Buddhist Romanticism

“From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of
morality… All this has been summed up in Augustine’s formula:
‘Love, and do what you like.’” 45
Huxley does add, however, that this sense of love is not incompatible
with the idea of divine commandments. In fact—in a passage that may have
been Maslow’s inspiration for Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences—Huxley
states that unitive consciousness is the source of all moral values.
“We see then that, for the Perennial Philosophy, good is the
separate self’s conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine
Ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness,
the refusal to know that the Ground exists. This doctrine is, of course,
perfectly compatible with the formulation of ethical principles as a
series of negative and positive divine commandments, or even in
terms of social utility. The crimes which are everywhere forbidden
proceed from states of mind which are everywhere condemned as
wrong; and these wrong states of mind are, as a matter of empirical
fact, absolutely incompatible with that unitive knowledge of the
divine Ground, which, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the
supreme good.” 46
Huxley does not directly address the question of whether mortification
is a process that arrives at its goal, or is one that must be constantly pursued
throughout life, but he does seem to endorse the latter position by quoting
Augustine, this time more accurately:
“If thou shouldst say, ‘It is enough, I have reached perfection,’ all
is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one’s
imperfection.” 47
Unlike the Romantics, Huxley does not recommend erotic love as a
means of mortification, and he does not assume that religions have
progressed or are destined to progress over time. As for one’s duty to make
one’s religion evolve, Huxley has little to say on the topic except that world
peace will be impossible unless all religions evolve to the point where they
accept the perennial philosophy as their common core.
As we noted above, the truth claim of the perennial philosophy is based
on the principle of corroboration: the claim that these teachings are
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