I got my hands on a collection of
writings by Aldous Huxley recently. It had been many years since I had
relished going through some of the works of Huxley. Below are some of
the extracts from the book titled Moksha – Aldous Huxley's
Classical Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
edited by Michael Horowitz and Cynthia Palmer. This exercise is
mainly so that I have some of his writing as a reference for me in
case the book moves on (which is quite likely to happen and which is
how it should be). Am putting this in the public domain so that it
provides as uplifting an experience for whoever comes across it as it
did for me. Enjoy the trip....
'Open you eyes again and look at
Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right
hand, as you've already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world
into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying
fire. Life and death,order and disintegration,impartially. But now
look at Shiva's other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised
and the palm is turned outwards. What does this gesture signify? It
signifies, “Don't be afraid; it's All Right'. But how can anyone in
his senses fail to be afraid, when it is so obvious that they're all
wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He's
using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing?Look
closely you will see that the right foot is planted squarely on a
horrible little subhuman creature -the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf but
immensely powerful in his malignity, Mulayaka is the embodiment of
ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on
him, break his back! And that is precisely what Nataraja is doing.
Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But
notice that it isn't at this trampling right foot that he points his
finger; it's at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he's in
the act of raising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why?
That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity, -
it's the symbol of release, of Moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances
in all the worlds at once – in the world of physics and chemistry,
in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world
finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light...' from
Aldous Huxley's Island (1961)
'Drug-
taking, it is significant, plays an important role in every primitive
religion. The Persians and, before them, the Greeks and probably the
ancient Hindus used alcohol to produce religious ecstasy; the
Mexicans procured the beatific vision by eating a poisonous cactus; a
toadstool filled the Shamans of Siberia with enthusiasm and endowed
them with the gift of tongues. And so on. The devotional exercises of
the later mystics are all designed to produce the drug's miraculous
effects by purely psychological means. How many of the current ideas
of eternity, of heaven, of supernatural states are ultimately derived
from the experiences of drug-takers? -
from A Treatise on Drugs(1931)
'All
existing drugs are treacherous and harmful.The heaven into which they
usher their victims soon turns into a hell of sickness and moral
degradation. They kill, first the soul, then, in a few years,the
body. What is the remedy?”Prohibition” answer all contemporary
governments in chorus. But the results of prohibition are not
encouraging. Men and women feel such an urgent need to take
occasional trips from reality, that they will do almost anything to
procure the means of escape. The only justification for prohibition
would be success;but it is not, and in the nature of things, cannot,
be successful. The way to prevent people from drinking too much
alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine or cocaine, is to give them
an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the
present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such
a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of
suffering humanity”-
from A Treatise on Drugs(1931)
'...Confronted
by a chair which looked like the Last Judgement – or to be more
accurate, by a Last Judgement which, after a long time and with
considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair – I found myself
all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going
too far. Too far, even though the going was into intenser beauty,
deeper significance.The fear, as I analysed it in retrospect, was of
being overwhelmed,of disintegrating under a pressure of reality
greater than a mind, accustomed to live most of the time in a cosy
world of symbols, could possibly bear. The literature of religious
experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming
those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some
manifestation of the Mysterium
Tremendum.In theological
language this fear is due to the incompatibility between man's egoism
and the divine purity, between man's self aggravated separatedness
and the infinity of God.Following Boehme and William Law,we may say
that, by unregenerate souls, the divine Light at its full blaze can
be apprehended only as a burning purgatorial fire. An almost
identical doctrine is to be found in The
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
where the departed soul is described as shrinking in agony from the
Pure Light of the Void, and even from the less tempered Lights, in
order to rush headlong into the comforting darkness of self-hood as a
reborn human being, or even as a beast, an unhappy ghost, a denizen
of hell. Anything rather than the burning brightness of unmitigated
Reality -anything! - from
the Doors of Perception (1954)
'
...i took down my copy of Evans -Wentz's edition of The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, and
opened at random.'O
nobly born, let not thy mind be distracted.' That was the problem –
to remain undistracted. Undistracted by the memory of past sins, by
imagined pleasure, by the bitter aftertaste of old wrongs and
humiliations, by all the fears and hate and cravings that ordinarily
eclipse the Light. What those Buddhist monks did for the dying and the
dead, might not the modern psychiatrist do for the insane? Let there
be a voice to assure them, by day and even when they are asleep, that
in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the
ultimate Reality remains unshakeably itself and is of the same
substance as the inner light of even the most cruely tormented mind.
By means of such devices as recorders, clock controlled switches,
public address systems and pillow speakers it should be very easy to
keep the inmates of even an understaffed institution constantly
reminded of this primordial fact.Perhaps a few of the lost souls
might in this way be helped to win some measure of control over the
universe -at once beautiful and appalling, but always other than
human, always totally incomprehensible – in which they find
themselves condemned to live.' - from
the Doors of Perception (1954)
'Now,
the problem is, how can we visit the remote areas of the mind, where
these creatures live? Some people, it is clear, can go there
spontaneously and more or less at will. A few of these travelers were
great artists, who could not only visit the Antipodes[of the mind],
but could also give an account of what they saw, in words, or in
pictures. Much more numerous are those who have been to the
Antipodes[of the mind], have seen its strange inhabitants, but are
incapable of giving adequate expression to what they have observed.
At the present time they are reluctant to give even an inadequate
expression to their experience. The mental climate of our age is not
favorable to visionaries. Those who have such spontaneous
experiences, and are unwise enough to talk about them, are looked on
with suspicion and told that they ought to see a psychiatrist. In the
past, experiences of this kind were considered valuable and those who
had them were looked up to. This is one of the reasons (though not
perhaps the only reason) why there were more visionaries in earlier
centuries than there are today' – from
Mescaline and the “Other World”(1955)
'
The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily
sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Blissful visions
are generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a
feeling of deindividualization. (It is, no doubt, this feeling of
deindividualization which makes it possible for the Indians who
practice the peyote cult to use the drug not merely as a shortcut to
the visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving
solidarity within the participating group) When the visionary
experience is terrible and the world is transfigured for the worse,
individualization is intensified and the negative visionary finds
himself associated with a body that seems to grow progressively more
tense, more tightly packed, until he finds himself at last reduced to
being the agonized consciousness of an insipated lump of matter, no
bigger than a stone that can be held between the hands' -
from Heaven and Hell (1956)
'Negative
emotions-the fear which is the absence of confidence, the hatred,
anger or malice which exclude love – are the guarantee that
visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling. The
Pharisee is a virtuous man; but his virtue if of the kind which is
compatible with negative emotion. His visionary experiences are
therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful' -
from Heaven and Hell (1956)
'When
administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these
chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience.
Thus a person who takes mescaline or LSD may suddenly understand –
not only intellectually but organically, experientially – the
meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is Love,”
or “Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him”. It goes without
saying that this kind of temporary self transcendence is no guarantee
of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is
a 'gratuitous grace', which is neither necessary nor sufficient for
salvation, but which, if properly used, can be enormously helpful to
those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences,
whether occurring simultaneously, or as the result of swallowing the
right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of
'spiritual exercises' or bodily mortification. Those who are offended
by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a
genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard
mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self -torture
– inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for
the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing
drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in
general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the
procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing
techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged
suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased
concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; an the psychological
consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness.
Again, meditations involving long, intense concentrations upon a
single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons
which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of
respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing' – from
Drugs that Shape Men's Minds(1958)
'If
i had the control of education I would start pointing out to
children, of quite small age, that the fundamental rule of morality,
the golden rule, begins on the sub-human level, even the
sub-biological level. If you want nature to treat you well, you must
treat nature well.If you start destroying nature, nature will destroy
you, and this basic moral precept is fundamental in our present
knowledge of ecology and conservation. What we know now about ecology
points to the fact taht nature exists in the most delicate balance,
and that anything which tends to upset the balance will produce
consequences of the most unexpected character and often of the most
disastrous character. We see then that many of the most important
ethical truths flow quite naturally and simply from scientific facts,
and I feel very strongly that this kind of bridging between the world
of pure science and the world of ethics should be made from the
earliest age.' - from
the Final Revolution( 1959)
'In
the past we have had revolutions which were all on the periphery of
things. The environment was changed in the hope of changing the
individual at the center of the environment. Today, thanks to the
application of techniques to human beings, we are in a position to
change the human being. So that the final revolution will concern man
and woman as they are, and not the environment in which they live,
and I can't see how one could go any further than the ultimate nature
of this revolution.' - from
The Final Revolution(1959)
'Now
the question arises, what if anything, can be done about this steady
advance of technicization? Obviously, stopping it is out of the
question. Technicization is going on whether we like it or not., and
also it seems perfectly clear that without a steady increase of
technicization in many fields it would be almost impossible to manage
or provide a decent life for the rapidly increasing numbers of the
human species. So that we have to put up with the fact that this
technical process is going on, and is going to go on developing
according to the laws of its own being. It is going to be developed
for the purpose of producing more and efficiency, not necessarily for
the purpose of producing fully developed human beings. That has
nothing to do with it, nor have any questions of ethics got anything
to do with it. The categorical imperative of technology is
efficiency'- from The
Final Revolution(1959)
'These
bio-chemical methods are, I suppose, the most powerful and the most
foolproof, so to say, of all the methods for transporting us into
this other world that at present exist, I think, as Professor Leary
will point out tonight, that there is here a very large field for
systematic experimentation by psychologists, because it is now
possible to explore areas of the mind at minimum expense to the body,
areas which were almost impossible to get at before, except either by
the use of extremely dangerous drugs or else by looking around for
the rather rare people who spontaneously can go into this world.
(of course it is very difficult for them to go in on demand, “ the
Spirit bloweth where it listeth,”we can never be sure that the
people with the spontaneous gift of visionary experience will have it
on demand). With such drugs as psilocybin it is possible for the
majority of people to go into this other world with very little
trouble and with almost no harm to themselves.'-
From Visionary Experience (1961)
'There
is a kind of visionary experience which people have with the eyes open
and which consists in a transfiguration of the external world so that
it seems overwhelmingly beautiful and alive and shining. This of
course is what Wordsworth described so beautifully and so accurately
in his great Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality,
and similar experiences can be found in the works of the mystics, in
the work of the Anglican mystic, Traherne, who gives an incredibly
beautiful description of the kind of transfigured world in which he
lived in childhood. This description ends up with the most beautiful
passage where he describes this wonderful world, and says, “And so
with much ado I was taught the dirty devices of the world which now I
unlearn and become as a little child again so that I now enter once
more the Kingdom of God.”.
And
here, as I said before, here is surely one of the great challenges to
modern education: How to keep alive this world of immense value which
people have during childhood and which certain privileged people
retain throughout their lives? How do we keep this alive and at the
same time impart a sufficient amount of conceptual education to make
them efficient citizens and scientists? This I don't know, but I am
absolutely certain that this is on of the important challenges
confronting modern education'-
From Visionary Experience (1961)
'Spiritual...For
sensitive ears, alive to its overtones of inspirational twaddle, this
is almost a dirty word.And yet, in certain contexts, what other word
can one use?Reading Meister Eckhart , for example, or listening as we
did at Gstaad, to Krishnamurti, one is forced to recognise that
“spiritual”can be
mot juste.”I show you
sorrow and the ending of sorrow.”
All
the great masters of the spiritual life (that word again!) have been
at once profoundly pessimistic and almost infinitely optimistic.
If certain conditions
are fulfilled, human beings may cease to behave as the pathetic or
deplorable creatures they mistakenly think they are and be what in
fact they have always been, if they had only given themselves a chance
of knowing it -enlightened, liberated, “godded in God”. But that
more than a very few of us will ever fulfill those conditions is
overwhelmingly improbable. Many are called, but very few are chosen;
for very few ever choose to be chosen. The ending of sorrow is
feasible;but the continuance of sorrow is certain.All that the
masters of the spiritual life can do is to remind us of who in fact
we are and of the means whereby we may come to the recognition of our
identity – meditation in the sense of complete and inclusive
awareness at every instant, and the corollaries of such meditation,
right being and, from right being, spontaneous right action.' - from
Exploring the Borderlands of the Mind (1961)
'Dear Tim,
I
forgot, in my last letter, to answer your question about Tantra.
There are enormous books on subject by “Arthur Avalon” (Sir John
Woodroffe), which one can dip into with some profit.Then there is the
chapter on it in Heinrich Zimmer's Philosophies
of India. The fullest
scholarly treatment , on a manageable scale, is in Mircea Eliade's
various books on Yoga. See also Conze's Buddhist
Texts. As far as one can
understand it, Tantra seems to be a strange mixture of superstition
and magic with sublime philosophy and acute philosophical insights.
There is an endless amount of ritual and word-magic. But the basic
ideal seems to me the highest possible ideal- enlightenment, not
apart from the world (as with the Vedantists and the Nirvana-addicts
of the Hinayana School of Buddhists) but within the world, through
the world, by means of the ordinary processes of living. Tantra
teaches a yoga of sex,a yoga of eating (even eating forbidden foods
and drinking forbidden drinks). The sacramentalizing of common life,
so that every event may become a means whereby enlightenment can be
realized, is achieved, essentially, through constant awareness. This
is the ultimate yoga – being aware, conscious even of the
unconscious – on every level from the physiological to the
spiritual. In this context see the list of 112 exercises in
awareness, extracted from a Tantric text and printed at the end of
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (by
Paul Reps)(now in paperback). The whole of “Gestalt Therapy” is
anticipated in these exercises – and the therapy is not merely for
the abnormal, it is above all a therapy for the much graver sickness
of insensitiveness and ignorance which we call “normality” or
“mental health”. LSD and the mushrooms should be used, it seems
to me, in context of this basic Tantric idea of the yoga of total
awareness, leading to enlightenment within the world of everyday
experience – which of course becomes the world of miracle and
beauty and divine mystery when experience is what it always ought to
be.
Yours,
Aldous' – Letter to Dr
Timothy Leary (1962)
'”Dope...Murugun was telling me about the fungi that are used here
as a source of dope”.
“What's
in a name?...Answer, practically everything. Murugan calls it dope
and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex,
the dirty word evokes. We on the contrary, give the stuff good names
– the moksha medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty
pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are
deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of
the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try. For him it's
dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever
indulges in”. - from
Island (1961)
“Another thing we're just beginning to understand.”said
Vijaya,”is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What's
happening in the brain when you're having a vision? And what's
happening when you pass from a premystical to a genuinely mystical
state of mind?”
“Do you know?” Will asked.
“'Know'
is a big word. Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible
guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas –
they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain
areas of primary projection – the visual cortex, for example. Just
how the moksha-medicine
produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out. The
important fact is that,somehow or other, it does produce them. And
somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas
of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving,
or moving, or feeling.”
“And how do the silent areas respond?” Will inquired.
“Let's
start with what they don't
respond with. They don't respond with visions or auditions, they
don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of
parapsychological performance. None of that amusing premystical
stuff. Their response is the full blown mystical experience. You know
– One in all and All in one. The basic experience, with its
corollaries – boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and
meaning.”
“Not
to mention joy,” said Dr. Robert,”inexpressible joy.” - from
Island (1961)
“You're
like that mynah.” said Dr. Robert at last. “Trained to repeat
words you don't understand, or know the reaon for, 'It
isn't real. It isn't real.'
But if you'd experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday
you'd know better. You'd know that it was much more real that what
you call reality. More real that what you're thinking and feeling at
this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But not
real is what you've been
taught to say. Not real,
not real.” Dr. Robert
laid a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder.” You've been told
that we're just a set of self-indulgent dope-takers, wallowing in
illusions and false samadhis.
Listen, Murugan –
forget all the bad language that's been pumped into you. Forget it at
least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred
milligrams of moksha-medicine
and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about
your own nature, about this strange world you've got to live in,
learn in,suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to
die one day – maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who
knows? But it's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't
prepare for it.” - from
Island (1961)
'What
can, and what should, the individual do to improve his ironically
equivocal relationship with the culture he finds himself embedded?
How can he continue to enjoy the benefits of culture, without at the
same time, being stupefied or frenziedly intoxicated by it's poisons?
How can he become discriminatingly acculturated, rejecting what is
silly and downright evil in his conditioning, and holding fast to
that which makes for humane and intelligent behavior?
A culture cannot be discriminatingly accepted, much less be modified,
except by persons who have seen through it – by persons who have
cut holes in the confining stockade of verbalized symbols and are
able to look at the world and, by reflection, at themselves in a new
and relatively unprejudiced way. Such persons are not merely born;
they must also be made. But how?
In the field of formal education, what the would-be hole cutter needs
is knowledge. Knowledge of the past and present history of cultures
in all their fantastic variety, and knowledge about the nature and
limitations, the uses and abuses, of language. A man who knows that
there have been many cultures, and that each culture claims to be the
best and truest of all, will find it hard to take too seriously the
boastings and dogmatizings of his own tradition. Similarly a man who
knows how symbols are related to experience, who practices the kind
of linguistic self-control taught by the exponents of General
Semantics, is unlikely to take too seriously the absurd or dangerous
nonsense that, within every culture, passes for philosophy, practical
wisdom and political argument.
As
a preparation for hole cutting, this kind of intellectual education
is certainly valuable, but no less certainly insufficient. Training
on the verbal level needs to be supplemented by training in wordless
experiencing. We must learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate
the art of pure receptivity.' - from
Culture and the Individual (1963)
'Like
the culture by which it is conditioned, normal waking consciousness
is at once our best friend and a most dangerous enemy. It helps us to
survive and make progress; but at the same time it prevents us from
actualizing some of our most valuable potentialities and, on
occasion, gets us into all kinds of trouble. To become fully human,
man, proud man, the player of fantastic tricks, must learn to get out
of his own way; only then will his infinite faculties and angelic
apprehension get a chance of coming to the surface.In Blake's words,
we must “cleanse the doors of perception”; for when the doors of
perception are cleansed, “everything appears to man as it is –
infinite.” To normal waking consciousness things are the strictly
finite and insulated embodiments of verbal labels. How can we break
the habit of automatically imposing our prejudices and the memory of
culture-hallowed words upon immediate experience? Answer: by the
practice of pure receptivity and mental silence. These will cleanse
the doors of perception and, in the process, make possible the
emergence of other than normal forms of consciousness – aesthetic
consciousness, visionary consciousness, mystical consciousness.
Thanks to culture we are the heirs of vast accumulations of
knowledge,to a priceless treasure of logical and scientific method,
to thousands upon thousands of useful pieces of technological and
organizational know-how.But the human mind-body possesses other
sources of information, makes use of other types of reasoning, is
gifted with an intrinsic wisdom that is independent of cultural
conditioning.' - from
Culture and the Individual (1963)
'Self-education
on the non-verbal level is as old as civilization.”Be still and
know that I am God” - for the visionaries and mystics of every time
and every place, this has been the first and greatest of the
commandments. Poets listen to their Muse and in the same way the
visionary and the mystic wait upon inspiration in a state of wise
passiveness, of dynamic vacuity. In the Western tradition this state
is called “the prayer of simple regard.” At the other end of the
world it is described in terms that are psychological rather than
theistic. In mental silence we “look into our own Self-Nature,”
we “hold fast to the Not-Thought which lies in thought.” We
“become that which essentially we have always been.” By wise
activity we can acquire useful analytical knowledge about the world,
knowledge that can be communicated by means of verbal symbols. In the
state of wise passiveness we make possible the emergence of forms of
consciousness other than the utilitarian consciousness of normal
waking life. Useful analytical knowledge of the world is replaced by
some kind of biologically inessential but spiritually enlightening
acquaintance with the world as beauty. Or there can be direct
acquaintance with the intrinsic strangeness of existence, its wild
implausibility. And finally there can be direct acquaintance with the
world's unity. This immediate mystical experience of being at one
with the fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the infinite
diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed in
words. Like visionary experience, the experience of the mystic can be
talked about only from the outside. Verbal symbols can never convey
its inwardness.' - from
Culture and the Individual (1963)
'Through
these new psychedelics, the subject's normal waking consciousness may be
modified in many different ways. It is as though, for each
individual, his deeper self decides which kind of experience will be
most advantageous. Having decided, it makes use of the drug's
mind-changing powers to give the person what he needs. Thus, if it
would be good for him to have deeply buried memories uncovered,
deeply buried memories will duly be uncovered.In cases where this is
of no great importance, something else will happen. Normal waking
consciousness will be replaced by aesthetic consciousness, and the
world will be perceived in all its unimaginable beauty, all the
blazing intensity of its”thereness.” And aesthetic consciousness
may modulate into visionary consciousness. Thanks to yet another kind
of seeing, the world will now reveal itself as not only unimaginably
beautiful, but also fathomlessly mysterious – as a multitudinous
abyss of possibility forever actualizing itself into unprecedented
forms. New insights into a new, transfigured world of givenness, new
combinations of thought and fantasy – the stream of novelty pours
through the world in a torrent, whose every drop is charged with
meaning.There are the symbols whose meaning lies outside themselves
in the given facts of visionary experience, and there are these given
facts which signify only themselves. But “only themselves” is
also “no less than the divine ground of all being.” “Nothing
but this” is at the same time “the Suchness of all.” And now
the aesthetic and visionary consciousness deepen into mystical
consciousness. The world is now seen as an infinite diversity that is
yet a unity, and the beholder experiences himself as being at one
with the infinite Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at
every point of space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual
perishing and perpetual renewal. Our normal word-conditioned
consciousness creates a universe of sharp distinctions, black and
white, this and that, me and you and it. In the mystical consciousness
of being at one with infinite Oneness, there is a reconciliation of
opposites, a perception of the Not-Particular in the particulars, a
transcending of our ingrained subject-object relationships with
things and persons ; there is an immediate experience of our
solidarity with all being and a kind of organic conviction that in
spite of the inscrutabilities of fate, in spite of our own dark
stupidities and deliberate malevolence, yes, in spite of all that is
so manifestly wrong with the world, it is yet, in some profound,
paradoxical and entirely inexpressible way,All Right.For normal
waking consciousness, the phrase, “God is Love,” is no more than a
piece of wishful positive thinking. For the mystical consciousness,
it is a self-evident truth.' - - from
Culture and the Individual (1963)
The
choice is always ours.Then, let me choose
The
longest art, the hard Promethean way
Cherishingly
to tend and feed and fan
That
inward fire,whose small precious flame,
Kindled
or quenched,creates
The
noble or the ignoble men we are,
The
worlds we live in and the very fates,
Our
bright or muddy star –
from Orion (1931)
