Aldous Huxley

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Perennial Philosophy (1945), The Doors of Perception (1954) and Island (1962).

The four doctrines

Aldous Huxley holds that four doctrines stand at the core of the higher religions. He set them out in his introduction to the translation of the Bhagavad Gita made by his teacher Swami Prabhavananda with Christopher Isherwood, and gathered the mystics' witness to them in The Perennial Philosophy. First, the world of matter and of individual minds is the manifestation of a divine Ground, within which all partial realities have their being. Second, human beings can know that Ground not only by inference but by direct intuition, higher than reasoning, which unites the knower with what is known. Third, each person has a double nature, a passing ego and an eternal Self, the spark of the divine within the soul. Fourth, the one purpose of human life is to identify with the eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Ground.

He calls this the perennial philosophy, a phrase he takes from Leibniz, and finds its shortest statement in the Chandogya Upanishad: that art thou, the Self within a person being the Ground of all things. The Ground has many names, Brahman in India, the Godhead in Eckhart, the Tao in China, the Clear Light in Tibet, and his anthology sets the mystics who name it side by side, theme after theme.

Knowledge follows being

Knowledge, in his teaching, is a function of being: what a person can know depends on what a person is. The Ground cannot be seen by a mind full of self, any more than a clouded glass can show the light. So the way to it is moral before it is mystical, and it asks the conditions the saints name: to become loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. The Gospel puts the rule in one line: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

Three ways for three kinds

People differ in temperament, and he holds that each kind has its own way to the Ground and its own typical fault. Some are drawn to devotion, to a personal God loved with feeling; some to action, to works done without self-seeking; some to knowledge and contemplation. The Gita's three yogas of devotion, works and knowledge answer to them. A wise religion, he holds, leaves room for all three, and the follower of one way does not despise the others.

The death of self-will

The discipline he values most is not the austerity of the body but the mortification of self-will. Harsh fasts and penances, in his reading of the saints, often feed the ego they mean to starve, and the wisest masters counsel moderation. The real work is daily and small: to bear the irritation without complaint, to keep back the sharp word, to do the duty of the hour without seeking credit, to want nothing for oneself in what one gives. Non-attachment, to persons, things, ideas and even one's own virtue, is its fruit, and charity, love without self-seeking, is both its means and its end.

Time, eternity and idolatry

The Ground lies outside time, in an eternal now, and the life of the spirit is lived there, in the present moment given wholly. Against it Huxley sets the idolatries of his century: the worship of a nation, a party, a technology or a future paradise, for whose sake the living present and living people are sacrificed. Any end short of the Ground becomes an idol when it is treated as final, even art, science or a cherished ideal.

Mind at Large and the reducing valve

The Doors of Perception adds a theory of the mind. Following the philosopher C. D. Broad, who drew on Henri Bergson, Huxley holds that the brain and the senses are not makers of awareness but filters of it. Each person is potentially Mind at Large, aware of everything happening everywhere; to survive, the animal must attend only to what is useful, and so the brain works as a reducing valve, letting through only a trickle of what could be known. Language then fixes that trickle into a world of named and useful things.

On the day he describes, the valve opened. Flowers in a vase shone with what Eckhart called is-ness; the folds of his trousers became labyrinths of meaning; books glowed like jewels. He understood, he says, the Zen saying that the dharma body of the Buddha is the hedge at the bottom of the garden. He also found the cost: the will was weakened, other people seemed of little concern, and the practical life became hard to care about.

Heaven, hell and the limit of the drug

Heaven and Hell maps what he calls the antipodes of the mind, regions as far from everyday awareness as the far side of the earth, full of visions of light, colour and more than natural significance. People have always prized gems, glass, gold, fireworks and the colours of great painting, he argues, because they recall those regions. But the antipodes have their hell as well as their heaven: the same opening that shows splendour can, for some, show a boundless and meaningless terror.

He is plain that such seeing is not the goal. He would not, he writes, equate it with the realisation of the end of human life; at most it is what Catholic theology calls a gratuitous grace, not necessary to salvation, perhaps a help. The house adds what his account needs: these drugs are unlawful in most countries, can bring terror, confusion and lasting harm, above all to anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, and nothing in his books is a guide to them. The older roads he names, long fasts, loss of sleep and harsh breath practices, carry dangers of their own and are not for imitation.

Two islands

His novels set the teaching in two pictures. Brave New World shows a state that keeps people content by breeding, conditioning in sleep, easy pleasure and the drug soma, until they love a servitude they cannot see. Island, his last word, shows its answer: Pala, a small society where mynah birds are taught to call out attention and here and now, so that no one forgets the present; where children learn plain science beside the training of awareness; and where the whole of life is a practice of being awake. Between the two books lies his lasting concern: whether the arts of conditioning will be used to dull people into contentment, or the arts of attention to set them free.