The Secret of Genius

Aldous Huxley was one of the great and open minds of the 20th century. When he died on November 22, 1963 at age 69, he left behind a legacy of having the 'secret of genius' of which he speaks here. It takes remarkable strength and resiliency to maintain that spirit of the child: the innocence, trust and wonder that animates the child's movements through his or her personal world as well as the more expansive outside world. Those characteristics are the reason for childlike enthusiasm.

Huston Smith wrote the following to honor the 25th anniversary of Aldous Huxley's death:

He loved the desert, he told me, for its symbolic power. Its emptiness emptied his mind. "The boundlessness of its sands [I paraphrase] spreads a mantle of sameness - hence unity - over the world's multiplicity in something of the way snow does. The nothingness to which the Deseret fathers were drawn is not a blank negation. It is a no-thing-ness in which everything is so interfused that divisions are transcended. Pure light contains all the frequencies of the rainbow, but undemarcated. The Void is the vacuum-plenum complex, grasped by its vacuum pole."             And Live Rejoicing, p. 161

May you always carry that spirit of the child within you!