Perennial Philosophy
Been reading a nice work from Aldous Huxley called “The Perennial Philosophy”. Rufus M. Jones: “…it’s both an anthology and an interpretation of the supreme mystics, East and West. There are well-known books on Western Mysticism. There are studies of Oriental and Mohammedan mysticism, but this is the first time that anybody has adequately covered the entire field and showed equal familiarity with all fields.”
An example, he’s talking about Charity and lovelessness and how it’s affected man to this day, “the distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquility and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for personal loss or punishment; where there is tranquility, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence…”
“Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to cooperate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and subhuman levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth’s natural resources, ruin it’s soil, ravage it’s forests, pour filth into it’s rivers and poisonous fumes into it’s air.”
“From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art - a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and have set up various kinds of mass production by machines in their place. And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness to human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass production and mass distribution.”
“With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, and the three have conspired to expropriate ever increasing numbers of small owners of land and productive equipment, thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increasing the power of a minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows.”
“This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucracies or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration - and of course the coercive and therefore essentially loveless nature of control remains the same, whether the bosses call themselves “company directors” or “civil servants”.
“The only difference between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from a position with in a conventionally respected hierarchy, while the second derive more power form position than from wealth. Upon this fairly uniform ground-work of loveless relationships are imposed others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling.”
“And the crowning superstructure of uncharity is the organized lovelessness of the relationships between state and sovereign state - a lovelessness that expresses itself in the axiomatic assumption that it is right and natural for national organizations to behave like thieves and murderers, armed to the teeth and ready, at the first favorable opportunity, to steal and kill.”