Religion: Manual of Mysticism

During the ’20s, when British Novelist Aldous Huxley was writing sexy, sophisticated novels (Point Counter Point), the fashionable thing was humanistic materialism. By this week it was plain that the times and Author Huxley have changed: the new vogue is mysticism.

Mystic Huxley, for some years a resident of California and a latter-day disciple of California’s mystic Gerald Heard, has called his newest book The Perennial Philosophy (Harper; $3). Under 27 headings, Author Huxley has presented the principal tenets of mysticism in his own words, illustrating by quotations from Mystics Eckhart, Lao-Tzu, William Law, many another.

But Huxley plainly intended his new book to be neither a show piece of erudition nor a collection of wise old sayings and bright young remarks. Instead, he designed it as a manual of man’s relationship to God, as stated by certain saints and mystics. How successfully this perennial philosophy gets across to the reader depends largely on the reader.

The fundamentals are deceptively simple: 1) that God is immanent and transcendent — the Whole of which all things, especially man, are a part; 2) that man’s great potentiality and purpose to achieve a union with the Whole; 3) that man can achieve such union only by ruthlessly eliminating all human desires and illusions of a separate self, letting the divine element work and grow within him. But self-improvement faddists looking for a 15-minute-a-day course to “happiness” need not apply. Sample Huxley dicta:

On Two Worlds. “The world inhabited by ordinary, nice unregenerate people is … so dull that they have to distract their minds from being aware of it by all sorts of artificial ‘amusements.’. . . For those who have deserved the world by making themselves fit to see God within it as well as within their own souls, it wears a very different aspect.”

On Salvation. “For what is probably the majority of those who profess the great historical religions, [Heaven] signifies … a happy posthumous condition of indefinite personal survival conceived of as a reward for good behavior . . . and a compensation for the miseries inseparable from life in a body. But for those who . . . have accepted the Perennial Philosophy . . . ‘heaven’ is not an exclusively posthumous condition. He only is completely ‘saved’ who is delivered here and now.”