| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780060570583 | | Publisher: Perennial | | Publish Date: 4/1/2004 | | Buy.com Sku: 33957535 | | Item#: BCYXEH | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.25H x 5.5L x 1T | | Pages: 336 |
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| | | | "In studying the Perennial Philosophy we can begin either at the bottom, with practice and morality; or at the top, with a consideration of metaphysical truths; or, finally in the middle, at the focal point where mind and matter, action and thought have their meeting place in human psychology..." (from the first line) The Perennial Philosophy is defined by its author as "The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds." With great wit and stunning intellect, Aldous Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains them in terms that are personally meaningful.
Annotation:
This non-fiction work by the author of BRAVE NEW WORLD brings together a collection of mystical writings with psychological interpretations intended to expose the metaphysical threads that link many of the world's different faith systems.
| PraiseNew York Times
"It is important to say that even an agnostic, even a behaviorist-materialist, model 1925, can read this book with joy. It is the masterpiece of all anthologies. As Mr. Huxley has proved before, he can find and frame rare beauty in literature, and here, long before Freud, writers are quoted who combine beauty with proud psychology." - Signe Toksvig 09/30/1945 |
| Author Bio| Aldous Huxley | | Aldous Huxley was the third son of Leonard Huxley, a teacher, editor, and author, and the former Julia Arnold, a schoolmistress. His paternal grandfather was the famed scientist Thomas Henry Huxley (a noted defender of the theories of Charles Darwin, and the person who coined the term "agnostic"), and a maternal great-uncle was the poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Their grandfather's mantle was taken up by Huxley's older brother Julian, who became a noted biologist. Aldous was planning on a career in medicine; he was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. When he was 14, his mother died of cancer, and three years later Huxley was stricken by an eye infection that left him blind for a year. His eyesight never recovered beyond a return of partial vision in one eye, and this led him to change his plan of studying medicine; instead he studied literature at Oxford. While he was at Oxford, his older brother Trevenen committed suicide. After completing his bachelor's degree in 1916, Huxley worked briefly as a teacher at Eton. He then moved to London and pursued a career as a literary critic and poet. In 1919 he married Maria Nys, who gave birth to their only child the next year, the same year Huxley published his first volume of stories. By 1923, Huxley had published two acclaimed novels, CHROME YELLOW and ANTIC HAY, and his reputation as one of the finest satirists of his time was established. He and Maria spent the next several years living on the Continent, and he continued to publish books, achieving great success with the novels POINT COUNTER POINT and BRAVE NEW WORLD. In 1934, upon the completion of EYELESS IN GAZA, Huxley experienced severe writer's block, along with depression and insomnia. In an effort to cure these afflictions he began practicing meditation and pursuing an interest in metaphysics. Huxley emerged from this dark period the next year, and leaving behind his famed sardonicism, embraced a more idealistic view of human potential. He and his family moved to the United States in 1937, living first at the ranch of his deceased friend D. H. Lawrence, and in 1938 settling in Southern California. Huxley worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood during the late 1930s and 1940s while continuing to write fiction and essays. His interest in metaphysics deepened over the years, and in 1953 he experimented with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline; the results of these experiments are recounted in his book THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION. In 1955, Maria Huxley died. The next year Huxley married Laura Archera, a musician, film editor, and therapist. In his final years, Huxley continued his long-established interest in travel, visiting countries around the world, often lecturing on his ideas. He published his final novel, ISLAND, in 1962, and succumbed to throat cancer the next year, on the same day John F. Kennedy was shot. Huxley is best known in the United States for BRAVE NEW WORLD, which is often assigned reading in secondary schools, but ISLAND--whose model society is much more pleasant than the one found in BRAVE NEW WORLD--also has a durable and devoted following. His early novels are fine portraits of postwar English society, and it is on these that his reputation as a literary stylist rest. The contrast between these early satires and the metaphysical and sociological concerns of his later work is stark, and readers are often fans of either his "English period" or his "American Period," but not often fans of both. No matter what works of Huxley one reads, however, one will find perceptive social observation and elegant prose. He is immortalized with a place in the jacket collage of the Beatles' SERGEANT PEPPER album. |
| | Read A Chapter | Introduction Philosopria Perennis -- the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing -- the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in, the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages Click to read more... Introduction Philosopria Perennis -- the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing -- the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in, the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe. In the pages that follow I have brought together a number of selections from these writings, chosen mainly for their significance -- because they effectively illustrated some particular point in the general system of the Perennial Philosophy -- but also for their intrinsic beauty and memorableness. These selections are arranged under various heads and embedded, so to speak, in a commentary of my own, designed to illustrate and connect, to develop and, where necessary, to elucidate. Knowledge is a function of being, When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing. For example, the being of a child is transformed by growth and education into that of a man; among the results of this transformation is a revolutionary change in the way of knowing and the amount and character of the things known. As the individual grows up, his knowledge becomes more conceptual and systematic in form, and its factual, utilitarian content is enormously in. creased. But these gains are offset by a certain deterioration in the quality of immediate apprehension, a blunting and a loss of intuitive power. Or consider the change in his being which the scientist is able to induce mechanically by means of his instruments. Equipped with a spectroscope and a sixty-inch reflector an astronomer becomes, so far as eyesight is concerned, a superhuman creature; and, as we should naturally expect, the knowledge possessed by this superhuman creature is very different, both in quantity and quality, from that which can be acquired by a star-gazer with unmodified, merely human eyes. Nor are changes in the knower's physiological or intellectual being the only ones to affect his knowledge. What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves. "Practice," in the words of William James, "may change our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequences of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve." To put the matter more succinctly, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And the same idea has been expressed by the Sufi poet, Jalal-uddin Rumi, in terms of a scientific metaphor: "The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love." This book, I repeat, is an anthology of the Perennial Philosophy; but, though an anthology, it contans but few extracts from the writings of professional men of letters and, though illustrating a philosophy, hardly anything from the professional philosophers. The reason for this is very simple. The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. Why should this be so? We do not know. It is just one of those facts which we have to accept, whether we like them or not and however implausible and unlikely they may seem. Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water. to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behaviour, to other minds. It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfil certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid. In regard to few professional philosophers and, men of letters is there any evidence that they did very much in the way of fulfilling the necessary conditions of direct spiritual knowledge. When poets or metaphysicians talk about the subject matter of the Perennial Philosophy, it is generally at second hand. But in every age there have been some men and women who chose to fulfil the conditions upon which alone, as a matter of brute empirical fact, such immediate knowledge can be had ... Continues...
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