Head in the Clouds
My current book I am using for Lectio Divinia is Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. It’s one of those dense books where one page inspires a full day’s thought at minimum, so I may be talking about it for a few months hence.
It is an attempt to glean a “Perennial Philosophy,” a term coined by mathematician, philosopher (and Catholic convert) Gottfried Leibnitz, from the writings of the world’s mystical traditions. This is like the “common watertable” of spiritual truth I was referring to a few days ago. I am feeling a real draw toward the Unitive right now. Maybe it’s because the world seems to be falling apart, I dunno.
Anyway, expect me to bore you with a few tidbits along the way. There’s this one point about the natures of God that my mind is wrestling with — about the possibly unpleasant side effects of worshipping only limited aspects of God — that I want to write about, but I can barely grok the concepts themselves, much less find the words to describe my thoughts about them.
That is the benefit of spiritual blogging. Having to come up with concise words facilitates understanding. Not that I am particularly concise, but I am downright terse compared to Huxely.
I identify with Huxley in a way. It’s evident that he was torn between the world of ideas and the “real” world he was “missing out” on by having his head in the clouds all the time. I’m so there. Here’s a poem he wrote that I present as exhibit A:
The Life Theoretic
While I have been fumbling over books
And thinking about God and the Devil and all,
Other young men have been battling with the days
And others have been kissing the beautiful women.
They have brazen faces like batering-rams.
But I who think about books and such -
I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,
And the women palsy me with fear.
But when it comes to fumbling over books
And thinking about God and the Devil and all,
Why, there I am.
But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,
Perhaps, perhaps…God knows.
— Aldous Huxley