WHO YA GONNA TRUST? hIM OR YOUR LYING EMOTIONS:
The Fly in the Honey: Are emotions a trustworthy guide to God? (Aldous Huxley, June 1, 2025, Plough Quarterly)
The phrase “religion of experience” has two distinct and mutually incompatible meanings. There is the “experience” of which the Perennial Philosophy treats – the direct apprehension of the divine Ground in an act of intuition possible, in its fullness, only to the selflessly pure in heart. And there is the “experience” induced by revivalist sermons, impressive ceremonials, or the deliberate efforts of one’s own imagination. This “experience” is a state of emotional excitement – an excitement which may be mild and enduring or brief and epileptically violent, which is sometimes exultant in tone and sometimes despairing, which expresses itself here in song and dance, there in uncontrollable weeping. But emotional excitement, whatever its cause and whatever its nature, is always excitement of that individualized self, which must be died to by anyone who aspires to live to divine Reality. “Experience” as emotion about God (the highest form of this kind of excitement) is incompatible with “experience” as immediate awareness of God by a pure heart which has mortified even its most exalted emotions…. The peace that passes all understanding is one of the fruits of the spirit. But there is also the peace that does not pass understanding, the humbler peace of emotional self-control and self-denial; this is not a fruit of the spirit, but rather one of its indispensable roots.