Chapter 4 Mysticism and Pacifism
Huxley’s mystical turn in the mid-1930s was intimately associated with paci- fism, 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.
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4 See Ropp, Warrior’s Way, 90–91. Heard’s misconception of satyagraha will be discussed below.