God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshipped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely ‘spiritual’, purely ‘intellectual’, purely ‘aesthetic’, it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.
I ate civilization.
But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.
No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.
In Hitler’s words, the propagandist should adopt ‘a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with’. He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated.
And anyhow the body seemed perfectly well able to look after itself. In reality, of course, it always does look after itself. All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
Cuando el individuo siente, la comunidad se resiente.
El mundo es estable ahora. Las gentes son felices; tienen cuanto desean, y no desean nunca lo que no pueden tener.
Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.
His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.
We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.
There was a little hill behind the house. You climbed it, and there was the whole sky from horizon to horizon. A hundred and eighty degrees of brute inexplicable mystery. It was a good place for just sitting and saying nothing.
Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence.
Preaching is an art, and in this, as in all other arts, the bad performers far outnumber the good.
Waiting on God is a bore; but what fun to argue, to score off opponents, to lose one’s temper and call it ‘righteous indignation,’ and at last to pass from controversy to blows, from words to what St. Augustine so deliciously described as the ‘benignant asperity’ of persecution and punishment!
Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause profound changes in consciousness. Certain.
To give organisations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.
La felicidad nunca tiene grandeza.
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
The triumph of humanism is the defeat of humanity.