of them will achieve any good. 

P99 But there is something effective to be done on the levels where good actually exists. I’m not a defeatist, I’m a strategist. I believe that if a battle is to be fought, it had better be fought under conditions in which there’s at least some chance of winning. I believe that, if you want the golden fleece, it’s more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black.’

‘Then where ought we to fight for good?’

‘Where good is.’

‘But where is it?’

‘On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level … well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of the spirit - only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. 

On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. 

Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestation of good on the other two levels. For, in so far as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our politics, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, low resistance to infection, sexual aberrations, insanity and suicide. Not to mention all the rest.

P100 In so far as we’re human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the spiritual and timeless good that we’re capable of as potential inhabitants of eternity, as potential enjoyers of the beatific vision. We worry and crave ourselves out of the very possibility of transcending personality and knowing, intellectually at first and then by direct experience, the true nature of the world.

‘Luckily, most of us don’t manage to behave like human beings all the time. We forget our wretched little egos and those horrible great projections of our egos in the ideal world - forget them and relapse for a while into harmless animality. The organism gets a chance to function according to its own laws; in other words, it gets a chance to realize such good as it’s capable of. That’s why we’re as healthy and sane as we are. Even in great cities, as many as four persons out of five manage to go through life without having to be treated in a lunatic asylum. If we were consistently human, the percentage of mental cases would rise from twenty to a hundred. But fortunately most of us are incapable of consistency - the animal always resuming its rights. 

And to some people fairly frequently, perhaps occasionally to all, there come little flashes of illumination - momentary glimpses into the nature of the world as it is for a consciousness liberated from appetite and time, of the world as it might be if we didn’t choose to deny God by being our personal selves. Those flashes come to us when we’re off our guard; then craving and worry come rushing back and the light is eclipsed once more by our personality and its lunatic ideas, its criminal policies and plans.

P120 There is something you can do, but only on condition that you know what the nature of the world happens to be. If you know that the strictly human level is the level of evil, you won’t waste your time trying to produce good on that level. Good manifests itself only on the animal level and on the level of eternity. Knowing that, you’ll realize that the best you can do on the human level is preventative. You can see that purely human activities don’t interfere too much with the manifestations of good on the other levels. That’s all. But politicians don’t know the nature of reality. If they did, they wouldn’t be politicians. Reactionary or revolutionary, they’re all humanists, all romantics. They live in a world of illusion, a world that’s a mere projection of their own human personalities. They act in ways which would be appropriate if such a world as they think they live in really existed. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist except in their imaginations. Hence nothing that they do is appropriate to the real world. All their actions are the actions of lunatics, and all, as history is there to demonstrate, are more or less completely disastrous. So much for the romantics.

The realists, who have studied the nature of the world, know that an exclusively humanistic attitude towards life is always fatal, and that all strictly human activities must therefore be made instrumental to animal and spiritual good. They know, in other words, that men’s business is to make the human world safe for animals and spirits. A home fit for animals and spirits, for physiology and disinterested consciousness.

At present, I’m afraid, it’s profoundly unfit. The world we’ve made for ourselves is a world of sick bodies and insane or criminal personalities. How shall we make this world safe for ourselves as animals and as spirits? If we can answer that question, we’ve discovered what to do. 

What are the things that make the world unsafe for animals and spirits?

P121 Obviously greed and fear, lust for power, hatred, anger…

If you want to make the world safe for animals and spirits, you must have a system that reduces the amount of fear and greed and hatred and domineering to their minimum. Which means that you must have enough economic security to get rid of at least that source of worry. Enough personal responsibility to prevent people from wallowing in sloth. Enough property to protect them from being bullied by the rich, but not enough to permit them to bully. And the same thing with political rights and authority - enough of the first for the protection of the many, too little of the second for domination of the few.

P122 But the many are there. You’ve got to do something about them.

You’ve got to do something about them, but at the same time there are circumstances when you can’t do anything. You can’t do anything effective about anyone if he doesn’t choose or isn’t able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing.

P123 You’ve got to help people if they’re faced with war or ruin or enslavement, if they’re under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration. You’ve got to help. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can’t help if they persist in the course of behavior which originally got them into their trouble.

For example, you can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can’t preserve them from collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personality - in other words, if they persist in worshipping themselves rather than God. So much for conditional clauses. 

Now let's consider the actual facts of the present situation. For our purposes, the most significant facts are these: the inhabitants of every civilized country are menaced; all desire passionately to be saved from impending disaster; the overwhelming majority refuse to change the habits of thought, feeling and action which are directly responsible for their present plight. In other words, they can’t be helped, because they are not prepared to collaborate with any helper who proposes a rational and realistic course of action. In these circumstances, what ought the would-be helper do?

P124 No, I certainly wouldn’t advise their abandonment. I’d advise the constant reiteration of the truths they’ve been told again and again during the past three thousand years. And, in the intervals, I’d do active work on the technics of a better system, and active collaborations with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization. 

Incidentally, the price, measured in human terms is enormously high. Though of course, much lower than the price demanded by the nature of things from those who persist in behaving in the standard human way. Much lower than the price of war, for example, particularly war with contemporary weapons. Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.

P126 If you’re a lowbrow, you can live in the idiot world of the homme moyen sensuel - the world where the irrelevances consist of newspapers and baseball, of sex and worry, of advertising and money and halitosis and keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a hierarchy of idiocies. Naturally, you and I prefer the classiest variety.

P127 Nothing like an idiot-universe if you want a quiet irresponsible life. That is, provided you can stand the idiocy. A lot of people can’t. After a time, they get tired of their no-track world. They feel the need of being concentrated and directed. They want their lives to have some sense. That’s when they go communist, or join the Church of Rome, or take up with the Oxford group. Anything, provided it will make them one trackers. And, of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases they choose the wrong track. Inevitably. Because there are a million wrong tracks and only one right - a million ideals, a million projections of personality, and only one God and one beatific vision.

From no-track idiocy most of them pass on to some one-track lunacy, generally criminal. It makes them feel better, of course; but pragmatically, the last state is always worse than the first. If you don’t want the only thing worth having, my advice is: Stick to idiocy.

P128 Personality is self-will, and self-will is the negation of reality, the denial of God. But now suppose there were some way of eliminating the ego from consciousness. If you could do this, you’d get close to reality. Now, the interesting thing is that, as a matter of brute fact, this thing can be done, has been done again and again. If you choose to climb on to the level of eternity, the impasse no longer exists.

P129 In so far as we think as strictly human beings, we fail to understand what is below us no less than what is above. And then there’s a further trouble. Suppose we stop thinking in a strictly human fashion; suppose we make it possible for ourselves to have direct intuitions of the non-human realities in which, so to speak, we’re embedded. Well and good. 

But what happens when we try to pass on the knowledge so acquired? We’re floored. The only vocabulary at our disposal is a vocabulary primarily intended for thinking strictly human thoughts about strictly human concerns. But the things we want to talk about are non-human realities and non-human ways of thinking. Hence the radical inadequacy of all statements about our animal nature and, even more, of all statements about God, or spirit, or eternity.

P132 The average person either has had glimpses of eternity, or has some other reason for believing in its existence, but can’t understand what the experts say about it; can’t understand because of the inadequacy of the language in which the fauna of the spiritual world is ordinarily described. In other words, he either hasn’t had the immediate experience of eternity and so has no reason to believe that eternity exists; or else he does believe that eternity exists, but can’t make head or tails of the language in which it’s talked about by those who have had experience of it. Furthermore when he wants to talk about eternity himself - and he may wish to do so, either in order to communicate his own experiences to others or to understand them better, from the human point of view, himself - he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. For either he recognizes that the existing language is unsuitable - in which cases he has only two rational choices: to say nothing at all, or to invent a new and better technical language of his own, a calculus of eternity, so to speak, a special algebra of spiritual experience - and if he doesn’t invent it, nobody who hasn’t learnt it will know what he is talking about. That’s the first horn of the dilemma.

The second horn is reserved for those who don’t recognize the inadequacy of the existing language; or else who do recognize it, but are irrationally hopeful enough to take a chance with an instrument which they know to be worthless. These people will write in the existing language, and their writing will be, in consequence, more or less completely misunderstood by most of their readers. Inevitably, because the words they use don’t correspond to the things they’re talking about. Most of them are words taken from the language of everyday life…But the language of everyday life refers almost exclusively to strictly human affairs. What happens when you apply words derived from that language to experiences on the plane of the spirit, the plane of timeless experience? Obviously, you create a misunderstanding; you say what you didn’t mean to say.

Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language. If they’re not, you can’t expect to talk sense. In spite of which, we insist on using one word to connote entirely different things.

P134 If we wanted to understand the word ‘love’, if we wanted to think about it realistically, we should say that we were in love, but that God was x-love. In this way, people who had never had any first-hand experience on the level of eternity would at least be given a chance of knowing intellectually that what happens on that level is not the same as what happens on the strictly human level. They’d know, because they’d seen it in print, that there was some kind of difference between love and x-love. Consequently, they’d have less excuse than people have today for imagining that God was like themselves, only a bit more so on the side of respectability and a bit less so, of course, on the other side. And, naturally, what applies to the word ‘love’ applies to all the other words taken over from the language of everyday life and used to describe spiritual experience. Words like knowledge, wisdom, power, mind, peace, joy, freedom, good and consciousness. They stand for certain things on the human level. But the things that writers force them to stand for when they describe events on the level of eternity are quite different. Hence the use of them merely confuses the issue. They just make it all but impossible for anyone to know what’s being talked about.

People who write about experiences on the level of eternity also make use of technical phrases borrowed from various systems of philosophy.

Isn’t that your algebra of spiritual experience? Isn’t that the special, scientific language you’ve been talking about?

It’s an attempt at such an algebra, but unfortunately a very unsuccessful attempt. Unsuccessful because this particular algebra is derived from the language of metaphysics, bad metaphysics, incidentally. The people who use it are committing themselves, whether they like it or not, to an explanation of the facts as well as a description.

P135 An explanation of actual experiences in terms of metaphysical entities, whose existence is purely hypothetical and can’t be demonstrated. In other words, they’re describing the facts in terms of figments of the imagination; they’re explaining the known in terms of the unknown. Take a few examples. “Ecstasy”. It’s a technical terms that refers to the soul’s ability to stand outside the body- and of course it carries the further implication that we know what the soul is and how it’s related to the body and the rest of the universe. 

Or take another instance, a technical term that is essential to the Catholic theory of mysticism: “infused contemplation”. Here the implication is that there’s somebody outside us who pours a certain kind of psychological experience into our minds. The further implication is that we know who that somebody is. 

Or consider even “union with God”. What it means depends on the upbringing of the speaker. It may mean “union with the Jehovah of the Old Testament”. Or it may mean “union with the personal deity of orthodox Christianity”. It may mean what it probably would have meant, say, to Eckhart, “union with the impersonal Godhead of which the God of orthodoxy is an aspect and a particular limitation.” Similarly, if you were an Indian, it may mean “union with Isvara” or “union with Brahman”. In every case, the term implies a previous knowledge about the nature of things which are either completely unknowable, or at best only to be inferred from the nature of the experiences which the term is supposed to describe. 

So there you have the second horn of the dilemma- the horn on which all those who use the current religious vocabulary to describe their experiences on the level of eternity inevitably impale themselves.

And the way between the horns? Isn’t it the way of the professional psychologists who have written about mysticism? They’ve evolved a pretty sensible language.

I haven’t mentioned them for the same reason as in talking about beauty I shouldn’t mention professional aestheticians who had never been inside a picture gallery. 

They talk about what they know. But what they know isn’t worth talking about. For what they know is only the literature of mysticism, not the experience.

P136 There is a way between the horns. The practical way. You can go and find out what it means for yourself, by first-hand experience. But there’s an awful lot of stairs to get there.

P142 Yes, even the best kind of human love might be inadequate, might actually be worse than inadequate. It might actually be an obstacle to prevent him from giving his loyalty to the highest cause of all.

No loyalty was good in itself, or brought religious insight except loyalty to the highest cause of all. ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not the highest cause of all more.’

P143 The worst was being loyal to your physiology. It was hateful to admit it; but so too was the best: being loyal to your physiology and at the same time (which was its distinguishing mark) loyal also to your higher feelings - to that empty ache of longing, to that infinity of tenderness, to that adoration, that happiness, those pains, that sense of solitude, that longing for identity. You were loyal to these, and being loyal to these was the definition of the best kind of love, of what people called romance and praised as the most wonderful thing in life. But being loyal to these was being loyal to yourself; and you couldn’t be loyal to yourself and loyal at the same time to the highest cause of all. The practical conclusion was obvious: they were mutually exclusive.

P197 You’re too optimistic about social reforms. Like most people nowadays, you’re insanely optimistic about people as they are, people living exclusively on the human level. You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world we live in. But the world we live in is a consequence of what men have been and a projection of what they are now. If men continue to be like what they are now and have been in the past, it’s obvious that the world they live in can’t become better. If you imagine it can, you’re wildly optimistic about human nature.

But, on the other hand, you’re wildly pessimistic if you imagine that men and women are condemned by their nature to pass their whole lives on the strictly human level. Thank God, they’re not. They have it in their power to climb out and up, on to the level of eternity.

P198 No human society can become conspicuously better than it is now, unless it contains a fair proportion of individuals who know that their humanity isn’t the last word and who consciously attempt to transcend it.

That’s why one should be profoundly pessimistic about the things most people are optimistic about- such as applied science, and social reform, and human nature as it is in the average man or woman. And that’s also why one should be profoundly optimistic about the thing they’re so pessimistic about that they don’t even know it exists - I mean, the possibility of transforming and transcending human nature. Not by evolutionary growth, not in some remote future, but at any time - here and now, if you like- by the use of properly directed intelligence and good will.

It’s the kind of pessimism and the kind of optimism you find in all the great religions. Pessimism about the world at large and human nature as it displays itself in the majority of men and women. Optimism about the things that can be achieved by anyone who wants to and knows how.

You know the pessimism of the New Testament. Pessimism about the mass of mankind: many are called, few chosen. Pessimism about weakness and ignorance: from those that have not shall be taken away even that which they have. Pessimism about life lived on the ordinary human level; for that life must be lost if the other eternal life is to be gained. Pessimism about even the highest forms of worldly morality: there’s no access to the kingdom of heaven for anyone whose righteousness fails to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees. Who are they? Simply the best citizens, the pillars of society; all right-thinking men. In spite of which, or rather because of which, Jesus calls them a generation of vipers. That’s the pessimistic side of the Gospel teaching. And more systematically and philosophically, you’ll find the same things set forth in the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. 

P199 The world as it is and people on the strictly human level- they’re beyond hope: that’s the universal verdict. Hope begins only when human beings start to realize that the kingdom of heaven, or whatever other name you care to give it, is within and can be experienced by anybody who’s prepared to take the necessary trouble. That’s the optimistic side of Christianity and the other world religions.

This is the sort of optimism they teach you in the liberal churches. What they teach you in the liberal churches hasn’t got anything to do with Christianity or any other realistic religion. It’s nothing more than early twentieth century humanism seasoned with nineteenth century evangelicalism. Humanism affirms that good can be achieved on a level where it doesn’t exist and denies the fact of eternity. Evangelism denies the relationship between causes and effects by affirming the existence of a deity who forgives offences.

The amiable silliness of the liberal churches is good enough for quiet times; but note that it’s always supplemented by the ferocious lunacies of nationalism for use in times of crisis.

“As a man sows, so shall he reap. God is not mocked.”

P218 By their insane refusal to recognize facts as they are, men and women condemn themselves to have their desires stultified and their lives distorted or extinguished. They are under no necessity to remain exclusively on the human level of existence. It is in their power to pass from the level of the absence of God to that of God’s presence. 

P219 Each member of the psychological swarm is determined; and so is the conduct of the total swarm. But beyond the swarm, and yet containing and interpenetrating it, lies eternity, ready and waiting to experience itself. But if eternity is to experience itself within the temporal and spatial cage of any individual human being, the swarm we call the ‘soul’ must voluntarily renounce the frenzy of its activity, must make room, as it were, for the other timeless consciousness, must be silent to render possible the emergence of profounder silence. God is completely present only in the complete absence of what we call our humanity.

No iron necessity condemns the individual to the futile torment of being merely human. Even the swarm we call the soul has it in its power temporarily to inhibit its insane activity, to absent itself, if only for a moment, in order that, if only for a moment, God may be present. 

But let eternity experience itself, let God be sufficiently often present in the absence of human desires and feelings and pre-occupations: the result will be a transformation of the life which must be lived, in the intervals, on the human level.

Even the swarm of our passions and opinions is susceptible to the beauty of eternity; and, being susceptible, becomes dissatisfied with its own ugliness; and, being dissatisfied, undertakes to change itself.

Chaos gives place to order - not the arbitrary, purely human order that comes from the subordination of the swarm to some lunatic ‘ideal’, but an order that reflects the real order of the world. Bondage gives place to liberty - for choices are no longer dictated by the chance occurrences of earlier history, but are made teleologically and in the light of a direct insight into the nature of things. Violence and mere inertia give place to peace - for violence is the manic, and inertia the depressive phase of that cyclic insanity, which consists in regarding the ego or its social projections as real entities. Peace is the serene activity which springs from the knowledge that our ‘souls’ are illusory and their creations insane, that all beings are potentially united in eternity. Compassion is an aspect of peace and a result of the same act of knowledge.

P220 Any individual has it in his power to refrain from falling, to stop destroying himself. The solidarity with evil is optional, not compulsory.

Below are a couple interviews with Aldous Huxley, it will put this book in its proper context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasBxZsb40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM4Gklmp1lw