Aldoux Huxley’s Philosophy | eBook | AudioBook

The Following is an Excerpt from this Book

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) was a prominent English author and one of the famous Huxley family’s most influential members. He had published a variety of novels, on different topics. Many of his books deal with contemporary culture, with the implications of scientific science and later on mysticism and recreational substances such as drugs. Perhaps Huxley is best known for his novel, Brave New World. He talks about a society in the far future in the novel, which was published in 1932, where the entire social order is focused on hereditary characteristics, and not on any individual’s personal attempt to learn and develop oneself.
Huxley advocates the cross-pollination of East and West at a period when Alan Watts was starting to popularize western teachings and influential public figures such as Jack Kerouac were switching to Buddhism. With a reference to visionary psychologist and philosopher William James, who was among his major influences, he considers the idea that human consciousness is flowing through a larger spiritual realm, filtered in a way that helps their survival: if one has to get out of traffic on Sunset Boulevard, it’s not a good thing to be aware of all that’s going on the world. Approaching transportation is the need of the hour.
This is what the brain does for an individual: it shrinks down the area so that one can go through life without having to face serious problems. But people should be opening up and being what has always been from the very beginning that is far better known than they normally think they are. One will understand the identification with what James has called the universal consciousness and what the Atman-Brahman is called in the West. The conclusion of life in all great religious practices is the realization that the finite represents the essence of the Infinite. That’s, of course, a total paradox when it’s described in words; but it’s one of the experiential reality.
But, Huxley claims, this deeper and more complex sense of self is typically overshadowed by the shallow masks that people mistake for themselves. The superficial self — the self that they call their own that reacts to their names and that conducts its business — has a terrible habit of thinking itself to be absolute in some sense. People also realize in an elusive and profound way that in the depths of their attitude lies the impossible. And still, they want to have the name understood. But sadly, because of the ignorance people live in — partly a cultural product, partly a genetic and voluntary product — they prefer to look at themselves as being utter, at this miserable little self. One either worship oneself as such or project some magnified self-image into an expectation or objective that stops short of the highest ideal or objective, and therefore, worship that.
Almost 50 years before Adrienne Rich lamented the abuse of language used to control human expectations in her groundbreaking critique of capitalism, Huxley claims that the use and distortion of reality mediate the self-relationship and is responsible for the propensity to equate the deeper self with the superficial self: this is the greatest gift that man has ever earned or has ever got. And one still has to note that while language is important to him, if they use it wrongly, it can be lethal too. If an individual examines his living cycles, he finds that at least.