Aldous Huxley on religion

The word "religion": Now you've got it

I was going to write about Shakespeare god-quotes, and came across Aldous Huxley's dictated deathbed piece on God and Shakespeare, that says this about religion:

"And what about "religion"? The word is used to designate things as different from one another as Satanism and satori, as fetish-worship and the enlightenment of a Buddha, as the vast politico-theologic of financial organizations known as churches and the intensely private visions of an ecstatic. A Quaker silence is religion, so is Verdi's Requiem. A sense of the blessed All-Rightness of the Universe is a religious experience and so is the sick soul's sense of self-loathing, of despair, of sin, in a world that is the scene of perpetual perishing and inevitable death."

Satori, by the way, is: sa·to·ri (sä-tôr'ē) n. A spiritual awakening sought in Zen Buddhism, often coming suddenly. I got this from a blog, as a matter of fact, entitled The satorialist. (Not to be confused with sartorial, dealing with tailors and men's clothing).

I just liked this paragraph and wanted to share it.

Actually, I don't like the idea of a "sick soul." That smacks of mind control and enforced conformity to me. Soul sickness sounds like a way of saying mental illness, and I think a lot of mental illness is just sensitive people struggling with the irrationality, hostility, and madness of the world around them. Despair should not be equated with sin. It's a response to oppression. I believe psychic oppression is very real.