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	<TITLE>Aldous
Huxley: &quot;The Perennial Philosophy</TITLE>
	
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<font size="4">Aldous
Huxley: &quot;The Perennial Philosophy&quot;</font></B></p>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>THIS
latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and
saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The
sayings are arranged under several heads such as &quot;That art
Thou&quot;, &quot;The Nature of the Ground&quot;, &quot;Divine
Incarnation&quot;, &quot;Self-Knowledge&quot;, &quot;Silence&quot;,
&quot;Faith&quot; etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents
and also of the &quot;Neo-Brahmin's&quot; own personal preoccupation.
There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying,
meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's
standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>A similar compilation was published in the <I>Arya,
</I>called <I>The Eternal Wisdom (Les Paroles <FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&Eacute;</FONT>ternelles,
</I>in French) a portion of which appeared later on in book-form:
that was more elaborate, the contents were arranged in such a way
that no comments were needed, they were self-explanatory, divided as
they were in chapters and sections and subsections with proper
headings, the whole thing put in a logical and organised sequence.
Huxley's compilation begins under the title of the Upanishadic text
&quot;That art Thou&quot; with this saying of Eckhart: &quot;The more
God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is
within, the more without&quot;. It will be interesting to note that
the <I>Arya </I>compilation too starts with the same idea under the
title &quot;The God of All; the God who is in All&quot;, the first
quotation being from Philolaus, &quot;The Universe is a Unity&quot;.
<I>The Eternal Wisdom </I>has an introduction called &quot;The Song
of Wisdom&quot; which begins with this saying from the Book of
Wisdom: &quot;We fight to win sublime Wisdom; therefore men call us
warriors&quot;.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 131</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Huxley gives only one quotation from Sri Aurobindo under
the heading &quot;God in the World&quot;. Here it is:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot;The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the
son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may
even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in
its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep
our feet firmly on the physical. 'Earth is His footing' says the
Upanishad, whenever it images the Self that manifests in the
universe.&quot; Huxley's commentary is as follows:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot; 'To its heights we can always come.' For those of
us who are still splashing about in the lower ooze, the phrase has a
rather ironical ring. Nevertheless, in the light of even the most
distant acquaintance with the heights and the fullness, it is
possible to understand what its author means. To discover the Kingdom
of God exclusively within oneself is easier than to discover it, not
only there, but also in the outer worlds of minds and things and
living creatures. It is easier because the heights within reveal
themselves to those who are ready to exclude from their purview all
that lies without. And though this exclusion may be a painful and
mortificatory process, the fact remains that it is less arduous than
the process of inclusion, by which we come to know the fullness as
well as the heights of spiritual life. Where there is exclusive
concentration on the heights within, temptations and distractions are
avoided and there is a general denial and suppression. But when the
hope is to know God inclusively – to realise the divine Ground in
the world as well as in the soul, temptations and distractions must
not be avoided, but submitted to and used as opportunities for
advance; there must be no suppression of outward-turning activities,
but a transformation of them so that they become sacramental.&quot;</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The neatness of the commentary cannot be improved upon.
Only with regard to the &quot;ironical ring&quot; of which Huxley
speaks, it has just to be pointed out, as he himself seems to
understand, that the &quot;we&quot; referred to in the phrase does
not mean humanity in general that 'splashes about in the lower ooze'
but those who have a sufficiently developed inner spiritual life.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>There is a quotation from Lao Tzu put under the heading
&quot;Grace and Free Will&quot;: &quot;It was when the Great Way
declined that human kindness and morality arose&quot;.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 132</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>We fear Mr. Huxley has completely missed the point of
the cryptic sentence. He seems to take it as meaning that human
kindness and morality are a means to the recovery of the Lost
Way-although codes of ethics and deliberate choices are not
sufficient in themselves, they are only a second best, yet they mark
the rise of self-consciousness and have to be utilised to pass on
into the unitive knowledge that is Tao. This explanation or
amplification seems to us somewhat confused and irrelevant to the
idea expressed in the apophthegm. What is stated here is much simpler
and transparent. It is this that when the Divine is absent and the
divine Knowledge, then comes in man with his human mental knowledge:
it is man's humanity that clouds the Divine and to reach the' Divine
one must reject the human values, all the moralities, <I>salva
dharm<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>n, </I>seek only the Divine.
The lesser way lies through the dualities, good and evil, the Great
Way is beyond them and cannot be limited or measured by the relative
standards. Especially in the modern age we see the decline and almost
the disappearance of the Greater Light and instead a thousand smaller
lights are lighted which vainly strive to dispel the gathering
darkness. These do not help, they are false lights and men are apt to
cling to them, shutting their eyes to the true one which is not that
that one worships here and now, <I>nedam yadidam up<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">Ä</FONT>sate.</I></FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>There is a beautiful quotation from the Chinese sage, Wu
Ch'<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&ecirc;</FONT>ng-<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&ecirc;</FONT>n,
regarding the doubtful utility of written Scriptures:</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>&quot;&#39;Listen to this!&#39; shouted Monkey. &#39;After all the trouble we had getting here from China, and after you specially
ordered that we were to be given the scriptures, Ananda and Kasyapa
made a fraudulent delivery of goods. They gave us blank copies to
take away; I ask you, what is the good of that to us?' 'You needn't
shout,' said the Buddha, smiling. 'As a matter of fact, it is such
blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see
that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe
this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some
writing on.' &quot;</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>A sage can smile and smile delightfully! The parable
illustrates the well-known Biblical phrase, 'the letter killeth, but
the spirit giveth life'. The monkey is symbolical of the ignorant,
arrogant, fussy human mind. There is another Buddhistic</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 133</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>story
about the monkey quoted in the book and it is as delightful; but
being somewhat long, we cannot reproduce it here. It tells how the
mind-monkey is terribly agile, quick, clever, competent, moving
lightning-fast, imagining that it can easily go to the end of the
world, to Paradise itself, to Brahmic status. But alas! when he
thought he was speeding straight like a rocket or an arrow and arrive
right at the target, he found that he was spinning like a top at the
same spot, and what he very likely took to be the very fragrance of
the topmost supreme heaven was nothing but the aroma of his own
urine.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 134</FONT></P>
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