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.