Perennial Philosophy
Quotes, Passages and Commentary Chapter XII: Time and Eternity
Page 184:
“The universe is an everlasting succession of events; but its ground, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the timeless now of the divine spirit.”
Page 186:
“From Hobbs onwards, the enemies of the Perennial Philosophy have denied the existence of the eternal now. According to these thinkers, time and change are fundamental; there is no other reality. Moreover, future events are completely indeterminate, and even God can have no knowledge of them…
The existence of the eternal now is sometimes denied on the ground that a temporal order cannot co-exist with another order which is non-temporal; and that it is impossible for a changing substance to be united with a changeless substance…But according to the Perennial Philosophy, the eternal now is a consciousness; the divine Ground is spirit…”
Page 188:
“Past and future veil God from our sight;
Burn up both of them with fire. How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?
So long as the reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets,
Nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.”
Jalal-uddin Rumi
Page 189:
“Time is what keeps the light from reaching us.
There is no greater obstacle to God than time.
And not only time but temporalities…”
Eckhart
Page 192:
…the philosophy which affirms that what goes on in time is the only reality, results in a different kind of theory and justifies quite another kind of political practice. This has been clearly recognized by Marxist writers, who point out that when Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a revolutionary religion, and that when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel…”
Page 193:
“The aim of all revolutions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past…But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world–in a future…”
“From the records of history it seem to be abundantly clear that most of the religions and political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence.”
Page 194:
“For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness the ultimate good is to be sought neither in the revolutionary’s progressive social apocalypse, nor in the reactionary’s revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine now which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience.”
“Unlike early Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism [Islam] (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism…”
Page 199:
“Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.”
From the Svimad Bhagavatam
The Perennial Philosophy: by Aldous Huxley
HarperCollins Publ. 1944