in conversation
ON EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY, PSYCHEDELICS & INNER GUIDANCE
10/22/2024 Aldous Huxley’s Divine WithinHUXLEY'S BRILLIANT ARTICULATION OF THE "MINIMUM WORKING HYPOTHESIS" WE NEED TO GUIDE OUR INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUAL DISCOVERIES AND GROWTH. RECENTLY I began reading Aldous Huxley’s book The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment. Perhaps because I’ve been searching in many ways my entire adult life to discover how science can be in service of awakening, I was stunned to discover that Huxley’s words expressed something I have long believed but could not express in words. He wrote that developing clarity was crucial to deepening spiritual growth and, quite unexpectedly, he also wrote that a very specific working research hypothesis was needed to “motivate and guide this research.” Luckily for me, and for you I trust, Huxley has answered in the text below his own question of "what sort and how much of a working hypothesis do we need?"
From Huxley's The Divine Within: For those of us who are not congenitally the members of an organized church, who have found that humanism and nature-worship are not enough, who are not content to remain in the darkness of ignorance, the squalor of vice, or the other squalor of respectability, the minimum working hypothesis would seem to run to about this: That there is a Godhead, Ground, Brahman, Clear Light of the Void, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestations. That the Ground is at once transcendent and immanent. That it is possible for human beings to love, know and, from virtually, to become actually identical with the divine Ground. That to achieve this unitive knowledge of the Godhead is the final end and purpose of human existence. That there is a Law or Dharma which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way which must be followed, if men are to achieve their final end. That the more there is of self, the less there is of the Godhead; and that the Tao is therefore a way of humility and love, the Dharma a living Law of mortification and self-transcending awareness. This, of course, accounts for the facts of history. People like their egos and do not wish to mortify them, get a bigger kick out of bullying and self-adulation than out of humility and compassion, are determined not to see why they shouldn't "do what they like" and "have a good time." They get their good time; but also and inevitably they get wars and syphilis, tyranny and alcoholism, revolution, and in default of an adequate religious hypothesis the choice between some lunatic idolatry, such as nationalism, and a sense of complete futility and despair. Unutterable miseries! But throughout recorded history the great majority of men and women have preferred the risk—no, the positive certainty of such disasters to the tiresome whole-time job of seeking first the kingdom of God. In the long run, we get exactly what we ask for. Comments are closed.
|
|