Every now and then, I come across a book that attempts to 'say it all' about what makes life meaningful. Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy is one such a book. I have to say that Huxley's understanding of human beings and his humaneness shows throughout this book. And I am humbled when reading it, because there are many instances where I am seeing a tall mountain in his writings and saying, "wow, that's quite a high place to scale! I have a long way to go!" Good writers perhaps give us a glimpse of this mountain. I think the trick is not to make readers feel terrible about their position in relation to that mountain but, more so, to inspire them in the process of contemplating and engaging the mountain itself.
Huxley has a chapter on "Charity" where he talks about a kind of ideal love that is not blemished by desires or lusts. He cites different spiritual texts and religious viewpoints to show a kind of current that runs throughout religious writings. I want to share the following quote:
"We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge become unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility." (p.81).
Already, my brain starts to crackle as I am reading these lines. Can love be a 'mode of knowledge'? How does that work? The dominant paradigm in scientific circles, at least, is to see knowledge as something detached from love. But then, as I read these sentences, I reflect: is it not the case that we only know deeply what we are capable of loving deeply? If my experience of something is only cursory and lacks the passion of involvement, can I really say I 'know it' well? To know is to spend time with something, at least on a regular basis. For example, there is a qualitatively vast difference between reading about a cat or dog in an anatomy textbook, and sitting down with a cat or a dog to interact. In this regard, I can even think of a regular meditative practice as a form of love. It is committed, it is repetitive (to a certain extent), and it involves revisiting the same situation with new eyes each time. And this kind of involvement is a simple curiosity which might start with something small and stay with smallness. Seeing the universe in a drop of rain might be one example of what kind of knowing the love of simple things might yield if one waits for it to happen.
But Huxley doesn't just stop here. He refers to the idea that "when love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge". It's interesting for me to see the words 'disinterested' and 'intense' in the same sentence. Can love be both disinterested and intense a the same time? In order to understand Huxley's view, we have to read further to see what isn't love, in Huxley's eyes. Huxley remarks, "Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds and spirit outside the self." (p.81). So, Huxley is saying that disinterestedness is the hallmark of love. It is not about 'not having passion', but it is more about being passionate without a bias or a sense of "I" am loving something. Huxley suggests that our normal ways of looking at love as 'desire' is often a distortion of things around us, because it refers back to the lusts of the self. Rather than seeing things the way they are, the "lust-dieted man", as Huxley puts it, "subordinates the laws of Nature and the spirit to his own cravings" (ibid).
Does Huxley mean that true love has no 'object' and no 'subject', no 'lover' and no 'loved'? Huxley uses the term 'love knowledge' (p.82) to describe a kind of pure love of God or all creation which is not tainted by attachment to 'my likes' or particular others. As difficult as it may seem to grasp that this love without attachment is possible, Huxley sticks to this vision through and through. He insists that the only way to true love of the divine or all reality is through a kind of self-emptying, which he describes through various quotes from spiritual teachers (p.86-89). To love is to completely accept things as they are unfolding, things as they are created, and things as they are in their revealing to us. This contrasts with trying to grasp particular qualities in order to hold onto special 'sweet' experiences, including what Huxley calls "the sweetness of God" (p.86).
I think that a lot of what Huxley says in these brief passages can relate to meditation. Regardless of what tradition it comes from, most meditative practices stress the relaxation of the mind, to a point where all the objects of the mind are not seen apart from mind itself. The 'edges' around subject and object start to smooth over, as a meditator stops attaching to coarse thoughts about liking one or disliking another. What results is a kind of lightness of being. I can't say that this lightness of being is anything like traditional notions of 'love' that I internalized while growing up. It certainly isn't a very stereotypical love that tries to get attention or something from someone. It's rather an open curiosity which treats all things on an equal par.
One of the dangers of reading Huxley without that first-hand experience of lightness is that it tends to look as though Huxley is advocating a 'resigned' attitude, or even a 'do-gooder' attitude toward charity. His chapter on "mortification" (p.96) attests to this possibility: I need to somehow 'give up' desire altogether in order to embrace 'true love', much the same way that I should eat broccoli instead of chocolate. People give lip service to this idea, without really knowing where they can access its power.
From my own experiences (however shallow) in meditation, I can say that this resignation is not quite what meditation is like. With meditation, one is not trying to even get rid of lusts or desires. Slowly, one is observing that lusts are phenomena of mind, and not these kind of solid, concrete 'givens' of the body. The letting go experience, however, is not at all a kind of 'willful parting' of desires. In fact, it is a kind of letting go of grasping to any ideas whatsoever, including ideas on what love is supposed to be. For example, if I cling to the notion that love should be charitable and not self-interested, all I am doing is adding one thought to another, and creating a conflict between these two thoughts: one that 'desires', the other that says, "desires are bad". This inner conflict creates the illusion that real love will win over desires. But does this happen? It hardly does, because one is relying on will-power to credit one thought over another. In fact, people will need to continue to use will-power to make it seem that one thought is 'better' than the other, when all thoughts are only conditioned and temporary experiences arising in mind.
I believe that Huxley's analysis and definition of true love is correct, but I don't think that one needs to view it as opposite to 'lusts'. Lusts are also part of the mind that can be enjoyed without being indulged. If I observe the sensation of lust, but don't see that there is a 'me' having lust, I can actually just observe it passing through without a 'me' being compelled to act on it. This is hard to realize, but acting on lust is always assuming that there is a solid 'me' that has to act on it or control the situation. But if I view the lust as one part of an unfolding, total environment, does it ever need to be acted upon? In this way, all experienced can be completely accepted without the need to react to one or the other.
Of course, in the end, Huxley's conclusions mesh with my own conclusions, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that love and lust are opposites. Love and lust just exist on very different wavelengths. And it is possible for love to encompass all emotional states without attaching to them.
Huxley, Aldous (1945, 1990), The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West. New York: Harper.
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