047 - Huxley's pathway to spiritual reality

[Dharmadeva]

Twentieth Century Literature > Spring, 1995

Color and light: Huxley's pathway to spiritual reality - author Aldous
Huxley
Sally A. Paulsell

Unlike modern British writers such as T. S. Eliot and Evelyn, Waugh, Aldous
Huxley did not convert to a specific religious community indigenous to
Western culture; however, his entire life embraced a consciousness-expanding
search for ultimate reality revealed to him through the mystical qualities
of color and light. Like Eliot and Waugh, Huxley found himself regarded by
many critics as unfaithful to his earlier writing after his conversion to a
spiritual faith. Huxley's friend Christopher Isherwood states that Huxley's
developing beliefs were "widely represented as the selling-out of a
once-brilliant intellect" (Clark 303), and Donald Watt concurs that "in the
minds of a majority of critics Huxley was fixed as an entertaining recorder
of the frenetic 1920s who later recoiled into an aesthetically suicidal
mysticism" (AH 31).(1) More recent critics still tend to divide Huxley's
canon into two halves in which Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is sometimes referred
to as his "conversion" novel (Bowering 114, Watt AH 19). Although the
assumption has been weakening, what many critics mistakenly took to be an
abrupt change of direction and attitude in Huxley's writing actually
represents a continuation of his search for theological idealism. The
writer's steps on the pathway to spiritual reality can be charted -- from
his first book of poetry in 1916 to his last novel in 1962 -- through his
distinctive use of the imagery of color and light. By 1936 Huxley had
already started his troubled spiritual journey from despair toward mystical
union with the "pure light of the void." Despite elements of wishful
thinking and open doubt in Huxley's life and work, his conscious commitment
to the struggle to believe in the Divine Light can be traced as early as
1922 in his first novel, Crome Yellow.

Confirmation of Huxley's intentional use of color is summarized in his
"Natural History of Visions," a 1959 lecture posing the question, "Why are
precious stones precious?" (Human 216). These brightly colored pebbles, says
Huxley, are not beautifully harmonized like a work of art or a piece of
music; they are single objects which the human mind responds to in an
unaccountable way. He states that one reason for our interest can be found
in the Phaedo where Socrates speaks about the ideal world of which our world
is in a sense a rather bad copy. Socrates says: "In this other earth the
colors are much purer and more brilliant than they are down here. The
mountains and stones have a richer gloss, a livelier transparency and
intensity of hue" (217). Plato writes not merely about a metaphysical idea
but also about another inner world which has landscape and beautiful regions
of memory, fantasy, imagination, dreams, and-most remote -- "the world of
visions" (218). Huxley explains the importance of light and color in this
world of visions:

This experience of the pure light of the void is a visionary

experience of what may be called the highest, the most mystical

kind. On a rather lower level the lights seem to be broken up and

become, so to speak, incorporated in different objects and

persons and figures. It is as though this tremendous white light

were somehow refracted through a prism and broken up into

different coloured lights. In this lower form of vision we have the

intensification of light in some way associated with the

story-telling faculty, so that there are visions of great complexity

and elaboration in which light plays a tremendous part, but it is

not the pure white light of the great theophanies. (228-29)

Huxley deduces, therefore, that precious stones are precious because they
are objects in the external world -- along with fire, stained glass,
fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle, Christmas-tree lights, rainbows,
and sunlight -- which most nearly resemble the things that people see in the
visionary world (232-35). Poets and storytellers, by giving us a mystic
vision of these objects with gemlike qualities, bring us into contact with
the visionary world and potentially stimulate our own visions within us.

Mysticism, difficult to define, becomes more difficult with Huxley's
encompassing of Eastern and Western mystical thought evident in The
Perennial Philosophy (1944). The Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions
summarizes a variety of inclusive definitions: "an apprehension of an
ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things, a direct apperception of deity,
the art of union with reality, an immediate contact or union of the self
with a larger-than-self." Several schemas for the stages in a mystic's
experience are also listed, such as the "fivefold classification of
awakening, purgation, surrender, illumination, and union" (508). Saint John
of the Cross includes the "dark night of the soul" between the last two
steps reflecting an experience of isolation from deity or reality just
before union.(2) Many persons in search of the Divine Presence (including
Huxley) commonly report experiencing the dark night of the soul more than
once and at different stages of their mystic quest. The question for many
observers and presumably for Huxley himself is whether they ever achieved
this last stage of union with Absolute Reality.

Like most true mystics, Huxley never claims for himself mystical status; in
fact, in his essay "One and Many" (1929) he states that he is "officially"
an agnostic. He goes on to say that some days he believes that "God's in his
heaven and all's right with the world" while on other days he believes he is
living in an "uncaring universe" (Do 1-2). As late as 1962 he wrote to Reid
Gardner, "I remain an agnostic who aspires to be a gnostic" (Letters 935).
In another letter to Gardner a few months later, Huxley confided that he had
a "sense of the world's fundamental All Rightness" (938). Huxley's inquiring
mind typically juxtaposes skepticism with affirmation; the stages of his
mystical experience do not fall into a doubt-free steady continuum. Eliot,
the friend and poet whose themes Huxley often emulates, writes that "doubt
and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief"

Julian Huxley recognized the mystical quality in his brother's personality
when they were children:

From early boyhood, I knew in some intuitive way that Aldous

possessed some innate superiority and moved on a different level

of being from us other children. This recognition dawned when

Aldous was five and I a prep school boy of twelve: and it

remained for the rest of his life. (21)

Others also writing in Julian's memorial volume remember his perception of
the mystery of the universe; for example, David Cecil reminisces that "he
had a profound sense of some spiritual reality, not to be apprehended by the
senses, existing beyond the confines of time and space, serene, inviolate,
ineffable" (14). Whatever our conclusion to the question of whether Huxley
ever achieved union with a larger-than-self, clearly this searcher for truth
signals his progress toward visionary experience through color imagery in
his poetry and fiction. We can best follow Huxley's spiritual journey in
this way because he connects his natural affinity to color and light imagery
with his progression toward inner visionary union. Thus he uses the imagery
of luminous color and richly hued colored objects in a positive way to mark
movement approaching unity with the Divine. Whereas a clear white light
represents ideal mystical union, the bright colors that precede this ideal
depict positive steps toward acceptance -- toward unity with the "one and
many."

Huxley's interest in color may have intensified during an illness when he
was sixteen. In 1911 while at Eton, Huxley had trouble with his eyes. The
school matron, thinking the boy had pinkeye, advised him to stay in the dark
-- an experience Huxley did not like (Bedford 32). Years later he wrote
about his illness:

At sixteen I had a violent attack of keratitis punctato, which left

me (after eighteen months of near-blindness, during which I had

to depend on Braille for my reading and a guide for my walking)

with one eye just capable of light perception. (Art vii)

"Light perception" remained an important ingredient in Huxley's creative
life as a poet and novelist as well as in his pursuit of the mystical
experience. The murky, blurred colors seen through near blindness would
represent for Huxley stagnation (the symbolic dark night of the soul, if you
will) as opposed to luminous colors which forecast mystical visionary
experience. Even though Huxley does not use an abundance of metaphoric
imagery in his writing,(3) when he does, color imagery usually constitutes
an integral part of the figurative language.

Looking at his spiritual journey chronologically, we see that in 1915 when
Huxley published his first book of poetry, The Burning Wheel -- reminiscent
of the Buddhist "wheel of becoming" -- he was already exploring the
importance of light and color as it relates to mysticism in his need to find
order in his grievous, chaotic world. Doubtful of every solution, however,
the poems in the volume are either contrapuntal arguments between Huxley's
different voices or parodies of Wordsworth's reassurance that unity with God
is possible. Looking back from a perspective of many years, Huxley calls
this earlier self a "Pyrrhonic aesthete" (one who doubts everything) (Brave
viii). This early poetry, deliberately written in many voices, moves toward
parody and satire. In "Darkness" Huxley presents the dichotomy between
desired union with God and despair in terms of a brilliant, blinding vision
and a wounded, twisted spirit. The darkness in the first stanza (which the
speaker has never known) is an experience of dazzling beauty:

My close-walled soul has never known

That innermost darkness, dazzling sight,

Like the blind point, whence the visions spring

In the core of the gazer's chrysolite....

The mystic darkness that laps Cod's throne

In a splendour beyond imagining,

So passing bright.

The "mystic darkness" (in the language of Christian mysticism) "blinds" the
human mind due to the brilliance of God's light. The second stanza, however,
counterpoints with mean-spirited darkness "of lust and avarice, / Of the
crippled body and the crooked heart" (Collected 17) -- darkness with which
the speaker is all too well acquainted.

Even though the poet gives no hint that the speaker's spiritual quest can be
fulfilled, images of light, darkness, and color describe the glorious sight
in the first stanza. "Chrysolite," a mineral in the form of a gemlike,
gold-colored stone, resides in the center ("core") of the stanza surrounded
by images of darkness which are actually images of the blinding brilliance
of God. The darkness in the second stanza remains "static" and "rather
undeveloped," according to Donald Watt, but he also agrees that it expresses
Huxley's enduring theme of "the need for some guiding light in the dark
night of the soul" (Meditative" 116-17).

The seeds of Huxley's developing ideas about the levels of vision in the
external world also emerge in a compatible poem in The Burning Wheel. In
"Two Realities" "I," possibly the poet, sees life in its brilliant colors --
"A waggon passed with scarlet wheels / And a yellow body, shining new" and
feels a sense of the beauty of life. The speaker becomes disillusioned,
however, when he realizes that his companion's vision differs -- the
companion sees "a child that was kicking an obscene / Brown ordure with his
feet" (Collected 20). The poet feels the futility of life because our
limitations of perception imprison US.(4) The bright, shining colors of
scarlet and yellow give hope because, unaccountably, the mind responds to
them while the "obscene / Brown ordure," which has no brightness, represents
life in a confused, muddled world of despair. Huxley (the Pyrrhonic
aesthete) in modernist counterpoint juxtaposes both views but cannot choose.

In Defeat of Youth (1918) several poems introduce specific connections
between soothing thoughts and the generic term "color." In "Stanzas," for
example, the speaker would like to live in a beautiful world free from pain
"like a pure angel, thinking colour and form / ... Spilling my love like
sunlight, golden and warm / On noonday flowers" (73). "Poem" begins: "Books
and a coloured skein of thoughts were mine; / And magic words lay ripening
in my soul" (73). Frequently used images such as "Coloured skein" and
"Coloured strands" symbolize for Huxley the band or spectrum of colors (like
those in the rainbow) which develop from a white light after passing through
a prism. These skeins and strands have the potential to recombine into white
light -- the pure white light of the void.

"Scenes of the Mind" introduces ideas developed further in later novels,
such as the potential for making bright colors out of dull lead
(symbolically the potential for visions of ecstatic experience as opposed to
deathlike paralysis in the disordered waste land of modern society) and the
calm pastoral hush of "crystal silence" where in contented evenings:

I held a wealth of coloured strands,

Shimmering plaits of silk and skeins

Of soft bright wool. Each colour drains

New life at the lamp's round pool of Gold. (74)

The optical illusion of the "pool of Gold" from the lamp's light enlivens
the color in the spectrum of strands, plaits, and skeins. Miraculous
transformation takes place within the mind when

Beauty or sudden love has shined

And wakened colour in what was dead

And turned to gold the sullen lead. (75)

The poet equates non-specific color citations with purity and enchanting
supernatural effects of inner quiet; moreover, the "dead" "sullen lead"
which "turned to gold" describes the process of developing the paint
pigment, chrome yellow. This compound of chromic acid and lead becomes
golden yellow in its purest hue. In idyllic moments in "Scenes of the Mind,"
a Wordsworthian God is seen in the waterfall or in the flame of a fire.
However, in swift counterpoint the scene freezes into stone, causing "the
death of gems" (75). Although Huxley cannot ultimately accept these
color-filled scenes of the mind as reality, they demonstrate the importance
of color to the poet's emerging mystical vision.

Leda (1920) continues with poetry of disillusionment, and Huxley uses the
myth of Leda and Jove as a framework for shaping the world's chaos and
perversion. In "Leda" Huxley describes the young queen in terms of ironical
perfection. She undresses to become "dazzingly naked" (85) while bathing
with her maidens. "The sun's golden heat" clothes her "in softest flame"
(94). This scene of carefree innocence, however, fills Jove with lust; and
with help from another god he schemes to rape her. Jove, disguised as a
"dazzling white" swan, feigns attack by "an eagle, tawny and black" (95).
This "colorless" pair's destructive plot results in a pointless, sensuous
seduction of Leda. Now instead of playing in the light of joyful innocence,
she must veil her body "from the shame / Of naked light and the sun's
noonday flame" (98). Offering no hope for deliverance from the negation of
this spiritually barren world, the poet emphasizes colorlessness in Leda.

Huxley turned to short stories, novels, and essays during the twenties. His
first novel, Crome Yellow, takes its name from the country house named Crome
where the novel's house party gathers but more importantly from "chrome
yellow," the compound of substances used as pigment in paints ranging in hue
from light greenish yellow to reddish medium yellow. Chrome yellow, one of
the chrome colors noted for its clearness and brilliance, reflects golden
yellow in its purest hue; thus, the luminescence of both chrome yellow and
the house party at Crome has the potential to captivate with its dazzling
brilliance. The creative guests (including a writer, a poet, an artist, and
a philosopher) arrive bringing bright promise of sparkling conversation;
they fall short of their promise, however, because they cling only to their
own pet topics.

Crome Yellow centers around the young poet Denis Stone, who, as his name
implies, has the opportunity of being a "sparkling stone" with a bright and
colorful poetic future of depth and intensity and a warm future full of
love. Just as the fire in "Scenes of the Mind" freezes into the dullness of
visually impenetrable stone and in "Stanzas" hardens into "chiselled stone"
(Collected 73), Denis Stone remains colorless and opaque -- not a precious
gem. Through color imagery early in the novel we get a hint of the young
poet's potential for a meaningful life and of his ultimate failure to
develop that potential. Huxley describes Denis (reminiscent of Eliot's
Prufrock trying to decide whether to wear his white flannel trousers robed)
on his first morning at the Wimbush estate where he has joined a house
party:

Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky

serene. He decided to wear white flannel trousers -- white flannel

trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new

peach-colored tie. And what shoes? White was the obvious

choice, but there was something rather pleasing about the notion

of black patent leather. . . . His half might have been more

golden, he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a

greenish tinge in it. (14)

Although he selects rather color-free attire, Denis's white flannel
trousers, silk shirt, peach-colored tie, and black patent-leather shoes have
a certain sparkle and gloss. His hair (yellow with green tinges -- a hue of
chrome yellow), however, suggests dullness and loss of purity in color. This
streaked mixture of yellow and green, which "might have been more golden" --
the purest hue of chrome yellow -- symbolically foreshadows Denis's lack of
courage to declare his love and to stimulate his own inner poetic vision.

The poet evades reality and writes insipid Georgian verse rather than
examining his life and thereby creating ironic, satiriral poetry. In
addition to this professional failure, Denis also fails to pursue his love
for Anne Wimbush. For one brief mystical moment, however, he comes in
contact with his feelings and takes positive action. The scene occurs at
night in the garden where Denis assists Anne after she falls and hurts
herself:

He felt in his pockets for the match-box. The light spurted and

then grew steady. Magically, a little universe had been created, a

world of colours and forms -- Anne's face, the shimmering

orange of her dress, her white, bare arms, a patch of green

turf -- and round about a darkness that had become solid and

utterly blind. (82)

This vision of "colours and forms" give Denis self-confidence, and
instinctively he begins to comfort and to kiss the woman he loves. For once
the young poet discards his Prufrockian inertia and acts on honest emotions.
The flaming match goes out, however, and the vision (Huxley's frequent
sight-enhancing image of an optical illusion provided by a temporary circle
of light) disappears. The inept lover's boastful offer to carry Anne back to
the house ends in humiliation as he staggers out of control; again he
becomes the object of laughter. Discouraged at the way others perceive him,
Denis decides to end his holiday at Crome on the subterfuge of urgent family
business; he feels as if he is planning his funeral. Denis mistakenly
believes he has acted decisively (albeit unwisely), but his inability to
face his feelings with integrity has only served to deepen his paralysis.

The artists, Gombauld, rivals Denis for Anne's attention and for artistic
veracity. Huxley's imagery of color and light in Gombauld's painting holds
the most promise for mystical vision at Crome; in fact, Denis tell Anne, "I
have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine
reality out of chaos" (18). Denis prostitutes his art while Gombauld strives
to complete his creative vision. Gombauld's half-finished picture inspired
by Caravaggio involves a man fallen from a horse:

A white, relentless light poured down from a point in the right

foreground. The beast, the fallen man, were sharply illuminated;

round them, beyond and behind them, was the night. They were

alone in the darkness, a universe in themselves. . . . A central gulf

of darkness surrounded by luminous forms.(53)

According to Sir Kenneth Clark, the picture being imitated is Caravaggio's
"Conversion of St. Paul" (Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley 15-18) --a painting
which coincides with Huxley's spiritual quest. Art critic John Canaday
notes:

Caravaggio dramatized otherwise realistic scenes by means of

brilliant artificial light, sometimes from a miraculous source. His

most spectacular use of this device [is] The Conversion of Saint

Paul.... The light itself is a symbol of spiritual transfiguration -- and

is visible only to Saul.(70-71)

This pure, luminous form of chrome yellow (amber light seen as crystal white
in its piercing brilliance) signifies the pure light of heaven -- a vision
which only Saul has seen. Sanford Marovitz misses the significance of
Huxley's use of Caravaggio's painting in Crome Yellow when he writes that
the painting "has little if any relation to the rest of the novel" (174). In
fact, Huxley desperately desires this "spiritual transfiguration," but, like
Gombauld, he wonders about his ability to free himself from the despair of
the world. How would he know if he had seen the mystical vision of God?
Gombauld looks at his canvas and thinks: "But that something he was after,
that something that would be so terrific if only he could catch it -- had he
caught it? Would he ever catch it?" (Crome 53)

Not only was Huxley struggling with the mysticism of spiritual reality, he
was also struggling with the question of Western versus Eastern mysticism.
One important scene from the novel reveals, through form, light, and color,
his attraction to both religious disciplines. As Denis and Anne take a
morning tour of the grounds at Crome, Denis sees:

That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the

terrace to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so

much as on forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun.

The silver of water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained,

at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was

a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the

flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge

Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge,

you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startingly

and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders blazed and

flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like

a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour. Denis held open

the little iron gate for his compansion. "It's like passing from a

cloister into an oriental palace," he said.(16)

The black and white landscape, equally beautiful by moonlight as by
sunlight, depends on forms for its beauty. Huxley compares this staid garden
to a cloister -- a place devoted to religious seclusion such as a monastery.
Western monastic life depends on forms for its beauty: mass, liturgical
offices, chanting the Psalms. The holy "hours and seasons" provide the
dominant forms for observance. The "huge Babylonian wall of yews" separating
the formal garden from the flower garden has to be negotiated through
tunnels and a wicket in the wall. Babylon, the place of exile and captivity
for the people of Israel and Judah, also symbolizes the modem, corrupt,
warring world represented as the realm of resistance to God. The tunnel in
the hedge, akin to the black tunnels where the mole creeps in Huxley's poem
"Mole" and the dim tunnels in "The Reef " where the sightless fish swim,
represent restraint, chaos, and uncertainty. Once through the mazey tunnels
formed by poisonous yew trees one emerges in a flower garden of warmth,
perfume, and color. This bright "oriental palace" of Eastern mysticism
stirred the poorly sighted Huxley who, nevertheless, remained unconvinced
that he could find his way through the tunnel to mystical union.

Huxley continues his search for spiritual belief in Antic Hay (1923), where
Theodore Gumbril, Jr., just like Denis Stone, loses his opportunity for love
and happiness through indecision. Gumbril takes Emily to see the flowers at
Kew Gardens, where he had been happy as a child with his mother. He had
drawn maps of the gardens "and coloured them elaborately with different
coloured inks to show where the different flowers grew" (161). Now the green
grass "glowed in the sunlight, as if it were lighted from inside" (163), and
the trees make a dark shadow against the sky or sometimes a filtered pattern
with moving light shining through. Gumbril meditatively compares this
outward quiet of grass and trees with an inward quiet which dispels the
frenetic noise of factories, jazz bands, and newspaper vendors. Once touched
by this equally beautiful and terrifying "crystal quiet" (163), he finds all
the noise of daily activity in this world unimportant. "One would have to
begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange unheard-of
manner" (164). This quiet crystal world of mystical contemplation seems
native to Emily, who tells Gumbril: "Being happy is rather melancholy --
like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the
clouds and the sunshine to-day" (170). They attend a symphony concert; then,
filled with happiness, they go to Gumbril's rooms, where they spend a tender
night in the enchanting atmosphere of the lights of two candles burning --
"two shining eyes of flame" (171). This image is used similarly in Huxley's
poem "By the Fire" in The Defeat of Youth. "And candles watch with tireless
eyes" (Collected 63) two lovers who sit contentedly by the fire until one of
them begins to think of the world outside and its problems. The candles only
temporarily push back the gloom.

The "eyes" of the candles and the "crystal silence," like that in Huxley's
poem "Scenes of the Mind," do not last. The enchantment shatters because
Gumbril is frightened by this contemplative inner world of quiet; therefore
he sabotages his relationship with Emily by allowing his drunken friends to
draw him back into their fellowship. He even entertains his friends by
revealing intimate details of Emily's life. Gumbril delays his departure for
his appointment in the country with her. When he finally makes his journey,
he finds the cottage empty. Gumbril's indecision smashes any possibility of
entering the (contrapuntally both feared and desired) symbolic "crystal
silence" of visionary experience.

Using Eliot's images, Huxley writes, "Aridly, the desiccated waste extended"
(212). Gumbril's friends, involved in sordid affairs, five lives of
desperation while he continues to carouse with Myra Viveash. They spend one
night endlessly circling the West End in a taxi looking for an end to
boredom. Each time they crisscross London, they pass through Piccadilly
Circus with its garish neon lights creating a St. Vitus's dance of animated
pictures. This satirical perversion of the sanctity of colors in the world
of visionary experience reinforces other symbols of meaningless activity:
the blinking neon lights create the illusion of motion in their circular
patterns; the antic-hay ring dance moves circularly to the music of Pan;
Myra and Gumbril circle London aimlessly; Shearwater pedals his stationary
bicycle mile after mile. In a parody of the Buddhist wheel of life, death,
and rebirth, this pointless activity precludes any inner growth in -- what
Eliot would later call "the still point of the turning world" -- the crystal
quiet of the soul.

In Those Barren Leaves (1925) mystical solitude finally emerges as a
feasible alternative to the frantic circular emptiness of modern life.
Calamy, a house-party guest (similar to those in Crome Yellow), contemplates
the mystery of the universe. He wishes to fix his spirit on the secret of
the other world until "its symbols cease to be opaque and the light filters
through from beyond" (267). During a sensual night with Mary Thriplow,
Calamy performs a basic exercise of mystical contemplation. In the dark
bedroom he holds his opened hand against a window with the starlit night
shining through and ponders "all the different ways in which these five
fingers ... have reality and exist" (340). He believes that if he had the
freedom to concentrate on his fingers for a period of time (even months) he
might cut "right through the mystery and really get at something -- some
kind of truth, some explanation" (340). In The Perennial Philosophy Huxley
writes that many Eastern and Western spiritual teachers recommend intense
concentration on an image or idea. Such an exercise is helpful when it
results in "mental stillness, such a silence of intellect, will and feeling,
that the divine Word can be uttered within the soul" (32).

In the final scene of the book a melancholy yet determined Calamy withdraws
from the world to begin his silent, contemplative quest for union with
absolute reality. Huxley directly links Calamy's vision of clear color and
sparkle with the inner world of mystical experience:

The cottage was in the shadow now. Looking up the slope he

could see a clump of trees still glittering as though prepared for

a festival above the rising flood of darkness. And at the head of

the valley, like an immense precious stone, glowing with its cold

inward fire, the limestone crags reached up through the clouds

into the pale sky. Perhaps he had been a fool, thought Calamy.

But looking at that shining peak, he was somehow

reassured.(379-80)

The trees "glittering as though prepared for a festival" and the limestone
crags "like an immense precious stone, glowing with its cold inward fire"
represent those brilliantly colored objects in the external world which
Huxley believes lead people to mystical experiences in the visionary world.
Huxley's "cold inward fire" does not burn with heat; instead, it gives forth
a glow, a light from within, a nimbus illuminating the hope that life can be
ordered through the discipline of mind and body in meditation. Calamy has
seen the "shining peak" and although it may not be the "pure light of the
void" (Perennial 32) he feels "reassured." From his first book of poetry,
Huxley has used imagery of color and light to suggest a quest for union with
the infinite, but until now he has been unable to surrender himself to the
possibilities of mystical illumination.

By 1928 Huxley (excessively influenced by the "life force" philosophy of D.
H. Lawrence represented by Rampion in Point Counter Point) temporarily
neglects the literary expression of his mystical vision, seen through images
of color and light, in order to satirize perverted sexual relationships and
perverted scientific reason. Jerome Meckier states that "It is possible to
assume that under the impact of renewed acquaintanceship with Lawrence,
Huxley, in 1926, makes an about face from the semi-mystical conclusions
Calamy comes to at the end of Those Barren Leaves" (Aldous Huxley 80-81).
This assumption is borne out by the absence of familiar imagery of color and
light.

Huxley returned to poetry at the end of the decade in two short volumes:
Arabia Infelix (1929) and The Cicadas (1931). For Huxley spiritual crises
scar these years, and poem after poem reflects the torment of his soul. As
Meckier emphasizes, no longer can Huxley's persona of the sceptical
"Pyrrhonic aesthete" contentedly expose the "apparent meaninglessness of
modern, that is, post-war life" (Aldous Huxley 210). Huxley strives in these
poems to overcome his own despair, i.e., his own dark night of the soul, and
reach out to the visionary world signified by pure, wondrous color. In "The
Yellow Mustard," the final poem in Huxley's 1931 collection, Huxley
describes the shadowy mustard fields which are concealed by low clouds and
entombed by "Grey mountain-heaps of slag and stone" (Collected 165). These
emblems of the poet's mind "dark with repinings" turn to "glory," however,
when the clouds open and a "conquering ray" reveals the pure chrome yellow
of the glittering mustard field:

And touched, transfiguringly bright

In that dull plain, one luminous field;

And there the miracle of light

Lay goldenly revealed.

Although the external world offers no consolation -- "despair / Hung dark,
without one rift of blue" -- there "sleeps" within each one of us "some
grain of mustard seed" (166). By alluding to these synoptic Gospel
references to the power of faith and the Kingdom of God within each human
being, Huxley emphasizes that we must waken this hallowed core of our
existence (the ground of our being) which is revealed through the mystical
power of color and light.

Brave New World (1932) explores colorlessness, the polar opposite of
positive mystical color imagery. This dystopian novel, continuing to reflect
Huxley's spiritual crisis, portrays a strictly controlled society which has
scientifically eliminated individuality. "Happiness" is programmed through
sexual freedom and a drug (soma) which creates feelings of euphoria. Scent
and color organs provide music and momentary pictures on the ceiling such as
an artificial tropical sunset followed by a bogus sunrise (51). In this
synthetic world Huxley eschews bright primary color imagery in favor of
dull, dark hues which border on colorlessness. To identify the stereotyped
levels of society, for example, Deltas wear khaki, Epsilons (genetically
manipulated to be stupid) wear black, hard working Alphas wear grey,
upper-caste Gammas wear green, and so on. These drab colors, far from
translucent or glossy, serve utilitarian purposes; they in no way lead to
creativity outside of this genetically controlled community. Religious
thought becomes virtually impossible in a society that forbids being alone
and seeking silence. A note of affirmation resides in the novel, however,
because Helmholtz Watson defies the laws and his genetic conditioning and
writes a poem which celebrates silence and acclaims a spiritual "presence."

Huxley named Helmholtz Watson, at least in part, for Hermann Ludwig
Ferdinand Von Helmholtz (1821-1894) the noted German physiologist,
psychologist, mathematician, and physicist (Meckier "Our Ford" 47).(5) This
modem Renaissance man wrote what is probably the most important work on the
physics and physiology of vision. His three-volume Physiological Optics
(1856-1866) includes his conception of the structure and action of color
perception and how light illumination changes the vision. Von Helmholtz also
invented the ophthalmoscope, an optical instrument for examining and
focusing light on the interior of the eye. This brilliant scientist and
color theorist perfectly symbolizes his namesake Helmholtz Watson, who has a
mental excess which makes him aware of his individuality and sets him apart
from other people. A lecturer at the college of emotional engineering,
Watson ably invents phrases, but he wants to write penetrating ones which
look beneath surface reality. Just as the scientist Von Helmholtz invented
an instrument for looking into the interior of the eye in an effort to
understand the effects of color and fight on one's vision, Huxley's
Helmholtz Watson wants to invent brilliantly colored phrases which look into
one's soul to a world of mystical vision. The authorities exile this poet
and a fellow maverick to the Falkland Islands, where they can think or write
poetry amid the silence of wind and storm. Watson will survive and continue
his creative development because the spiritual presence" in his poetry
triggers theocentric stirrings within him. His retreat from the brave new
world's soma-controlled society will free him to pursue mystical oneness --
the same goal Huxley desires for his own life.

Eyeless in Gaza (1936), rather than a "conversion" novel, acts as a
summation of Huxley's spiritual journey up to this point. it functions as a
Bildungsroman not only of Huxley's development from adolescence to maturity
but also of the evolution of his mystical vision seen in the color and light
imagery in his work. The title refers to the Israelite, Samson (solar or
sun's man), who became blinded by vanity and thereupon revealed the secret
of his strength. Having failed to rely upon the Lord, Samson lost his
legendary power, allowing his Philistine captors to put out his eyes. Samson
remains eyeless in Gaza until he again calls upon the Lord for strength.
Feeling his strength and his divine purpose returning, he receives second
sight and pulls down the Philistine temple upon himself and his captors.
Huxley's play on sight, loss of sight, insight, and second-sight embraces
not only the biblical story of Samson but also Milton's interpretation of
this story in Samson Agonistes, Milton's own blindness, and Huxley's
near-blindness. By the end of the novel, the synthesis of the spiritual
journeys of author and protagonist culminates in the guise of Dr. Miller
(modeled after Huxley's friend Gerald Heard, among others), who instructs
Anthony Beavis in mystical meditation.

In adolescence young Anthony travels on a train with his father and uncle to
Lollingdon for his mother's funeral service. Anthony has a mystical reverie;
the wheels of the train begin to chant "dead-a-dead-a-dead," and he cannot
keep the refrain from shouting in his head, "for ever." Anthony begins to
cry and has to wipe his eyes. Then, "luminous under the sun, the world
before him was like one vast and intricate jewel. The elms had withered to a
pale gold. Huge above the fields, and motionless, they seemed to be
meditating in the crystal light of the morning" (18). As in his first book
of poetry, Huxley parodies Wordsworth's philosophy found in "Tintern Abbey"
and The Prelude. Whereas Wordsworth describes his childhood as a time of
unconscious mystical oneness with the universe, Huxley satirically
counterpoints Anthony's paradisiacal reveries with intrusive images of
death. The mixture of nightmare imagery with the glowing hopefulness of
light continues as the three mourners make their way to the burial plot.
"The old horse drew them; slowly along lanes, into the heart of the great
autumnal jewel of gold and crystal, and stopped at last at the very core of
it. In the sunshine, the church tower was like grey amber" (21). But as they
move to the church, Anthony becomes trapped like a dwarf in the middle of a
black well of adults. It was as though "Their blackness hemmed him in,
obscured the sky, eclipsed the amber tower and the trees.... This black well
was dark with the concentrated horror of death. There was no escape. His
sobs broke out uncontrollably" (23-24). Although Anthony, like the child in
"Tintern Abbey" and The Prelude, has an affinity for supernatural beauty in
his mystical reverie, fragmentation and grief emerge instead of oneness and
peace.

Anthony (now at Oxford) and his friend Brian Foxe have a theological-debate
about mystical books such as The Way of Perfection. Anthony admits that he
believes "in the fundamental metaphysical theory of mysticism" (81), but
this is known truth and not experienced truth. At a party that evening,
drunk on champagne, Anthony suddenly sees the world in a new light:

The apples and oranges in the silver bowl were like enormous

gems. Each glass under the candles, contained, not wine, but a

great yellow beryl, solid and translucent. The roses had the glossy

texture of satin and the shining hardness and distinctness of

form belonging, to metal or glass. Even sound was frozen and

crystalline.(90)

This vision resonates with Huxley's earlier writing. The gemlike colors of
the apples and oranges trigger recollections of the shimmering orange of
Anne's face in Denis's match light in Crome Yellow. The wine transformed
into "yellow beryl" in the light of the candles recalls the shining eyes of
candle flame in Gumbril's room in Antic Hay. Although Anthony is opening his
mind to new ideas through his reading at Oxford, it is only while in a
drunken reverie that he feels free enough to experience these ideas. Sober
again, Anthony mirrors societal mores, and participates in the "alien
element" by repeatedly betraying his friend Brian; his betrayal of the
confidences of Brian's fiancee (similar to Gumbril's betrayal of Emily in
Antic Hay) results in Brian's suicide.

A most unusual incident in 1933 catapults Anthony into a search for meaning
in his life. He and his lover, Helen Amberley (her last name a variant of
the color amber -- a translucent yellow, one of the chrome-yellow hues used
in stage lighting to simulate sunlight), sunbathing on the flat roof of
Anthony's house, are spattered by the bright red blood of a dog dropped from
an airplane. The dried blood quickly turns dull brown, and this distributing
baptism leads first Helen and finally Anthony to the realization that their
purely physical relationship has no future. They must search for detachment
from ego, not detachment from duty. Anthony finds a way to serve others, and
in so doing internalizes what he already knows mentally -- the "Unity of
mankind, unity of all life, all being even" (417). A mystical vision
follows, and Huxley uses imagery of light and dark to describe it. Anthony's
mind passes from "stormy light" to "dark peace" -- from "widening darkness
into another light" (422). The intensity and profundity of peace grow until

the final consummation, the ultimate light that is the source and

substance of all things, source of the darkness, the void, the

submarine night of living calm; source finally of the waves and

the frenzy of the spray-forgotten now. For now there is only the

darkness expanding and deepening, into light; there is only this

final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this

illumination. (423)

In this way Eyeless in Gaza emerges as a pivotal novel in which Huxley sums
up the movement in his life and in his writing toward mystical vision and
union with God using both satire and the illumination of the pure light of
the void to mark his progress.

In After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), Huxley satirizes Californian
excess. Like Miller in Eyeless in Gaza, Mr. Propter embodies the Eastern
mystical philosophy of Gerald Heard. Although Huxley primarily assigns to
Propter the rather static role of lecturer and conscience to the sinful
surrounding community, Huxley does write one scene of Propter deep in
mystical contemplation which simulates Huxley's own periods of meditation.
Propter, an advocate for migrant workers, lives in a white bungalow where he
often meditates on a bench under a eucalyptus tree (noted for its healing
oil, strength, and shelter) on questions such as "What is man?" and "What is
God?" In a scene reminiscent of Gautama Buddha meditating under the Bo tree
-- tree of enlightenment or wisdom -- in the Buddhist tradition, Propter
"had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect
himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other
consciousness . . . that free, pure power greater than his own" (76-77).

He looked again at the mountains, at the pale sky between the

leaves, at the soft russet pinks and purples and greys of the

eucalyptus trunks; then shut his eyes once more.

"A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent of God,

capable of God and filled with God if man so desires." And what

is God? . . . For little by little these thoughts and wishes and

feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and

as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a

kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still,

alert and passive. . . . The busy nothingness of his being

experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace

and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for

the blissful freedom from personality. (77-78)

Even though Huxley introduces Propter's mystical state using colors of the
"pale sky" and the "pinks and purples and greys of the eucalyptus trunks,"
the ecstatic experience itself is described in the language used
ecumenically by mystics. In his enthusiasm for the universal language of
mystical experience -- especially the Vedantist philosophy promoted by Heard
-- Huxley uses less color imagery related to mystical union. However,
imagery of color and light reemerges prominently in Time Must Have a Stop
(1944).

Softer, yet still luminous and transparent colors in Time Must Have a Stop
signal progress on the journey to the crystal, pure white light of spiritual
union with the Divine. The color blue emerges as a passive/aggressive "hound
of heaven" spiritual entity. The color is associated not only with the
spiritual mystic Bruno Rontini, but also with the mystical presence that
will not let Eustace Barnack rest after his death. As Huxley draws his
readers deeper into a mystical experience of the clear pure light, the
bright gemlike colors recede in favor of a more tranquil yet piercing blue.

In his quest for spiritual synthesis, Huxley offers several spiritual models
in various stages of their religious journeys in Time Must Have a Stop:
Bruno Rontini, the mystic; Eustace Barnack, the spiritual resister; and
Sebastian Barnack, the poet in the process of achieving mystical union. Two
of these models appear in earlier novels, for example, the mystic depicted
by Miller (Eyeless) and Propter (After) and the searching poet depicted by
Calamy (Those) and Beavis (Eyeless). The spiritual resister, however, who is
aware of and troubled by the mystical dimension and yet struggles to
maintain his ego and his identity, adds a new dimension to Huxley's
characters.

Bruno Rontini, a second-hand bookshop owner who basks in a "crystal silence"
even in the midst of city noises, has a great compassion for Eustace. Huxley
describes Bruno's remarks to Eustace about the freedom of the will to resist
spirituality:

People had been able to say no even to Filippo Neri and Francois

de Sales, even to the Christ and the Buddha. As he named them

to himself, the little flame in his heart seemed to expand, as it

were and aspire, until it touched that other light beyond it and

within, and for a moment it was still in the timeless intensity of a

yearning that was also consummation.(96)

This sparkling "little flame" within Bruno, which expands at the thought of
Christ and the Buddha, brings him into contact with the visionary world and
stimulates visions of "that other light." He urges Eustace to drop his
resistance and experience this same paradoxical yearning/consummation.
Because of the energy expended in Bruno's concern for the salvation of
others, he always looks physically tired and emaciated; however, there is a
peace and gaiety about him, and his eyes are always "blue and bright" (91).
When Sebastian meets Bruno he notices "the eyes were blue and very bright.
Blue fires in bone-cups" (211). Subsequently, when Sebastian sees Bruno
after his ten years of imprisonment, Bruno is very ill, but "the blue bright
eyes were full of joy, alive with an intense and yet somehow disinterested
tenderness" (253). The blue here is probably related to Christian symbolism,
which somewhat arbitrarily has been taken "to represent eternity, faith,
fidelity, loyalty, truth and spotless reputation" (Hulme 29).

As Eustace Barnack lies dying on a dark bathroom floor, he has a faint
awareness of God or what he always derisively refers to as the Gaseous
Vertebrate. This awareness turns into a bright light bringing with it an
eternity of joy (125-26). Later, in the Bardo state (that intermediate stage
between this world and rebirth into another incarnation), he feels himself
in contact with Bruno, and the overpowering light becomes "tenderly blue"
(154). Eustace resists the seductive power of the blue light:

Out there, in here, the silence shone with a blue imploring

tenderness. But none of that, none of that! The light was always

his enemy. Always, whether it was blue or white, pink or pea

green. He was shaken by another long, harrowing convulsion of

derision.(207)

Eustace will not let himself be fooled by the special color of the light
because all light threatens to engulf him. The light's liveliness and
transparency lead to the pure white light of the void. Later, "He knew what
the light was up to. He knew what that blue tenderness of silence was
beseeching him to do" (209). In Eustace's last thoughts from his
purgatorial/Bardo Thodol existence, he still resists
salvation/reincarnation: "But there was the light again, the shining of the
silence. None of that, none of that. Firmly and with decision, he averted
his attention" (237).

Huxley introduces Eustace's nephew, Sebastian Barnack, into the novel as a
self-centered, baby-faced adolescent who writes poetry. Bruno initiates
Sebastian's spiritual journey because the young poet senses the depth of the
bookseller's mystical spirituality. When Sebastian goes to see Bruno for the
first time after his uncle's death, he notices "a square of sunlight,
glowing like a huge ruby on the tiled floor" (211). This combination of
color and light provides Bruno with the only luxury he desires. At the end
of that visit Bruno advises Sebastian to "Try to be more honest, to think
less of himself. To live with people and real events and not so exclusively
with words" (227). On the way home, Sebastian composes the last verse
recorded in the novel:

Walking on Grape Nuts and imagination

Among recollected crucifixion and these jewels

Of horizontal sunlight.(227)

Through the incandescent brilliance of the "jewels" and the "sunlight,"
Sebastian, the young poet, begins his long spiritual journey toward
salvation and the "world of visions." Eventually he stops writing poetry
altogether to devote himself to the completion of Bruno Rontini's
philosophical and spiritual writings -- the Minimum Working Hypothesis -- a
prototype for Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, published the following year.

Huxley's efforts to maintain his vision were tested in Ape and Essence
(1948) which reflects Huxley's anguish over World War II and its aftermath.
In the frame story a producer looks for the author of a discarded Hollywood
movie script. The narrator for this frame story observes the spectacular
view as he and the producer drive through the desert:

Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a noiseless,

but almost explosive transformation. The clouds had shifted and

the sun was now shining on the nearest of those abrupt and

jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands, out of the

enormous plain. A moment before they had been black and

dead. Now suddenly they came to life between a shadowed

foreground and a background of cloudy darkness. They shone as

if with their own incandescence.(17-18)

Reflecting Huxley's own mystical experience in his beloved California
desert, a scene (or person) which had seemed "black and dead" could suddenly
be transformed by the sun bursting through the clouds (or an illumination
within the soul). In the midst of war and devastation, Huxley perceived that
the land (or human spirit) could suddenly shine with the intensity and
brilliance found in the love of God -- a luminous island surrounded by
darkness.

Ape and Essence, the fantasy of nightmare existence following a
thermonuclear holocaust, describes scavenging barbarians digging up
California's famous cemetery plots in the ruins of suburban Los Angeles to
plunder the expensively appointed caskets. The narrator describes the way
the world used to look: "The sea, the bright planet, the boundless crystal
of the sky -- surely you remember them!" (38). War has produced "the black
serrated shape of a rocky island" (38), "stagnant plague-fog," and "a wreath
of pus-colored vapor" (53).

The hero of the movie script, botanist Dr. Alfred Poole, is called "Stagnant
Poole" (55) by his students and colleagues because he has not lived up to
his potential. "It is as though he lived behind plate glass, could see and
be seen, but never establish contact" (55). When he does make contact with
another captive he finds love, and dares to plan an escape from the baboons
who control them. Images of color and light relating to mystical vision
persist in this satire through the mystical poetry of Shelley, a volume of
whose poems Poole rescued from the furnace in much the same way that this
script has been rescued. Shelley's poetry reveals to the two lovers (who
have set themselves free) the meaning of the soul:

An image of some bright Eternity,

A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendor

Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender

Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love.(164)

After escaping from their captors, Poole quotes Shelley again:

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe ...

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.(204)

Sitting beside the grave of their dramatist creator, these two people -- an
island in the midst of chaos -- dare to believe in the "Light."

Huxley wrote his next novelette, The Genius and the Goddess (1955), during
the months of his wife's failing health; she died only four months after the
book was finished. Although Huxley confided that he modeled the goddess,
Katy, after Frieda Lawrence and her symbiotic relationship with her genius
husband, D. H. Lawrence (Letters 831), Huxley's fatalistic attitude in the
novel about the senselessness of suffering mirrors his personal sorrow.
Spiritual grace found in the mystical imagery of light and color in this
work combines with animal grace and human grace to form "The Unknown
Quantity" needed to know oneself. The narrator, John Rivers, explains:

"At one end of the spectrum it's pure spirit, it's the Clear Light of

the Void; and at the other end it's instinct, it's health, it's the

perfect functioning of an organism that's infallible so long as we

don't interfere with it; and somewhere between the two extremes

is what St. Paul called `Christ' the divine made human."(99)

Although Rivers gains spiritual insight from his experiences, ultimately the
novel gives little hope for most of us to be open to all three aspects of
the same underlying mystery.

Emerging from this latest dark night of the soul at a deeper level of
mystical experience, Huxley wrote a Utopian novel in which he explored
principles expressed in The Perennial Philosophy, such as the potential for
all human beings to be identified with the Godhead and the beneficence of
humility rather than ego. Here, instead of an island made up of two people
escaping the chaos of life in the fable Ape and Essence, a whole society
joins together on the pathway to inner mystical vision. Huxley's
philosophical teaching, paramount in Island (1962), harmonizes with the
writer's colorful descriptive passages which suggest the world of visions.
All of nature on the island of Pala has an intensity of hue, an iridescent,
glowing quality which leads to the visionary world in each of us. For
instance, a flock of pigeons fly "green-winged and coral-billed, their
breasts changing color in the light like mother-of-pearl"(23). Even the
children have gemlike qualities: a little Palanese girl "wore a full crimson
skirt . . . in the sunlight her skin glowed like pale copper flush with
rose"(8). This idyllic place and its people, although subject to the sins
and diseases of the world, have progressed a long way toward unity with the
Divine.

Huxley's lifelong interest in art and its ability to bring divine order to
one's life reaches its apex in Island. A guest in Pala, Will Farnaby, visits
a meditation room where he beholds a landscape painting by a Palanese
artist. Like Caravaggio's painting, the light transports:

"What clouds!" said Will. "And the light!"

"The light," Vijaya elaborated, "of the last hour before dusk.

It's just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter

than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting

light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon

brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens

every shadow." . . . And between dark and dark was the blaze of

young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of

naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of

evergreen foliage.(186)

Will's host sees the painting as "a manifestation of Mind with a large M"
(185) and as "a genuinely religious image" (186). landscapes are religious
because they remind us who we are, they compel us "to perform an act of
self-knowing," and they reflect distance which "reminds us that there are
mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there":

"Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life.

Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the

flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces

between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a

fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the

void."(187)

Thus, in Island Huxley creates a society in which the highest visionary
experience is possible; one can move beyond brilliant colors to the
transcending Clear Light. For instance, as Lakshmi, a deeply religious
woman, moves closer to death, her daughter-in-law, Susila, reminds her of
the occasion when she was a little girl of eight and first saw the Clear
Light:

"An orange butterfly on a leaf, opening and shutting its wings in

the sunshine -- and suddenly there was the Clear Light of pure

Suchness blazing through it, like another sun."

Much brighter than the sun," Lakshmi whispered. "But

much gentler. You can look into the Clear Light and not be

blinded. And now remember it. A butterfly on a green leaf,

opening and shutting its wings -- and it's the Buddha Nature

totally present, it's the Clear Light outshining the sun."(265)

This mystical vision is not limited to selected people on Pala. Only those
persons on the island who are deeply involved in evil fail "to discover
their Buddha Nature" (244). As Donald Watt reminds us in his discussion of
Huxley's symbolic use of the word "island," people are isolated, like
islands, only on the surface of their routine lives; "they are nevertheless
united, like islands, beneath the uneasy, oceanic flux.... They are joined
in a unitive psychic land which, for Huxley, is the mystical "Divine
Ground'" ("Vision" 177). Only those who know nothing experientially of a
divine vision -- like the Fordians (the citizens in Brave New Worlds whose
hygienic lives are controlled by advanced scientific and behaviorist
methods), John Barnack, Jo Stoyte, Murugan, or Colonel Dipa -- are truly
isolated from themselves, from other people, and from the inner world.
Sebastian Barnack, for instance, gains the capacity to love other people
while on his quest for mystical union with the "pure light of the void."

Just as Sebastian no longer needs to write poetry, the Palanese in Island
who are nearing the end of their spiritual journeys no longer need color for
an awareness of the visionary world. Huxley defines the "prayer of quiet" as
"the prayer of waiting upon the Lord in a state of alert passivity and
permitting the deepest elements within the mind to come to the surface"
(Human 203). Complementing this definition, Huxley writes in "Natural
History of Visions":

In these highest forms of vision ["prayer of quiet"], the light is

undifferentiated; it is what in Buddhist literature is called the

"pure light of the void." It is an immense white light of

extraordinary power. (Human 227)

The "pure light," analogous to silence or the "prayer of quiet," represents
direct experience of the divine. For Huxley, the beauty of the lively
transparency of brilliantly lighted color leads us closer and closer to the
internal visionary world and unity with the Ground of All Being.

Huxley parallels Lakshmi's death scene in Island with his own experience of
his wife Maria's death. Again the light and the divine become one:

"In the desert and, later under hypnosis, all Maria's visionary and

mystical experiences had been associated with light.... Light had

been the element in which her spirit had lived, and it was

therefore to light that all my words referred. I would begin by

reminding her of the desert she had loved so much, of the vast

crystalline silence . . .of the snow-covered mountains at whose

feet we had lived. . . . And I would ask her to look at these lights

of her beloved desert and to realize that they were not merely

symbols, but actual expression of the divine nature; an

expression of Pure Being, an expression of the peace that passeth

all understanding . . . an expression of the love which is at the

heart of things, at the core, along with peace and joy and being,

of every human mind. . . . I would urge her to advance into those

lights." (Bedford II 185-86)

Using hypnosis or psychedelic drugs (what the Palanese call mokshamedicine),
Huxley believed he enhanced the enlightenment of the mystical experience by
diminishing the human ego.(6)

Huxley makes clear, however, that the mystical experience often begins
before a person is consciously aware of the phenomenon. Just as the dying
Lakshmi remembers first seeing the Clear Light when she was eight years old,
she also remembers a view from the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude
station which looks out over the sea. Susila gently guides the dying woman's
thoughts:

"Blue, green, purple-and the shadows of the clouds were like

ink. And the clouds themselves -- snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And

while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember,

Lakshmi?"

"You mean, about the Clear Light?"

"About the Clear Light," Susila confirmed. "Why do people

speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they've seen the

sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to

identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear

Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because,

consciously or unconsciously, they've been having revelations of

Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born?" (Island

264)

Huxley may have been thinking of his own life and his own "revelations of
Mind in the form of Light ever since [he was] born." Remember that Aldous's
brother Julian recognized at age twelve that five-year-old Aldous lived on a
different level of being and continued to do so all of his life. Huxley's
mystical attachment to color and light -- ranging from bright jewel colors
to the clear light of mystical union -- encompassed his forty-seven years as
a writer. As early as 1922, his use of color and light in Crome Yellow
connects with his explorations into mysticism. His spiritual quest
materializes not only through the light which blinds and transforms Saul on
the road to Damascus, but also through his symbolic use of color, light, and
form in examining the relative merits of Western and Eastern religions. By
1925 Calamy's hope for mystical illumination emerges as a dominant theme in
Those Barren Leaves. Poetry such as "The Yellow Mustard" conjoins color and
light with inner faith in 1931. One year later in Brave New World Helmholtz
Watson seeks mystical union in the silence of the island on which he is
exiled, foreshadowing Huxley's utopian Island with its bright colors and
transcendent Clear Light -- the unity of all things. Aptly, that color of
light can be produced by blending all the tints in the spectrum; thus, light
is a symbol of the union of every virtue (Hulme 20). Huxley's intense focus
in his writing on the high mystical quality of color and light as a link
with the pure light of the void permeated his life. For Huxley, everyone who
sees beauty in the light is on the path to mystical experience -- just at
different stages of the journey.

NOTES

(1) Elizabeth Bowen in 1936 stated that Huxley was "preaching a new
asceticism: if he presses the point further he will not be popular" (148).
Orville Prescott in 1944 wrote, "In recent years Mr. Huxley has seen visions
and become a convert to a private mystic faith. His last three or four books
have been contrite attempts to live down his earlier ones. Unfortunately,
though spiritually elevated, they have been dull and mediocre." C. E. M.
Joad in 1946 stated, "If a choice must be made, the unregenerate Huxley of
sixteen years ago seems to be infinitely preferable to the sour-faced
moralist of today."

(2) Evelyn Underhill has a chapter (380-412) explaining "the dark night of
the soul" in its many manifestations. She concludes that all these types of
`darkness' with their accompanying and overwhelming sensations of impotence
and distress, are common in the lives of the mystics" (393; cited in
Abingdon 512).

(3) "I am and, for as long as I can remember, I always have been a poor
visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures
in my mind" (Doors 15). Huxley makes similar statements in letters and other
personal Writing.

(4) The "obscene / Brown ordure" (possibly elephant excrement) parallels
Huxley's frequent mentions of "mud" representing a limitation of vision. In
his last novel, Island, however, a succulent plant, symbolic of
enlightenment, grows out of the mud (108).

(5) Von Helmholtz was first cited as one of several possible sources for
Helmholtz Watson's name by Meckier. He writes, "Watson's name is a
meaningful amalgam that links the thoughts of Freud, Brucker, and Herman Von
Helmholtz with Pavlov and the practices of the American behaviorist John
Broadus Watson." No mention is made, however, of Helmholtzs Treatise on
Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall, 3 vols. Trans. 1909. New
York: Dover, 1962.

(6) Zaehner argues that Huxley recants the position that the psychedelic
experience is identical to mystical experience. He claims that Huxley in the
last days of his life came to see the psychedelic experience as a form of
self-worship (108-09).

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