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The Perennial Philosophy By looking at the collective history of the human encounter with the Divine we can gain an insight into the depths of knowing that are potentially available to us individually and collectively. A few words from different sages is a good place to start. "God is unified oneness-one without two, inestimable. Genuine divine existence engenders the existence of all of creation. The sublime, inner essences secretly constitute a chain linking everything from the highest to the lowest, extending from the upper pool to the edge of the universe. There is nothing - not even the tiniest thing-that is not fastened to the links of this chain. Everything is catenated in its mystery, caught I its oneness. God is one, God' secret is one, all the worlds below and above are all mysteriously one. Divine existence is indivisible."
We look
at it and do not see it;
Thou art
the fire
"We of the twentieth century know better. We know that all religious aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source and goal. We know that the God of the educated and the God of the child, the God of the civilized and the God of the primitive, is after all, the same God; and that this God does not measure our differences, but embraces all who live rightly and humbly on the earthy."
"The Single human individual is not actually cut off from the universe. He is part of it, and between this part and the totality of the cosmos there exists a real connection which is broken only for our perception. At first we take this part of the universe as something existing on its own, because we do not see the belts and ropes by which the fundamental forces of the cosmos keep the wheel of our life revolving."
"Know thyself, and thou shalt know the non-self, the Lord of all. What is my ego? It is my hand or my foot, flesh or blood, muscle or tendons? Ponder deeply and thou shalt know that there is no such thing as "I." An analysis of the "ego" convinces that the ultimate substance is God alone. When egoism vanishes, Divinity manifests itself."
Much of the historical evidence to support the idea of transpersonal stages of development rests on the perennial philosophy, a term coined by mathematician and philosopher Gotfreid Liebniz, and later made famous by Aldous Huxley in his book of the same name. Huxley describes the perennial philosophy as "…the thing-the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being…"(i) The perennial philosophy finds that all of the world's wisdom traditions, the mystics teachings of the world's great religions, are in general accord with one another. This is not to say that they agree at every point. However, they all espouse a contemplative tradition, a path or set of practices, that if followed closely will eventually reveal to the practitioner a unique view of reality; a Spiritual view of reality. Wilber points out that the founders of the world's wisdom traditions "… almost without exception, underwent a series of profound spiritual experiences. Their revelations, their direct spiritual experiences, were not mythological proclamations… but rather direct apprehensions of the Divine (Spirit, Emptiness, Deity, The Absolute)."(ii) Each person's experience of the Divine is interpreted through their own cultural and social framework, giving rise to a number of traditions around the world that, while explaining the same or similar deep experience, do so in very different ways. For instance, the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah does not proceed in the same fashion, nor do its mystics explain their experiences in exactly the same fashion as Christian mystics, or the Sufi mystics of Islam, even though they are all worshipping the same God and describing the same vision of union with that God in Godhead. However, even though their reports are not identical, these visions of the Divine are similar enough, and in great enough accord with the mystics of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, among others, that we clearly see their relation and relative truth. They are all describing the same vision of the ultimate nature of reality from different backgrounds, and different depths. These slightly divergent messages are only to be expected. Six reviewers can see the same film, each enjoy it immensely, but each take different things from it. Reading these reviews one would understand that they all saw the same film, but that they each understood it differently. The writings of the world's mystics are much the same, and nothing helps to support an understanding and acceptance of the perennial philosophy like reading the great texts of the world's wisdom traditions. There are a number of wonderful anthologies and serious studies, many of which are listed in the bibliography, but I highly recommend The Perennial Philosophy, by Aldous Huxley, The Essential Mystics, by Andrew Harvey, and The Enlightened Mind, by Stephen Mitchell. The perennial philosophy helps us understand that spiritual insight is both universal and universally available to all of us whatever our religious or cultural background. Of course,
there are a number of researchers who disagree with this proposition
of a perennial philosophy, but by and large they make the dysfunctional
postmodern mistake of granting all spiritual insight an equivalent depth
of meaning. Thus, rather than accept the idea of various stages of transpersonal
or spiritual development, which only seem natural and expected in light
of the widely accepted stages of personal development, they suggest
that all spiritual development, while of different cultural value, is
of equivalent depth. This disdain for hierarchy within spiritual pursuit
is understandable, but in an attempt to give value to everyone's spiritual
experience, they under value spiritual experience of greater depth and
insight. There is no problem in ranking, in a general fashion, the depth
of spiritual experiences, as this is a common feature within individual
spiritual traditions. For instance, within every school of Buddhism
one finds clearly delineated levels of spiritual realizations. These
exist not to separate people and create divisiveness or pathological
hierarchy, but to help the individual spiritual aspirant in their journey.(iii)
Footnotes i) Aldous
Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii.
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