Aldous Huxley: On Truth and the Nature of Spiritual Reality

By: Aldous Huxley

Why dost thou prate of God?
Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.
—Meister Eckhart

The further one travels, the less one knows.
—Lao Tzu

In religious literature the word ‘truth’ is used indiscriminately in at least three distinct and very different senses. Thus, it is sometimes treated as a synonym for “fact,” as when it is affirmed that God is Truth meaning that He is the primordial Reality. But this is clearly not the meaning of the word in such a phrase as “worshipping God in spirit and in truth.”

Here, it is obvious, ‘truth’ signifies direct apprehension of spiritual Fact, as opposed to second-hand knowledge about Reality, formulated in sentences and accepted on authority or because an argument from previously granted postulates was logically convincing.