Aldous Huxley New American Library Bhagavad Gita Hinduism

Aldous Huxley in the introduction to the New American Library edition of the Bhagavad Gita interprets the Gita as not only the distillation of Hinduism but also the distillation of religion in general. Huxley claims that the theology of the Gita is relevant to all religious people not just to the Hindu because he says it presents the four basic elements of a spiritual world view.
He presents these four fundamental doctrines as what he calls the Perennial Philosophy:

"First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

Of course, Huxley's Divine Ground is called Brahman in the Gita. But after Huxley discusses these four aspects of religion giving examples from a variety of religious traditions, he comes to the modern world-view and conjectures about why modern people have turned away from religion - he blames industrialization and technology.

Because of technological progress, Huxley claims that a utopian vision of life on earth has driven people away from the thurst for spiritual knowledge. He writes about the doctrine of progress through technology: "These false and, historically, aberrant and heretical doctrines are now systematically taught in our schools and repeated, day in, day out, by those anonymous writers of advertising copy who, more than any other teachers, provide European and American adults with their current philosophy of life."

I think we should put Huxley's pessimistic remarks about modern technology into historical perspective. He wrote these words in 1944 at the height of World War II. The technological innovations that he was witnessing were the most destructive forces of terror that man had ever unleashed on the planet. It is no wonder, then, that he sees technology as the antithesis of the religious life.