Perennial Phil Ch 5 CHARITY [11,5695]

Perennial Phil Ch 5 CHARITY [11,5695]

05 최고의 사랑 - 모든 오류는 사랑의 부족에서 생긴다

He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.

i John iv

By love may He be gotten and holden, but by thought never.

The Cloud of Unknowing

Whosoever studies to reach contemplation (i.e. unitive know­ledge) should begin by searchingly enquiring of himself how much he loves. For love is the motive power of the mind (mackina mends), which draws it out of the world and raises it on high.

St. Gregory the Great

The astrolabe of the mysteries of God is love.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

Astrolabe

An astrolabe is an ancient astronomical instrument that was a handheld model of the universe. Its various functions also make it an elaborate inclinometer and an analogue calculation device capable of working out several kinds of problems in astronomy. Wikipedia

Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly.

Shakespeare

Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.

William Law

WE can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge, and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. 

Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only [95 96] biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds and spirit outside the self. 

The lust-dieted man 'slaves the ordinances of Heaven'—that is to say, he subordinates the laws of Nature and the spirit to his own cravings. 

The result is that 'he does not feel' and therefore makes himself incapable of knowledge. 

His ignorance is ultimately voluntary; if he cannot see, it is because 'he will not see.' Such voluntary ignorance inevitably has its negative reward. 

Nemesis follows hubris—sometimes in a spectacular way, as when the self-blinded man (Macbeth, Othello, Lear) falls into the trap which his own ambition or possessiveness or petulant vanity has pre­pared for him; sometimes in a less obvious way, as in the cases where power, prosperity and reputation endure to the end but at the cost of an ever-increasing imperviousness to grace and enlightenment, an ever completer inability to escape, now or hereafter, from the stifling prison of selfness and separateness. 

How profound can be the spiritual ignorance by which such 'enslavers of Heaven's ordinances' are punished is indicated by the behaviour of Cardinal Richelieu on his death-bed. The priest who attended him urged the great man to prepare his soul for its coming ordeal by forgiving all his enemies. 'I have never had any enemies,' the Cardinal replied with the calm sincerity of an ignorance which long years of intrigue and avarice and ambition had rendered as absolute as had been his political power, 'save only those of the State.' Like Napoleon, but in a different way, he was 'feeling heaven's power,' because he had refused to feel charity and therefore refused to know the whole truth about his own soul or anything else.

Cardinal Richelieu

Former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of France

Armand Jean du Plessis, Duke of Richelieu, known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a French clergyman and statesman. He was also known as l'Éminence rouge, or "the Red Eminence", a term derived from the title "Eminence" applied to cardinals, and the red robes they customarily wore

Here on earth the love of God is better than the knowledge of God, while it is better to know inferior things than to love them. By knowing them we raise them, in a way, to our intelligence, whereas by loving them we stoop towards them and may become subservient to them, as the miser to his gold.

St. Thomas Aquinas (paraphrased)

[ 97]

This remark seems, at first sight, to be incompatible with what precedes it. But in reality St. Thomas is merely distinguishing between the various forms of love and knowledge. It is better to love-know God than just to know about God, without love, through the reading of a treatise on theology. 

Gold, on the other hand, should never be known with the miser's love, or rather concupiscence, but either abstractly, as the scientific investigator knows it, or else with the disinterested love-know­ledge of the artist in metal, or of the spectator, who love-knows the goldsmith's work, not for its cash value, not for the sake of possessing it, but just because it is beautiful. 

And the same applies to all created things, lives and minds. 

It is bad to love-know them with self-centred attachment and cupidity; it is somewhat better to know them with scientific dispassion; it is best to supplement abstract knowledge-without-cupidity with true disinterested love-knowledge, having the quality of aes­thetic delight, or of charity, or of both combined.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Pascal

By a kind of philological accident (which is probably no acci­dent at all, but one of the more subtle expressions of man's deep-seated will to ignorance and spiritual darkness), the word 'charity' has come, in modem English, to be synonymous with 'almsgiving,' and is almost never used in its original sense, as signifying the highest and most divine form of love. 

almsgiving 구호, 희사, 자선

Owing to this impoverishment of our, at the best of times, very in­adequate vocabulary of psychological and spiritual terms, the word 'love' has had to assume an added burden. 

'God is love,' we repeat glibly, and that we must 'love our neighbours as our­selves'; but 'love,' unfortunately, stands for everything 

from what happens when, on the screen, two close-ups rapturously collide 

to what happens when a John Woolman or a Peter Claver feels a concern about Negro slaves, 

because they are temples of the Holy Spirit

—from what happens when crowds shout and sing and wave flags in the Sport-Palast or the Red Square 

to what happens when a solitary contemplative becomes absorbed in the prayer of simple regard. 

Ambiguity in vocab­ulary leads to confusion of thought; 

and, in this matter of love, confusion of thought admirably serves the purpose of an un­regenerate and divided human nature that is determined to make the best of both worlds—to say that 

it is serving God, while in fact it is serving Mammon, Mars or Priapus.[98] 

--

Mammon /ˈmæmən/ in the New Testament of the Bible is commonly thought to mean money, material wealth, or any entity that promises wealth, and is associated ..

 Mars was the Roman god of war and second only to Jupiter in the Roman pantheon

In Greek mythology, Priapus is a minor rustic fertility god, protector of livestock, 

--

Systematically or in brief aphorism and parable, 

the masters of the spiritual life have described the nature of true charity 

have distinguished it from the other, lower forms of love. 

Let us consider its principal characteristics in order. 

First, charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good. 

God is to be loved for Himself, not for his gifts, and persons and things are to be loved for God's sake, because they are temples of the Holy Ghost. 

Moreover, since charity is disinterested, it must of necessity be universal.

Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.... Of all the motions and affections of the soul, love is the only one by means of which the creature, though not on equal terms, is able to treat with the Creator and to give back some­thing resembling what has been given to it. . . . When God loves, He only desires to be loved, knowing that love will render all those who love Him happy.

Sr. Bernard

For as love has no by-ends, wills nothing but its own increase, so everything is as oil to its flame; it must have that which it wills and carnxot be disappointed, because everything (including Un­kindness on the part of those loved) naturally helps it to live in its own way and to bring forth its own work.

William Law

[ 99]

Those who speak ill of me are really my good friends. [?]

When, being slandered, I cherish neither enmity nor preference, There grows within me the power of love and humility, which is born of the Unborn.

Kung-ckia Ta-shik

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love their cow—for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advan­tage. Indeed, I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.

Eckhart

A beggar, Lord, I ask of Thee

More than a thousand kings could ask.

Each one wants something, which he asks of Thee.

I come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

I will have nothing to do with a love which would be for God or in God. This is a love which pure love cannot abide; for pure love is God Himself.

St. Catherine of Genoa

As a mother, even at the risk of her own life, protects her son, her only son, so let there be good will without measure between all beings. Let good will without measure prevail in the whole world, above, below, around, unstinted, unmixed with any feel­ing of differing or opposing interests. If a man remain steadfastly in this state of mind all the time he is awake, then is come to pass the saying, 'Even in this world holiness has been found.'

Metta Sutta

Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.

Sri,nad Bliagavatam

[100]        

The second distinguishing mark of charity is that, unlike the lower forms of love, it is not an emotion. It begins as an act of the will and is consummated as a purely spiritual awareness, a unitive love-knowledge of the essence of its object.

Let everyone understand that real love of God does not consist in tear-shedding, nor in that sweetness and tenderness for which usually we long, just because they console us, but in serving God in justice, fortitude of soul and humility.

St. Teresa

The worth of love does not consist in high feelings, but in detach­ment, in patience under all trials for the sake of God whom we love.

St. John of the Cross

By love I do not mean any natural tenderness, which is more or less in people according to their constitution; but I mean a larger principle of the soul, founded in reason and piety, which makes us tender, kind and gentle to all our fellow creatures as creatures of God, and for his sake.

William Law

The nature of charity, or the love-knowledge of God, is defined by Shankara, the great Vedantist saint and philosopher of the ninth century, in the thirty-second couplet of his Viveka-Cliudamani.

Among the instruments of emancipation the supreme is devotion. 

Contemplation of the true form of the real Self (the Atman which is identical with Brahman) is said to be devotion.

In other words, the highest form of the love of God is an im­mediate spiritual intuition, by which 'knower, known and knowledge are made one.' [ 101]

The means to, and earlier stages of, this supreme love-knowledge of Spirit by spirit are described by Shankara in the preceding verses of his philosophical poem, and consist in acts of a will directed 

• towards the denial of self-ness in thought, feeling and action, 
• towards desirelessness and non-attachment or (to use the corresponding Christian term) 'holy indifference,' 
• towards a cheerful acceptance of affliction, without self-pity and without thought of returning evil for evil, and finally 
• towards unsleeping and one-pointed mindful­ness of the Godhead who is at once transcendent and, because transcendent, immanent in every soul.

It is plain that no distinct object whatever that pleases the will can be God; and, for that reason, if the will is to be united with Him, it must empty itself, cast away every disorderly affection of the desire, every satisfaction it may distinctly have, high and low, temporal and spiritual, so that, purified and cleansed from all unrully satisfactions, joys and desires, it may be wholly occupied, with all its affections, in loving God.

For if the will can in any way comprehend God and be united with Him, it cannot be through any capacity of the desire, but only by love; and as all the delight, sweetness and joy, of which the will is sensible, is not love, it follows that ione of these pleasing impressions can be the adequate means of uniting the will to God. These adequate means consist in an act of the will.

And because an act of the will is quite distinct from feeling, it is by an act that the will is united with God and rests in Him; that act is love. This union is never wrought by feeling or exertion of the desire; for these remain in the soul as aims and ends. It is only as motives of love that feelings can be of service, if the will is bent on going onwards, and for nothing else....

He, then, is very unwise who, when sweetness and spiritual delight fail him, thinks for that reason that God has abandoned him; and when he finds them again, rejoices and is glad, thinking that he has in that way come to possess God.

More unwise still is he who goes about seeking for sweetness in God, rejoices in it, and dwells upon it; for in so doing he is not seeking after God with the will grounded in the emptiness of faith and charity, but only in spiritual sweetness and delight, which is a created thing, following herein in his own will and fond pleasure. . . . It is impossible for the will to attain to the sweetness and bliss of the divine union otherwise than- in detach­ment, in refusing to the desire every pleasure in the things of heaven and earth.

St. John of the Cross

Love (the sensible love of the emotions) does not unify.

True, it unites in act; but it does not unite in essence.

Eckhart

The reason why sensible love even of the highest object cannot unite the soul to its divine Ground in spiritual essence is that, like all other emotions of the heart, sensible love intensifies that selfness, which is the final obstacle in the way of such union. 'The damned are in eternal movement without any mixture of rest; 

we mortals, who are yet in this pilgrimage, have now movement, now rest.. . . Only God has repose without move­ment.' 

Consequently it is only if we abide in the peace of God that passes all understanding that we can abide in the knowledge and love of God. 

And to the peace that passes under­standing 

we have to go by way of the humble and very ordi­nary peace which can be understood by everybody

- peace between nations and within them (for wars and violent revo­lutions have the effect of more or less totally eclipsing God for the majority of those involved in them); 

- peace between individuals and within the individual soul (for personal quarrels and private fears, loves, hates, ambitions and distrac­tions are, in their petty way, no less fatal to the develop­ment of the spiritual life than are the greater calamities).

 We have to will the peace that it is within our power to get for ourselves and others, in order that we may be fit to receive that other peace, which is a fruit of the Spirit and the con­dition, as St. Paul implied, of the unitive knowledge-love of God.[ 103]

It is by means of tranquillity of mind that you are able to trans­mute this false mind of death and rebirth into the clear Intuitive Mind and, by so doing, to realize the primal and enlightening Essence of Mind. You should make this your starting point for spiritual practices. Having harmonized your starting point with your goal, you will be able by right practice to attain your true end of perfect Enlightenment.

If you wish to tranquilize your mind and restore its original purity, you must proceed as you would do if you were purifying a jar of muddy water. You first let it stand, until the sediment settles at the bottom, when the water will become clear, which corresponds with the state of the mind before it was troubled by defiling passions. Then you carefully strain off the pure water. When the mind becomes tranquillized and concentrated into perfect unity, then all things will be seen, not in their separate­ness, but in their unity, wherein there is no place for the passions to enter, and which is in full conformity with the mysterious and indescribable purity of Nirvana.

Surangama Sutra

This identity out of the One into the One and with the One is the source and fountainhead and breaking forth of glowing Love.

Eckhart

Spiritual progress, as we have had occasion to discover in several other contexts, is always spiral and reciprocal. 

Peace from dis­tractions and emotional agitations is the way to charity; and charity, or unitive love-knowledge, is the way to the higher peace of God. 

And the same is true of humility, which is the third characteristic mark of charity. Humility is a necessary condition of the highest form of love, and the highest form of love makes possible the consummation of humility in a total self-naughting.

Would you become a pilgrim on the road of Love?

The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.

Ansari of Herat

[104]

I have but one word to say to you concerning love for your neighbour, namely that nothing save humility can mould you to it; nothing but the consciousness of your own weakness can make you indulgent and pitiful to that of others. You will answer, I quite understand that humility should produce for­bearance towards others, but how am I first to acquire humility? Two things combined will bring that about; you must never separate them. The first is contemplation of the deep gulf; whence God's all-powerful hand has drawn you out, and over which He ever holds you, so to say, suspended. The second is the presence of that all-penetrating God. It is only in beholding and loving God that we can learn forgetfulness of self, measure duly the nothingness which has dazzled us, and accustom our­selves thankfully to decrease beneath that great Majesty which absorbs all things. Love God and you will be humble; love God and you will throw off the love of self; love God and you will love all that He gives you to love for love of Him.

Fénelon

Feelings, as we have seen, may be of service as motives of charity; 

but charity as charity has its beginning in the will

• —will to peace and humility in oneself, 
• will to patience and kind­ness towards one's fellow-creatures, 
• will to that disinterested love of God which 'asks nothing and refuses nothing.' 

But the will can be strengthened by exercise and confirmed by perseverance. 

This is very clearly brought out in the follow­ing record—delightful for its Boswellian vividness—of a con­versation between the young Bishop of Belley and his beloved friend and master, François de Sales.

I once asked the Bishop of Geneva what one must do to attain perfection. 'You must love God with all your heart,' he answered, 'and your neighbour as yourself.' [ 105]

'I did not ask wherein perfection lies,' I rejoined, 'but how to attain it.' 'Charity,' he said again, 'that is both the means and the end,

the only way by which we can reach that perfection 

which is, after all, but Charity itself. . . .

Just as the soul is the life of the body, so charity is the life of the soul.'

'I know all that,' I said. 'But I want to know how one is to love God with all one's heart and one's neighbour as oneself.'

But again he answered, 'We must love God with all our hearts, and our neighbour as ourselves.'

'I am no further than I was,' I replied. 'Tell me how to acquire such love.'

'The best way, the shortest and easiest way of loving God with all one's heart is to love Him wholly and heartily!'

He would give no other answer. At last, however, the Bishop said, 'There are many besides you who want me to tell them of methods and systems and secret ways of becoming perfect, and I can only tell them that the sole secret is a hearty love of God, and the only way of attaining that love is by loving.

 You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving.

 All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves. If you want to love God, go on loving Him more and more. Begin as a mere apprentice, and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master in the art. Those who have made most progress will continually press on, never believ­ing themselves to have reached their end; for charity should go on increasing until we draw our last breath.'

Jean Pierre Camus

The passage 

from what St. Bernard calls the 'carnal love' of the sacred humanity to the spiritual love of the Godhead, 

from the emotional love that can only unite lover and beloved in act to the perfect charity which unifies them in spiritual substance, 

is reflected in religious practice as the passage from meditation, discursive and affective, to infused contemplation. 

All Chris­tian writers insist that the spiritual love of the Godhead is superior to the carnal love of the humanity, 

which serves as introduction and means to man's final end in unitive love-knowledge of the divine Ground; 

but all insist no less strongly that carnal love is a necessary introduction and an indispensable means. 

Oriental writers would agree that this is true for many persons, but not for all, since there are some born contem-platives who are able to 'harmonize their starting point with their goal' and to embark directly upon the Yoga of Know­ledge. It is from the point of view of the born contemplative that the greatest of Taoist philosophers writes in the following passage.[106] 

Those men who in a special way regard Heaven as Father and have, as it were, a personal love for it, how much more should they love what is above Heaven as Father! Other men in a special way regard their rulers as better than themselves and they, as it were, personally die for them. How much more should they die for what is truer than a ruler! When the springs dry up, the fish are all together on dry land. They then moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with forgetting each other in a river or lake.

Chuang Tsu

The slime of personal and emotional love is remotely similar to the water of the Godhead's spiritual being, but of inferior quality and (precisely because the love is emotional and there­fore personal) of insufficient quantity. Having, by their volun­tary ignorance, wrong-doing and wrong being, caused the divine springs to dry up, human beings can do something to mitigate the horrors of their situation by 'keeping one another wet with their slime.' But there can be no happiness or safety in time and no deliverance into eternity, until they give up thinking that slime is enough and, by abandoning themselves to what is in fact their element, call back the eternal waters. 

To those who seek first the Kingdom of God, all the rest will be added. From those who, like the modern idolaters of pro­gress, seek first all the rest in the expectation that (after the harnessing of atomic power and the next revolution but three) the Kingdom of God will be added, everything will be taken away. And yet we continue to trust in progress, to regard personal slime as the highest form of spiritual moisture and to prefer an agonizing and impossible existence on dry land to love, joy and peace in our native ocean.[ 107]

The sect of lovers is distinct from all others;

Lovers have a religion and a faith all their own.

Jolal-uddin Rumi

The soul lives by that which it loves rather than in the body which it animates. For it has not its life in the body, but rather gives it to the body and lives in that which it loves.

St. John of the Cross

Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinctions between what hinders and what helps itself.

St. Augustine

The distinguishing marks of charity are disinterestedness, tranquillity and humility. But where there is disinterestedness there is neither greed for personal advantage nor fear for per­sonal loss or punishment; where there is tranquillity, there is neither craving nor aversion, but a steady will to conform to the divine Tao or Logos on every level of existence and a steady awareness of the divine Suchness and what should be one's own relations to it; and where there is humility there is no censoriousness and no glorification of the ego or any pro­jected alter-ego at the expense of others, who are recognized as having the same weaknesses and faults, but also the same cap­acity for transcending them in the unitive knowledge of God, as one has oneself. From all this it follows that charity is the root and substance of morality, and that where there is little charity there will be much avoidable evil. All this has been summed up in Augustine's formula: 'Love, and do what you like.'[108]  

Among the later elaborations of the Augustinian theme we may cite the following from the writings of John Everard, one of those spiritually minded seventeenth-century divines whose teachings fell on the deaf ears of warring factions and, when the revolution and the military dictatorship were at an end, on the even deafer ears of Restoration clergymen and their successors in the Augustan age. (Just how deaf those ears could be we may judge by what Swift wrote of his beloved and morally perfect Houyhnhnms. The subject matter of their conversations, as of their poetry, consisted of such things as 'friendship and benevolence, the visible operations of nature or ancient traditions; the bounds and limits of virtue, the unerring rules of reason.' Never once do the ideas of God, or charity, or deliverance engage their minds. Which shows sufficiently clearly what the Dean of St. Patrick's thought of the religion by which he made his money.)

Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can! Just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, "You are at liberty to beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to.'

Jo/in Everara'

From this it follows that, where there is charity, there can be no coercion.

God forces no one, for love cannot compel, and God's service, therefore, is a thing of perfect freedom.

Hans Den/i

But just because it cannot compel, charity has a kind of author­ity, a non-coercive power, by means of which it defends itself and gets its beneficent will done in the world—not always, of course, not inevitably or automatically (for individuals and, still more, organizations can be impenetrably armoured against divine influence), but in a surprisingly large number of cases.

Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed.

Lao Tu

'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me'—in those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease.

'He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me'—in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.

For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time—this is an old rule.

D/zammapada

----

Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness. 

We begin by lacking charity towards Nature, so that instead of trying to co-operate with Tao or the Logos on the inanimate and sub-human levels, we try to dominate and exploit, we waste the earth's mineral resources, ruin its soil, ravage its forests, pour filth into its rivers and poisonous fumes into its air. 

From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art—a lovelessness so extreme that we have effec­tively killed all the fundamental or useful arts and set up various kinds of mass-production by machines in their place. 

And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to per­form the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates and by the interminable paper work connected with mass-production and mass-distribution. 

With mass-production and mass-distribution go mass-financing, 

and the three have conspired to expropriate ever-increasing num­bers of small owners of land and productive equipment, 

thus reducing the sum of freedom among the majority and increas­ing the power of a minority to exercise a coercive control over the lives of their fellows. 

This coercively controlling minority is composed of private capitalists or governmental bureaucrats or of both classes of bosses acting in collaboration—and, of course, the coercive and therefore essentially loveless nature of the control remains the same, whether the bosses call them‑selves 'company directors' or 'civil servants.' [110] 

The only differ­ence between these two kinds of oligarchical rulers is 

that the first derive more of their power from wealth than from posi­tion within a conventionally respected hierarchy, 

while the second derive more power from position than from wealth. 

Upon this fairly uniform groundwork of loveless relationships are imposed 

others, which vary widely from one society to another, according to local conditions and local habits of thought and feeling. 

Here are a few examples: contempt and exploitation of coloured minorities living among white majori­ties, or of coloured majorities governed by minorities of white imperialists; hatred of Jews, Catholics, Freemasons or of any other minority whose language, habits, appearance or religion happens to differ from those of the local majority. 

And the crowning superstructure of uncharity is the organized loveless­ness of the relations between state and sovereign state—a love­lessness that expresses itself in the axiomatic assumption that 

it is right and natural for national organizations to behave like thieves and murderers, armed to the teeth and ready, at the first favourable opportunity, to be and kill. 

(Just how axiomatic is this assumption about the nature of nationhood is shown by the history of Central America. So long as the arbitrarily delimited territories of Central America were called provinces of the Spanish colonial empire, there was peace between their inhabitants. 

But early in the nineteenth century the various administrative districts of the Spanish empire broke from their allegiance to the 'mother country' and de­cided to become nations on the European model. 

Result: they immediately went to war with one another. 

Why? Because, by definition, a sovereign national state is an organ­ization that has the right and duty to coerce its members to steal and kill on the largest possible scale.)

'Lead us not into temptation' must be the guiding principle of all social organization, and the temptations to be guarded against and, so far as possible, eliminated by means of appro­priate economic and political arrangements are temptations against charity, that is to say, 

against the disinterested love of  God, Nature and man. [111]

First, the dissemination and general acceptance of any form of the Perennial Philosophy will do something to preserve men and women from the temptation to idolatrous worship of things in time

—church-worship, state-worship, revolutionary future-worship, humanistic self-worship, 

all of them essentially and necessarily opposed to charity. 

Next come decentralization, widespread private ownership of land and the means of production on a small scale, discouragement of monopoly by state or corporation, division of economic and political power (the only guarantee, as Lord Acton was never tired of insisting, of civil liberty under law).

 These social rearrangements would do much to prevent ambitious individuals, organizations and governments from being led into the temptation of behaving tyrannously; while co-operatives, democratically controlled professional organizations and town meetings would deliver the masses of the people from the temptation of making their decentralized individualism too rugged. 

But of course none of these intrinsi­cally desirable reforms can possibly be carried out, so long as it is thought right and natural that sovereign states should prepare to make war on one another. 

For modern war cannot be waged except by countries with an over-developed capital goods industry; countries in which economic power is wielded either by the state or by a few monopolistic corporations which it is easy to tax and, 

if necessary, temporarily to nationalize; countries where the labouring masses, being without property, are rootless, easily transferable from one place to another, highly regimented by factory discipline. 

Any decentralized society of free, uncoerced small owners, with a properly balanced economy must, in a war-making world such as ours, be at the mercy of one whose production is highly mechanized and centralized, whose people are without property and there­fore easily coercible, and whose economy is lop-sided. 

This is why the one desire of industrially undeveloped countries like Mexico and China is to become like Germany, or England, or the United States. So long as the organized lovelessness of war and preparation for war remains, there can be no mitigation, on any large, nation-wide or world-wide scale, of the organized lovelessness of our economic and political relation­ships.‑[iii]  

War and preparation for war are standing temptations to make the present bad, God-eclipsing arrangements of society progressively worse as technology becomes progressively more efficient.  

Perennial Phil Ch 1 THAT ART THOU [13,7296]

Perennial Phil Ch 1 THAT ART THOU [13,7296]

IN studying the Perennial Philosophy we can begin 

• either at the bottom, with practice and morality; 
• or at the top, with a consideration of metaphysical truths; 
• or, finally, in the middle, at the focal point where mind and matter, action and thought have their meeting place in human psychology.

• The lower gate is that preferred by strictly practical teachers —men who, like Gautama Buddha, have no use for speculation and whose primary concern is to put out in men's hearts the hideous fires of greed, resentment and infatuation.
•  Through the upper gate go those whose vocation it is to think and specu-late—the born philosophers and theologians. 
• The middle gate gives entrance to the exponents of what has been called 'spir­itual religion '—
• the devout contemplatives of India, 
• the Sufis of Islam, 
• the Catholic mystics of the later Middle Ages, and, 
• in the Protestant tradition, such men as Denk and Franck and Castellio, as Everard and John Smith and the first Quakers and William Law.

It is through this central door, and just because it is central, that we shall make our entry into the subject matter of this book. 

The psychology of the Perennial Philosophy has its source in metaphysics and issues logically in a characteristic way of life and system of ethics. Starting from this mid-point of doctrine, it is easy for the mind to move in either direction.

In the present section we shall confine our attention to but a single feature of this traditional psychology—the most import­ant, the most emphatically insisted upon by all exponents of the Perennial Philosophy and, we may add, the least psychological. For the doctrine that is to be illustrated in this section belongs to autology rather than psychology—to the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground.

[ autology  The study of oneself. ]

7 8 THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

 Based upon the direct experience of those who have fulfilled the necessary conditions of such knowledge, this teaching is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvarn asi ('That art thou'); 

• the Atman, or immanent eter­nal Self, is one with Brahman, 
• the Absolute Principle of all existence;

and the last end of every human being is to discover the fact for himself, to find out Who he really is.

The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without.

Eckhart

Only the transcendent, the completely other, can be immanent without being modified by the becoming of that in which it dwells. The Perennial Philosophy teaches that it is desirable and indeed necessary to know the spiritual Ground of things, not only within the soul, but also outside in the world and, beyond world and soul, in its transcendent otherness—'in heaven.'

Though GOD is everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul. The natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee. But there is a root or depth of thee from whence all these facul­ties come forth, as lines from a centre, or as branches from the body of the tree. This depth is called the centre, the fund or bottom of the soul. This depth is the unity, the eternity—I had alm'ost said the infinity—of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it rest but the infinity of God.

William Law

This extract seems to contradict what was said above; but the contradiction is not a real one. God within and God without —these are two abstract notions, which can be entertained by the understanding and expressed in words. But the facts to which these notions refer cannot be realized and experienced except in 'the deepest and most central part of the soul.'

[ 9]

 And this is true no less of God without than of God within. But though the two abstract notions have to be realized (to use a spatial metaphor) in the same place, the intrinsic nature of the realization of God within is qualitatively different from that of the realization of God without, and each in turn is different from that of the realization of the Ground as simultaneously within and without—as the Self of the perceiver and at the same time (in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita) as 'That by which all this world is pervaded.'

When Svetaketu was twelve years old he was sent to a teacher, with whom he studied until he was twenty-four. After learning all the Vedas, he returned home full of conceit in the belief that he was consummately well educated, and very censorious [severely critical of others.]　.

His father said to him, 'Svetaketu, my child, you who are so full of your learning and so censorious, have you asked for that knowledge by which we hear the unhearable, by which we per­ceive what cannot be perceived and know what cannot be known?'
'What is that knowledge, sir?' asked Svetaketu.
His father replied, 'As by knowing one lump of clay all that is made of clay is known, the difference being only in name, but the truth being that all is clay—so, my child, is that knowledge, knowing which we know all.'
'But surely these venerable teachers of mine are ignorant of this knowledge; for if they possessed it they would have im­parted it to me. Do you, sir, therefore give me that knowledge.'
'So be it,' said the father.... And he said, 'Bring m&a fruit of the nyagrodha tree.'

'Here is one, sir.'
'Break it.'
'It is broken, sir.'
'What do you see there?'
'Some seeds, sir, exceedingly small.'
'Break one of these.'
'It is broken, sir.'
'What do you see there?'
'Nothing at all.'
The father said, 'My son, that subtle essence which you do not
perceive there—in that very essence stands the being of the huge
nyagrodha tree. In that which is the subtle essence all that exists
has its self. That is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu,
art That.'

'Pray, sir,' said the son, 'tell me more.'
'Be it so, my child,' the father replied; and he said, 'Place
this salt in water, and come to me tomorrow morning.'
The son did as he was told.

Next morning the father said, 'Bring me the salt which you put
in the water.'
The son looked for it, but could not find it; for the salt, of
course, had dissolved.

The father said, 'Taste some of the water from the surface of
the vessel. How is it?'

'Salty.'
'Taste some from the middle. How is it?'
'Salty.'
'Taste some from the bottom. How is it?'
'Salty.'

The father said, 'Throw the water away and then come back
to me again.'
The son did so; but the salt was not lost, for salt exists for
ever.
Then the father said, 'Here likewise in this body of yours, 
my son, you do not perceive the True; but there in fact it is. 
In that which is the subtle essence, all that exists has its self. That 
is the True, that is the Self, and thou, Svetaketu, art That.'

From the Cliandogya Upanishad

The man who wishes to know the 'That' which is 'thou' may set to work in any one of three ways. 

• He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of 'dying to self'—self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feel-ing—come at last to a knowledge of the Self, the Kingdom of God that is within. 
• Or else he may begin with the thous existing outside himself, and may try to realize their essential unity with God and, through God, with one another and with his own being. 
• Or, finally (and this is doubtless the best way), he may seek to approach the ultimate That both from within and from without, so that he comes to realize God experimentally as at once the principle of his own thou and of all other thous, animate and inanimate. 

[11] 

The completely illuminated human being knows, with Law, that God 'is present in the deepest and most central part of his own soul'; 

but he is also and at the same time one of those who, in the words of Plotinus, 

see all things, not in process of becoming, but in Being, 

and see themselves in the other. 

Each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world. 

Therefore All is everywhere. 

Each is there All, and All is each. 

Man as he now is has ceased to be the All. 

But when he ceases to be an individual, 

he raises himself again and penetrates the whole world.

[Plotinus was a major Hellenistic Greek philosopher born and raised in Roman Egypt, regarded by modern scholarship as the founder of Neoplatonism.]

It is from the more or less obscure intuition of the oneness that is the ground and principle of all multiplicity that philosophy takes its source. And not alone philosophy, but natural science as well. All science, in Meyerson's phrase, is the reduction of multiplicities to identities. Divining the One within and be­yond the many, we find an intrinsic plausibility in any explana­tion of the diverse in terms of a single principle.

The philosophy of the Upanishads reappears, developed and enriched, in the Bhagavad-Gita and was finally systematized, in the ninth century of our era, by Shankara. Shankara's teaching (simultaneously theoretical and practical, as is that of all true exponents of the Perennial Philosophy) is summarized in his versified treatise, Viveka-Chudamani ('The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom'). All the following passages are taken from this conveniently brief and untechnical work.

The Atman is that by which the universe is pervaded, but which nothing pervades; which causes all things to shine, but which all things cannot make to shine.
The nature of the one Reality must be known by one's own clear spiritual perception; it cannot be known through a pandit (learned man). Similarly the form of the moon can only be known through one's own eyes. How can it be known through others?

Who but the Atman is capable of removing the bonds of igno­rance, passion and self-interested action?

Liberation cannot be achieved except by the perception of the identity of the individual spirit with the universal Spirit. 

It can be achieved neither by Yoga (physical training), nor by Sankhya (speculative philosophy), nor by the practice of religious cere­monies, nor by mere learning.

Disease is not cured by pronouncing the name of medicine, but by taking medicine. Deliverance is not achieved by repeating the word 'Brahman,' but by directly experiencing Brahman.

The Atman is the Witness of the individual mind and its opera­tions. It is absolute knowledge..

The wise man is one who understands that the essence of Brahman and of Atman is Pure Consciousness, and who realizes their absolute identity. The identity of Brahman and Atman is affirmed in hundreds of sacred texts....

Caste, creed, family and lineage do not exist in Brahman. Brah­man has neither name nor form, transcends merit and demerit, is beyond time, space and the objects of sense-experience. Such is Brahman, and 'thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness.

Brahman is  (in Hinduism) the ultimate reality underlying all phenomena.

Brahman is formless but is the birthplace of all forms in visible reality

Supreme, beyond the power of speech to express, Brahman may yet be apprehended by the eye of pure illumination. Pure, abso­lute and eternal Reality—such is Brahman, and 'thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness....

Though One, Brahman is the cause of the many. There is no other cause. And yet Brahman is independent of the law of causation. Such is Brahman, and 'thou art That.' Meditate upon this truth within your consciousness.

The truth of Brahman may be understood intellectually. But (even in those who so understand)

the desire for personal separ­ateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginning-less time. 

It creates the notion, 'I am the actor, I am he who experiences.' 

This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. 

It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. 

By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separ­ateness is called Liberation.

It is ignorance that causes us to identify ourselves with the body, the ego, the senses, or anything that is not the Atman. 

He is a wise man who overcomes this ignorance by devotion to the Atman.

When a man follows the way of the world, or the way of the flesh, or the way of tradition (i.e. when he believes in religious rites and the letter of the scriptures, as though they were intrinsically sacred), knowledge of Reality cannot arise in him.

The wise say that this threefold way is like an iron chain, binding the feet of him who aspires to escape from the prison-house of this world. He who frees himself from the chain achieves De­liverance.

Shankara [ Adi Shankara, 8th century Hindu philosopher ]

deliverance

- the state of being saved from a painful or bad experience:

We pray for deliverance from our sins.

The families hoped for the safe deliverance of their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

----

 More examples

People in the country gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them.

Her deliverance came after a three-year legal battle by her parents to allow her to die with dignity.

Penelope was promised deliverance from her suffering.

----

In the Taoist formulations of the Perennial Philosophy there is an insistence, no less forcible than in the Upanishads, the Gita and the writings of Shankara, upon the universal immanence of the transcendent spiritual Ground of all existence. 

'What fol­lows is an extract from one of the great classics of Taoist litera­ture, the Book of Chuang Tzu, most of which seems to have [14]  been written around the turn of the fourth and third cen­turies B.C.

Immanence, in philosophy and theology, a term applied, in contradistinction to “transcendence,” to the fact or condition of being entirely within something (from Latin immanere, “to dwell in, remain”).

• Do not ask whether the Principle is in this or in that; it is in all beings. 
• It is on this account that we apply to it the epithets of supreme, universal, total.  
• It has ordained that all things should be limited, but is Itself unlimited, infinite. 
• As to what pertains to manifestation, the Principle causes the succession of its phases, but is not this succession. 
• It is the author of causes and effects, but is not the causes and effects. 
• It is the author of condensations and dissipations (birth and death, changes of state), but is not itself condensations and dissipations. 
• All proceeds from It and is under its influence. 
• It is in all things, but is not identical with beings, for it is neither differentiated nor limited.

Chuang Tu

From Taoism we pass to that Mahayana Buddhism which, in the Far East, came to be so closely associated with Taoism, bor­rowing and bestowing until the two came at last to be fused in what is known as Zen. The Lankavatara Sutra, from which the following extract is taken, was the scripture which the founder of Zen Buddhism expressly recommended to his first disciples.

Those who vainly reason without understanding the truth are lost in the jungle of the Vijnanas (the various forms of relative knowledge), running about here and there and trying to justify their view of ego-substance.

The self realized in your inmost consciousness appears in its purity; this is the Tathagata-garbha (literally, Buddha-womb), which is not the realm of those given over to mere reasoning.

Pure in its own nature and free from the category of finite and infinite, Universal Mind is the undefiled Buddha-womb, which is wrongly apprehended by sentient beings.

Lankavatara Sutra

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra (Sanskrit: लंकावतारसूत्र, Standard Tibetan: ལང་ཀར་བཤེགས་པའི་མདོ་) is a prominent Mahayana Buddhist sūtra. This sūtra recounts a teaching primarily between Gautama Buddha and a bodhisattva named Mahāmati, "Great Wisdom". The sūtra is set in Laṅkā, the island fortress capital of Rāvaṇa, the king of the rākṣasa demons. The title of this text roughly translates as "Scripture of the Descent into Laṅkā".

The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra figured prominently in the development of Chinese, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhism. It is notably an important sūtra in Chan Buddhism and Japanese Zen.

능가경 위키백과

- 《능가경(楞伽經)》(산스크리트어: लंकावतारसूत्र 랑카바타라 수트라)은 후기 대승불교의 경전이다.

One Nature, perfect and pervading, circulates in all natures, 

One Reality, all-comprehensive, contains within itself all realities. 

The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water, 

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon.

The Dharma-body '(the Absolute) of all the Buddhas enters into
my own being.
And my own being is found in union with theirs.
The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame;
Like space it knows no boundaries,
Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and
fullness.

It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it;
You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it,
And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way.
You remain silent and it speaks; you speak, and it is dumb;
The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.

Yung-chia Ta-shii

현각 (당나라) 위키백과

현각(玄覺: 665~713) 또는 영가현각(永嘉玄覺)은 중국 선종의 승려이다

I am not competent, nor is this the place to discuss the doc­trinal differences between Buddhism and Hinduism. Let it suffice to point out that, when he insisted that human beings are by nature 'non-Atman,' the Buddha was evidently speak­ing about the personal self and not the universal Self. The Brahman controversialists, who appear in certain of the Pali scriptures, never so much as mention the Vedanta doctrine of the identity of Atman and Godhead and the non-identity of ego and Atman. 

What they maintain and Gautama denies is the substantial nature and eternal persistence of the individual psyche. 'As an unintelligent man seeks for the abode of music in the body of the lute, so does he look for a soul within the skandhas (the material and psychic aggregates, of which the individual mind-body is composed).' 

About the existence of the Atman that is Brahman, as about most other metaphysical matters, 

the Buddha declines to speak, on the ground that such discussions do not tend to edification or spiritual progress among the members of a monastic order, such as he had founded. 16

But though it has its dangers, though it may become the most absorbing, because the most serious and noblest, of distractions, metaphysical thinking is unavoidable and finally necessary. Even the Hinayanists found this, and the later Mahayanists were to develop, in connection with the practice of their religion, a splendid and imposing system of cosmo­logical, ethical and psychological thought. 

This system was based upon the postulates of a strict idealism and professed to dispense with the idea of God. But moral and spiritual experi­ence was too strong for philosophical theory, and under the inspiration of direct experience, the writers of the Mahayana sutras found themselves using all their ingenuity to explain why the Tathagata and the Bodhisattvas display an infinite charity towards beings that do not really exist. 

At the same time they stretched the framework of subjective idealism so as to make room for Universal Mind; 

qualified the idea of soullessness with the doctrine that,

if purified, the individual mind can identify itself with the Universal Mind or Buddha-womb; and, 

while maintaining godlessness, asserted that this realizable Uni­versal Mind is the inner consciousness of the eternal Buddha and that the Buddha-mind is associated with 'a great com­passionate heart' which desires the liberation of every sentient being and bestows divine grace on all who make a serious effort to achieve man's final end. 

In a word, despite their inaus­picious vocabulary, the best of the Mahayana sutras contain an authentic formulation of the Perennial Philosophy—a formula­tion which in some respects (as we shall see when we come to the section, 'God in the World') is more complete than any other.

In India, as in Persia, Mohammedan thought came to be enriched by the doctrine that God is immanent as well as transcendent, while to Mohammedan practice were added the moral disciplines and 'spiritual exercises,' by means of which the soul is prepared for contemplation or the unitive know­ledge of the Godhead. 

It is a significant historical fact that the poet-saint Kabir is claimed as a co-religionist both by Moslems and Hindus. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the perse­cuting and make the wars. [ 17]

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray.

Kabir

----

That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. 

For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often 'wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. 

Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. 

In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.' 

For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning 'two' should connote badness. 

The Greek prefix dys-(as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonourable) are both derived from 'duo.' 

The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue ('blunder,' liter­ally 'two-sight'). 

Traces of that 'second which leads you astray' can be found in 'dubious,' 'doubt' and Zwefl—for to doubt is to be double-minded. 

Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its 'two-timers.' 

Ob­scurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy 'two' makes another decisive appearance.

-----

Here it may be remarked that the cult of unity on the politi­cal level is only an idolatrous ersat for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spiritual levels. Totalitarian regimes justify their existence by means of a philosophy of political monism, according to which the state is God on earth, unifica­tion under the heel of the divine state is salvation, and all means to such unification, however intrinsically wicked, are right and may be used without scruple. 

This political monism leads in practice to excessive privilege and power for the few
[18]  and oppression for the many, to discontent at home and war abroad. 

But excessive privilege and power are standing tempt­ations to pride, greed, vanity and cruelty; oppression results in fear and envy; war breeds hatred, misery and despair. All such negative emotions are fatal to the spiritual life. 

Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit can come to the unitive know­ledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another.

-----

Among the Christians and the Sufis, to whose writings we now return, the concern is primarily with the human mind and its divine essence.

My Me is God, 

nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.

St. Catherine of Genoa

In those respects in which the soul is unlike God, 

it is also unlike itself.

St. Bernard

I went from God to God, 

until they cried from me in me, 'O thou I!'

Bayaid of Bistun

Two of the recorded anecdotes about this Sufi saint deserve to be quoted here.

 'When Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, "Four years." 

They said, "How can that be?" 

He answered, "I have been veiled from God by the world for seventy years, 

but I have seen Him during the last four years. 

The period during which one is veiled does not belong to one's life." 

On another occasion someone knocked at the saint's door and cried, 

Is Bayazid here?' 

Bayazid answered, 'is anybody here except God?'

[ 19]

To gauge the soul we must gauge it with God, 

for the Ground of God and the Ground of the Soul are one and the same.

Eckhart

The spirit possesses God essentially in naked nature, and God the spirit.

Ruysbroeck

For though she sink all sinking in the oneness of divinity, 

she never touches bottom. 

For it is of the very essence of the soul that she is powerless to plumb the depths of her creator. 

And here one cannot speak of the soul any more, 

for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. 

There she is no more called soul, but is called immeasurable being.

Eckhart

The knower and the known are one. 

Simple people imagine that they should see God, 

as if He stood there and they here. 

This is not so. 

God and I, we are one in knowledge.

Eckhart

'I live, yet not I, but Christ in me.' 

Or perhaps it might be more accurate to use the verb transitively and say, 

'I live, yet not I; for it is the Logos who lives me'

—lives me as an actor lives his part. 

In such a case, of course, the actor is always infinitely superior to the role. 

Where real life is concerned, there are no Shakespearean characters,, 

there are only Addi-sonian Catos or, more often, grotesque Monsieur Perrichons and Chancy's Aunts 

mistaking themselves for Julius Caesar or the Prince of Denmark. 

But by a merciful dispensation it is always in the power of every dramatis persona to get his low, 

stupid lines pronounced and supernaturally transfigured by the divine equivalent of a Garrick.

O my God, how does it happen in this poor old world that 

Thou art so great and yet nobody finds Thee, that 

Thou callest so loudly and nobody hears Thee, that 

hou art so near and nobody [30] feels Thee, that 

Thou givest Thyself to everybody and nobody knows Thy name? 

Men flee from Thee and say they cannot find Thee; 

they turn their backs and say they cannot see Thee; 

they stop their ears and say they cannot hear Thee.

Hans Denk

----

Between the Catholic mystics of the fourteenth and fifteenth. centuries and the Quakers of the seventeenth 

there yawns a wide gap of time made hideous, so far as religion is concerned, with interdenominational wars and persecutions. 

But the gulf was bridged by a succession of men, whom Rufus Jones, in the only accessible English work devoted to their lives and teachings, has called the 'Spiritual Reformers.' 

Denk, Franck, Castellio, Weigel, Everard, the Cambridge Platonists—in spite of the murdering and the madness, the apostolic succession remains unbroken. The truths that had been spoken in the Theologia Germanica—that book which Luther professed to love so much and from which, if we may judge from his career, he learned so singularly little—were being uttered once again by Englishmen during the Civil War and under the Cromwellian dictatorship. The mystical tradition, perpetuated by the Protestant Spiritual Reformers, had become diffused, as it were, in the religious atmosphere of the time when George Fox had his first great 'opening' and knew by direct experience:

that Every Man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ, and I saw it shine through all; And that they that believed in it came out of Condemnation and came to the Light of Life, and became the Children of it; And that they that hated it and did not believe in it, were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ. This I saw in the pure Openings of Light, without the help of any Man, neither did I then know where to find it in the Scriptures, though afterwards, searching the Scrip­tures, I found it.

From Fox's Journal

[ 21]

-----

The doctrine of the Inner Light achieved a clearer formu­lation in the writings of the second generation of Quakers.

'There is wrote William Penn, 'something nearer to us than Scriptures, to wit, 

the Word in the heart from which all Scrip­tures come.' 

And a little later Robert Barclay sought to ex­plain the direct experience of tat tvam asi in terms of an Augustinian theology that had, of course, to be considerably stretched and trimmed before it could fit the facts. 

Man, he declared in his famous theses, is a fallen being, incapable of good, unless united to the Divine Light. 

This Divine Light is Christ within the human soul, and is as universal as the seed of sin. 

All men, heathen as well as Christian, are endowed with the Inward Light, 

even though they may know nothing of the outward history of Christ's life. Justification is for those who do not resist the Inner Light and so permit of a new birth of holiness within them.

Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, 

only it is unperceived.

Theologia Germanica

When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.

Sen T'sen

It is because we don't know Who we are, 

because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, 

that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. 

We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, 

by return­ing to our eternal Ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been. 

Plato speaks in the same sense when he says, in the Republic, that 

'the virtue of wis­dom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains.' 

And in the Theaetetus he makes the point, 

so frequently insisted upon by those who have practised spiritual religion, that 

it is only by becoming Godlike that we can know God—and 

to become Godlike is to identify ourselves with the divine element which in fact constitutes our essential nature, 

but of which, in our mainly voluntary ignorance, we choose to remain unaware.[22]

우리가 하나님을 알 수 있는 것은 오직 하나님을 닮음으로써만 가능하며, 하나님과 같이 된다는 것은 사실상 우리의 본질적인 본성을 구성하지만 주로 자발적인 무지에서 우리가 알지 못하기로 선택하는 신성한 요소와 우리 자신을 동일시하는 것입니다.

They are on the way to truth 

who apprehend God by means of the divine, Light by the light.

Philo

Philo was the exponent of the Hellenistic Mystery Religion which grew up, as Professor Goodenough has shown, among the Jews of the Dispersion, between about 200 BC and 100 A.D. 

Reinterpreting the Pentateuch in terms of a metaphysical system derived from Platonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism and Stoicism, 

Philo transformed the wholly transcendental and almost anthropomorphically personal God of the Old Testament 

into the immanent-transcendent Absolute Mind of the Perennial Philosophy. 

But even from the orthodox scribes and Pharisees of that momentous century which witnessed, along with the dissemination of Philo's doctrines, 

the first beginnings of Christianity and the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, even from the guardians of the Law we hear significantly mystical utterances. Hillel, the great rabbi whose teachings on humility and the love of God and man read like an earlier, cruder version of some of the Gospel sermons, is reported to have spoken these words to an assemblage in the courts of the Temple. 

'If I am here' (it is Jehovah who is speaking through the mouth of his prophet). 'everyone is here. If I am not here, no one is here.'

The Beloved is all in all; the lover merely veils Him; The Beloved is all that lives, the lover a dead thing.

Jalal-uddin Rumi.

There is a spirit in the soul, untouched by time and flesh, flowing from the Spirit, remaining in the Spirit, itself wholly spiritual. [ 23]

In  this principle is God, ever verdant, ever flowering in all the joy and glory of His actual Self. Sometimes I have called this prin­ciple the Tabernacle of the soul, sometimes a spiritual Light, anon I say it is a Spark. But now I say that it is more exalted over this and that than the heavens are exalted above the earth. So now I name it in a nobler fashion.... It is free of all names and void of all forms. It is one and simple, as God is one and simple, and no man can in any wise behold it.

Eckhart

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Crude formulations of some of the doctrines of the Peren­nial Philosophy are to be found in the thought-systems of the uncivilized and so-called primitive peoples of the world. 

Among the Maoris, for example, every human being is re­garded as a compound of four elements—a divine eternal principle, known as the toiora; an ego, which disappears at death; a ghost-shadow, or psyche, which survives death; and finally a body. 

Among the Oglala Indians the divine element is called the sican, and this is regarded as identical with the ton, or divine essence of the world. Other elements of the self are the nagi, or personality, and nya, or vital soul. 

After death the sican is reunited with the divine Ground of all things, the nagi survives in the ghost world of psychic phenomena and the niya disappears into the material universe.

In regard to no twentieth-century 'primitive' society can we rule out the possibility of influence by, or borrowing from, some higher culture. 

Consequently, we have no right to argue from the present to the past. Because many contemporary savages have an esoteric philosophy that is monotheistic with a monotheism that is sometimes of the 'That art thou' variety, we are not entitled to infer offhand that neolithic or palaeolithic men held similar views.
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More legitimate and more intrinsically plausible are the inferences that may be drawn from what we know about our own physiology and psychology. 

We know that human minds have proved themselves capable of everything from imbecility to Quantum Theory, from Mein Kampf and sadism to the  sanctity of Philip Neri, from metaphysics to crossword puzzles, power politics and the Missa Solemnis. [24] We also know that human minds are in some way associated with human brains, and we have fairly good reasons for supposing that there have been no considerable changes in the size and conforthation of human brains for a good many thousands of years. Conse­quently it seems justifiable to infer that human minds in the remote past were capable of as many and as various kinds and degrees of activity as are minds at the present time.

It is, however, certain that many activities undertaken by some minds at the present time were not, in the remote past, undertaken by any minds at all. For this there are several obvious reasons. Certain thoughts are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. 

Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in ques­tion are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present. For long periods of history and prehistory it would seem that men and women, though perfectly capable of doing so, did not wish to pay attention to problems which their descendants found absorbingly interest­ing. 

For example, there is no reason to suppose that, between the thirteenth century and the twentieth, the human mind underwent any kind of evolutionary change, comparable to the change, let us say, in the physical structure of the horse's foot during an incomparably longer span of geological time. 

What happened was that men turned their attention from cer­tain aspects of reality to certain other aspects. The result, among other things, was the development of the natural sciences. 

Our perceptions and our understanding are directed, in large measure, by our will. We are aware of, and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way. 

The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come to the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers—that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained.[ 25]

 It is clear that many of the things to which modern men have chosen to pay attention were ignored by their pre­decessors. Consequently the very means for thinking clearly and fruitfully about those things remained uninvented, not merely during prehistoric times, but even to the opening of the modern era.

The lack of a suitable vocabulary and an adequate frame of reference, and the absence of any strong and sustained desire to invent these necessary instruments of thought—here are two sufficient reasons why so many of the almost endless potential­ities of the human mind remained for so long unactualized. 

Another and, on its own level, equally cogent reason is this: much of the world's most original and fruitful thinking is done by people of poor physique and of a thoroughly unpractical turn of mind. Because this is so, and because the value of pure thought, whether analytical or integral, has everywhere been more or less clearly recognized, provision was and still is made by every civilized society for giving thinkers a measure of protection from the ordinary strains and stresses of social life. 

The hermitage, the monastery, the college, the academy and the research laboratory; the begging bowl, the endowment, patronage and the grant of taxpayers' money—such are the principal devices that have been used by actives to conserve that rare bird, the religious, philosophical, artistic or scientific contemplative. 

In many primitive Societies conditions are hard and there is no surplus wealth. The born contemplative has to face the struggle for existence and social predominance without protection. The result, in most cases, is that he either dies young or is too desperately busy merely keeping alive to be able to devote his attention to anything else. When this happens the prevailing philosophy will be that of the hardy, extraverted man of action.

All this sheds some light—dim, it is true, and merely inferential—on the problem of the perennialness of the Perennial Philosophy. 

In India the scriptures were regarded, not as revelations made at some given moment of history, but as eternal gospels, existent from everlasting to everlasting, inas­much as coeval with man, or for that matter with any other kind of corporeal or incorporeal being possessed of reason. [26]

 A similar point of view is expressed by Aristotle, who regards the fundamental truths of religion as everlasting and inde­structible. There have been ascents and falls, periods (literally 'roads around' or cycles) of progress and regress; but the great fact of God as the First Mover of a universe which partakes of his divinity has always been recognized. 

In the light of what we know about prehistoric man (and what we know amounts to nothing more than a few chipped stones, some paintings, drawings and sculptures) and of what we may legitimately infer from other, better documented fields of knowledge, what are we to think of these traditional doctrines? 

My own view is that they may be true. We know that born contemplatives in the realm both of analytic and of integral thought have turned up in fair numbers and at frequent inter­vals during recorded history. 

There is therefore every reason to suppose that they turned up before history was recorded. That many of these people died young or were unable to exer­cise their talents is certain. But a few of them must have sur­vived. In this context it is highly significant that, among many contemporary primitives, two thought-patterns are found—

• an exoteric pattern for the unphilosophic many and
•  an esoteric pattern (often monotheistic, with a belief in a God not merely of power, but of goodness and wisdom) for the initiated few. 

1. intended for or likely to be understood by the general public.
2. intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.

There is no reason to suppose that circumstances were any harder for prehistoric men than they are for many contempor­ary savages. But if an esoteric monotheism of the kind that seems to come natural to the born thinker is possible in modern savage societies, the majority of whose members accept the sort of polytheistic philosophy that seems to come natural to men of action, a similar esoteric doctrine might have been current in prehistoric societies. 

True, the modern esoteric doctrines may have been derived from higher cultures. But the signifi­cant fact remains that, if so derived, they yet had a meaning for certain members of the primitive society and were considered valuable enough to be carefully preserved. 27

We have seen that many thoughts are unthinkable apart from an appropriate vocabulary and frame of reference. But the fundamental ideas of the Perennial Philosophy can be formulated in a very simple vocabulary, and the experiences to which the ideas refer can and indeed must be had immediately and apart from any vocabulary whatsoever. 

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Strange openings and theophanies are granted to quite small children, who are often profoundly and permanently affected by these experiences. 

We have no reason to suppose that what happens now to persons with small vocabularies did not happen in remote antiquity. 

In the modern world (as Vaughan and Traherne and Wordsworth, among others, have told us) the child tends to grow out of his direct awareness of the one Ground of things; 

for the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral think­ing, whether on the 'psychic' or the spiritual level. 

Psychic preoccupations may be and often are a major obstacle in the way of genuine spirituality. [?]

In primitive societies now (and, presumably, in the remote past) there is much preoccupation with, and a widespread talent for, psychic thinking. 

But a few people may have worked their way through psychic into genuinely spiritual experience

—just as, even in modern indus­trialized societies, a few people work their way out of the prevailing preoccupation with matter and through the prevail­ing habits of analytical thought into the direct experience of the spiritual Ground of things.

Such, then, very briefly are the reasons for supposing that the historical traditions of oriental and our own classical antiquity may be true. 

It is interesting to find that at least one distinguished contemporary ethnologist is in agreement with Aristotle and the Vedantists. 

'Orthodox ethnology,' writes Dr. Paul Radin in his Primitive Man as Philosopher, 'has been nothing but an enthusiastic and quite uncritical attempt to apply the Darwinian theory of evolution to the facts of social experience.' And he adds that 'no progress in ethnology will be achieved until scholars rid themselves once and for all of the curious notion that everything possesses a history; 

until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man, as a social being, as specific physiological reactions are ultimate for him, as a biological being.'  28 

Among these ultimate concepts, in Dr. Radin's view, is that of mono­theism.   Such monotheism is often no more than the recog­nition of a single dark and numinous Power ruling the world. But it may sometimes be genuinely ethical and spiritual.

The nineteenth century's mania for history and prophetic Utopianism tended to blind the eyes of even its acutest thinkers to the timeless facts of eternity. Thus we find T. H. Green writing of mystical union as though it were an evolutionary process and not, as all the evidence seems to show, a state which man, as man, has always had it in his power to realize. 

'An animal organism, which had its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle.' 

But in actual fact it is only in regard to peripheral knowledge that there has been a genuine historical development. Without much lapse of time and much accumulation of skills and infor­mation, there can be but an imperfect knowledge of the material world. But direct awareness of the 'eternally complete consciousness,' which is the ground of the material world, is a possibility occasionally actualized by some human beings at almost any stage of their own personal development, from childhood to old age, and at any period of the race's history.