Showing posts with label Aldous Huxley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aldous Huxley. Show all posts

29 May 2012

'If one's wise,' he said at last, 'one doesn't ask whether it makes any sense. One does one's work and leaves the problem of evil to one's metabolism. That makes sense all right.'
'Because it's not oneself,' said Sebastian. 'Not human, but a part of the cosmic order. That's why animals have no metaphysical worries. Being identical with their physiology, they know there's a cosmic order. Whereas human beings identify themselves with money-making, say, or drink, or politics, or literature. None of which has anything to do with the cosmic order. So naturally they find that nothing makes sense.'

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 298-299
In politics we have so firm a faith in the manifestly unknowable future that we are prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to an opium smoker's dream of Utopia or world dominion or perpetual security. But where natural resources are concerned, we sacrifice a pretty accurately predictable future to present greed. We know, for example, that if we abuse the soil it will lose its fertility; that if we massacre the forests our children will lack timber and see their uplands eroded, their valleys swept by floods. Nevertheless, we continue to abuse the soil and massacre the forests. In a word, we immolate the present to the future in those complex human affairs where foresight is impossible; but in the relatively simple affairs of nature, where we know quite well what is likely to happen, we immolate the future to the present.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 286
True religion concerns itself with the givenness of the timeless. An idolatrous religion is one in which time is substituted for eternity – either past time, in the form of a rigid tradition, or future time, in the form of Progress towards Utopia. And both are Molochs, both demand human sacrifice on an enormous scale. Spanish Catholicism was a typical idolatry of past time. Nationalism, Communism, Fascism, all the social pseudo-religions of the twentieth century, are idolatries of future time.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 285
There isn't any secret formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 275
But there is also the life of the spirit, and the life of the spirit is the analogue, on a higher turn of the spiral, of the animal's life. The progression is from animal eternity into time, into the strictly human world of memory and anticipation; and from time, if one chooses to go on, into the world of spiritual eternity, into the divine Ground. The life of the spirit is life exclusively in the present, never in the past or future; life here, now, not life looked forward to or recollected.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 269-270
We understand the devilishness of the political manifestations of the lust for power; but have so completely ignored the evils and dangers inherent in the technological manifestations that, in the teeth of the most obvious facts, we continue to teach our children that there is no debit side to applied science, only a continuing and ever-expanding credit. The idea of Progress is based on the belief that one can be overweening with impunity.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) p. 268

22 Apr 2012

'Inevitable Progress!' he repeated. 'Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are – there we are in the Golden Future. But needless to say, in the very nature of things, the future can't be golden. For the simple reason that nobody ever gets anything for nothing. Massacre always has to be paid for, and its price is a state of things that absolutely guarantees you against achieving the good which the massacre was intended to achieve. And the same is true even of bloodless revolutions. Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards. Backwards and downwards,' he repeated; and, taking the cigar out of his mouth, he threw back his head and gave vent to a long peal if wheezy laughter.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 128-129