They were the meaning and they were born into meaning.
Their world taught them that they and it were meaningless.
Religion taught them to have faith that there is a meaning.
Some believed it and some didn’t.
But how many saw that they were the meaning and that they were living in it?
When we treat persons as mere objects we diminish ourselves.
Our ability to see things as pictures is achieved by the intellect not just by sensibility. To be able to identify something as an image of something else is to see the image as conveying not just a reminder of that depicted object but presenting it under a certain angle and with a certain slant and to see it with a certain meaning. All this is the work of intellect and not just sensibility.
Wholes can be analyzed into pieces and moments. Pieces can be detached from their wholes. Moments can’t. A branch is a piece of a tree. It can exist independently of it, at which point it itself becomes a whole. A musical pitch is a moment. It can’t exist independently from a sound.
God isn’t dead. He’s dismembered. His parts are scattered all around us. If only we have eyes to see.
It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.
-Aldous Huxley , Island
Such bad poetry(as most Oriental art), read Charles Swinburne instead.
and then there’s this…
The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act. … What would the average man (sic) do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness. He accomplishes thereby a peculiarly human victory: the ability to be smug about terror.
-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Thats some good stuff bro, first time I am seeing something sensible on this forum. Post more. I dont agree with the psychoanalysts and psychologists but this is at least interesting and coherent.
Has Huxley ever written anything on Christianity?
The perennial philosophy.
Terror management theory
I don’t have a problem with psychology but with their dishonesty as to what is possible to be established and what isn’t. Most of them talk about things like fear or hatred as if these were some rigorous and observable phenomena when we simply and plainly lack the technological and scientific ability to penetrate the mechanisms of brains and cognition and emotion in general to any meaningful degree. And psychoanalysis is complete quackery that is completely discredited and scientifically hopeless, psychology has to wait and accept it is only relevant as a branch of biology and sociology is not a science, like philosophy or economics, and that’s completely fine.
I know what fear and hatred are. I don’t need to wait around for science to tell me.
Which one I can think of three.
Julien, Thomas Henry, and Aldous
Not really about Christianity, though is it.
It is a failed attempt atfinding a “highest” common denominator to a series of incompatible religions, only to conclude with a sort of half baked atheism.
Grand father Thomas Henry mentions God only to dismiss him, coining the term agnostic.
2 Other notable Huxley’s were eugenicists, so probably not much use to the discusion.
Science can tell you more about them, beyond your own personal experience of them.
If you scroll up you will see that he was responding to a quotation by Aldous Huxley.