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ellis_mc 's review for:
The Perennial Philosophy
by Aldous Huxley
What to say about this book. It was not easy to get through to be honest and there's a lot of pretty out there metaphysics to wade through to get to the nuggets of wisdom. But the nuggets are certainly there, and as a time capsule it is fascinating. Huxley's critiques of modernism and advertising are pretty poignant given that he saw his time as one of excess commercialism and obsession with the self, keeping in mind this was in the 1940's, and we've only dumped gasoline on that fire in the time since.
As a reformed atheist, I did have to tamp down my skepticism every time god was mentioned (which not shockingly is a lot). But I found if I replaced it with something like "the oneness of the universe" or "the connectedness of all things" (which I don't think is too far from how Huxley saw God) I could get much more into it.
Overall, very interesting, but pretty dry. I'll leave one passage here that I thought was particularly great:
"Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence—silence of the - mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on woodpulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught} is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground."
As a reformed atheist, I did have to tamp down my skepticism every time god was mentioned (which not shockingly is a lot). But I found if I replaced it with something like "the oneness of the universe" or "the connectedness of all things" (which I don't think is too far from how Huxley saw God) I could get much more into it.
Overall, very interesting, but pretty dry. I'll leave one passage here that I thought was particularly great:
"Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classification) distinguished three degrees of silence—silence of the - mouth, silence of the mind and silence of the will. To refrain from idle talk is hard; to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on woodpulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to prevent the will from ever achieving silence. Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught} is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground."