What is it about...

Rank these in your favorite order.

When Harry Met Sally

You've Got Mail

Sleepless in Seattle

Personally, the answer to this question is:

1.You've Got Mail

2. (Super close, almost tied for first) When Harry Met Sally

3. Sleepless in Seattle

I'm not sure what it is about these three movies but I love them. Legitimately. I can name other romantic comedies that I love (Alex & Emma, The Proposal, While you were sleeping etc.) but these stand alone, in my mind, as the best of the genre. (I've talked about You've Got mail before.)

I'm not quite sure why. Here's what I have come up with so far.

1. Maybe it's the fact that Meg Ryan is in all three and I think she is adorable. Not the Meg Ryan of today with plastic surgery, she is the shadow of her former self.

2. You've Got Mail is a remake of an earlier movie called, Shop around the corner. Is it that older films contain something special and updating them allows them to be with reach to the general public? The stories written historically are able to stand the test of time, like an updated version of shakespeare? (ie. 10 things I hate about you/Taming of the shrew)

3. Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner. Could it be that Norah Ephron wrote H&S and Mail? Something is seriously wrong with this woman. She can write. She pulls on my heart stings, and makes bust a gut laughing.

Or is it that Rob Reiner who directed H&S and starred in Sleepless? He has a way to capture emotion, happy and sad and communicate in a completely real way.

Is it the combined forces of these two kamikaze's of hollywood?

4. Finally, is it the timelessness of the stories? When Harry Met Sally the impossibility of love within the context of friendship. You've Got Mail, technology brings us closer while pushing us further away. (sidenote: should we be concerned with a robot uprising? Technology taking over the world? Skynet has been released.) Or is it the romance and simple impossibility of true love at first sight?

Personally, I think aspects of these films can stand right up next to films like, Casablanca (Another great love story) and Citizen Kane

Give me your thoughts. Other Films? Agree or Disagree.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 8

(Edging further along the canyon. The indistinct glare still shown on the other side of the gorge. We still travel on hoping to find a way across. Up ahead, we see a group of sages.)

Huxley: Good-day gentlemen. This is Matt. He hails from what the natives call Myrtle Beach We are today talking about Love.

(I nod. Then I made out St. John among them. He spoke up first.)

St John: How do you know God?

Matt: I’d say you know God when you love Him.

St. John: And why is that?

Matt: Because God is love.

St. John: Very good. You can’t get to God by thought, only by love. Remember that.

Huxley: Yes. Matt wants unitive knowledge, the kind that unifies him to God.

St. John: The only way to get there is to see how much he loves!

Huxley: Right.

Matt: Why exactly?



St. John: Because the mind itself has motives, and those motives are powers that move the mind along. One of these motives is Love. Love draws you up out of your Self and sets you on high.

Huxley: Remember that love is the astrolabe for God’s mysteries.

St. John: I would give you directions to cross the gorge, but each path is different, unique to the traveler.

(Somewhat disappointed, we plodded along. Huxley and I began to talk).

Huxley: Knowing and loving are related in a certain way.

Matt: How?

Huxley: Can you love something without knowing what it is? Or, can you ever know something through and through without loving it?

Matt: What are you saying? That love has its own epistemology?

Huxley: Precisely. Love is a mode of knowledge!

Matt: So, when does Love bring union with God?

Huxley: It’s got to become disinterested and intense enough.

Matt: Why disinterested?

Huxley: If not, it’s a biased love; it’s not undiluted charity. Recall that love is a mode of knowledge. Well, if you’ve got biased love, what kind of knowledge do you have?

Matt: I suppose it’s a partial and distorted knowledge.

Huxley: Of what, though?

Matt: Of the Self, of the world, of things, lives, minds, spirits outside my Self.

Huxley: Right. What happens to someone whose diet is Lust, not Love?

Matt: Oh, this is Shakespeare! The lust-dieted man ‘slaves the ordinances of Heaven’!

Huxley: Right. And that man slaves the ordinances of Heaven because the laws of Nature and the Spirit are subordinated to his cravings.

Matt: So, the lust-dieted mind suffers an ignorance.

Huxley: A voluntary ignorance.

Matt: But he can’t see! How can a blind man help what he can’t see?

Huxley: But he will not see. He puts his hands over his eyes.

Matt: What is the reward of this blindness?

Huxley: It depends. The ambitious or the possessive or the vain or the petulant all fall into their traps. Less obviously, one can sacrifice salvation, enlightenment, or the possibility of escaping the Self, to power, prosperity, or reputation!

Matt (sigh): This spiritual ignorance is terrible.

Huxley: It is. Do you remember Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed?

Matt: I don’t.

Huxley: His priest told him to prepare his soul before death by forgiving his enemies.

Matt: How did the Cardinal respond? 

Huxley: He said simply: ‘I have never had any enemies to forgive, except the State.’ You see, a life full of avarice, ambition, and intrigue made the Cardinal spiritually ignorant. He had no charity for the State. And you now see what this does.

Matt: How sad. The Cardinal is doomed to not knowing the entirety of his soul or anything else.

(At a bend in the trail, Aquinas seemed to be strolling by.)

Aquinas: I could help but here you talking of Love, how Love and Knowledge are related but different.

Huxley: What did you have in mind?

Aquinas: To love God is better than to know Him.

Matt: Why is that to you?

Aquinas: Because to know something is to raise it to my intelligence. But if I love something, I stoop to it in order to become its servant. It’s like the relationship between the miser and his gold!

(At that point, he left us by going around the bend.)

Huxley: Very enlightening! We can know God by reading theology, and we can know God by loving Him: two very different modes of knowing.

Matt: I liked the analogy between the miser and his gold.

Huxley: I did too. It’s like the spectator at an art show. He loves the painting not for what its worth, but because of its beauty.

(We heard footsteps quickening behind us. It was Pascal. He was in a hurry to be somewhere, but we didn’t know where. He heard the last part of the sentence and quickly said something as he passed.)

Pascal: We have to be so careful not to make Truth an idol. Truth and Love can’t be put asunder. So, we can’t love or worship the Truth.

(He scurried by off the path and up the hill on the right with lots of energy and passion. We resumed our discussion.)

Huxley: Charity doesn’t remind you of Love, does it? I mean, in Myrtle Beach.

Matt: Yea, I was about to ask you about that. We use that word to mean ‘almsgiving’, mainly.

Huxley (amused): That’s got to be some kind of philological accident! Or, maybe it’s no accident. Maybe it’s a subtle expression of something.

Matt: Of what?

Huxley: Of a seed that’s very deeply planted is the heart of man: that sprouts into ignorance and blooms into darkness. But charity is really a kind of love, the highest form of love.

Matt: English does have a very inadequate vocabulary.

Huxley: Very much so! Especially with psychological or spiritual talk. I remember St. John from earlier. He is famous for saying, ‘God is Love’. And we repeat it glibly.

Matt: Or that we love our neighbor as our Self.

Huxley: Yes. In Myrtle Beach, what do you think pops in the mind of the average denizen there?

Matt: Probably all sorts of things. They could think of a sex-scene in a movie, or someone caring for someone downtrodden, because that person is a temple of the Holy Ghost.

Huxley: Or lots of other things. But when our vocabulary isn’t clear, neither is our thought. Unclear thought is what a divided human nature loves. But we don’t want division, because we don’t desire to be unregenerate in our being.

Matt: So, what is charity, the highest form of love? What are some of its characteristics?

(To be continued . . . )

Sweet Bubblicious

I am a sucker for some radio, bubble gum pop. I always have been. Everything from Will Smith's Willenium, Britney Spears, and anything else that fits with in that context. I love it.

(Big willie style all in it, gettin jiggy wit it)

I also love the "bubblegum" in other genres. I am a sucker for Entertainment Weekly. I am interested in what is going on in the world of entertainment, who is dating who, who broke up with who etc.

In the art world I am a fan of the Rococo. Fragonard, maybe the Lady GaGa of his time, painting pictures of children on swings, sitting in the grass, so sweet in fact, you can feel the cavities forming.

Over the past year I secretly have worn out a few songs that I believe encompass some of the better of this world of radio pop.

Katy Perry- I Kissed a Girl, Hot and Cold

Lady Gaga- Poker Face, Just Dance

Taylor Swift-Love Story

The three above were in high rotation with my John Coltrane, Jurassic 5 and Bob Dylan. I couldn't help myself. During this time of complete musical gluttony I continued to ask the question, "Why not". And certainly why not.

The song that has been in high rotation recently is; Ke$ha- Tik Tok.

This can be completely blamed on the new game show that I have yet to see, Minute to Win it.

The commercial for this game show makes it look like the greatest thing on TV and I am convinced that it will be.

What are your guilty pleasures? Or less abrasive title, Bubblegum Pop mainstays?

Athletics as a story.

I by no means am an athlete. I enjoy playing basketball and there was a time when I knew my way around a soccer ball. On the other hand I have never been a sports "fan". At the risk of sounding cliche' the most engaging portion of the superbowl for me were the commercials. Occasionally, if it was close, I would be engaged. Other than that consider me uninterested. I'll hang out at the food table waxing eloquently about Plato or Lady GaGa.

Like some people can reference a particular person's RBI's for a certain season or how many National championships some one has. I could tell you when the beatles released the white album (1968), but ask me anything related to stats a glaze comes over my eyes and I think of other more interesting things, Lady GaGa for example.

As I have gotten older the narrative of Sports has interested me. Specifically, baseball. It is America's past time. Nothing sums up a classic summer day than a Hotdog, a cold Beer, and an afternoon at the BallPark. Historically, there is so much connected with it, Civil rights, Scandal, Human fortitude. All of these things make for a great novel. Ken Burns the Documentarian spent 10 volumes exploring the history of the sport and I was enamored. After watching that documentary, I sat down infront of the television to watch a complete baseball game. I waited for the something inspiring to happen. A triple play, a great outfield catch, diversity being overcome...

Nothing.

So much nothing in fact that I fell asleep in the third inning. I did not miss much considering when I woke up from the baseball induced slumber, the score was the same.

I can think of one time I was completely engaged in a baseball game. A few years ago, the Red Sox won the World Series. You may or may not have heard. It was not that big of a deal. But, it was after years of heartbreak after heartbreak. The curse of the Great Bambino was Broken.

When the Red Sox started their series, that seemed doomed. I was watching with a friend from undergrad. He was raised on the Red Sox. He had followed them for years. Given years and years of dedication to them as a fan. I happened to be at his house for the first loss. I continued to come over for the next two losses. The next game they won. I immediately smelled a story. I said things like, "They can do it, they could win!" Nate, the Boston fan, immediately communicated the the wall before them. No one in any sport in the history of athletics had ever come back from a deficit like that.

Slowly but surely, It happened.

I had nothing to base my prediction on. In my selfish desire to see a story on the field I believed it could happen. When they won, Nate, the Red Sox fan, I looked at him and he was in tears. He had been waiting his entire life for that moment. It happened in his lifetime and he was there to experience it.

Following sports as closely as Nate, or as many others do, it becomes a story. Watching these men or women perform at the highest level of sport is second to none. The olympics is a great example of this. Individuals who 50 weeks out of the year work at Home Depot and train for one event and perform on a world stage and bring home the gold. It's enough to bring the coldest person to tears.

Sports/Athletics allows people to enter into a larger Meta-narrative. A little boy playing T-ball is participating in something larger.

I'm not ready to start memorizing stats but, I am ready to give my allegiance to a team.

Los Angeles Dodgers.

I have t-shirt. Nothing says dedication like a t-shirt.

Alexander Vilenkin and The Many Worlds Theory

I'm going to take a brief detour from Huxley during my trip to see my grandparents to talk about Alexander Vilenkin, professor of physics at Tufts University, and the leading authority on what is called The Multiverse.

Vilenkin wrote a book called Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. In it, he defends the idea of a Multiverse. Imagine that our universe is a grape. On Vilenkin's model, our universe is just one grape among many on a gravevine. In fact, there may be an infinite amount of grapes on this grapevine, or even an infinite amount of grapevines!

Basically, all the evidence for the Big Bang is from within one grape. As our grape expands - like a balloon - it looks as if ALL of space/time is expanding. But it's really just one universe on a grapevine, which spawns an infinite number of other grape-universes. The Big Bang just assumes that our grape is the only grape; space/time didn't have a beginning at the beginning of our grape, since there's an infinite amount of other grapes with their own space/times. Or, space/time is something like an umbrella over the gravevine as a whole. And since the grapevine is eternal, so is space/time.

We also have to remember that each grape is causally connected to every other grape, just as every grapevine is causally connected to every other grapevine: there's an infinite amount of grapes and an infinite amount of grape vines. Each grape and grapevine has a boundary and that boundary is what is called an event-horizon.

Vilenkin also believes that our grape is always inflating, like a balloon that's inflated with more and more air, so it expands more and more. This is strange though, because even though he thinks each grape is inflated eternally, the grapevines have a finite past. Maybe he means that each grape has a finite past and now that they have spawned they'll go on inflating forever.

According to the first inflationary theory, our universe is in a true-vacuum state. There is almost no density, like a desert with a little amount of trees. But earlier, the universe was in a false-vacuum state, having lots of density, like a jungle, thick with trees, foliage, and vines. This high density makes lots of gravity. But the gravity is overwhelmed by the energy from the density in the false-vacuum state. This energy causes a VERY powerful inflation, which makes the universe grow from the size of an atom to a size bigger than the universe as we see it today. But Vilenkin needs more than this inflationary theory.

Vilenkin, remember, wants to make the inflation of the grapes eternal. This is where scalar fields come in. These scalar fields determine how much density a false-vacuum state will have, like a gardener determines how many flowers to have in a garden. But these scalar fields have a special job to do: they have to get that false-vacuum state to expand so fast that when it starts to wither into true-vacuums (creating island universes: aka 'grapes'), the false-vacuum outruns (expands faster than) the island universes. This means the island universes are further disconnected from time. New island universes will pop up as the gap between the expanding false-vacuum and the other island universes gets bigger, like an ocean between two continents getting wider and wider leaves more and more room for more islands.

Very briefly: Vilenkin does say the Multiverse is finite. And he says the false-vacuum will go on inflating forever and ever. He does NOT explain how there is no violation of the second law of thermodynamics. More on that later.

As butter gets thinner and thinner the more it is spread, the center of the island universes get more and more hallow and dark the more it expands. At the rim of every island universe we have various Big Bangs, as the false-vacuum withers into true true-vacuum. In other words, every grape is growing, even though every grape is finite, since it had a beginning in the grapevine. Each grape (or island) had its own Big Bang. But here we have to make a distinction.

There is a Multiverse time and a time relative to particular island/grape universes. From the standpoint of the Multiverse's time, the islands/grapes pop up one after the other, successively. Vilenkin then does something very tricky. From the standpoint of each and every island/grape's time, each Big Bang happened at the same time (not successively)! So, from the Multiverse's standpoint, all those infinite amount of Big Bangs that WILL happen have, from the grape/island's perspective, ALREADY HAPPENED! That's why we can say here - in our grape/island - that there is already an infinite amount of grapes/islands. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can say OUR island/grape is infinite. Excuse me? Am I the only one raising my eyebrows here?

Lets go further. Perched up in our island, we can only see so much: a frontier. The frontier keeps going, and if you kept traveling you'd reach the edge of the island itself. From Earth, though, we can only see so much. We'll call this our perch. Even though quantum mechanics says there's only a finite number of histories from the Big Bang to any perch (like there's only a finite number of pages that can be traced to the spine of a book), Vilenkin thinks there's an infinite number of perches IN our island! That means all the histories in our perch are echoed infinitely! What? Read that again.

Vilenkin doesn't prove that quantum mechanics can be a map of the physical world. To undercut this, we could point out the reality of free agents, people whose choices aren't random, which they'd have to be if quantum mechanics described them. I mean (per the above paragraph), think about it. Is my counterpart in another island/grape really typing this thread an infinite amount of times, in an infinite amount of ways (say, with a clown-suit on!)? Further, how does Vilenkin magically turn the infinite, TEMPORAL, FUTURE 'succession' of perches (let alone the islands/grapes) into the infinite, SPATIAL 'simultaneous' range of perches? How can you do this? I don't see it: at all.

On the one hand (from the multiverse's perspective), the islands are still popping up, as the ocean between the continents grows wider, as the false-vacuum (prodded on by these scalar fields) outruns the latest island. On the other hand (from the island's perspective), the islands are already there! Huh? I also see that Vilenkin espouses a B-theory of time, at least relative to the islands, which is strange. The only way for the infinite amount of islands to be already 'out there' is if their times are 'out there' too: hence, the B-theory. So, another way to undercut Vilenkin is to prop up an A-theory of time and give reasons why the B-theory isn't right. If it takes time for the 'wave of time' to reach a certain point in the future, the islands' times can't exist, and so neither can the islands.

Vilenkin also thinks that by putting out into the galactic ocean an infinite amount of islands, the design that our island has won't be improbable at all! If there's an infinite amount of islands, then of course an island like ours is bound to pop up sooner or later, he'd reason. All the scalar fields have to do is weather a quantum fluctuation, which will make a certain vacuum shrivel off from the false-vacuum (like a petal from a flower). Each vacuum has certain values, and these values are the constants that you hear about: the ones that are 'fine-tuned', like an instrument. But if there's an infinite amount of islands, each with there own values/constants, it's no wonder we see the fine-tuning in our own perch! We see what we want to see in Nature, since we're humans. We see intelligence because intelligence is doing the seeing.

Psychologically, it's almost as if Vilenkin is motivated by the desire to dethrone Man. Okay, perhaps the motivation for the Big Bang is to enthrone him again. Who knows? But at least, the Big Bang is consistent with the evidence we see from our perch. We don't even see any of the other perches, let alone the other islands/grapes, let alone other grapevines! So, at the very worst, you have a motive and no evidence on the one hand, and a motive and lots of evidence on the other. That's why I'll always take the Big Bang right now. It's that simple.

But let's put that aside. Remember, if the A-theory of time is true, Vilenkin's grapes/islands don't even exist yet: that means there ISN'T an infinite number of them. This down plays the probability point from the many-worlds theory. There's only as many islands as have popped up since the beginning of the first withering of the first false-vacuum: which would be the multiverse itself, the granddaddy grapevine. Is it at all probable that our universe (island/grape) with all its fine-tuning values/constants would have sprouted so soon? I mean, cosmically, 15 billion years isn't that long.

Lets go back to the eternal inflation point. Recall, Vilenkin thinks the multiverse will inflate forever. Okay, how? Well, Vilenkin thinks the scalar fields have properties that are in the driver's seat of the inflation going on forever. But guess what Vilenkin says on page 61?: "Another important question is whether or not such scalar fields really exist in nature. Unfortunately, we don't know. There is no direct evidence for their existence" Uh oh. So, we have no good reason to think the multiverse eternally inflates. That's a bit of a problem, no?

Another problem: why hasn't the multiverse died out yet? I mean, it's been around for an infinitely long time. I feel like this concept of infinity is tossed around and only certain philosophers know what it really entails. Shouldn't the multiverse have died a heat-death by now? Shouldn't there be thermodynamic equilibrium by now? If not, why not? Is our universe just an island of disequilibrium? If so, why is our island so big? I mean, it's pretty large. Shouldn't it look much smaller, shouldn't it be more probable that it be smaller if the whole grapevine was in equilibrium? Roger Penrose thinks that the odds are VERY VERY small that our island would be as big as it is. It should be about the size of our solar system, let alone our galaxy, let alone our perch, let along our grape/island!

And why don't I see strange things like a giraffe appear out of nowhere in my living room and then disappear again? The odds against that happening are a flea compared to the elephant of there being an island that has the constants/values for life, if - of course - there WAS a multiverse.

And if there WAS, did IT have a beginning? Ironically, Vilenkin - along with Arvind Borde and Alan Guth - in 2003, said that if a universe is expanding, it's got to have a beginning: it's got to have a space/time frontier. This principle pretty much applies to any model. Here it is, straight from the horses' mouth, Vilenkin: "It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning" (p. 176). Thus, the mutiverse had a beginning. So, it popped into being out of nothing. Or, quantum tunneling? If so, why can't God bring it about that way too? At least, with God we have an efficient cause. This brings us to Vilenkin's model: quantum creation!

Imagine that the first state of our universe is a basketball filled with a false-vacuum, with teeny tiny bits of matter in it. If our basketball has a small enough radius, Newton says it'll collapse; but quantum physics says it'll tunnel, which will make our basketball inflate. So, there's two states. First, there's the state before the quantum tunneling; second, there's the state after the tunneling. But Vilenkin thinks that the state BEFORE the tunneling is NOTHING. Yet that's not what Vilenkin's diagram shows in his book. It shows that every step of the tunneling is SOMETHING into SOMETHING else. Vilenkin seems to think that if you DO have a radius whose measure is zero, that's the same thing as having NO radius. But it's NOT the same thing. In one case, you have SOMETHING; in the other, you have NOTHING.

Vilenkin admits it's not UTTERLY nothing. He wants this apparition 'nothing' to be subject to quantum laws. So, Vilenkin is comfortable with saying that there was a time when there was the laws of physics and yet no universe! Hmmmm. But that's not true when we realize that by 'no universe', Vilenkin means 'the state prior to the tunneling', when the radius measured 'zero'. But guess what? That state had some properties. Nothingness is the absence of properties! Not the same thing. So, Vilenkin misunderstands 'nothingness'.

Interestingly, Vilenkin has put on his 'philosopher hat' when he starts to wonder just what these laws of physics are. Are they abstract objects? Vilenkin says, YES! They are concepts that actually exist in a Mind. Excuse me? It's on page 205. Check it out!

So, there doesn't seem to be good reason to believe in a multiverse. Vilenkin's model is flawed big time. It presupposes a B-theory of time, which I think is flawed. The Big Bang model is still the best model. The many-worlds hypothesis doesn't have an infinite amount of worlds to work with; and it's pretty unlikely that an island would pop up that would permit life so early! 15 billion years isn't a long time, cosmically. Quantum mechanics doesn't describe everything in the natural universe. There's no reason to think the scalar fields can make the multiverse expand forever. Even if the multiverse is true, we should be seeing a MUCH smaller island than we do, in fact, see from our perch. And still, the odds against the fine-tuning of our island is still HUGELY improbable. On top of all this, the multiverse had a beginning, as Vilenkin points out. But it doesn't come from nothing, since Vilenkin misunderstand 'nothingness'. It comes from the false-vacuum state prior to its quantum tunneling! Well, guess what Vilenkin: that has properties - so, it's not nothing.

Good Vibrations

Dictionary.com defines culture as;

the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc

Because of the nature of this blog pertaining to culture I feel it is necessary to have definition to work off of.

I want to focus your attention to "that arises from a concern". I almost died today. This week is my finals week and has not only kept from communicating with you loyal followers of The Heretical Review, but also it has kept me from my sweet, sweet, bed. Sleep is something that I miss dearly, like the touch from a former lover or a piece of cake for a woman on a diet, I need it, I crave it, I'm pining. I rarely pine, I'm not proud but, never the less, It's happening.

This morning at 4 a.m. an earthquake, a whopping 4.0 on the richter scale, hit sunny Los Angeles. A friend here at Fuller said she always wondered what her response would be under these auspicious circumstances. Fight? Flight? It is a question that can only be answered when you are under the gun.

Apparently my response is sleeping. Also, it is appropriate to know that I did not realize that we even had a earthquake until, Sam my roommate, mentioned it casually. He said, "Yea, it woke me up, I thought about waking you up but then I fell back asleep." It's good to know that we are people you can depend on. And by depend, I mean just assume I am dead in a major natural disaster, it will save you time and energy in the rescue process. And If I am able to find you in the end, the surprise will be all the more special.

I think this is an appropriate time to turn the corner and discuss some films; I cannot remember a movie with the plot line that deals specifically with earthquakes. I can think of plenty of movies that have earthquakes in them. I can also think of films with the earth opening up and swallowing up people and cities. But, no earthquake films. Outside of the 1974 film called "Earthquake". This is a little explored natural disaster.

I, want to take this time now to implore Steven Speilberg, George Lucas or Michael Bay to take on the challenge. There is a whole world of heartache and man overcoming the odds to be explored here.

Postscript

I plan to pick up on my commentary on the 23rd of March. I'm going to see my grandparents for a little over a week. Before you know it, I'll be back! Things are getting hectic as I plan to go off to Basic. But I'll stay on track as best I can and be back posting whenever I can.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 7

As someone who is pushed into the ocean over a ship in the midst of sleep is shocked out of unconsciousness, I came to my senses. I noticed that the scene was different than it was a moment ago, as if the environment morphed on its own, like a butterfly from its cocoon. I frantically searched for Huxley and found him about 20 feet away looking at me, as if waiting for me. I got to my feet and strolled over to him with a heaviness in my head, not like a hangover, but more like a drug-induced high. It felt natural, as if I got there without cheating, as natural as the feeling of fulness after a healthy meal.

Huxley: “Glad to see you’re ready. You already look changed, as the sea looks different in the evening than it does in mid-afternoon. Are you ready to find out how God is in the World? Remember throughout the day that He is not in the world like a beaver is in its dam. The world is not a greenhouse that makes the divine flowers blossom.”

This must be the mystery of Immanence and Transcendence, again. Our language is like a belt that is too tight for the waist of Reality. It is a funnel and we’re only allowed to see Reality come through the narrow end. We see the sheet music with its flute, clarinet, strings, drums, tuba, cello, and violin sections; but we’re only equipped with a piano. How Reality must squeeze through the tiny door of Reality as Alice did to enter Wonderland.

Huxley: “The best road to the Divine Ground is through your Self and that which your Self perceives. If she were conscious, the best way Mona Lisa could reach Da Vinci would be through her Self and the scenery in which she is placed. She would find Da Vinci’s character in her Self and in all the elements in her environment, just as we can find the character of the Divine in our Self and Nature.”

The Mona Lisa always existed as an idea in Da Vinci, just as we have always existed as an idea in the Divine. Before we were born, He knew us. Da Vinci’s mind was the habitation of all his ideas, just as in his loins each man carries in himself the future of posterity.

God is Spirit, and so He is simple, since He has no parts, and Spirit has no parts. He is everywhere, like a voice is everywhere in a room once spoken.

Huxley: “Matt. When do you see one thing separated from another? When are you above understanding, as a man is above a beast?” I answered: When I see God in everything, I am above mere understanding, just as when a man sees the personality of his favorite author strung like a common thread throughout his works, he is above merely understanding the content of what is written.

Huxley: “Each one of us is an atom in the divine body, an element of heat in a ray from the Divine Sun. In everyone, there is an essence in which the Godhead is there. We meet the Godhead in our essence, and our essence is like the spine that holds the pages of the book of our Selves together; it is that which is at the bottom of every page. The book of humankind is a thick tome; but there is no page that is not in perpetual contact with the spine. Because of this mutual contact, the page can come to know the spine. And let’s not forget about Nature. A tree has a form that reveals to us the Divine Ground. It is a symbol showing us Reality. The tree is a fed by the roots, which soak up the water; from the trunk the branches spring out, and from the branches we have twigs that give birth to foliage, all of which is given life by the sun. Everything in the life of a tree points to the Divine and its relation to us. We are a tree; we only grow if we’re rooted and rained on and given light by the sun.”

I saw clearer now. The poet tries to capture an image of the Divine and contain it like a photograph. But we can only see the image if the mode of our being changes. We’ll like the same song if the mode of our being is similar. No matter how much the song moves us, if we share with excitement the song with a friend whose mode of being is miles away from our own, they’ll meet the song with indifference. Faith, love, and hope prepare us to ‘see God’ like a microscope prepares us to see an atom. We’ll begin to feel the heat of the ray from the Godhead like we’d begin to see the pattern of an optical illusion if we look at it just right.

If I kneel when I pray, if I feel a reverence before a shrine (my stomach flutters), my imagination, my feelings, my emotions change, thus changing my mode of being. A vortex whistles down from the storm clouds of my consciousness and the vortex becomes a psychic medium, much like a channel for spiritual water, or an instrument for spiritual music. Through this medium, I interpret the prayer or the reverence. It is this medium that stamps my experience or the image with the Divine. This aspect of the Divine is the bridge to the Divine Ground. It is always possible, though, to hear the words, but not the music. But the music will always be there, waiting, like a buried treasure in a secret chamber on an uncharted island. The psyche must be tuned to see it, just as an instrument must be tuned to play the right notes: then the music will be right.

Huxley: “The way to the Divine outside yourself is harder than the way to the Divine within. The heights without are more arduous than the heights within. Without, temptations and distractions come like constant interruptions during a good conversation. But this must happen to find God not just in the Self, but in the World. Ironically, these distractions are the stepping stones, the rungs in your ladder. You must meet every temptation and turn it into a sacrament. It was designed for you and you alone because you were made for it. We must pay attention to our life like an artist pays attention to his masterpiece. Every element must be given attention.”

I saw now why the Far East was filled with landscape painting; it was a religious duty, to find God in the World. The Heavens declare the glory of God!

I heard the story of Li-lou, who could see a soft hair at a distance of a hundred paces. But when the Emperor dropped his precious jewel in the water, Li-lou couldn’t find it, despite his extraordinary eyesight. Yet Hsiang-wang found it! When Li-lou dove in the waves roared and the deep darkened. But when Hsiang-wang dove in, the sea calmed and the jewel shined! Li-lou could see but he could not see, for he did not walk in the higher spheres.

I then heard of those who saw God in Nature, but not in their Self. Wordsworth saw it in The Prelude, as did Byron. Pleasure rushes over them as if they were tingling. Though Wordsworth saw it, he did not take it in. He admired the beauty, but didn’t marry it. It didn’t transform him into a butterfly, but affected him from the outside, like the temperature. But St. Bernard scaled the heights of the Self and received the fulness of Nature. Nature became a patient teacher. St. Bernard: “Listen to a man of experience: thou wilt learn more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach thee more than thou canst acquire from the mouth of a scholar.” Nature is a stepping-stool to God. We use it as we might use a pair of spectacles to see. Philo says: “Even though a man may be incapable of making himself worthy of the creator of the cosmos, yet he ought to try to form himself from being a man into the nature of the cosmos and become, if one may say so, a little cosmos.”

Our path converged onto an impasse. I looked over the edge and had a momentary fit of vertigo. The drop over the cliff swooped down into a canyon. The base of it must have been a couple of miles down. My foot accidentally must have pushed over some pebbles as I edged to the frontier because I heard a light echoing tumbling down the curvature of the canyon wall. I wondered how we were to get across. It was much too dangerous to try to climb down: we didn’t have the tools. I did see that the path broke into two opposite directions so that it looked like a ‘T’. But were we to go left or right? The canyon stretched beyond my sight so I couldn’t see if either path lead across or not. Huxley bid me to go right, so I went right. I peered over the edge of the canyon to my left and saw a river that looked like a long, blue stringy strand of silk, curving its way in the contours of the rock like a snake. The other side of the canyon was much too bright to make out anything distinctly. I thought it was the sun setting, but the sky was still blue, and I still saw the sun off-kilter above. It couldn’t be another sun. Maybe I’ll get to see more if we progress along this path.

How do you listen pt. 2

I am currently working on master's degree and they were not joking about the "Master" part. I have spent quite a bit of time in the library. Like Anne Frank, I have hidden myself in my cubby looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, (in her case it was the Americans, mine is the end of an oppressive quarter) .

Because of this new cave-like existence, the only real thing I have time for anymore is listening to music. Music is an interesting phenomenon. It is an extremely layered art form. Like, a good piece of literature or a painting there is so much to appreciate. I find myself listening to a song a thousand times and discovering something new each time.

But, the most interesting thing I have found in music is the non-musical nuances that take place. I like most people, look forward to and get excited about certain things; guitar and drum solos, a smooth bass line, gang vocals, and even a clever or emotional lyric. But, something that I have discovered that I have an equal amount of appreciation for a voice crack or someone exhaling.

For example, in Ray Charles' Halleluja I jus

t love her so, Ray's voice cracks at the end of the song and it seems so appropriate based on the theme of the song. He truly loves that person and in his joy he sings and loses all control and regard for his voice. The song becomes all the more lovely because of it.

Sufjan Steven's haunting, John Wayne Gacy Jr., is the biography of a man who committed some terrible atrocities. Steven's compare's himself to him and places himself along this man. At the end of the song Steven's exhales and in that exhausted, expelling of breath, something so much deeper is communicated than words can describe.

Live versions of songs in the past have bothered me. The crowd would always bother me, often times the music would not be different enough to make it worth my attention. Live albums that I enjoyed were few and far between. Not until I began to listen to some older Mo-town and Soul did I discover some truly wonderful live versions of songs. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, The Temptations, Al Green, Marvin Gaye to name a few, showed the raw emotion in songs. These men, when they sing there songs live there is something almo

st animalistic. They scream and yell their lyrics. They roll around on the floor to communicate their love.

Music is the single most galvanizing thing in my life. There are very few things that can get me as excited as a moment from a Led Zepplin song. But, there is something entirely brand new to consider when I think of these non-music acts that exist in certain songs.

Listen for these. See if acknowledging it changes the meaning of a song, maybe it will give it a greater context and a deeper meaning.

Songs for further consideration:

Otis Redding- Try a little tenderness

Al Green- Let's Stay Together

Dusty Springfield-You don't have to say you love me

Erykah Badu- Green Eyes

Stevie Wonder- Living for the City

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 6

The talk on Incarnation would be brief. As we were walking I felt something strange when I looked at him. I could choose to see myself if I wanted to, but if I didn’t, I could ignore the pale reflection and attend to Huxley. It was like looking through a window in a candle-lit room out into the dusk. You can see a pale reflection of yourself in the window; yet you can ignore the reflection just long enough to see the objects through the window. Every now and then, as Huxley would talk, I could see an image of myself, not hovering over and above his own, but amalgamating with it, almost as if you would begin to see elements of a friend’s personality in another’s, like discerning a style in a piece of writing.

It was cooler today. If felt like a gradual descent into a pool after an hour in a jacuzzi, like taking a shower and, little by little, running out of hot water. The sky had changed. It was more gray than azure. It made me think of the triumph, even the insolence, of Nature, of things that grow and develop. We walked in the cool of the day as did the Lord in Eden just after the Fall.

Huxley: “The first thing to be said today is this. Though Christianity is as historical as the day of your birth, and has historical roots just as real as the roots of a thriving oak tree, I want to say that it is more spiritual than historical. In a marriage, what is most important is the love between the lover and the beloved, not the historic date of the marriage ceremony. Of course, a ceremony is special and it’s treasured deeply every anniversary. But a marriage that depended completely on an anniversary is as doomed as a man who has a shelter from the eternal storm and yet forgot to stock the mansion with food and drink. Read your Kierkegaard. Our point of departure is not the historical but an eternal consciousness. Christianity, though rooted in the soil of history, branches out into the eternal sky of the human heart. But today Christianity is only viewed as a historical thing, as if you’d view a friendship as a historical thing.”

I thought about this. I felt elevated for a moment, as if a wave - while passing me - lifted me off the ocean floor, and set me tenderly on the sandy bottom. I remember knowing myself in that primordial existence I had before entering the middle door as a baby exits a womb. This knowledge lead me to focus on my neighbor, to love my neighbor. But it was a carnal love, not a spiritual one. From my inner fringe of this web I climbed to carnal love of Christ. I remembered the importance of sorrow and how Christ is called a Man of Sorrows. This was not the voyage, but the departure, the boarding dock. Sorrow is the conduit of charity, spiritual love. But I won’t neglect reaching carnal love, just as a climber won’t neglect climbing a lower summit to reach a higher. I remember that I needed to merge with God, and since God is spirit, the love I needed to merge to Him must also be spiritual, not carnal, just as carnal lover and carnal beloved merge and the fruit is a child. This lead me to ponder the reason for the Incarnation. It is primarily because of the Fall that He came, just like it is because of the sickness that a doctor comes.

I remembered all the wire-drawn systems of theology I had read by ‘speculative barristers’ and the ‘metaphysical jurists’. The palaces built were as majestic as The Colosseum, as far-reaching as the Great Wall of China. But what, I wondered, were these structure’s point of departure? No one can come to the Father but by Christ, just as you can’t enter the room with no windows unless you come through the door. But we can’t come into the room without the door being unlocked, and we won’t pay any attention to the door unless it enchants us. Christ must draw us like the smell of a baking turkey allures us to taste it. To merge with God we have to imitate Him: to become one in a military unity, the soldier must imitate the training instructor, the student must imitate the teacher, spirit must imitate Spirit, spirit must incarnate Spirit: we must become little Christs.

I have seen that Thou art That. I have beheld the One Ground in all things. God is within and without. The road to God is a two-way street, headed inside the cave of the soul, and outside and up the summit of Nature. A sudden splash of salty wind massaged my back and I leaned and tilted where I was standing like a ship on a swell. I began to bubble and boil and simmer on the inside. I gripped my chest. Before I knew what was happening I was sobbing. I feared that my consciousness would rupture or shatter, like a fragile piece of china. But all the shards felt their way back to a new whole, like the fragments in a kaleidoscope. The self was a giant cataract of slush in the furnace of not-Self. I was drowsy with delight and the scene seemed to be transubstantiated, kneaded through with a different thread, and new shapes and modes of knowing glimmered before me like shooting stars. It became very warm. The smell turned away from a moist saltiness to the smell of burning logs. It smelt like incense. New fragments came as if out of nowhere, a balmy breeze caressed my face and neck and my entire being felt relaxed, as if in a hammock between two palm trees on a white-sanded beach cradling the bluest water you had ever seen. The ocean reminded me not of mere water, but of a ripened field in early Autumn, and the crashing of the falling waves pervaded my mind. Even my clothes seemed to shine. Another summer breeze blind-sided me to my left and you could hear the branches and the leaves hum and whistle and the startled birds fritter away. The fragrance was like passing by a thousand roses in the night. Huxley’s hair became disheveled. More tears ran down my cheeks. I wondered what island this breeze came from. Then, from the very center of this warmth, there shot into my chest (I think I heard the snap of the bow) the shrill, the undisputed, the ravenous, the unstoppable. It was love. It scorched and scraped the bottom of the cave of my soul. I fell onto the ground, gripped, blinded, paralyzed. I couldn’t speak. I received the silence.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 5

The rain stopped and the sun peaked through the clouds like a mother peaks at her baby. The clouds receded and the gray made way for the blue. We were to talk about sanctity today. I didn’t know much about it. I do think I understood the points about personality. The sages walked by me like the figures you see in a marble urn. It was movement to be sure; but the grace was like the gallop of a stallion, yet quiet as a gazelle. My own movement was almost a shadow. I felt like I was melting wax before the purity of fire. I was in a nest without any wings. Everywhere in the wood seemed like a dim dream. The scene looked like a painting. The vestiges of the rain padded the turf like sweet tears.

If I could only describe the grass: it was like our flowers. They were soft as silk, and to lay on it felt as gentle and passionate as a kiss. It seemed to breathe. When the wind swirled through the treetops like a comb through a woman’s hair, it sounded like a virgin choir. The sound was teeming with silent music. The leaves fluttered and the branches sang and my soul moaned. It was like a distant hive of bees, and yet the buzzing was like the stream of a brook. I had mentioned the many trees that were here; looking out on them was almost like looking at a bookshelf. Your eye scans the shelf, sees one spine jump out, and scans the rest. Huxley put his hand on my shoulder and I was out of my trance. I had the feeling that sanctity would be a mountain of its own, with ridges wild, cover in clustered pines with the thick aroma of sap. Huxley would be my torch on this knotty path. My ear will be a conch shell; if you listen you can hear within the salty waves clashing and raging against the reef of my consciousness, as relentless as a swarm of locusts and as ferocious as a lion chasing a wildebeest. I will ascend to the calm floor of the ocean: it is calm no matter how high the waves on the surface.

I saw an Asian man sitting Indian-style at the base of a sequoia. He was as still as a stonefish. We walked over to him to ask him what he was doing. I felt like I was in an empty concert hall mounting a stage to talk to the conductor. I felt like if I talked my voice would echo. We asked: “Are you a ‘deva’?” A deva is a divine being or superhuman being. “No.”, he replied. “Are you a ‘yaksha’?”, we asked. A ‘yaksha’ is a nature spirit. “No. But I am not a man either.”, he added. “I am nothing. I have been annihilated. I have neither craving, desire, or evil influence. I am Buddha.”

Huxley: “This is a case of one-pointedness. Only one-pointedness can merge with God, just as a sword can pierce a man’s flesh and not a feather. You are to be One, not Legion. But there is also the lonely isthmus connecting the country of theory to that of practice. A man need not read a book on how to love his wife: his heart is the sheet music. One-pointedness also requires monotheism; for if there were many gods, the knower would be many-pointed. The mode of the knower determines the knowledge known. We can begin to see why Buddha is inadequate. There is no Divine Ground: only Nirvana. Nirvana correctly points to the not-Self, but doesn’t notice that in doing so, the Divine Ground is noticed. It would be like the lover noticing his love but paying no attention to the beloved. His love only exists as it pertains to the beloved.”

Huxley: “Consider hagiography, biography of the saints. It is unpopular today and this is not surprising. The mass of men have minds full of distraction; their appetite for novelty is ravenous, like the fury of an anthill bombarding an intruder. But the saints are obsessed about one topic only: God, the Divine Reality or Ground - like a wonderer in the desert is obsessed with finding water. Their acts are all as monotone and predictable as the chime of a clock: all selfless. It is no wonder no one wants to read a chronicle of their lives: it would be as banal as reading a history of every tree that grew out of the ground. Boswell’s biography of Johnson is a box-office smash: but who was William Law? Johnson - until his death bed - spread his brilliant tentacles to all kinds of subjects, rendering his personality Legion. Law was as simple as a child.”

Huxley: “The saint is absorbed into God like a drop of water in the ocean. He neglects his personality as a hinderance. This concentrated force is then made to move and influence societies and people. It is like the musical dabbler, who can play a little violin, a little cello, a little piano. But the man who is obsessed with the piano! In the saint, the Logos lives untamed like a jungle. St. Paul: ‘It is not I, but Christ who lives in me.’ Christ is the ‘not I’. Christ’s influence spread like a contagion, not because of his personality, but because He was ‘not I’. Christ was the perfect conduit for the super-personal life, and the supernatural life roared into others like Niagara. The I must undergo a controlled demolition to make way for the ‘not I’.”

I began to think of the Incarnation in general. It seemed to be a common element in nearly all religions, like paint is the common element in all painting, like a musical scale is common to all instruments. This will be the next topic. I wondered away from Huxley like a lonesome cloud. A shadow was beginning to cast on my mind. It was like the cloud-cover of the moon in the night. It was bright enough to be seen through the clouds, but not bright enough to cast any shadows. I sat on a large stone at the bottom of a hillside to think. I thought about how the moon is locked in its dark vault and how its brightness is derivative like a mirror. I thought about how the moon might in some sense incarnate the sun’s luminosity. But that can’t be right. A blasting whirl of wind came from behind me. The leaves swirled upward like my thoughts and settled down again like freshly fallen snow. Huxley beckoned me to come and learn about Incarnation.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 4

I woke to find that I had been awake for a while. For I was standing next to a lake. Huxley was at my side asking me to jump in. The rippling skin of the lake shimmered and just beneath the surface I thought I saw movement. I dipped my toe in to test the temperature and found it very agreeable. I felt one with the liquid, like my own body was agreeing with it. As I stepped in I found that I couldn’t descend gradually. It was a cliff, and the lake swallowed me at once. I also found that I couldn’t float, that I was plummeting, down, down, further and further, and I began to feel the water get colder, and the pressure in my head get stronger. As I panicked, I opened my eyes and saw Huxley waving his arms about as if he was giving me directions. The moment I put out my arms my plummeting stopped abruptly. I felt my lungs begin to burn since I was running out of breath. I gulped in a mouthful of cool, delicious water, choked, and felt the beginnings of suffocation. Then something strange happened. I found that I could breath with ease. Bubbles leaked out of my mouth as if I was a scuba diver. I felt a sudden flash of relief. It was delightful. I also found that maneuvering was very simple. You just point in the direction you want to go and then paddle. I could move at great speed, as fast as a dolphin. Huxley joined me at my side and began to explore the underwater exotica. After about an hour we reemerged and dried off on the bank. In swimming in the lake, I told Huxley how it seemed almost alive, like it had its own personality. Ah! Personality.

Huxley: “Ah! But this is one of the things that must die. Isn’t it strange that words with a Latin origin sound better, more intellectual, than a word with an Anglo-saxon origin? Maternal seems more sophisticated than motherly, intoxicated more than drunk. This may explain why we attach so much important to ‘personality’, of Latin origin. People think it is reverential, the highest form of reality that we come into contact with. But look at the Anglo-saxon equivalent: selfness. The overtones of reverence are gone! The high-class is gone. It is now like the discord from a cracked bell! We finally see that ‘personality’ is just what we need to get rid of.”

We walked away from the crashing of the waterfall and into a clearing. We sat down on a carpet of brush.

Huxley: “It is the Self, the final obstacle to knowledge of God, the kind of knowledge that merges us with God. The original sin is to be a Self; the death of the Self is the original virtue! But we lose personality; that’s sounds much worse. But it only ‘sounds’ words because of the Latinity of ‘personality’. It sounds solemn if put that way. We remember that the Trinity is a community of ‘persons’. But these Persons are not the same as the persons we meet everyday. There is only one thing had in common: the indwelling Spirit in all of us. The Self eclipses this Spirit like the moon eclipses the sun. Unfortunately, the word ‘person’ simultaneously names the Persons of the Trinity and our Self, and so we think that to get rid of ‘personality’ somehow denigrates the Persons. Perhaps our Self willed this subconsciously! Our Self loves itself. Our Self wants a reason for its love. What better reason than to christen the Self with the same title that names the Trinity!”

He pulled out a book that liked looked like a white cotton candy. The cover was a dark cloud and the pages looked like cirrus clouds. And from the cirrus cloud came a voice lie pouring rain and it startled me. I listened.

The Cloud of Unknowing: “How do we destroy the naked knowing and feeling in our being? If the naked knowing was destroyed, do all hinderances disappear? Yes. But we need God’s special grace to make this happen. You then need to be able to receive the grace, the grace of destroying the naked knowing and feeling. If you don’t receive the grace, the naked knowing and feeling will fester. But what is this ability? What is its nature? It is a strong and deep ghostly sorrow! Sure, all men have sorrow. But those men that know and feel they have sorrow have it more deeply. Any other type of sorrow is a game. This sorrow is perfect. It cleanses the soul of sin and the pain deserved from the sin. It allows the soul to receive joy! ---- This sorrow is full of holy desire. How does the soul bear this sorrow? It is only because sometimes it is fed by working rightly. If the soul knows and feels God, he inevitably also knows and feels that it is a foul stinking lump of Self that knows and feels. This Self must be despised, hated, and forsaken! Only after this can you be a perfect disciple on the mount of perfection. If you go mad for this, you go mad for sorrow. ---- Every soul must feel this sorrow and desire. God must be willing and we must be able. This is the treasure God has vouchsafed for us.”

Huxley: “What is this stinking lump, this Self that has to die before we can truly know God in purity of spirit? Hume said we are a bundle of complexes and perceptions, one coming after the other very rapidly and in constant flux. The Buddhists say almost the same thing: there is no soul underneath the flux of perceptions or the bundles of complexes. But how did the bundles become bundles? Did they come together of their own free will? If so, why, how, and where? There is no good answer to these questions. So, there must be a soul underneath the bundles and the complexes. The soul organizes everything. This organization just happens to be a particular personality. This is Hinduism and Western thought from Aristotle to today. But man isn’t just a mind and a body; he is a mind, body, and a spirit: a trinity. Personality is a product of mind and body. The spirit is akin to the Ground of all being. Our final end is to love, know, and merge with the Godhead. The Godhead is our not-self that our Self merges with only if the Self chooses to die. Once the Self dies, the spirit lives!”

Three sages came by and said:

William Law: “How could we deny the Self if there wasn’t something else in us that wasn’t a Self?”

Berulle: “We are a nothing, a void, surrounded by God, a hollow God fills if He desires.”

Eckhart: “There’s an inward and an outward man. The outward man depends on the soul, which blends with the flesh. This is the servant, the outward man, the old man. The inner man, the new man, the friend, is the spirit. There is a seed of God in us. Good farming will make it sprout. Its fruits will be God-fruits, as pear seeds sprout pear-fruits.”

Huxley: “It is important that the will is free, free to choose the Self or the Godhead, damnation or salvation. Our craving will never be satisfied if the Self is chosen, but choosing the Self manifests itself in as many ways as there are vices or objects of affection. The more vices and objects of affection the Self latches onto the more unique and idiosyncratic the personality. However, in a crisis the personality is completely submerged and we are raised to a higher level, we are different. In disaster, ordinary people become heros, martyrs: in fact, selfless. It seems easier to be selfless in a crisis than in ordinary experience. In ordinary experience, nothing shocks us out of Selfness. We have only our will and knowledge of God. Without crisis, we wallow in our personality. Nevertheless, the saint transforms every single moment into a moment of crisis! At each moment we choose between life and death, damnation and salvation, darkness and light, Self and God, time and eternity, our will or His. This is not easy and that is why the saint trains himself daily, like the soldier or the athlete. They train to arrive at the state where they are aware of the divine Ground of themselves and everyone else, and to meet every circumstance selflessly, with love. This training is very difficult; that is why there are many soldiers, but few saints! They meet a crisis moment by moment. Through this training, the saint transcends personality in all circumstances. They love their neighbor, including their enemies.”

Everywhere was shade. It looked like a storm was coming. The wind picked up in waves and I began to feel a mist in intervals. We sought shelter under the canopy of the trees. The sky opened and the deluge broke free. The thunder was its escort. The land was given its weekly shower. The air became thick with all kinds of scents mixed with the moisture. Everything had a coating of dew. Even the mud seemed clean, as if one could use it like a bar of soap and the rain itself like shampoo. But it was refreshing and the temperature was pleasant. We waited out the squall. Today we had discussed personality; later we would discuss sanctity and the divine incarnation. I laid on my stomach at the outer boundary of our tent to just watch and relax.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 3

When I awoke from my slumber, I found that my guide had not slept. Sleep to the natives is a voluntary pleasure, like eating chocolates. I got up off the soft pillowy mattress made of stalks of grass and stretched and blew off the cobwebs. We walked back toward the sagacious throng eager to find out just what this That was that my Thou was akin to. I slept longer than I thought; the sun began to dip toward the West. My shadow was longer than yesterday. A pride of lions strolled past us as Huxley took up one of the cubs to play with it. I felt uneasy around such unorthodox frolicking. Huxley told me tomorrow we could go for a swim in the lake. “Things are different here”, he told me. “You don’t have to hold your breath underwater.” A chalky crescent moon was just beginning to push through the purplish blue sky because of the waning sun. Little specks of luster speckled the country’s enchanted canopy.

As we were walking, Huxley began to brace me for the evening’s lesson. Huxley: “Now listen carefully. What you’ll find this Being to be, this Ground, is something that the unaided intellect can’t fully wrap its arms around. The trunk of this tree is too massive. The branches are too high up to climb. To experience this Being, you need to undergo a mystical death. ‘He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.’ The seed must be put into the ground. The Self must die; for if it doesn’t, there is no room for God. This is hinted at in the annual crop cycle and the dying and rising gods of pagan mythology. To know yourself, you have to die to yourself. To find yourself, you have to lose yourself.”

“Well see recurring themes.”, Huxley added. “The trinity of persons of Christendom is echoed in Hinduism, as if other religions had the same sheet music but played the song in the wrong key. Consider Hinduism. Brahman is the supreme deity, and just as Christ is the wisdom of God, Isvara is the activity of Brahman. Just as Christianity has its angels, Hinduism has its minor deities. God is to be distinguished from Godhead. The trinity manifests the Godhead in the form of persons. The persons are the things that our concepts apply to. The Godhead is that which our concepts cannot apply. And just as in Christianity, the wisdom of God (the Logos) is incarnated in Christ, so other religions have their incarnations. The general theme of ‘incarnation’ is seen in this: that just as Christ is begotten of the Father, so we all are passive relative to God; He is masculine, we feminine. He is the musician; we are the piano.”

Huxley: “We see it again in Buddhism. We have ‘3 bodies’: Dharmakaya (primordial, the Clear Light of the Void), Sambhogakaya (the personal God, as seen in the Old Testament), and Nirmanakaya (the material body, the vessel of the incarnation, the Buddha). In Islam, there are 3: Al Haqq (abyss of the Godhead), Allah (the personal God), and the Prophet (incarnation of the Logos)."

“The Lord’s prayer sums up the mystery of the Godhead: Our Father who art in Heaven. He is ‘ours’, since He is immanent. ‘Art’ means He is Being, the Absolute, the Ground. Finally, He is ‘in Heaven, wholly other, transcendent. Thus, we must die to Self, sacrifice our kingdom to His, ‘They Kingdom come’, but only if it is ‘as it is in Heaven.”

I asked what this meant from our end. What happens when we only worship one aspect of the Divine: say, His power. Huxley: “This doesn’t happen in all cases. But this probably will get us a religion rites, sacrifices, and legalism, following rules. This improves conduct, but that’s about it. It does nothing to enrich character or modify consciousness. I could play a concerto note for note and not be moved by the music. On the other hand, I could be moved by a piece of music and not be able to play a lick. Our calling, our destiny, is to both play and be enraptured!”

I thought about this. God is loving. He is love. I really thought about this. Love. My conduct has changed; my character is changed; my very consciousness is changed. What is the complete change of consciousness we long for?: deliverance! enlightenment! salvation!

As we got closer to the throng, I could finally begin to hear the talking of the sages more distinctly. Most of them were sitting. But one looked at me, and after some murmuring, the one man standing up told us to come and join them. Sitting in a circle were St. Bernard, Shankara, Lao Tzu, St. John of the Cross, and Mr. Eckhart from yesterday. They were all talking about God, or the Absolute. I heard St. Bernard first: “Who is God? I can think of no better answer than, He who is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, it is included in these words, namely, He is.”

Shankara spoke to make a point about language: “Words illustrate the meaning of an object. For example, ‘cow’ and ‘horse’ (the words) belong to the category of substance. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs. It can’t therefore be denoted by words. Therefore, it can’t be defined by word or idea. It is the One ‘before whom words recoil’.”

Lao Tzu had been silently assenting the entire time: “Exactly. Heaven and Earth sprang from the Nameless.” Sitting beside him was St. John of the Cross who said: “One of the greatest favors bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly that it cannot comprehend God at all. The saints in the higher heaven know this. They know him most perfectly who admit He is infinitely incomprehensible.”

Huxley pulled me up and we decided to walk around a bit. Huxley: “It is hard to think of an incomprehensible God. But think of something incomprehensible in our own experience.” At this moment - and inexplicably - Bach’s Suite for a Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major began to dance in the background, as if summoned by a spell, like the cobra to the flute. “The mind can actually affect matter! Extraordinary to think about. Magical! The relation between our minds and bodies is indeed magical. It is like the relation between God and the world. Our minds can affect our bodies in all sorts of ways. I can mentally tame my rabid emotions; I can will my hand to raise; if you will forgive me: there is ESP, telepathy, mind-reading, even entelechy. The evidence I’ve investigated is overwhelming.”

“So, if all this mystery enshrouds the mind, what can we say about God? That He created! Creation. Once created, it is sustained, just as when we sleep, our heart continues to beat, and our lungs continue to inhale and exhale, and the digestive system continues to operate. Our bodies ‘sustain’ us while we sleep just as God ‘sustains’ every electron in the cosmos. In China, this would be called the Tao, the way, the path. St. Paul says: ‘In Him we move and live and have our being.’”

“There is a hierarchy of being in God: the Godhead, the persons, and the incarnation.” As Ruysbroeck says: “In the Reality unitively known by the mystic, we can speak no more of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Persons.”

This is the Godhead, the Trinity, prior to the Persons, higher up than the Persons in the hierarchy of being. We say God is one being and three persons. Yet in the order of being, it is ‘out of’ this being that arise the persons: the being begets the persons.

Huxley: “Listen to Dionysius the Areopagite.”

Dionysius: “The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret. For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear; and, though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendors of transcendent beauty. We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness and, though not seeing and not knowing, to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge - by the very fact of neither seeing Him nor knowing Him. For this is truly to see and to know and, through the abandonment of all things, to praise Him who is beyond and above all things. For this is not unlike the art of those who carve a life-like image from stone; removing from around it all that impedes clear vision of the latent form, revealing its hidden beauty solely by taking away. For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise Him by taking away than by ascription; for we ascribe attributes to Him, when we start from universals and come down through the intermediate to the particulars. But here we take away all things from Him going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.”

It was starting to make sense. God is nothing, for God is no ‘thing’. God is not a ‘what’; He is a ‘that’. And ‘thats’ aren’t understood through concepts, but direct apprehension. Romeo didn’t love concepts about Juliet; but directly apprehended her. This is why we know God by not knowing Him. Knowing is bound up with concepts. When we directly apprehend, we cease to know, for knowing is bound up with - again - with concepts. The first step toward direct apprehension is annihilating the ego, dying to Self, the wall between our Thou and the That we’re all after.

The sun had set. Most of the sages were fast asleep. I cozied myself against a sycamore tree, remembering that this was the tree Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus. Huxley meanwhile headed over to a cedar across a swarm of sapphire lilies. I thought I’d like to wake up early the next morning. I rested my head down on a cool clump of grass growing near the stump and drifted swiftly into dream-filled doze.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 2

In the first chapter, we come to the enigmatic sounding “That Art Thou”. Without the King James twist on the words, it would be “That, You Are”, (say it in a Yoda voice) which is just “You are That” without the grammatical inversion. The question then becomes: “Well, what is ‘that’?” But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The first concept observed in Huxley’s telescope is Being, which I’ll capitalize throughout the blog. But in order to go out on our voyage, Huxley wants to pin down his method. Just how are we going to set out? How have people set out on this journey in the past?

In my commentary, I’m going to switch from straight prose to imaginative fantasy just to give a slight impression of what I felt when I first read the book.

Imagine you’re in a room with no windows and three doors, each proclaiming to be the Way to find Truth. Above door number 1 is written: this is the Way of concepts, professional philosophy and theology - come to solve philosophy’s immemorial problems! Above door number 3 is written: tame the passions - all that matters is practice, ethics. But being the Goldilocks we are, we read what’s above door number 2: come where knowledge and love meet, where practice and theory kiss - the realm of that point where mind and matter are linked. Choose wisely, for it is very hard to turn back and choose another once the choice has been made. We choose the middle door, somewhat influenced by Aristotle’s admonition that the middle way is the mean between the extremes of excess and deficiency.

We’re immediately greeted by a joyful bunch of people: Sufis, Mystics, Quakers, Zen Masters, William Law, and a whole host of others. We seemed to be in a garden, full of daisies, roses, and the smell of the lilac filled the area like a perfume. There were all kinds of trees: oak, maple, redwood, apple. The shade was filled with a misty smell mixed with dew. It felt like an ancient place and yet newer and more alive than any place I'd been. I thought I heard a lark. All of nature was embraced by green plumage. The sun was coming up in the East and so the air was filled with the freshness of morning. The most peculiar thing about the place after walking for a minute was that there were no bugs! We are in Nature’s bosom with no flies, gnats, spiders, or any flying or crawling insect. The only thing that caused me discomfort was when I sat Indian-style under a huge oak tree: the dew from the grass soaked my pants.

Huxley as my guide, he sat down beside me and laid down some ground-rules: “Because I can’t tell you too much about what this place is (or where it is), you’ll have to trust me and just do what I say. I’ll prepare you with some thoughts of my own and then I’ll introduce you to some of the natives. We might even get to eavesdrop on a conversation or two.” I agreed, too preoccupied with the beauty of the place I was now in. I saw in the background, a mile or so away, a lamb snuggling up to the lap of a tiger. I felt dirty and tainted, like when Isaiah told God he had unclean lips after meeting God’s beauty. Humming in the distance was a waterfall, and beside the foam made from the splash the lake was entirely placid and glassy.

“Try to pay attention.”, said my guide. “I want to congratulate you on picking the middle way. Well done. But to business. The first point is this: I trust you’ve heard of autology?” I hadn’t. “If something is autological, it refers to itself. Suppose I said: ‘I just spoke seven words of English.’ This would be autological, because if true, it refers to itself. In the same way, when you look for the Divine, you have to look in your Self. When you do this you come full circle, the snake eats its tail, you find the Divine in the Self.”

“This is the first lesson you’ll learn. Think of yourself. Go deep. Try to go to the bottom. You won’t make it, but try.” I tried and when I was trying something strange happened. In my field of vision, the image of a tunnel appeared and I thought I could detect a faint glow coming from some place where the tunnel curved off to the left.

“ Did you see the glow? Good. This is your true Self. This is the Self at the bottom of everyone and if you can train yourself to burrow to the bottom of your tunnel, you would see Being itself, the Divine Ground. You’ll see it is a mirror, but it is a magical mirror you can enter. Once you enter it, the universe is turned inside out and you come face to face with God.”

“In other words, once you burrow to the bottom, you’ll find that That Art Thou. It is the final end of human kind to get to rock bottom. But how is this possible? How can God be IN us and simultaneously be OUT of us? This is the mystery of God’s Immanence. This is what Mr. Eckhart thinks. Excuse me? Mr. Eckhart? What do you think of God’s immanence?

Eckhart: “The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without.”

Huxley: “You see. The mystery is this: He is at the bottom of all of us because He is wholly other than us, transcendent. William Law says this very well."

Law: “He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul.”

Huxley: “We can’t understand him.”

Law: “Right. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence thy understanding comes forth, as a branch from a tree. This depth is the bottom of the soul. It is the infinity of the soul: we know this because only the Infinite can satisfy the soul.”

Huxley: “Look, Matt! Listen. There’s a dialogue going on between a Master and Student!” I listened.

Student: “I’m home, Master. I’ve learned everything I need to know. I’ve read all the important books. Just ask me a question. I have the answer!"

Master: “How do you see what can’t be seen? Or hear what can’t be heard?"

Student: “The books I read didn’t go into that.”

Master: “Let me help you.” (there was such love in the Master’s twinkling eyes) “If we know everything there is to know about a lump of clay, we’ll know everything there is to know about any amount of lumps of clay. In life, what is this ‘clay’ that if you know it, you know all?”

Student: “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t know.” Master: “Pick that fruit off the nyagrodha tree.” He did. “Now, break it open. What do you see?” Student: “Seeds.” Master: “Now, break the seed open. What do you see? Don’t think, just answer.” Student: “Well, I don’t ‘see’ anything.” Master: That thing which you can’t ‘see’ is the essence of the nyagrodha tree. In that essence is the essence of all that exists. And That, my dear Student, Art Thou!”

Student: “Could you explain more? That wave rolled by me too swiftly and all I see now is the back of the crest breaking on the shore.” Master (with more love than ever in his eyes): “Of course! Bring me a glass of water.” The Student did so. Master: “Now, bring me some salt.” The Student obeyed. Master: “I am going to put the salt into the water.” He did, and as he did, the salt dissolved. “Where did it go?”, asked the Master. Student: “It dissolved, sir.” Master (with noticeable excitement): “You cannot see it. But taste! Taste!” The Student tasted. Master: “And how does it taste?” “Salty”, replied the Student. Master: “Dump the water out onto the Earth.” The Student dumped the water. Master: “Does salt now disappear since you cannot see it? No. It is here forever. By analogy, in your Self you do not see (nor cannot see) your essence. But that is you, my son. And Thou Art That.”

I came away from the discussion refreshed in my being. I felt like I just woke up from an excellent night’s sleep. The great novelist Leo Tolstoy was passing by and whispered in my ear: “That is what I mean when I wrote my book ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’, a direct quote from Him whom we cannot mention: yet.” It made sense. I remember Jesus’ prayer in John: “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.”

This echoed Plotinus: “Therefore All is everywhere. Each is there All, and All is Each.”

Huxley: “We meet the same thoughts in The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, the Bhagavad-Gita put in verse form by Shankara. We also meet it again in the Upanishads and in Taoism, in the Book of Chuang Tzu. Also: in Zen Buddhism.”

I asked if we could talk to the Buddah himself, feeling a brief fit of eagerness. But Huxley declined: “He doesn’t talk of such things, since he thinks they do not edify. He also doesn’t necessarily believe in the soul. In fact, a prospective is talking to the Buddah now. Listen.” Prospective: “But do you not even believe in the soul?” Buddah: “As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of a flute, so does he look for a soul in the ‘shandhas’, the mind/body aggregate.”

I was disappointed. From the East, we made our way back to the West, where I knew this concept had been prevalent. Huxley: “It hardly needs pointing out. The Kibir in India is fraught with it. But so is the West. Christian Saints and Muslim Sufis are never silent about it. St. Paul sums them all up: ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.’ There are the Catholic mystics and the Quakers, with their doctrine of the Divine Light, or Inner Light. There are the Reformers like Martin Luther heavily influenced by the mystical Theologia Germantica: ‘Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived.’ Again, remember Tolstoy’s whisper. Remember Plato’s Theaetetus: becoming Godlike is necessary to know God. Even the Jewish Rabbis, such as the great Hillel: ‘If I am here, everyone is here. If I am not here, no one is here.’ Savages throughout the world and at all times have held similar views.”

I began to understand just what these sages were saying. But I next wanted to know, not just that it was there waiting for me (like a hunter), but what it was like, its nature. What is the That that I am, the That that the Thou is akin to? If That art Thou, then what is That? Huxley lead me beyond the congregation of the sages in the green pasture, away from the buzzing of conversation, until all I heard was the gentle breeze against the untamed, knee-high grass, and the crunch, crunch of our feet on this undomesticated fur. The air smelt like burning leaves. It was cool, reminding me of spring. If I followed the meadowland out a couple of miles I could see the mountains. The scene was picturesque. I fell into a sound sleep.

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, Part 1

"If one is not a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge." - Aldous Huxley

In the next series of blogs, I have planned to do a running commentary on books that changed my life, or had a huge impact on my own philosophy. These are the books I return to again and again. This is no light task. I plan to make each blog a commentary on a chapter in the chosen book. The focus on a book might last a month: or more. I hope that these blogs can be a guide if you ever choose to read the book yourself. If you do, I would hope we could talk about it together.

The first book I want to examine is by Aldous Huxley called “The Perennial Philosophy”, published in 1945. It is not just an anthology of mystical quotations but an interpretation of these quotations. We are confronted with two delicious prospects in this book. First, we come face to face with true sages, zen masters, Sufis, and mystics from all kinds of traditions. Second, Huxley offers us a feast of excellent and erudite interpretation.

The book is divided into 27 chapters, not including the introduction, and so this book will take up at least 28 blogs. Each chapter talks about a certain concept. For example, chapter 1 talks about the concept of Being under the title “That Art Thou”. In this blog, I’ll just get us up to speed on the introduction. Right away, we’ll get to see just what this Perennial Philosophy is and why Huxley thinks it's so important: why it might be one of the most important things you could ever give yourself time to study.

Just what is this Perennial Philosophy (Leibniz came up with the phrase)? Huxley breaks down the definition into metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. Metaphysically, it is the ‘divine Reality’ at the bottom of every life, thing, and mind. Psychologically, it is that thing at the bottom of every soul, an image of that divine Something. Ethically, it is the meaning of life for all men, to know It (I’ll signify this by the capital It from now on), this Thing before all things, this Ground of Being before all being.

Huxley says It is everywhere. It is saturated in the mythology of any ancient you care to investigate. It is a theme that the East and West have commentated on for 25 centuries. Huxley has done the legwork of gathering together the thoughts of those from the East and West, who have pondered about It, who have written on It. They have said it the best, with the most beauty.

Huxley’s main axiom: changes in being mean changes in knowing. Try to remember what it was like when you were a child. You thought like a child, behaved like a child, felt like a child, and dreamed as a child. But then you began to see more of life, you read more, felt more, dreamed more, thought more. To Huxley, this meant your being actually transformed from a child to an adult: corresponding to this transformation, the scope of your knowledge grew, broadened, deepened, widened. But in another sense, it became stunted, narrow, shallow, conceptual.

The adult becomes systematic. They use concepts. They pay attention to things just to see if they can be of use. They forget what it was like to be a child. The child, Huxley says, ‘directly apprehends’ things, and this direct apprehension doesn’t use concepts. As they grew into adults, the faculty began to rust for lack of use, and it’s eventually viewed as out of date, obsolete. Intuition is neglected in favor of hands-on testing.

Huxley asks if the mystical realm of ethics does anything to change our being. What if seeing new things depended on action, how we act, our ‘practice’, our behavior? What if theory depended on behavior? In other words, if we started acting differently, would our theories start to look different, not quite right? Would other theories appear like new stars in the night sky? Is there something to that verse in Scripture: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”? A Sufi (Muslim mystic) also said: “The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.” An astrolabe is an ancient instrument used by Arabs to detect and predict astronomical behavior and objects. Love is that instrument that allows us to detect and predict the mysteries of God. Theory depends on Practice. There are ethical (in the mystical sense) conditions for spiritual knowledge, just as there are neural conditions for physical knowledge.

So, what of It, the ‘divine Reality’? Huxley has chosen mystics and zen masters to quote because only they have subordinated theory to practice, knowledge to love, like the child, the pure in heart. Only they have gotten in touch with It. This is the way it is. Just like water is made of one hydrogen element and two oxygen, and we found that out by testing water, so the person who has gotten to theory through the ‘narrow way’ of love finds that in himself is a mirror or image of It. The mystics experimented ethically/psychologically, just as the scientists experimented with matter. In each case, results follow; and this just is one of the results.

These few who have hiked the ‘narrow way’ have left writings, and if we want to go on an odyssey of our own, Huxley is giving us the map showing the geography of the terrain. He is giving us directions in interpreting the map. They are the sages, the prophets, the enlightened ones, the saints. The philosophers are too busy meddling around with their concepts, subordinating practice to theory, love to knowledge.

There is a remarkable lack of quotations from the Bible and Huxley gives what I think is a good reason. Everyone knows the Bible. It is familiar. Huxley has the utmost respect for the Bible and considers it the most important spiritual book in the West. But in his book, Huxley wanted to drive the wisdom of the ‘narrow way’ a little closer to home. So, he has picked saints and prophets who have lived the saintly life, who have earned their right to be heard, and whose writings were inspired by the Bible. In doing this, Huxley is making a psychological point: the unfamiliar is more striking and vivid. Meditation on these writings might lead the reader from the mirror to the Thing casting the reflection.

To those who are ‘poor in spirit’, ‘pure in heart’, who have voyaged the way that ‘few find’ we, therefore, ought to turn, just as we’d rather turn to someone who can see (the saint) rather than the blind man with a Ph.D in optics, the study of sight. The saints transformed their mode of being in order to transform their mode of knowing.