“Do you want to know what my secret is?” ❤️

On a Philosophical High | from Huxley ❤️

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Well, whenever students ask us, ‘Why do you think we should read the great philosophers of the past?’,

we gently tell them –

Well, that’s because, the great sages and philosophers of the past, help us obtain for ourselves a better life, a better approach to people, and a better engagement with society!

Most of us simply go through our everyday routine in sync with Nietzsche’s Idea of Eternal Recurrence, 

“to crave nothing more fervently than the infinite repetition, without alteration, of each and every moment!”

Indeed, what else can we do, when, ‘time’s winged chariot’ is catching up on us with such fervour and zeal? 😊

One reason, why it’s become difficult for us to ‘step aside’, and to indulge ourselves in bracketing!

Again, bracketing (or epoche) is Husserl’s term for ‘stepping aside’ from the everyday, commonplace way of seeing things!

In fact, most people live through their sweet lives without questioning what they believe.

That’s where Philosophy steps in, and says,

‘Hey, you there... could you just stop for a moment, and take a closer look at your life and worldviews?’

One such philosopher who makes us ‘pause’ on our routine pathways, and make us take a closer look at our life and worldviews, is Aldous Huxley.

“Aldous Huxley, novelist, essayist, mystic, wrote with the force of a Swift and the bite of a Voltaire”, says the blurb to his book titled, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published in 1952.

Any faint echoes of the Bard, here? 😊

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

(from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth)

Interestingly, the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was published in England as Adonis and the Alphabet.

By the way, Huxley and J. Krishnamurti, had a great mutual admiration for each other, ever since they first met in California in early 1938! So yes, reading both these great minds simultaneously is a treat in itself.

So here we go - 😊

In fact, reading through Huxley’s foreword to J. Krishnamurti’s book titled, The First and Last Freedom, leads one to a lot of wonderful, philosophical speculations and literary ruminations as well!

How much the humanist in Huxley anticipates the postmodernists, is anybody’s guess!

A cursory reading through his amazing foreword to J.K’s book, is ample validation to this credo.

‘A lie can be extended, propounded and repeated, but not truth; and when you repeat truth, it ceases to be truth,’

says Huxley in his Foreword to Krishnamurti’s book!

How much we are here, reminded of Adolf Hitler’s controversial maxim where he says,

‘Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it’!

True lies!

All Organized Beliefs are based on Separation!

“Belief inevitably separates. If you have a belief, or when you seek security in your particular belief, you become separated from those who seek security in some other form of belief. All organized beliefs are based on separation, though they may preach brotherhood,” 

he adds.

We Approach the Crisis of our times with ‘formulas’!

We approach the crisis of our times, not with love and insight, but “with formulas, with systems” - and pretty poor formulas and systems at that. But men of good will should not have formulas; for formulas lead, inevitably, only to ‘blind thinking’.

Symbols should never be raised to the rank of dogmas!

We are brought up as believing and practising members of some organization - the Communist or the Christian, the Moslem, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Freudian.

Consequently you respond to the challenge, which is always new, according to an old pattern; and therefore your response has no corresponding validity, newness, freshness.

If you respond as a Catholic or a Communist, you are responding - are you not? - according to a patterned thought.

Therefore your response has no significance.

Therefore what ‘one has to do, in order to meet the new challenge, is to strip oneself completely, denude oneself entirely of the background and meet the challenge anew’.

Where there is Judgement, Openness of mind is absent!

‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’

The gospel precept applies to our dealings with ourselves no less than to our dealings with others.

Where there is judgement, where there is comparison and condemnation, openness of mind is absent; there can be no freedom from the tyranny of symbols and systems, no escape from the past and the environment.

There is a transcendent spontaneity of life, a ‘creative Reality’, as Krishnamurti calls it, which reveals itself as immanent only when the perceiver’s mind is in a state of ‘alert passivity’, of ‘choiceless awareness’.

And that’s one reason why Jidduji, during one of his discourses, suddenly, stops midway through his talk, and asks this question,

“Do you want to know what my secret is?”

Jim Dreaver, who was part of the audience, says, Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! There was a silence.

Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice,

“You see, I don’t mind what happens.”

The secret to true happiness, ain’t it?

Coming back to Huxley -

Huxley’s opening lines in the foreword are a treat to those of us who dabble in theory!

Here goes –

Without Symbol-systems we should be Animals!

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds - the given and the homemade, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.

In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems - linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic.

Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals.

Well, Huxley’s foreword is not only an eye-opener to all and sundry, but also a sagely advice from Vedantist Huxley who takes his readers into realities that are beyond the generally accepted ‘five senses!’

All captions are this blogger’s!

All textual quotations are from JK’s The First and Last Freedom

Templates design: this blogger’s as well! 😊