The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy

By Aldous Huxley

 

 

Huxley steps into a Philosophy that is far as I can tell, reading this book is uniquely his.  Yet he comes upon it from a study of a broad collection of philosophic thinking authors of whom he cites regularly.  He would bear out a tenant point of his philosophy and then excerpts of a dozen authors that range from the 1500s to the twentieth century. 

 

The book espouses the following main tenants:

1.       The man who wishes to know “That” which is ‘thou” may set to work in one of three ways….That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and all other thus, animate and inanimate.

2.        ….it is only by becoming Godlike that we can know God– and to become Godlike is to identify ourselves with the divine element….

3.       Neo-Pythagoreanism Stoicism …. Transformed the wholly transcendental and almost automorphically personal God of the Old Testament into the immanent-transcendent Absolute Mind of the Perennial Philosophy.

4.       If I am here, everyone is here.  If I am not here, no one is here.

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 in eternity, no longer on the animal but on the spiritual level; he must  be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able to consciously to transcend separate selfhood he must do battle with the lower self in order the he may become identified with the Higher self within him which is akin to the divine Non 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 divine Ground.  

 

Below are excerpts from the book that support his tenants.

1.       Page 21  This absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology.

2.       Page 22:  we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure Godlike

3.       Page 23:  Things are a great deal better when te transcendent omnipotent personal God is regarded also a loving Father

But the complete transformation of consciousness, which is enlightenment, deliverance salvation comes only when God is thought of as the Perennial Philosophy affirms him to be immanent as well as transcendent, supra-personal as well as personal

4.       The ground in which the multifarious and time-bound psyche is rooted in a simple, timeless awareness.

5.       Page 34:  the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in the kind of worlds to which traditional language and languages of mathematics are adequate.

6.       Page 35:  Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be has except by union, and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the sel-regarding ego, which is the the barrier separating the ‘thou’ from the ‘That’.

7.       Page 36:  like the note of a cracked bell ….Perennial Philsophy have constantly insisted, man’s obsessive consciousness of and insistence on being a separate self is the final formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.

8.       Page 37:  For he may know sorrow earnestly that knoweth not only what he is, but that he is.

9.       Page 40:  The will is free and we are at liberty to identify our being either exclusively with our selfness and its interest, regarded as independent of indwelling Spirit and transcendent Godhead or exclusively with  the divine within us and without

10.  Page 43:  The dignity and difficulty of a good action certainly affects what is technically called its accidental worth, but all its essential worth comes from love alone. 

Spiritual training are much less narrowly specialized …the aim to be aware continuously of the Divine Ground of their own and other beings.

11.  Page 44: The aim of spiritual training  is to make people become selfless in every circumstance of life.

Saints testify to the fact that spiritual training leads to transcendence of personality, not merely in special circumstances of battle but in all citcumstances….one must “love his enemies”

12.  Page 45:  there cannot be monotheism except where there is singleness of heart.  (otherwise a group decision must give way to an individual decision)

13.  Page 48; Souls which have come into the unitive knowledge of God are almost nothing in themselves and all in God.

14.  Page 49:  Gospels tell us very little about the “I” which was Jesus, they make up for it by telling us inferentially in parables a good dal about the spiritual “not I”

Each biblical author wrote about the eternal  “not I” of Christ rather than the historical “I”

15.  Page 56:  the eternity which transforms us into Ourselves is not the experience of mere persistence after death.  There will be no experience of timeless Reality unless there is the same or similar knowledge within the world of time and matter.

16.  Page 60:  Godhead may be found in a condition of what may be called second hand objectivity, waiting to be perceived by minds suitably attuned to it.

17.  Page 62:  Mortification becomes more searching and more subtle there is need of unsleeping awareness and, on the levels of thought, feeling and conduct, the constant exercise of something like and “artist’s tact and taste”

In seeing your Divine Ground, what you see together with what you do not see, what you hear together with what you don’t hear, together with what you talk about with what you cannot talk about ….Here all your imaginations are once and for all put to an end.  This is the highest point of Zen.

18.  Page 67:  because men are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you.  Till you can sing and rejoice in God, as miser of gold, you can never enjoy the world.

The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it.  It is the Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it.  It is the Region of Light and Peace did not disquiet it.  When Jacob walked out of his dream he said God is here, and I wist it not.

19.  Page 70:  Reconciliation to the evanescent is revelation of the eternal…the principles of a theology, in which there could be no ultimate antithesis between nature and grace, science and religion in which the world of scientists and theologians are seen to be one and the same.

20.  Page 72: there is complete reconciliation to the evanescent and, through that reconciliation, revelation is eternal.

21.  Page 76:  Therefore I give you still another thought, which is yet purer and more spiritual:  IN the Kingdom of Heaven all is all, all is one, and all is our

Eckart

The sacredness of Nature, and sinfulness and folly of man’s overweening efforts to be her master rather than her intelligently docile collaborator

22.  Page 77:  Like landscape painting, the humanitarian movement in Europe was an almost completely secular affair.  In the Far East both were essentially religious.

23.  Page 80:  To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question of weather Progress is inevitable or even real is not a matter of primary importance.  For then the important thig is that the individual men and women should come to a unitive knowledge of the divine Ground…

24.  Page 81:  We can only love that what we know and we can neve know completely what w do not love. …”he does not feel” and therefore makes himself incapable of knowledge.

25.  Page 87:  It is by means of tranquility of mind that you are able to transmute this false mind of death and rebirth into the clear Intuitive Mind and so doing, to realize the primal and enlightening  Essance  of Mind.

26.  Page 92.  The distinguishing marks of charity and disinterestedness, tranquility and humility.

27.  Page 96: “Our Kingdom go” is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of “Thy Kingdom come”

28.  Page 97:  Holiness is the denial of separative self, in its creditable no less that discreditable aspects, and the abandonment of the will to God.

29.  Page 101:  Extreme physical austerities are not likely toto achieve this kind of mortification.  But the acceptance of what happens to us (apart from our own sins) in the course of daily living is likely to produce this result.  (mortification)

30.  Page 106:  It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undicovered life,which is the spiritual part of our being, wee share with the divine Ground.

31.  Page 107:  As long as I am this or that, or have this or that I am not all things.

32.  Page 113:  “I” prevents self consciousness …..The soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over simplicity.

33.  Page 113:  That soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity.  Such simplicity is indeed a great pleasure.

34.  Page 114:  The first step is for the soul to put away outward things and look within so as to know its own real interest …The next step the soul must add is contemplation of God, whom it fears to that of self … the third step is ceasing from restless self contemplation, the soul begins to dwell upon God instead, and by degrees fogets himself in Him.

35.  Page 115 … the fact that human nature is tripartite consisting of spirit as well as mind and body, the fact that we live on the boarder line between two world; the temporal and the eternal… man is nothing surrounded by God.

36.  Page 125:  In religious literature the word “truth” is used indiscriminately in at leas tree different senses.  Thus it is sometimes treated as a synonym for ‘fact’ as when it is affirmed  that God is ‘Truth”…

37.  Page 128:  The subject matter of Perennial Philosophy is the nature of eternal, spiritual Reality; but the language in which it must be formulated was developed for the purpose of dealing with the phenomena of time. … a sudden breaking through from reason to intuitive ‘intellect” capable og a genuine insight into the divine Ground of all being.

38.  Page 131:  One learns to paint by painting, and one learns to appreciate pictures by going to picture galleries and looking at them.

39.  Page 132:  In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience  … Do not strive to seek truth writes a Zen master, “only cease to cherish opinions”.

40.  Page 133:  Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who have ceased to cherish opinions” – even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstraction to be … It is by following and then abandoning, the rational and emotional path of the intellectual of intuitive “path of realization’.

41.  Page 135:  In and through Right Knowledge, one emegesfrom the infatuating delusion of  ”I”, “me”, “mine” and registration to deny the world in a state of premature and one sided ecstasy, or to affirmant by living like the average sensual man, one comes to the transfiguring awareness that samsara and nirvana are one….

42.  Page 136:  Both in Buddhism and Catholicism, monks and nun were encouraged to avoid the personal pronoun and to speak of themselves in terms circumlocutions that clearly their real relationships with cosmic reality and their fellow creatures.

43.  Page 141: Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself.  Reason is the shadoe cast by God.  God is the sun.

44.  Page 141:  Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason man lives nostalgically, in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on cleverness.

45.  Page 141:  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 in eternity, no longer on the animal but on the spiritual level; he must  be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able to consciously to transcend separate selfhood he must do battle with the lower self in order the he may become identified with the Higher self within him which is akin to the divine Non 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 divine Ground.        

46.  Page 145:  You can therefore know the knower according to the mode of the knower, and the mode of the knower is, in certain all-important respects within t the knowers control.   

47.  Page 148:  In the Bagahvadad Gita Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna in all three paths – liberation through action with out attachment; liberation through knowledge of the Self and the Absolute Ground of all being with which it is identical: and liberation through intense devotion to the personal God or the divine incarnation.

48.  Page 154:  devotion to the sacred humanity of the Avatar to the profession of Perennial Philosophy an the practice of purely spiritual religion that seeks unitive knowledge of the absolute Godhead.

49.  Page 155:  The emotional extravert concentrates his devotion on the personal or incarnate aspect of God, and comes at last to love the Absolute Godhead by an act, no longer of feeling but of will illuminated by Knowledge…leaving the bewildered Arjuna to the path of work without attachment, the path that leads the forgetting of self to the discovery of Self.

50.  Page 162: self ignorance leads to unrealistic behavior  and so causes every kind of trouble for everyone concerned; and bad because without self-knowledge there can be no true humanity therefore no self naughting , therefore no unitive knowledge.

51.  Page 163:  the human being art that which is not…Spiritual progress    is through the growing knowledge of the self as nothing of the Godhead as all-embracing Reality.

52.  Page 165:  In every exposition of the Perennial Philosophy the human soul is regarded as feminine in relation to the Godhead, the personal God and even the Order of Nature.

53.  Page 167:  Man’s nature is such the he must live a self-conscious life in time, not in a blissful sub-rational eternity on the hither side og good and evil. …Spiritual grace cannot be received, except by those who have willed away their self-will to the point of being able to truthfully say, “not I but God in me.”

54.  Page 168 :  Spiritual grace originates from the divine Ground of all being, and it is given for the purpose of helping man to achieve his final end, which is to return out of time and self-hood to that ground.

55.  Page 169:  The goal is perpetual inspiration from sources beyond the personal self; and the means are “human kindness and morality”’ leading to charity which is unitive knowledge of Tao, as at once the Ground of Logos.  ….   “it is the delegated image of God”  replied Ch’eng.  Your life is not your own.  It is the delegated harmony of God.

56.  Page 171:  Over and above this course of what may be called professional modification, some artists have practiced the kind of self-naughting which is indispensable precondition of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.  …. Industry without art is brutality.

57.  Page 173: Only those who have the perception of the saints can know all the time and by immediate experience that divine Reality manifests itself as a Power that is loving, compassionate and wise.

58.  Page 177:  Granted that the ground of the individual sou is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground of all existence.

59.  Page 179:  Fer even when it is not actually falling the stone has weight.

60.  Page 182:  To be adequate to our experience the myth would have t  be modified in two ways.  In the first place, it would have to me modified in two ways.  In the first place it would have to make clear that creation, in in comprehensible passage from the unmanifested One into the manifest multiplicity of nature and necessary condition of the Fall, to some extent it is te Fall.  And in the second place it would have to indicate that something analogous to fee will may exist below the human level.   ‘’Pain and evil are inseparable from individual existence in a world of time and, for human beings.”

61.   Page 184:  We see then that, for Perennial Philosophy, good is the separate self’s  conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine Ground which gives it being: the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that ground exists.  …The universe is an everlasting succession of events; but its ground, according to the  Perennial Philosophy, it the timeless now of the divine Spirit.

62.  Page 185:  Knowledge of what is happening now does not determine the event.  What is ordinarily called God’s foreknowledge is in reality a timeless no-knowledge, this is compatible with the freedom of the human creatures’ will in time.

63.  Page 187:  The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being…

64.  Page 191:  man can if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfeness and so come to union with timeless Spirit.

65.  Page 197:  …no one can learn from that which is called orthodoxy in particular churches, but is only to be had by a total dying of all worldly views from above as delivers the mind from all selfishness and makes it truth and goodness with an equality in every man.

66.  Page 199:  Like the bee gathering honey fro different lowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religion/man.

67.  Page 200:  The reign of violence will never come to an end until ….this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all world religions.

68.  Page 202:  But for those who have accepted the Perennial {philosophy as a theory a theory and have done their best to live it  out in practice, “heaven” is something else.  They aspire to be delivered out in separate selfhood in time and into eternity as realized in the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.

69.  Page 204:  The truth which this little myth is meant to illustrate is that there are as many conceptions of salvation as there are degrees of spiritual knowledge and the kind of liberation (or enslavement) actually achieved by any individual soul depends upon the extent  to which that soul chooses do dissipate its essentially voluntary ignorance.

70.  Page 206:  This body” he said ‘Is mortal, forever in the clutch of death.  But within it resides the SELF, immortal and without form.

71.  Page 207:  the nature of things is such that the unitive knowledge of the Ground was contingent upon achievement of a total selflessness cannot possibly be realized, eve with outside help, by those who are noy yet selfless.

72.  Page 211:  Immortality is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground; survival is persistence in one of the forms of time.

73.  Page 214:  More precisely, good men spiritualize their mind-bodies; bad men incarnate and mentalize their spirits.

74.  Page 215: There is not the slightest reason to suppose that ardent spiritualists are more likely to be save that those who have never attended a séance or familiarize themselves with the literature speculative  or evidential.

75.  Page 218:  Molinos distinguishes three degrees of silence – silence of the mouth, silence of the mind and silence of will….the hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and version within the will.

76.  Page 220:  I shall get what I want.  Weather my will coincides with the will of God, and weather in setting what I want I shall get what is spiritually, morally or even materially good for me are questions which I cannot answer in advance.

77.  Page 221:  But meanwhile the third clause of the Lords Prayer is repeated daily by millions, who have not the slightest intention of letting any will be done, except their own.

78.  Page 224:  prayer is an actuation of an intellective soul towards God expressing an entire dependance on him as the author and fountain of all good.

79.  Page 227: Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being.  The highest prayer is the most passive.

80.  Page 227: For the individual who achieves unity within his own organism and union with the divine ground, there is an end of all suffering.  The goal of creation is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness that infatuating urge to separateness which results in suffering, through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality.

81.  Page 228: Suffering and moral evil have the same source – a craving for the intensification of the separateness which is the datum of all creatureliness.

82.  Page 229: Rational intelligence makes possible unparallel worldly success on the oe hand, and on the other,  a further advance toward spirituality and a return, through unitive knowledge, to the divine Ground.

83.  Page 236: The core and spiritual heart of all higher religions is the Perennial Philosophy; and the Perennial philosophy can be assented to and acted upon without  resort to the kind of faith Luther was writing about in the foregoing passage (read the book). …There must also be faith in authority – the authority of those whose selflessness has qualified them to know the spiritual Ground of all being by direct acquaintance as by report.

84.  Page 237: This eternal life “stands in the knowledge” of the Godhead, not in faith in anything less than the Godhead.

85.  Page 238:  Only when the individual also “simply is’ by reason of his union through love-knowledge with the Ground can there be any question of complete and eternal liberation.

86.  Page 241: The parents are responsible for making the child what, by heredity and upbringing.  The soul or character incarnated in the child is of such nature, owing to past behavior that is forced to select those particular parents

87.  Page 242:  In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; God is not mocked.

88.  Page 249: I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismark or Fredrick the Great, but Martain Luther.

89.  Page 252:  Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, it has something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even self-devotion…

90.  Page 253:  Grac and inspiration are given when and to the extent to which a human being gives up self-will…

91.  Page 263: But for all the inadequacy and their radical unlikeliness to the facts to which they refer, words remain the most reliable and accurate of our symbols.

92.  Page 265:  Withing this psychic medium of non-personal sub-stratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persist as an independent existence, possessing its own derived and secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those with whose faith and devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something “out there’, as distinct from the something in their own imaginations.  And so long this projected psychic entity is nourished by faith and love of its worshipers, it will possess not merely objectivity, but power to get people’s prayers answered

93.  Page 266: Sweet is the journey of Jesus, giving true joy to the heart; but sweeter beyond honey and all else in his presence.

94.  Page 267:  We see then that intense faith and devotion, coupled with perseverance by many persons in the same forms of worship or spiritual exercise, have a tendency to objectify the idea or memory which is their content and so to create, in some sort numinous real presence, which worshippers, find “out there” no less, and quite another way, than “in here”.

95.  Page 287:  Whoever has God in mind, simply and solely God, in all things, such a man carries God into all his works and into all places, and God alone does all his works.He seeks nothing but God, nothing seems good to him but God.  He becomes one with God in every thought. 

96.  Page 299:  For the full enlightened, total lobrated person, samsara and nirvana, time and eternity, the phenomenal  and the Real ae essentially one.

97.  Page 300:  We cannot act rightly and effectively unless we are in the habit of laying ourselves open to the divine Nature of Things.  … Even the unsleeping heart restes between beat and bear.