Mysticism and Pacifism

Home , Aldous Huxley, Grey Eminence, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Pacifism, Satyagraha (opera)

Huxley’s mystical turn in the mid-1930s was intimately associated with pacifism, and his pacifist convictions were reinforced by the mystical philosophy of Gerald Heard and Jiddu Krishnamurti. As noted in Chapter 1, Huxley’s involve- ment with Ottoline Morrell and the Garsington set during World War i had led him to adopt a pacifist position, and the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and the imperial tensions of the 1930s had done nothing to change his mind. His disparaging article “What Gandhi Fails to See” (1930), would seem to contradict this statement, but Huxley was not objecting to Gandhi as a pacifist but as an “ascetic salvationist” whose spirituality blinded him to inconvenient facts, such as the “distressingly easy passage from non-violence to violence”,1 or the fact that reverting to a pre-industrial civilisation, as Gandhi was advocating, would entail the “death by starvation of millions upon millions of human be- ings” (in other words, the exponential increase in population made possible by industrialisation).2 Huxley’s interest in mysticism had been dampened by his trip to India and south-east Asia in 1925–26. In the article, Gandhi is pilloried as a representative of the kind of Hindu spirituality that Huxley had deplored in Jesting Pilate (1926): “To my mind ‘spirituality’ […] is the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. […] A little less spirituality and the Indians would now be free – free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions”.3 But as the 1930s progressed, Huxley was compelled by personal circumstances to re-evaluate his opinion of both Gandhi and mysticism and by 1936 he was publicly advocating satyagraha and practising meditation with Gerald Heard and members of the Peace Pledge Union (ppu). In the autumn of 1934, Huxley began to suffer from insomnia and depres- sion, and turned to the practice of meditation and prāṇāyāma to alleviate the symptoms. He may have been encouraged by Heard, who was organising group

1 Huxley was presumably thinking of the civil disobedience organised by Gandhi on March 30, 1919, to protest the passing of the Rowlatt Act, in which British troops opened fire on unarmed protestors, and which led to rioting, culminating in the Amritsar Massacre on April 10, 1919. 2 Aldous Huxley, “What Gandhi Fails to See”, in ce 3: 233–234. 3 Aldous Huxley, “India and Burma”, in ce 2: 469.

140 chapter 4 meditation sessions in the hope of achieving an evolutionary breakthrough in which the members of the group would at once become telepathically aware of each others’ thoughts as well as having mystical access to an Overmind or col- lective psychic field. Heard was primarily interested in neo-Advaita and yoga as providing means (such as meditation) to attain his own psychological and evolutionary ends, but he later used them in an attempt to attain pacifist aims (such as directing “satyagraha” at Hitler4). It was Heard who persuaded Huxley to join the ppu and to take an active role in recruiting members through mak- ing speeches and writing manifestoes. Initially, it seems that Huxley turned to mysticism reluctantly because it embodied a sort of non-sectarian religion that would encourage humankind to perceive itself as a monistic unity, as opposed to atomised individuals motivated solely by self-interest. But when Huxley moved to America he began to study neo-Advaita in earnest under the guidance of Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Even after Huxley grew disillusioned with the ppu and its potential to effect change, he never abandoned his pacifist convictions, which in turn were bolstered by his allegiance to neo-Advaita as well as other forms of mysticism. The influence of Heard can be felt in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Ends and Means (1937), After Many a Summer (1939) and, to some extent, Grey Eminence (1941). Shortly after Huxley settled in Los Angeles in 1937, he met an Indian sage named Jiddu Krishnamurti, who, in his youth, had been the World Teacher of the Theosophical Society (TS). Huxley found Krishnamurti’s mystical insights tremendously valuable, and the latter’s pacifist convictions were a source of re- assurance during World War ii when Huxley felt guilty at once again avoiding the European fray. Furthermore, Krishnamurti proved a loyal friend at a time when Huxley’s friendship with Heard was under strain. Part of the problem, as far as Huxley was concerned, was that even before Heard established Trabuco College (a spiritual community based in a monastery sixty miles outside Los Angeles), he was promoting himself as a guru, when his spiritual authority (such as it was) derived from his encyclopaedic knowledge of religious texts, rather than, as was the case with Krishnamurti, from first-hand mystical ex- perience. In this chapter, I examine the influence of Heard and Krishnamurti and the symbiotic relationship between mysticism and pacifism in Huxley’s work.

4 See Ropp, Warrior’s Way, 90–91. Heard’s misconception of satyagraha will be discussed below.