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.