So many gods...
so little time...
Aldous Huxley's view...
Aldous Huxley came from a very secular world. His great uncle was Matthew Arnold, a prominent British intellectual, poet and religious skeptic. Thomas Huxley, a noted paleontologist and key defender of Charles Darwin, was his grandfather. Aldous’s brother, Julian, was a famous biologist (and eugenicist), knighted in 1958.
If anyone had a pedigree for skepticism, it was Huxley.
And yet, while his first wife was dying in 1955, Huxley chanted from the “Tibetan Book of the Dead” as she passed. Huxley’s second wife, Laura, did the same for him when he died. "You are doing this so beautifully — you are going toward the light," she described her words after he died.
Huxley is most noted for “Brave New World,” a dystopian vision of technological tyranny where human spirit is crushed less by force than by pleasure and distractions. But his body of writing as a whole often focused on a mystical connection to the divine.
“Huxley always blended his Buddhism with a scientific perspective,” said Joan Wines, a Huxley expert and professor at California Lutheran University. “What he’s trying to find out is truth that is both spiritual and scientific.”
In 1945, Huxley wrote “The Perennial Philosophy,” with excerpts of classic texts ranging from Eastern Hinduism and Buddhism to mystical elements of Islam and early Christianity — an effort to synthesize a common core of faith.
Read more at national.deseretnews.com |
