Perennial Philosophy
Quotes, Passages and Commentary Chapter III: Personality, Sanctity, Divine Incarnation
Page: 36
“Personality, we are constantly being assured, is the highest form of reality, with which we are acquainted. But…a Teutonic synonym would be the word “selfness“…man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God.”
“…most of us prefer to ignore (the indwelling Spirit) in favor of our separate selfness… this God-eclipsing and anti-spiritual selfness…”
Page 38:
“…as Eckhart called it, is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being. Man’s final end, the purpose of his existence, is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual non-self can be achieved only by dying of selfness and living to spirit.”
Commentary:
These viewpoints are foundational to the perennial philosophy. They can be found within the Christian tradition in the work, The Cloud of Unknowing, as well as Hindu classics of the Bhagavad Gita and the major Upanishads. They also reappear in the Heart and Diamond Sutras of Buddhism, and finally even in the Daoist Dao De Jing. These Eastern sources mentioned can be found in summary form on this website. Huxley went on to ponder why this, what he called the “unitive” consciousness, was so repressed in our Western culture. This lack of inner awareness has been a plague over the history of Western wars, persecutions, and oppression.
The Perennial Philosophy: by Aldous Huxley
HarperCollins Publ. 1944