Aldous Huxley: Seeing in the dark

An Enneagram Type Five Surveys the Ground of Being

Aldous Leonard Huxley, 1894 -1963, Wikimedia Commons

[Enneagram Personality Type] Fives tend to be observers both of life and of themselves, looking on from a safe distance. In this sense they are scouts, surveying the terrain both without and within rather than fully traversing it. (Sandra Maitri)¹

Aldous Huxley is best known for his 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, though as a novelist, essayist and man of letters, he published a wide range of other works between the years 1916 and 1963. From his boyhood on he exhibited many of the traits of an Enneagram Type Five personality. His cousin Gervas reminisced to Aldous’s biographer about “the deeply interested curiosity with which he regarded the behaviour of the world.”² At the same time, another cousin found him “aloof and secretly critical at the early age of nine.”³ Rarely overtaken by emotion, even as a teenager Aldous was capable of detachment — “ a perspective, a sense of proportion,”⁴ further characteristics of the Type Five.

Loss of sight

Being naturally bookish and a gifted scholar, it was a terrible blow when Huxley suffered inflammation of the cornea, probably due to getting infected dust in both eyes when his immune system was compromised after a bout of flu. He was at school at Eton and by the time the condition was taken seriously, it was too late. He temporarily lost almost all his sight and had to teach himself to read Braille in order to continue with his studies. Although his eyesight did eventually improve somewhat, he had limited vision throughout his life and no night vision at all.

The early novels

Huxley achieved literary acclaim with the novels he published in the early 1920s, among them Crome Yellow and Antic Hay, though members of his family found it difficult to recognize in them the Aldous they knew, who was gentle and kind. The novels were satirical, sometimes bitingly so, but acute observations of the social world he inhabited, largely the upper class and intelligentsia of between-the-wars England. Often described as cynical, Huxley didn’t really see his writing that way. In ‘The Giaconda Smile,’ one of the short stories in his collection, Mortal Coils (1922), he has the writer Mr Hutton refute the same charge of cynicism: “I’m only speaking a melancholy truth. Reality doesn’t always come up to the ideal, you know. But that doesn’t make me believe any the less in the ideal.”⁵ The early novels are clever but have a strangely cool, distant atmosphere to them. In a play from the same collection, when the poet Sidney Dolphin keeps his silence, Paul asks whether he is brooding on the universe as usual. His reply is perhaps an echo of Huxley’s own feeling: “My philosophical detachment? But it’s only a mask to hide the ineffectual longings I have to achieve contact with the world.”⁶ Many Enneagram Type Fives report a sense of hopelessness about a perceived inability to engage directly with life.

The bigger picture

By 1925, Huxley was becoming dissatisfied with what he was writing. In a letter to Naomi Mitchison, regarding his novel Those Barren Leaves, he said the book was “in a queer way, I now feel, jejeune and shallow and off the point. All I’ve written so far has been off the point.”⁷ Confident that he was faithfully observing “the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values”⁸ that had gone before, Huxley was nevertheless becoming increasingly aware of the limits of his way of seeing, and the value of viewpoints that were not his own. His biographer Sybille Bedford, who was a close friend of both Aldous and his wife, Maria, writes of “his cognizance that Maria — who did not formulate, who did not, in his sense, think — was on the point, by intuition, by straight experience.” Bedford suggests that Aldous was expanding his horizons, “becoming able to use that faculty of [Maria’s] … At times he saw in an almost physical way through her.”⁹

In his novel Point Counter Point (1928), Huxley creates a character in Philip Quarles who is exploring in the same ways. “What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once… With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes…” His wife, who is much more in touch with her emotions than he is, replies: “Loving eyes, too.” He smiled at her and stroked her hand.”¹⁰

An underlying reality

From the latter part of the 1920s, Huxley’s writing begins to reflect more and more his growing sense of a universal Reality that underlies all existence, but which is impossible to understand conceptually. The theme of the essays in his book — Do what you will (1929) - could be summed up as “the final mystery is unknowable.”¹¹ This has been the refrain of mystics throughout the centuries, that Truth/God can only be experienced, not grasped in its entirety, nor even talked about satisfactorily. Nevertheless, it is possible to point towards the Truth, always being aware that any such signpost is partial and limited. In the old example, an elephant can appear very different when encountered from different angles - as a rope-like tail, a large flat foot, a long tube-like trunk - but it is still the same elephant. Many Type Five personalities are drawn to juxtaposing insights from different domains of knowledge, placing emphasis on “the interconnectedness of all of the parts of the cosmos and on some of the implications of this interpenetration.”¹² Huxley would later publish The Perennial Philosophy (1945), in which he brought together writings from different religious and philosophical sources which all point to:

a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places men’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.¹³

Seeing in the dark

In 1938, Huxley’s poor eyesight began to worsen still further. He discovered the Bates method, a way of training the viewer to achieve the best vision possible, given whatever damage the eyes have suffered. Through the disciplined practice of exercises and a new, relaxed approach to seeing that worked with the eyes, rather than against them, he gained some measure of improvement in his vision. Huxley’s second wife, Laura, suggests that he was able to benefit from the method by applying in a practical way what Krishnamurti, who became a friend of the Huxleys, called “freedom from the known.”¹⁴ Not only did the Bates method run counter to ophthalmic orthodoxy but it involved a letting go, a conscious relaxation of strain, in order to co-operate with the natural working of the eye.

This was analogous to what Huxley was coming to believe: that one route to apprehending divine Truth is letting go of certainty and received knowledge, and relaxing the concerns of the small, separate self — the personal ego. In practice this involves loosening identification with our beliefs and opinions and being willing to surrender our preferences. The fifth-century Christian, Dionysius, likened this process to a sculptor revealing the hidden beauty of the form s/he is carving by removing extraneous material, “solely by taking away.”¹⁵ Although what is left cannot be grasped conceptually, it can be experienced and trusted: a deeper sense of being, connected to an all-pervasive Being. In attempting to describe this experience, spiritual explorers throughout the ages have leaned on the language of paradox: the “super-luminous darkness”¹⁶ of Dionysius, the Cloud of Unknowing of the thirteenth-century anonymous English mystic,¹⁷ the ‘emptiness’ of the Buddha. Huxley tried using fiction to point to what he saw as the underlying spiritual Reality in several novels, starting with Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and finishing with Island in 1962. The novel which he considered his best attempt at “fusing ideas with story”¹⁸ was Time Must have a Stop, published in 1944.

Seeing is not enough

Between 1953 and his death in 1963, Huxley took psychedelic drugs on around twelve occasions, exploring altered states of consciousness in a time before the dangers of these drugs were fully known. Huxley’s interest was in alternative ways of accessing the mystical state of consciousness but he never regarded these experiences, induced by mescaline, LSD or psilocybin, as an end in themselves. In his novel, Island, the inhabitants of his utopian paradise use something they called moksha-medicine to access mystical states. However, Dr Robert explains to Will Faraday, who has been washed up on the island, that the experiences are not meant to be merely enjoyed like a “puppet show” but to open the islanders’ eyes to who they truly are. The medicine can give glimpses of “enlightening and liberating grace” but “it remains for you to decide whether you’ll co-operate with the grace”¹⁹ in everyday life.

In his own life, Huxley’s mysticism was not purely theoretical — it translated into a practical commitment to goodness and kindness. When Laura Archera, who would go on to become Huxley’s second wife, met the Huxleys, she found Aldous as an acquaintance, “easy and gentle, generous and mysterious.”²⁰ It appears that he was a Type Five personality who did not only ‘survey the terrain,’ (see Maitri quotation at the head of this article) but also sought to ‘fully traverse’ it, committing himself to inner work of exactly the sort the Enneagram suggests for a Type Five: embracing more intuitive, emotional ways of seeing in addition to his natural intellectualism, translating the insights explored in his ivory tower into his direct treatment of others in the real world.²¹ As he reminded the reader in the introduction to The Perennial Philosophy (p. viii), it is the “loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit” who are able to apprehend divine Reality.

In her account of her life with him, Laura Huxley wrote that “Glimpses … glimpses … Sick or well, Aldous was always catching glimpses. That ability of glimpsing, and expressing in part what he saw, made living fascinating.”²² So what was it that Huxley glimpsed in the dark, the ‘super-luminous darkness’ of Dionysius? What insights did he receive courtesy of ‘the enlightening and liberating grace’? We can never fully know but it seems that whatever it was gave him the courage and wisdom to help ease the passing of his first wife, Maria, and cope with the pain of his bereavement.²³ It certainly appears that he shared the intuition of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, that “all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” A few months before his death, Huxley wrote to a correspondent:²⁴

I have known that sense of affectionate solidarity with the people around me and the Universe at large — also the sense of the world’s fundamental All-Rightness, in spite of pain, death and bereavement

Notes

1. The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues (2005), New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, p.194.
2. Sybille Bedford (1993, first published 1973), Aldous Huxley: A Biography, London: Pan Macmillan, p.16.
3. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.10, quoting Laurence Collier in North House: A Memoir.
4. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.16, quoting Gervas again, in a conversation with SB.
5. ‘The Giaconda Smile’ is available online here: http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/4445/
6. ‘Permutations among the Nightingales’ is available online here: http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/4446/
7. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.10.
8. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.142, quoting a letter from Aldous to his father.
9. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.152.
10. Aldous Huxley (2018 Vintage Classics, first published 1928) Point Counterpoint, London: Penguin Random House, p.251.
11. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.218.
12. Sandra Maitri (2001),The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram: Nine Faces of the Soul, New York: Penguin Putnam, p.202.
13. Aldous Huxley ( Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009, first pub 1945) The Perennial Philosophy, New York: Harper Collins, introduction p.vii.
14. Laura Huxley (1968), This Timeless Moment, Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts, p.366.
15. Dionysius the Areopagite, quoted in Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 34.
16. As above, p.35.
17. A. Spearing, ed. and translator (2001), The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, Penguin Classics.
18. Bedford, Aldous Huxley, p.426–7.
19. Aldous Huxley (2005, first published 1962), Island, London: Vintage Books, p.169.
20. Huxley, Timeless Moment, p.8.
21. Huxley died before the modern development of the Enneagram as a system of personality typing and path to growth (see https://www.enneagraminstitute.com). Judging from his interest in the Sheldonian description of human types (Bedford, p. 352) and his commitment to spiritual growth, I believe he would have found the Enneagram a useful tool.
22. Huxley, Timeless Moment, p.145.
23. In Timeless Moment, (pp.15ff) Laura Huxley includes an account of Maria’s death, written by Aldous and given to a few of his friends. As she says, it is ‘a touching document of human love which could totally change, in many persons, their tremulous attitude toward death.’
24. Huxley, Timeless Moment, p.227.

END NOTE

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