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Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience

aldous huxley huston smith jacqueline hazard bridgeman

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With three new biographies published in the last year and the continued success of his 1932 novel, Brave New World , Aldous Huxley is experiencing a remarkable resurgence. In this mind-bending collection of essays, Huxley explores the notion of divinity from a variety of perspectives, including his deep knowledge of Eastern philosophy. Will be of great interest to fans of the East and Huxley's own growing group of followers and devotees.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1992

This edition

Format
320 pages, Paperback
Published
March 1, 2003 by The Crossroad Publishing Company
ISBN
9780824522520
ASIN
0824522524
Language
English

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About the author

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aldous huxley

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Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.3 / 5.0, 6 votes)
5 stars
3(50%)
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2(33%)
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6 reviews All reviews
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aislinnhanako27
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Two and a half stars. While I appreciated his wit and his Vedantic stance on religious philosophy, Huxley was very much a product of his Victorian upbringing. His pronouncements on mysticism and living life correctly were rather dry and judgmental. For anyone who has already read more original sources on mysticism, both Eastern and Western, this wouldn't present anything new or noteworthy.
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Edgerunner
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Aldous, hace falta más gente como tú.
Nótese primeramente, yo soy ateo. Agarré mi primer libro de ciencia -dura- a los 13 años cuando leí a Hawking por primera vez, una edición bellísima que aún conservo de "Historia del tiempo". Gracias a ese conocimiento, que me permite poder comprender desde la época de la núcleogénesis hasta el fin del minuto 3 desde el Big Bang, pasando por las áreas más densas de la materia hasta llegar a la concepción de la vida por medio del Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), me permite explicar el mundo, desde todo el punto de vista de la materia. El Modelo Estándar de la física de partículas, hasta las gratas y fascinantes imágenes que nos proporciona el James Webb, puede explicar al mundo, sin embargo, hay algo más.

Lamentablemente el cableado cerebral del ser humano, tiene algo distinto. Quisiera no decir que es algo único, para no caer en el error de ser llamado un antropocentrista, pero, y este es un gran PERO, el cerebro humano, tiene una cualidad particular. Esa cualidad particular, no sé como describirlo de una manera sencilla, es la capacidad de tener una dualidad; no solo percibimos el mundo como materia, sino que también percibimos algo que no es material, algo holístico, o espiritual. Solo fíjense en esto: hace unas semanas atrás fui al cementerio a visitar a la tumba de mi abuela, y le "toqué la puerta" y empecé a conversar con ella. ¿Algo totalmente ilógico no?
Hay miles de ejemplos de esto. Carl Sagan en sus libros decía que "no podía dejar de hablar con sus perros". O, quién no quisiera darle un abrazo a padre que ya murió? Ni siquiera a un humano, a un amigo, una hija de cuatro patas que se tuvo que ir? Es como la escena de Gladiator en la que el mientras moría tocaba los campos de trigo, mientras su familia lo esperaba. Esa capacidad de imaginar, de soñar, lo onírico de la postvida, es una cualidad humana, es el mismo motor que nos hizo crear religiones, el cielo, y el infierno, nada más que manifestaciones de nuestros temores y deseos.

Huxley en este libro, escribe muchas cosas de las cuales yo consideraría, solamente como genialidades. El libro es un compendio de ensayos sobre Dios, no el dios cristiano, o el Abrahámico, sino del único Dios que el Homo Sapiens como especie aspira a conocer. Vemos muchos ensayos sobre la filosofía teísta oriental, como occidental y la clásica diatriba entre el Occidente y la "muerte de dios", como fruto de la Ilustración y de la tecnificación del ser humano.
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thanatosimpulse
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book kind of blew my mind as a teenager. Really weird experience. I especially remember the passage on color. This book drove me to philosophy.
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Themakas
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This book overall just barely got three stars, but not because it is consistently mediocre. The book is a collection of essays. Some individual essays are wondeful, some individual sections/passages are great, but much of the book I find poorly reasoned and not very interesting. So it's all over the place, and on balance averages to something under 3 stars. Definitely not for everyone, and even if this is your cup of tea read discriminatingly...
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Igligl
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Un libro que a mi juicio envejeció muy mal. Una serie de ensayos con ideas predominantemente falaces, sesgadas y cristocéntricas.
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TheEdguy
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Before reading this book, my relationship with Huxley was confined to a bit of fiction and his historical account of political religiosity in, “The Devils of Loudon”. “Devils” made a great impression on me in my youth, and helped me to work out issues of forgiveness and compassion by exploring politicized selfishness and cruelty. But I didn’t know what to expect from this collection of essays on the nature of the divine.

On this, my first pass-through of the text, I don’t yet have the “umph” to adequately record my feelings, because I’m just not ready. I’ll have to go back to the book later to strip away its layers. I’m sympathetic to Huxley’s views on the personal search for meaning, with the accompanying personal responsibility to think and act for oneself. His clean language camouflages the profundity of his arguments – arguments that I have read before in eastern (translated) texts. Huxley weds eastern and western mysticism to form a surprisingly modern perspective on comparative religion. He offers many opportunities for understanding: Taking a mindful approach to the divine has often been criticized as being pragmatic and therefore, coldly cerebral. But Huxley understands the mystical, loving side of mindfulness that is, I strongly believe, misunderstood in the west. He also grasps the complexity of ritualism. It’s true that rituals help the human mind to focus. But the actual equipment and protocol of a ritual, though dear or sacred to the supplicant, is unimportant. A ritual is a vehicle towards satisfying personal or society needs. Huxley “gets” that we forget to revaluate our needs and motivations with an almost stunning consistency, and instead place primacy on the ritual itself -- which is missing the point.

Bottom line: I give this book a 5 star rating because it makes me think and feel in a tolerant, compassionate way. Sophisticated cynics beware: Huxley advocates for love, but he does it without being trite.
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