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.