On the Divine Within

The Divine Within is a fascinating, wide-ranging collection of Aldous Huxley’s essays. Huxley is best remembered for Brave New World and his other fiction, but he had an avid interest in mysticism and other non-orthodox religious practice; Advaita Vedanta was a particular curiosity of his, and he was one of the developers of the “perennial philosophy,” the idea that there’s a single spiritual mountain with many paths up it. The whole collection is learned and written in a scholarly style — I read it after Ram Dass, Adyashanti, and Alan Watts, and Huxley writes far more like a classical academic than those three, though he and Watts share perspectives that diverge somewhat from Ram Dass and Adyashanti. The most interesting part is his contrast between “immediate experience” and “symbolic religion,” what I’ve usually called mystical or prophetic religion as against priestly religion. Immediate experience aims to reach the divine source directly, and often, in my view, succeeds; symbolic religion is what happens afterward, once the experiences of the prophets and mystics get turned into texts, dogma, and ritual, so that practice calcifies and loses the divine spirit that first moved through it — something that happens, as far as I can tell, in every faith: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism. Funnily, Huxley has less patience for the paradoxes of Zen koans than I do; I find them fascinating, fun, and insightful, while he seems to regard them as a turgid obstacle worth poking fun at, especially in his essay “Notes on Zen.” Unlike so many charlatans, Huxley balances critical thinking evenly against a credulity toward the divine, and I really appreciated his insight.