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. They get their good times, saysHuxley; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis and revolution andalcoholism, tyranny and, in default of an adequate religious hypothesis, thechoice between some lunatic idolatry, like nationalism, and a sense ofcomplete futility and despair. Everybody realises that this is a sad state ofaffairs but throughout recorded history most men and women havepreferred the risks, the positive certainty of such disasters to the laboriouswhole-time job of trying to get to know the divine Ground of all being.Inthe long run we get exactly what we ask for.Huxley did not, of course, suggest that there was any proof, in themathematical sense, of the existence of God.We cannot divide matter bynothing and call it infinity, as one of Huxley s fictional characters tried to do.But there is, according to Huxley, abundant evidence that certain people, byno means extraordinary except in this mystical respect, have directlyexperienced and realised the spiritual Absolute, have become united in God.Then what of we ordinary, nice, unregenerate people, what can wedo about it? The answer is that our will is free and it is up to us.We caneither identify ourselves exclusively with our self-ness and its own intereststo the exclusion of God, in which case we shall be either passively damned oractively fiendish; or we can identify ourselves exclusively with the divine 191Aldous Huxley s Philosophywithin us and without, in which case we shall be saints.As is the case with thecurrent British Prime Minister, there is also a third way, the way of life forthe majority of us.Those who follow the third way are neither saint norfiend.At one moment, or in one set of circumstances, they are selfish; atanother moment, or in another set of circumstances, they are humble,contrite and compassionate.These are too godly to be wholly lost, but tooself-centred to achieve enlightenment and total deliverance.Human craving, Huxley suggests, can be satisfied only by followingthe saintly path.To some extent our path will vary according to ourtemperament.Broadly speaking, we are all Pickwicks, Hotspurs or Hamlets,or some complicated combination of more than one of these.On the earthlyplane, the Pickwick in us is characterised by gluttony, the love of comfort andthe love of social approval.Pickwick can find God only through devotion, adeliberate disciplining of his merely animal gregariousness and merelyhuman kindliness into devotion to the personal God, and universal goodwilland compassion towards all sentient beings.The path of works is for Hotspur.He must rid himself of the usual andfatal accompaniments of the love of action love of power and the desire tohurt and work without regard to the fruits of his work, in a state ofcomplete non-attachment. For Hamlet, there is the way of knowledge, through the modificationof consciousness, until it ceases to be ego-centred and becomes centred inand united with the Divine Ground. For all of us Pickwick, Hotspur andHamlet it boils down to the denial of Self, and thence the achievement ofa knowledge of God.Of course, none of this is easy.Above all, we must be charitablecharitable in the original sense of the word and not as it is used in thedebased verbal currency of our day.Charity includes within itselfdisinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. Where there isdisinterestedness, there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear forpersonal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neithercraving nor aversion & ; and where there is humility there is nocensoriousness and no glorification of the ego. There isn t any secret formula or method, scribbled the dying Brunoin Time Must Have a Stop, echoing as he did so the words of St François deSaes. You learn to love by loving by paying attention and doing what onethereby discovers has to be de done. But to put this doctrine into effectrequires constant awareness and discipline.To give but one example, the kindof talk in which most of us indulge is morally evil and spiritually dangerous, 192RONALD HOPEfor most of what we say is inspired by greed, sensuality, self-love, malice,uncharitableness or pure imbecility.All these idle words stand between usand God.The path to salvation today is as difficult as it has always been.Onevery side we are urged to be as extraverted and as uninhibitedly greedy aspossible since it is only the restless and distracted who spend money on thethings that advertisers want to sell.We are encouraged to love and adoredifferent kinds of clothes, cars, food and drink.We must chasten thesedesires and passions.That is not to say that we must deliberately seek out physicalausterities, because this may have the wrong effect.This can nourish thatpride in ourselves which it should be our aim to destroy.What we mustendeavour to achieve is a holy indifference towards the things in time, notmerely towards the physical satisfactions, but also towards the mentalsatisfactions the success, for example, of a cause to which we have devotedour best energies.If it succeeds, well and good; but if it suffers defeat, thatalso is well and good, if only in ways which to a time-bound mind are hereand now entirely incomprehensible.What, it may be asked, is the reward for all this effort? It is not,necessarily, a better world, though this would follow if there were betterpeople in it.To the exponents of the perennial philosophy, the question of a better world, of whether progress is inevitable or even real, is not a matterof primary importance.For them the important thing is that individual menand women should come to the unitive knowledge of God; and what intereststhem in the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness, whatever these terms may mean, but the degree to which ithelps or hinders individuals in their advance towards the final end.This obviously has an important political corollary as well as apersonal implication.Power always corrupts. All great men are bad. Thepolitical corollary is that we should live, not in great nation states, but inunits sufficiently small to be capable of shared spiritual existence and ofmoral and rational conduct.Such social rearrangement as decentralisation,small-scale property-owning and small-scale production would do much toprevent ambitious individuals and organisations from being led intotemptation.In seeking this deliverance out of time and into eternity we cannotlose sight of the fact that we are living in time.The life of a mystic is not alife of inaction; nor does it lead to suicide for in committing suicide we donot escape the boundaries of time [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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. They get their good times, saysHuxley; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis and revolution andalcoholism, tyranny and, in default of an adequate religious hypothesis, thechoice between some lunatic idolatry, like nationalism, and a sense ofcomplete futility and despair. Everybody realises that this is a sad state ofaffairs but throughout recorded history most men and women havepreferred the risks, the positive certainty of such disasters to the laboriouswhole-time job of trying to get to know the divine Ground of all being.Inthe long run we get exactly what we ask for.Huxley did not, of course, suggest that there was any proof, in themathematical sense, of the existence of God.We cannot divide matter bynothing and call it infinity, as one of Huxley s fictional characters tried to do.But there is, according to Huxley, abundant evidence that certain people, byno means extraordinary except in this mystical respect, have directlyexperienced and realised the spiritual Absolute, have become united in God.Then what of we ordinary, nice, unregenerate people, what can wedo about it? The answer is that our will is free and it is up to us.We caneither identify ourselves exclusively with our self-ness and its own intereststo the exclusion of God, in which case we shall be either passively damned oractively fiendish; or we can identify ourselves exclusively with the divine 191Aldous Huxley s Philosophywithin us and without, in which case we shall be saints.As is the case with thecurrent British Prime Minister, there is also a third way, the way of life forthe majority of us.Those who follow the third way are neither saint norfiend.At one moment, or in one set of circumstances, they are selfish; atanother moment, or in another set of circumstances, they are humble,contrite and compassionate.These are too godly to be wholly lost, but tooself-centred to achieve enlightenment and total deliverance.Human craving, Huxley suggests, can be satisfied only by followingthe saintly path.To some extent our path will vary according to ourtemperament.Broadly speaking, we are all Pickwicks, Hotspurs or Hamlets,or some complicated combination of more than one of these.On the earthlyplane, the Pickwick in us is characterised by gluttony, the love of comfort andthe love of social approval.Pickwick can find God only through devotion, adeliberate disciplining of his merely animal gregariousness and merelyhuman kindliness into devotion to the personal God, and universal goodwilland compassion towards all sentient beings.The path of works is for Hotspur.He must rid himself of the usual andfatal accompaniments of the love of action love of power and the desire tohurt and work without regard to the fruits of his work, in a state ofcomplete non-attachment. For Hamlet, there is the way of knowledge, through the modificationof consciousness, until it ceases to be ego-centred and becomes centred inand united with the Divine Ground. For all of us Pickwick, Hotspur andHamlet it boils down to the denial of Self, and thence the achievement ofa knowledge of God.Of course, none of this is easy.Above all, we must be charitablecharitable in the original sense of the word and not as it is used in thedebased verbal currency of our day.Charity includes within itselfdisinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. Where there isdisinterestedness, there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear forpersonal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neithercraving nor aversion & ; and where there is humility there is nocensoriousness and no glorification of the ego. There isn t any secret formula or method, scribbled the dying Brunoin Time Must Have a Stop, echoing as he did so the words of St François deSaes. You learn to love by loving by paying attention and doing what onethereby discovers has to be de done. But to put this doctrine into effectrequires constant awareness and discipline.To give but one example, the kindof talk in which most of us indulge is morally evil and spiritually dangerous, 192RONALD HOPEfor most of what we say is inspired by greed, sensuality, self-love, malice,uncharitableness or pure imbecility.All these idle words stand between usand God.The path to salvation today is as difficult as it has always been.Onevery side we are urged to be as extraverted and as uninhibitedly greedy aspossible since it is only the restless and distracted who spend money on thethings that advertisers want to sell.We are encouraged to love and adoredifferent kinds of clothes, cars, food and drink.We must chasten thesedesires and passions.That is not to say that we must deliberately seek out physicalausterities, because this may have the wrong effect.This can nourish thatpride in ourselves which it should be our aim to destroy.What we mustendeavour to achieve is a holy indifference towards the things in time, notmerely towards the physical satisfactions, but also towards the mentalsatisfactions the success, for example, of a cause to which we have devotedour best energies.If it succeeds, well and good; but if it suffers defeat, thatalso is well and good, if only in ways which to a time-bound mind are hereand now entirely incomprehensible.What, it may be asked, is the reward for all this effort? It is not,necessarily, a better world, though this would follow if there were betterpeople in it.To the exponents of the perennial philosophy, the question of a better world, of whether progress is inevitable or even real, is not a matterof primary importance.For them the important thing is that individual menand women should come to the unitive knowledge of God; and what intereststhem in the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness, whatever these terms may mean, but the degree to which ithelps or hinders individuals in their advance towards the final end.This obviously has an important political corollary as well as apersonal implication.Power always corrupts. All great men are bad. Thepolitical corollary is that we should live, not in great nation states, but inunits sufficiently small to be capable of shared spiritual existence and ofmoral and rational conduct.Such social rearrangement as decentralisation,small-scale property-owning and small-scale production would do much toprevent ambitious individuals and organisations from being led intotemptation.In seeking this deliverance out of time and into eternity we cannotlose sight of the fact that we are living in time.The life of a mystic is not alife of inaction; nor does it lead to suicide for in committing suicide we donot escape the boundaries of time [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]