-About the author (wikipedia)
On Aldous Huxley:
"Huxley's outlook is preconditioned by his intellectualism. In the best tradition of intellectuals he started off as a rebel. His rebellion seems to have gone through two stages: first he revolted against the established form of society and its conventions, and when this revolt only involved him in new and deeper bondages, he rose in revolt against and from himself. The second rebellion really developed out of the first; for, as Huxley himself says in Ends and Means, although this revolt against the 'political and economic system' may have been justified on the ground that it was unjust, he and his friends had nothing to put in its place. It was a revolt into meaninglessness; and it is not in the nature of persons so markedly cerebral as Huxley to live in a vacuum for long. His revolt against sexual morality was equally unrewarding, as, in th elong run, it always is. It is easy to become impatient with the Evangelical Counsel of chastity, and it is even easier to flout it and tread it under foot. Huxley, however, found that by so doing he enmeshed and entangled himself further in the material world which nauseated him and from which even then he longed to escape. He slowly came to realize, what all the great religions have always taught, that bondage to the passions is as harsh a slavery as that imposed by any political system. Or, to put it in a more practical way, in the long run it is less trouble to be chaste. Huxley's whole career then predisposed him to conversion to a type of religion that would provide him with a way of escape from a world in which he had found is so extraordinarily difficult to fit himself. He had, it seems, not been a happy man; and because he was both unhappy and introspective, he needed a philosophy or religion that would deliver him from both his unhappiness and himself. Being a highly intelligent man he realized that the unhappiness and the self were in some way connected; and this is the beginning of religion. What Huxley calls the 'poisonous fruits' of the philosophy of meaninglessness forced him to look beyond himself for something a little more satisfactory. Realizing that preoccupation with the self is the source of all unhappiness, he turned towards the two religions which made this connection most clear, - Hinduism and Buddhism. He was right to do this: for though the Gospels teach that one must die to oneself in order to live, this is only one of many Christian teachings, whereas both Hinduism and Buddhism regard the elimination of the ego as the sine qua non of 'liberation' or 'enlightenment' and never tire of saying so. Moreover, a return to Christianity would have been difficult for Huxley since he remembered it only as something dry, moralistic, and Pharisaical, as part and parcel of an inhuman and mechanistic society against which he, like Kierkegaard before him, had revolted. There would have been no sense in returning to a religion that seemed to have become ossified into a not very indispensable adjunct of a questionable social system. There was the further point too that Christianity was far less clear in teaching that unhappiness and the ego are one and the same thing than was either Buddhism or Hinduism. There are, of course, texts in the Gospels which say very nearly this; but modern Christianity has not been at great pains to emphasize them.Buddhism, on the other hand, emphasizes and constantly reiterates that since all phenomenal things are impermanent and in perpetual flux, there can be no real happiness in them, and that impermanence is therefore identical with pain. The cause of pain is 'craving' and release from pain can only be obtained by stamping out all craving, that is, by suppressing all desire. It is against this background that Huxley can write of the urge to escape and the longing to transcend oneself as being one of the principle appetites of the soul." (16-17)
"...Huxley implies that the taking of drugs is, or should be, part and parcel of all religion; and on this basis he criticizes Christianity for not 'baptizing' mescalin or similar drugs and incorporating them into Christian worship. This sounds outrageous: but it is not really so if we continue to bear in mind his major premise that 'the urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time'. The premise seems false, for it does not correspond to observed fact; and it would be only side-stepping the issue to say that this 'urge' is more often than not unconscious, since until the urge has been brought up into unconsciousness, it cannot be stated that it is there at all. The premise should be emended to some such formula as this: 'the urge to escape selfhood and the environment ( which are two very different things) is in almost every introspective introvert who is naturally retiring, over-cerebral, and over-sensitive, and who has been brought up in a materialist and industrialized environment, almost all the time.' If we are prepared to emend the premise this way, Huxley's panacea for society becomes intelligible, - except, of course, that we no longer speak of society as such, but only of a limited number of hyper-civilized persons in search of their soul.In lumping together 'the urge to escape from selfhood' and 'the urge to escape from the environment' Huxley is confusing two quite separate things. It is what William James calls the 'sick soul' which longs to escape from itself, and it is what Coormaraswamy calls the 'spiritual proletariat that aspires to escape from its environment. This 'proletariat' now forms a large part of any industrial society. Its members are occupied in doing intrinsically boring jobs, and if they seek relief in the cinema, television, and the 'comics', they do so not in order to escape from themselves, but in order to project themselves into what seem sto them a more meaningful existence. There plight is the exact opposite of the neurotic individual; for the later lives by and on introspection and is bound, sooner or later, to long to escape from a subject that has become a monomania, whereas the former has not yet got so far as finding a 'self' from which eh could wish to escape. He feels no urge to escape from himself, only an urge to escape from the dullness of everyday life in which no 'self' of any sort has any chance to develop." (19-20)
"It is not easy to see what Huxley's intention was when he wrote Doors of Perception: for hitherto he had bee one of the most stubborn defenders of what he calls the philosophia perennis, that philosophy which maintains that the ultimate truths about God and the universe cannot be directly expressed in words, that these truths are necessarily and everywhere and always the same, and that, therefore, the revealed religions which so obviously differ on so many major points from one another, can only be relatively true, each revelation being accommodated to the needs of the time and the place in which it was made and adapted to the degree of enlightenment of its recipients. Thus, as Coormaraswamy, another exponent of the philosophia perennis, has said, the only real heresy is to maintain that one religion only is in exclusive possession of the truth. All are rather facets of the same truth, this truth being presented in a different manner at different times in accordance with the spiritual development of the society to which it is directed. The truth itself is that experience by the mystics whose unity of thought and language is said to speak for itself.
There seems to be two very strong objection to such a theory. The first is that few of these authors can or will define what precisely constitutes a mystical experience, and until that is done, we do not really know what we are talking about. The second is to assert that all mystics speak the same language and convey the same message does not seem to be true even within one particular religious tradition. For our present purposes we may as well follow Mr. Huxley in including his own experiences under the influence of mescalin in the category of 'mysticism'. If we do this, however, we must also include the experiences of manic-depressives since mescalin is clinically used to reproduce artificially the state of mind typical of that distressing psychosis, and because, in fact, the experiences of manic-depressives show a marked resemblance not only to Huxley's experience, but also to that of some more conventional mystics. We will, then, first be dealing with those experiences which are usually termed pantheistic, the experience which tells you that you are all and all is you, 'when I am inseparably this and that and this and that are I; when I experience the other person as myself and the other, as myself, experience me. This experience is described clearly and with admirable concision in the Kaustaki Upanisad in the memorable formula, 'Thou art this all". This is the experience of the 'nature mystic': it is the experience of all as one and one as all. It is common in the later Sufi writers and can also be found in the works of modern authors who are not otherwise known as mystics. To call it 'pantheistic' is wrong, for in the proposition 'Thou art this all', neither term represents or can be construed as 'God', and 'pantheism' when translated into English means 'all-God-ism'. It would be far more accurate to describe this experience as 'pan-en-hen-ism', 'all-in-one-ism', for that is what in fact the experience tells us. It is, of course, the experience of Huxley not only perceiving his chair legs transformed, but actually being them, 'being his Not-self in that Not-self', as he accurately puts it."
Is this experience the same as that described by the so called mahavakyani or 'great sayings' which are the key texts of the Vedanta? These are four in number, and together they may be said to sum up the whole of Vedantin monism. They read as follows: (1) 'Thou art that'. (2) 'This atman is Brahman'. 'This individual soul is the Absolute'. (3) 'I am Brahman'. and (4) 'consciousness is Brahman'. What is meant by this? Brahman is the word used to represent the Absolute: it is the sole truly existing and eternal reality, beyond time and space and causation and utterly unaffected by these which, from its own standpoint, have no existence whatever. Atman means 'self ', the individual soul. The proposition, then, that Atman is Brahman means that the individual soul is substantially and essentially identical with the unquantifiable Absolute. From this it follows that the phenomenal world has no true existence in itself: from the point of view of the Absolute it is absolutely non-existent. Therefore, the soul which realizes itself as the Absolute, must also realize the phenomenal world as non-existent. This, then, is to experience one's own soul as being the Absolute, and not to experience the phenomenal world at all. To say that this is identical with the pan-en-henic experience, is to say something that is patently and blatantly untrue. For what sort of sense does it make to say that to experience oneself as actually being three chair legs which represent a minute proportion of the phenomenal world, is the same as to experience oneself as the Absolute for which the phenomenal world is simply not-being? Here, then, we already have two wholly distinct forms of 'mystical experience'.
Thirdly there is the normal type of Christian mystical experience in which the soul feels itself to be united with God by love. The theological premise from which this experience starts is that the individual soul is created by God in His own image and likeness from nothing and that it has the capacity to be united with God, of being 'oned' to Him as the medieval English mystics put it. Here again we have a third type, distinct, it would appear, from the other two. For whereas both the christian and the Vendantin experiences are wholly different from the pan-en-henic, so do they differ from each other. No orthodox Christian mystic, unless he is speaking figuratively or in poetry as Angelus Silesius does, can well go farther than to say that his individual ego is melted away in God by love: something of the soul must clearly remain if only to experience the mystical experience. The individual is not annihilated, though transformed and 'deified' as St. John of the Cross says: it remains a distinct entity though permeated through and through with the divine substance. For the non-dualistic Vedantin this is not so: the human soul is God; there is no duality anywhere. Superficially, at least, there is an enormous difference between the two." (27-29)
On Proust and Rimbaud:
"Proust was a neurotic and an introvert of the most extreme type. He had never sought out preternatural experiences, but when they came unasked, he did hid best to analyze them and to profit by them. His upbringing had been theistic and his knowledge of Catholic religion was considerable, and it would be surprising if he had not at least a nodding acquaintance with the Catholic mystics. Yet it never seems to have occurred to him that his tasting of immortality and the seeming liberation of his 'second' and immortal self could be attributed to any direct action of God. Proust's case is not comparable either to the pan-en-henic experience, or to the theistic mystic's experience of being united to God: it is simply the realization of the wholeness of his own personality in independence - separate both from God (if we concede His existence) and from the world. Proust's experience is in accordance with the Samkhya-Yoga 'philosophy' (a better term would be 'psychology') the aim of which is precisely to liberate the immortal soul from all its purely mortal trappings.
With Rimbaud we pass to the other extreme. He seems to be a case of self induced psychosis, of preternatural experience deliberately and recklessly sought. His is not a case of 'grace' gratuitously given or appearing unsolicited and one knows not whence. rather, he seeks to take heaven by storm, and to capture it not by the regular warfare prescribed by the Church but by a surprise attack which was to seize upon the holy place from the quarter in which it would be least prepared, from the approaches of Hell.
Rimbaud, like many of the best and most generous spirits of his generation, was in revolt against the contemporary 'bourgeois' morality, what he calls his 'sale education d'enfance'. He was, therefore, in revolt against the Church too which, like Marx and Engels, he saw as a staunch ally of the bourgeois order,the order, for him, of middle-class respectability and cant. It is certainly true of the case of Rimbaud that he was driven on by the urge 'to escape selfhood and the environment', and it is precisely in this that he differed so sharply from the great majority of his fellow men. There was, however, more to it than this. Whatever the methods he employed, he was not merely in search of an experience that would break down the walls between himself and the objective world, he was consciously in search of God Himself. Despite the blasphemies and despite the condition of temporary madness that he deliberately induced, Rimbaud knew that he could never be satisfied with a preternatural experience as such: he could not be satisfied unless and until he felt himself to be in the presence of God." (61-62)
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