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.