Perennial Phil Ch 2 THE NATURE OF THE GROUND [11,5593]

Perennial Phil Ch 2 THE NATURE OF THE GROUND [11,5593]

OUR starting point has been the psychological doctrine, 'That art thou.' 

The question that now quite naturally presents itself is a metaphysical one:

 'What is the That to which the thou can discover itself to be akin?

 essentially similar, related, or compatible

To this the fully developed Perennial Philosophy has at all times and in all places given fundamentally the same answer. 

The divine Ground of all existence is a spiritual Absolute, ineffable in terms of discursive thought, but (in certain circum­stances) susceptible of being directly experienced and realized by the human being. 

This Absolute is the God-without-form of Hindu and Christian mystical phraseology. 

The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive know­ledge of the divine Ground—the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to 'die to self' and so make room, as it were, for God. 

Out of any given generation of men and women very few will achieve the final end of human existence; but the opportunity for coming to unitive know­ledge will, in one way or another, continually be offered until all sentient beings realize Who in fact they are.

The Absolute Ground of all existence has a personal aspect. 

The activity of Brahman is Isvara, and Isvara is further mani­fested in the Hindu Trinity and, at a more distant remove, in the other deities or angels of the Indian pantheon. 

Analo­gously, for Christian mystics, the ineffable, attributeless God­head is manifested in a Trinity of Persons, of whom it is possible to predicate such human attributes as goodness, wis­dom, mercy and love, but in a supereminent degree.
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Definition of godhead신격

1: divine nature or essence

2  capitalized

a: GOD sense 1

b: the nature of God especially as existing in three persons —used with the

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Godhead in Christianity - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Godhead_in_Christianity

Godhead (or godhood) refers to the divinity or substance (ousia) of the Christian God, especially as existing in three persons — the Father, Son, and Holy ...

Godhead | theology | Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com › ... › Spirituality

Eckhart calls “Godhead” the origin of all things that is beyond God (God conceived as Creator). “God and the Godhead are as distinct as heaven and earth.” T

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ineffable 말로 표현할 수 없는

The divine Ground

Brahman

Brahman is the eternal, unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the divine ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being and everything beyond in this Universe.[64][65] The nature of Brahman is described as transpersonal, personal and impersonal by different philosophical schools. The word Brahman is derived from the verb brh (Sanskrit: to grow), and connotes greatness and infinity.

Brahman is talked of at two levels (apara and para). He is the fountainhead of all concepts but he himself cannot be conceived. He is the universal conceiver, universal concept and all the means of concept. Apara-Brahman is the same Para Brahma but for human understanding thought of as universal mind cum universal intellect from which all human beings derive an iota as their mind, intellect etc.[citation needed]

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https://sejinlifeforce.blogspot.com/2021/11/divine-ground-janet-smith-warfield.html

The perennial philosophy is not a formula for enlightenment, but its simple concepts have encouraged countless seekers to reach spiritual mastery. Although the perennial philosophy has far more to offer, here are four of its most basic and helpful concepts:

1. There is a Divine Ground that permeates the universe. The world we think we see is a temporary projection that originates from that Divine Ground
2. A change in consciousness is required to become aware of, and experience, the Divine Ground.
3. Everyone has the ability to experience the Divine.
4. Experiencing the Divine is life’s highest purpose.

Simply put: Life-giving intelligence permeates everything in existence. This intelligence wants to be known and can be known

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Finally there is an incarnation of God in a human being, who possesses the same qualities of character as the personal God, but who exhibits them under the limitations necessarily imposed by confinement within a material body born into the world at a given moment of time.

29 30 

 For Christians there has been and, ex hypotaesi, can be but one such divine incarnation; 

for Indians there can be and have been many. 

In Christendom as well as in the East, contemplatives who follow the path of devotion conceive of; and indeed directly perceive, the incarna­tion as a constantly renewed fact of experience. 

Christ is for ever being begotten within the soul by the Father, and 

the play of Krishna is the pseudo-historical symbol of an everlasting truth of psychology and metaphysics 

- the fact that, in relation to God, the personal soul is always feminine and passive.

Mahayana Buddhism teaches these same metaphysical doc­trines in terms of the 'Three Bodies' of Buddha—

1. the absolute Dharmakaya, known also as the Primordial Buddha, or Mind, or the Clear Light of the Void; 
2. the Sambhogakaya, corre­sponding to Isvara or the personal God of Judaism, Christian­ity and Islam; and 
3. finally the Nirmanakaya, the material body, in which the Logos is incarnated upon earth as a living, histor­ical Buddha.

logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) - the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning

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Among the Sufis, Al Haqq, the Real, seems to be thought of as the abyss of Godhead underlying the personal Allah, while the Prophet is taken out of history and regarded as the incarnation of the Logos.

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Some idea of the inexhaustible richness of the divine nature can be obtained by analysing, word by word, the invocation with which the Lord's Prayer begins

—'Our Father who art in heaven.' 

• God is ours—ours in the same intimate sense that our consciousness and life are ours. 
• But as well as immanently ours, God is also transcendently the personal Father, who loves his creatures and to whom love and allegiance are owed by them in return. 
• 'Our Father who art': when we come to consider the verb in isolation, we perceive that the immanent-transcendent personal God is also the immanent-transcendent One, the essence and principle of all existence. 
• And finally God's being is 'in heaven'; the divine nature is other than, and incommensurable with, the nature of the creatures in whom God is 

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 That is why we can attain to the unitive knowledge of God only when we become in some measure Godlike, only when we permit God's kingdom to come by making our own creaturely kingdom go.  [31]

unitive

1.  tending to unite or capable of uniting

2. characterized by unity

God may be worshipped and contemplated in any of his aspects. But to persist in worshipping only one aspect to the exclusion of all the rest is to run into grave spiritual peril.

 Thus, if we approach God with the preconceived idea that He is exclusively the personal, transcendental, all-powerful ruler of the world, we run the risk of becoming entangled in a religion of rites, propitiatory sacrifices (sometimes of the most horrible nature) and legalistic observances. 

Inevitably so; for if God is an unapproachable potentate out there, giving mysterious orders, this kind of religion is entirely appropriate to the cosmic situation. The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

Things are a great deal better when the transcendent, omni­potent personal God is regarded as also a loving Father. 

The sincere worship of such a God changes character as well as conduct, and does something to modify consciousness. 

But the complete transformation of consciousness, which is 'en­lightenment,' 'deliverance,' 'salvation,' comes only when God is thought of as the Perennial Philosophy affirms Him to be

—immanent as well as transcendent, 

supra-personal as well as personal

—and when religious practices are adapted to this conception.

transcendent경험을 초월한
beyond or above the range of normal or merely physical human experience.
immanent내재
existing or operating within; inherent.

When God is regarded as exclusively immanent, 

legalism and external practices are abandoned and 

there is a concentra­tion on the Inner Light. 

The dangers now are quietism and antinomianism, a partial modification of consciousness that is useless or even harmful, because it is not accompanied by the transformation of character which is the necessary prerequi­site of a total, complete and spiritually fruitful transformation of consciousness.


Finally it is possible to think of God as an exclusively supra-personal being. For many persons this conception is too 'philosophical' to provide an adequate motive for doing anything practical about their beliefs. Hence, for them, it is of no value.[32]

It would be a mistake, of course, to suppose that people who worship one aspect of God to the exclusion of all the rest must inevitably run into the different kinds of trouble described above. 

If they are not too stubborn in their ready-made beliefs, if they submit with docility to what happens to them in the process of worshipping, the God who is both immanent and transcendent, personal and more than personal, may reveal Himself to them in his fullness. 

Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is easier for us to reach our goal if we are not handi­capped by a set of erroneous or inadequate beliefs about the right way to get there and the nature of what we are looking for.

Who is God? I can think of no better answer than, He who is. Nothing is more appropriate to the eternity which God is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, or anything else of this sort, it is included in these words, namely, He is.

St. Bernard

The purpose of all words is to illustrate the meaning of an object. When they are heard, they should enable the hearer to understand this meaning, and this according to the four categories of sub­stance, of activity, of quality and of relationship. 

• For example, cow and horse belong to the category of substance. 
• He cooks or he prays belongs to the category of activity. 
• White and black belong to the category of quality. 
• Having money or possessing cows belongs to the category of relationship. 

 

• Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs, no common genus. 
• It cannot therefore be denoted by words which, like 'being' in the ordinary sense, signify a category of things. 
• Nor can it be denoted by quality, for it is without qualities; nor yet by activity, because it is without activity—'at rest, without parts or activity,' according to the Scriptures. 
• Neither can it be denoted by relationship, for it is 'without a second' and is not the object of anything but its own self. 

Therefore it cannot be defined by word or idea; as the Scripture says, it is the One 'before whom words recoil.'

Shankara  [33]

It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.
Truly, 'Only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences.'
He that has never rid himself of desire can see only the Outcomes.

Lao Tzu

One of the greatest favours bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is 

to enable it to see so distinctly and to feel so profoundly 

that it cannot comprehend God at all. 

These souls are herein somewhat like the saints in heaven, 

where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly 

that He is infinitely incom­prehensible; 

for those who have the less clear vision do not perceive so clearly as do these others how greatly He transcends their vision.

St. John of the Cross

• When I came out of the Godhead into multiplicity, then all things proclaimed, 'There is a God' (the personal Creator). 
• Now this cannot make me blessed, for hereby I realize myself as creature. 
• But in the breaking through I am more than all creatures; I am neither God nor creature; I am that which I was and shall re­main, now and for ever more. 
• There I receive a thrust which carries me above all angels. 
• By this thrust I become so rich that God is not sufficient for me, in so far as He is only God in his divine works. 
• For in thus breaking through, I perceive what God and I are in common. 
• There I am what I was. 
• There I neither increase nor decrease. 
• For there I am the immovable which moves all things. 
• Here man has won again what he is eternally and ever shall be. 
• Here God is received into the soul.

Eckhart

The Godhead gave all things up to God. 

The Godhead is poor, naked and empty as though it were not; it has not, wills not, wants not, works not, gets not. 

It is God who has the treasure and the bride in him, 

the Godhead is as void as though it were not.

Eckhart  [34]

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B] mind  influences matter


We can understand something of what lies beyond our experience by considering analogous cases lying within our experience. 

Thus, the relations subsisting 

• between the world and God and 
• between God and the Godhead 

seem to be analogous, in some measure at least, to those that hold

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• between the body (with its environment) and the psyche, and 
• between the psyche and the spirit. 

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In the light of what we know about the second—and what we know is not, unfor­tunately, very much—we may be able to form some not too hopelessly inadequate notions about the first.


Mind affects its body in four ways—

1] subconsciously, through that unbelievably subtle physiological intelligence, 

which Driesch hypostatized under the name of the entelechy; 

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entelechy /ɛnˈtɛləki,ɪnˈtɛləki/

• the realization of potential.
• the supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.

"such self-organization required a special biological force—entelechy"

the soul.

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2] con­sciously, by deliberate acts of will; 

3] subconsciously again, by the reaction upon the physical organism of emotional states having nothing to do with the organs or processes reacted upon; 

and, 

4] either consciously or subconsciously, in certain 'supernormal' manifestations.

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 Outside the body matter can be influenced by the mind in two ways—

first, by means of the body, and second, by a 'supernormal' process, recently studied under laboratory conditions and described as 'the PK effect.' 

Similarly, the mind can establish relations with other minds either indirectly, by willing its body to undertake symbolic activities, such as speech or writing; or 'supernormally,' by the direct approach of mind-reading, telepathy, extra-sensory perception.

Let us now consider these relationships a little more closely. In some fields the physiological intelligence works on its own initiative, as when it directs the never-ceasing processes of breathing, say, or assimilation. In others it acts at the behest of the conscious mind, as when we will to accomplish some action, but do not and cannot will the muscular, glandular, nervous and vascular means to the desired end. 

The appar­ently simple act of mimicry well illustrates the extraordinary nature of the feats performed by the physiological intelligence. 

When a parrot (making use, let us remember, of the beak, tongue and throat of a bird) imitates the sounds produced by the lips, teeth, palate and vocal cords of a man articulating words, what precisely happens?   35   Responding in some as yet entirely uncomprehended way to the conscious mind's desire to imitate some remembered or immediately perceived event, the physiological intelligence sets in motion large numbers of muscles, co-ordinating their efforts with such exquisite skill that the result is a more or less perfect copy of the original. 

Working on its own level, the conscious mind not merely of a parrot, but of the most highly gifted of human beings, would find itself completely baffled by a problem of com­parable complexity.

As an example of the third way in which our minds affect matter, we may cite the all-too-familiar phenomenon of 'nerv­ous indigestion.' In certain persons symptoms of dyspepsia make their appearance when the conscious mind is troubled by such negative emotions as fear, envy, anger or hatred. These emotions are directed towards events or persons in the outer environment; but in some way or other they adversely affect the physiological intelligence and this derangement results, among other things, in 'nervous indigestion.' 

From tuber­culosis and gastric ulcer to heart disease and even dental caries, numerous physical ailments have been found to be closely correlated with certain undesirable states of the conscious mind. 

Conversely, every physician knows that a calm and cheerful patient is much more likely to recover than one who is agitated and depressed.

Finally we come to such occurrences as faith healing and levitation—occurrences 'supernorinally' strange, but never­theless attested by masses of evidence which it is hard to discount completely. 

Precisely how faith cures diseases (whether at Lourdes or in the hypnotist's consulting room), or how St. Joseph of Cupertino was able to ignore the laws of gravitation, we do not know. (But let us remember that we are no less ignorant of the way in which minds and bodies are related in the most ordinary of everyday activities.) 

In the same way we are unable to form any idea of the modus operandi of what Professor Rhine has called the PK effect. Nevertheless the fact that the fall of dice can be influenced by the mental states of certain individuals seems now to have been estab­lished beyond the possibility of doubt.   36  And if the PK effect can be demonstrated in the laboratory and measured by statis­tical methods, then, obviously, the intrinsic credibility of the scattered anecdotal evidence for the direct influence of mind upon matter, not merely within the body, but outside in the external world, is thereby notably increased. 

Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge has written that "psychokinesis, or PK, violates the principle that mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did, no experimenter could trust his readings of measuring instruments.) It also violates the principles of conservation of energy and momentum.

Psychokinesis - Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Psychokinesis

The same is true of extra-sensory perception. Apparent examples of it are con­stantly turning up in ordinary life. But science is almost impotent to cope with the particular case, the isolated instance. Promoting their methodological ineptitude to the rank of a criterion of truth, dogmatic scientists have often branded everything beyond the pale of their limited competence as unreal and even impossible.

But when tests for ESP can be repeated under standardized conditions, the subject comes under the jurisdiction of the law of probabilities and achieves (in the teeth of what passionate opposition!) a measure of scientific respectability.

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Such, very baldly and briefly, are the most important things we know about mind in regard to its capacity to influence matter. From this modest knowledge about ourselves, what are we entitled to conclude in regard to the divine object of our nearly total ignorance?

First, as to creation: if a human mind can directly influence matter not merely within, but even outside its body, then a divine mind, immanent in the universe or transcendent to it, may be presumed to be capable of imposing forms upon a pre-existing chaos of formless matter, or even, perhaps, of thinking substance as well as forms into existence.

Once created or divinely informed, the universe has to be sustained. The necessity for a continuous re-creation of the world becomes manifest, according to Descartes, 'when we consider the nature of time, or the duration of things; for this is of such a kind that its parts are not mutually dependent and never co-existent; and, accordingly, from the fact that we are now it does not necessarily follow that we shall be a moment afterwards, unless some cause, viz, that which first produced us, shall, as it were, continually reproduce us, that is, conserve us.'

 Here we seem to have something analogous, on the cosmic level, to that physiological intelligence which, in men and the lower animals, unsleepingly performs the task of seeing that bodies behave as they should. Indeed, the physiological intel­ligence may plausibly be regarded as, a special aspect of the general re-creating Logos. In Chinese phraseology it is the Tao as it manifests itself on the level of living bodies.37

The bodies of human beings are affected by the good or bad states of their minds. Analogously, the existence at the heart of things of a divine serenity and goodwill  신성한 평온과 선의  may be regarded as one of the reasons why the world's sickness, though chronic, has not proved fatal. 

And if, in the psychic universe, there should be other and more than human consciousnesses ob­sessed by thoughts of evil and egotism and rebellion, this would account, perhaps, for some of the quite extravagant and improbable wickedness of human behaviour.

The acts willed by our minds are accomplished 

1. either through the instrumentality of the physiological intelligence and the body, 
2. or, very exceptionally, and to a limited extent, by direct supernormal means of the PK variety. 

Analogously the physical situations willed by a divine Providence may be arranged by the perpetually creating Mind that sustains the universe—in which case Providence will appear to do its work by wholly natural means; or else, very exceptionally, the divine Mind may act directly on the universe from the out­side, as it were—in which case the workings of Providence and the gifts of grace will appear to be miraculous. 

Similarly, the divine Mind may choose to communicate with finite minds either by manipulating the world of men and things in ways which the particular mind to be reached at that moment will find meaningful; or else there may be direct communication by something resembling thought transference.

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C] A temporal God


In Eckhart's phrase, God, the creator and perpetual re-creator of the world, 'becomes and disbecomes.' 

In other words He is, to some extent at least, in time. A temporal God might have the nature of the traditional Hebrew God of the Old Testament; 

or He might be a limited deity of the kind described by certain philosophical theologians of the present century; 

or alternatively He might be an emergent God, start­ing unspiritually at Alpha and becoming gradually more divine as the aeons rolled on towards some hypothetical Omega. 

(Why the movement shourd be towards more and better rather than less and worse, upwards rather than downwards or in undulations, onwards rather than round and round, one really doesn't know. There seems to be no reason why a God who is exclusively temporal—a God who merely becomes and is ungrounded in eternity—should not be as completely at the mercy of time as is the individual mind apart from the spirit. 

A God who becomes is a God who also disbecomes, and it is the disbecoming which may ultimately prevail, so that the last state of emergent deity may be worse than the first.)38 


The ground in which the multifarious and time-bound psyche is rooted is a simple, timeless awareness. By making ourselves pure in heart and poor in spirit we can discover and be identified with this awareness. In the spirit we not only have, but are, the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground.

Analogously, God in time is grounded in the eternal now of the modeless Godhead. It is in the Godhead that things, lives and minds have their being; it is through God that they have their becoming—a becoming whose goal and purpose is to return to the eternity of the Ground.

Meanwhile, I beseech you by the eternal and imperishable truth, and by my soul, consider; grasp the unheard-of. God and God­head are as distinct as heaven and earth. Heaven stands a thou­sand miles above the earth, and even so the Godhead is above God. God becomes and disbecomes. Whoever understands this preaching, I wish him well. But even if nobody had been here, I must still have preached this to the poor-box.

Eckhart  

Like St. Augustine, Eckhart was to some extent the victim of his own literary talents. Le style c'est l'1omme. No doubt. But the converse is also partly true. L'homme c'est le style. Because we have a gift for writing in a certain way, we find ourselves, in some sort, becoming our way of writing. We mould ourselves in the likeness of our particular brand of eloquence. Eckhart was one of the inventors of German prose, and he was tempted by his new-found mastery of forceful expression to commit himself to extreme positions—to be dctrinally the image of his powerful and over-emphatic sen­tences. 

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D] God vs Godhead

A statement like the foregoing would lead one to believe that he despised what the Vedantists call the 'lower knowledge' of Brahman, not as the Absolute Ground of all things, but as the personal God.

 In reality he, like the Vedan-tists, accepts the lower knowledge as genuine knowledge and regards devotion to the personal God as the best preparation for the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. 

Another point to remember is that 

the attributeless Godhead of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Christian and Sufi mysticism 

is the Ground of all the qualities possessed by the personal God and the Incarnation. 

'God is not good, I am good,' says Eckhart in his violent and excessive way. What he really meant was, 'I am just humanly good; God is supereminently good; the Godhead is, and his "isness" (istigkeit, in Eckhart's German) contains goodness, love, wisdom and all the rest in their essence and principle.' 

In consequence, the Godhead is never, for the exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, the mere Abso­lute of academic metaphysics, 

but something more purely perfect, more reverently to be adored than even the personal God or his human incarnation [Jesus?]

—a Being towards whom it is possible to feel the most intense devotion and in relation to whom it is necessary (if one is to come to that unitive know­ledge which is man's final end) to practise a discipline more arduous and unremitting than any imposed by ecclesiastical authority.39

There is a distinction and differentiation, according to our reason, between God and the Godhead, between action and rest. The fruitful nature of the Persons ever worketh in a living differentia­tion. But the simple Being of God, according to the nature thereof, is an eternal Rest of God and of all created things.40

Ruysbroecic

(In the Reality unitively known by the mystic), we can speak no more of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, nor of any creature, but only one Being, which is the very substance of the Divine Per­sons. There were we all one before our creation, for this is our super-essence. There the Godhead is in simple essence without activity.

Ruysbroeck

The holy light of faith is so pure that, compared with it, par­ticular lights are but impurities; and even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in His purity.

J. J. Olier

Coming as it does from a devout Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, this statement may seem somewhat startling. But we must remember that Olier (who was a man of saintly life and one of the most influential religious teachers of the seventeenth century) is speaking here about a state of con­sciousness, to which few people ever come. To those on the ordinary levels of being he recommends other modes of know­ledge. One of his penitents, for example, was advised to read, as a corrective to St. John of the Cross and other exponents of pure mystical theology, St. Gertrude's revelations of the incarnate and even physiological aspects of the deity. 

In Olier's opinion, as in that of most directors of souls, whether Catholic or Indian, it was mere folly to recommend the wor­ship of God-without-form to persons who are in a condition to understand only the personal and the incarnate aspects of the divine Ground. 

This is a perfectly sensible attitude, and we are justified in adopting a policy in accordance with it—pro-vided always that we clearly remember that its adoption may be attended by certain spiritual dangers and disadvantages. The nature of these dangers and disadvantages will be illus­trated and discussed in another section. For the present it will suffice to quote the warning words of Philo: 

'He who thinks that God has any quality and is not the One, injures not God, but himself.'41

Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all two-ness, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothing­ness to nothingness.

Eckhart

What Eckhart describes as the pure One, the absolute not-God in whom we must sink from nothingness to nothingness is called in Mahayana Buddhism the Clear Light of the Void. What follows is part of a formula addressed by the Tibetan priest to a person in the act of death.

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O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state

 (the' intermediate state' immediately following death, in which the soul is judged—or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character formed during its life on earth, what sort of an after-life it shall have). 

In this Bardo state all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, immaculate Intellect is like unto a translucent void without circumference or centre. At this moment know thou thyself and abide in that state. I, too, at this time, am setting thee face to face.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

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Going back further into the past, we find in one of the earliest Upanishads the classical description of the Absolute One as a Super-Essential No-Thing.   [43]

The significance of Brahman is expressed by ned neti (not so, not so); for beyond this, that you say it is not so, there is nothing further. Its name, however, is 'the Reality of reality.' That is to say, the senses are real, and the Brahman is their Reality.

Brhadaranyaka Upanishad [The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad is a treatise on Ātman (Self)]

In other words, there is a hierarchy of the real. 

The manifold world of our everyday experience is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; 

but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Real­ity,

 which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it.

The extract which follows next is of great historical signifi­cance, since it was mainly through the 'Mystical Theology' and the 'Divine Names' of the fifth-century author who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite that mediaeval Christendom established contact with Neoplatonism and thus, at several removes, with the metaphysical thought and disci­pline of India. 

In the ninth century Scorns Erigena translated the two books into Latin, and from that time forth their influence upon the philosophical speculations and the reli­gious life of the West was wide, deep and beneficent. 

It was to the authority of the Areopagite that the Christian expo­nents of the Perennial Philosophy appealed, whenever they were menaced (and they were always being menaced) by those whose primary interest was in ritual, legalism and ecclesiastical organization. 

And because Dionysius was mistakenly identi­fied with St. Paul's first Athenian convert, his authority was regarded as all but apostolic; therefore, according to the rules of the Catholic game, the appeal to it could not lightly be dismissed, even by those to whom the books meant less than nothing. In spite of their maddening eccentricity, the men and women who followed the Dionysian path had to be tolerated. And once left free to produce the fruits of the spirit, a num­ber of them arrived at such a conspicuous degree of sanctity that it became impossible even for the heads of the Spanish Inquisition to condemn the tree from which such fruits had sprung.43

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Dionysius the Areopagite (/daɪəˈnɪsiəs/; Greek: Διονύσιος ὁ Ἀρεοπαγίτης Dionysios ho Areopagitēs) was an Athenian judge at the Areopagus Court in Athens, who lived in the first century. A convert to Christianity, he is venerated as a saint by multiple denominations.
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The simple, absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are 

hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret.

 For this darkness, though of deepest obscur­ity, is yet radiantly clear; and, 

though beyond touch and sight, it more than fills our unseeing minds with splendours of trans­cendent beauty. .. . 

We long exceedingly to dwell in this trans­lucent darkness and, through not seeing and not knowing, 

to see Him who is beyond both vision and knowledge—by the very fact of neither seeing Him nor knowing Him. 

For this is truly to see and to know and, through the abandonment of all things, 

to praise Him who is beyond and above all things. 

For this is not unlike the art of those who carve a life-like image from stone: removing from around it all that impedes clear vision of the latent form, 

revealing its hidden beauty solely by taking away. 

For it is, as I believe, more fitting to praise Him by taking away than by ascription; for we ascribe attributes to Him, when we start from universals and come down through the intermediate to the particulars. 

But here we take away all things from Him going up from particulars to universals, that we may know openly the unknowable, which is hidden in and under all things that may be known. 

And we behold that darkness beyond being, concealed under all natural light.

Dionythis the Areopagite

---
The world as it appears to common sense consists of an indefinite number of successive and presumably causally con­nected events, involving an indefinite number of separate, individual things, lives and thoughts, the whole constituting a presumably orderly cosmos. 

It is in order to describe, discuss and manage this common-sense universe that human languages have been developed.

Whenever, for any reason, we wish to think of the world, not as it appears to common sense, but as a continuum, we find that our traditional syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. 

Mathematicians have therefore been compelled to invent radically new symbol-systems for this express purpose. 

But the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, 

it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in kind from the worlds to which traditional language and the languages of mathematics are adequate.   44      

Hence, in all exposi­tions of the Perennial Philosophy, the frequency of paradox, of verbal extravagance, sometimes even of seeming blasphemy. 

Nobody has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus, in terms of which we may talk coherently about the divine Ground and of the world conceived as its manifestation. 

For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in terms of a symbol-system, whose relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order.

-----

So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. 

The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about.

 Consider, for example, those negative definitions of the transcendent and immanent Ground of being. 

In state­ments such as Eckhart's, God is equated with nothing. And in a certain sense the equation is exact; for God is certainly no thing. 

In the phrase used by Scotus Erigena God is not a what; He is a That. 

In other words, the Ground can be denoted as being there, but not defined as having qualities. 

This means that discursive knowledge about the Ground is not merely, like all inferential knowledge, a thing at one remove, or even at several removes, from the reality of immediate acquaintance; 

it is and, because of the very nature of our language and our standard patterns of thought, it must be, paradoxical knowledge. 

Direct knowledge of the Ground cannot be had except by union, and 

union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the 'thou' from the 'That.'

Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency by Jules Evans

Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency by Jules Evans


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Breaking Open: Finding a Way Through Spiritual Emergency

Editor : Jules Evans, Editor : Tim Read

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Publisher : Aeon Books
Published : April 2020
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The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul’s natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence?



"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.'



Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science

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About the Editor(s)

Jules Evans is an author, broadcaster and academic philosopher. He is a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, where he researches the history and philosophy of flourishing. He was a BBC New Generation Thinker and a Times book of the year author. He is the author of 'Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations' (2012) and 'The Art of Losing Control' (2017). He blogs at www.philosophyforlife.org

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Tim Read is a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist based in London. He was Consultant Psychiatrist at the Royal London Hospital for 20 years leading the Emergency Liaison service and the Crisis Intervention Service. He has trained in psychoanalytic therapy (IGA) and in transpersonal therapy (GTT). He is a certified facilitator of Holotropic Breathwork and has a special interest in working with expanded states of consciousness. His book 'Walking Shadows: Archetype and Psyche in Crisis and Growth' was published in 2015.

View author's website

More titles by Tim Read

===

Spiritual emergencies are moments of messy awakening, crises of ego dissolution and rebirth that are often misunderstood and unskillfully managed by materialist psychiatry. As more Westerners meditate and are drawn to psychedelics to foster their psycho-spiritual growth, mystical experiences are becoming more common--yet some of them will be disturbing and difficult. There is an urgent need for our culture to upgrade its understanding of what these experiences are like and what helps people through the turbulence. Breaking Open is the first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. The contributors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight, and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. These people have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence?

===

Top reviews from other countries

Topher

3.0 out of 5 stars could be called how the other half suffer

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 February 2021

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An interesting book about how very well resourced people manage suffering - let me tell you its nothing like the shocking, pathalogising, dangerous nonsense encapsulated in the medical model that most have little choice in let alone any informed consent.

In fact these well resourced people are able to float above the ordinary barbarism of modern services and consider themselves to be having a 'spiritual emergency' none of your pseudo medical sounding 'disorders' or 'treatment' for 'symptoms' here.

Here people have resources of relative wealth, good relationships, travel, meaning, purpose, an ability to explore an expansive melting pot of possible solutions - not the five minutes with the stressed out GP labelled depressed and handed a prescription for the brain damaging but highly profitable drugs marketed as 'anti depressants' or being referred to IAPT - a relative production line of nonsense where 'recovery' means how you score on a tick box questionnaire. And god forbid you ever end up in secondary care - there the medical model is completely out of control.

Taken together our mental health systems for 'normal' people are casing more harm to both the people they are tasked to work with and to the people that work within them - with massive and relentless stress - such a happy state of affairs but great for maintaining power and internalising suffering - nothing to see in the culture - move along now - no cultural disorders here its all about you and your dysfunctional thoughts, behaviours, beliefs and attitudes - just keep taking the drugs and make sure you do your homework.

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Alastair McIntosh

5.0 out of 5 stars Such an important topic, such well written first-person experience chapters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 26 September 2020

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So far I've read 3 of the contributors' chapters and the editors' material. This covers such an important topic, building on the Stanislav & Christina Groff "Spiritual Emergency" classic. What this adds, is case studies written up by folks who have been through spiritual emergencies, with harrowing honesty about the often psychotic stages these took them through. It is common to find short accounts of such experience in anthologies, or accounts written up third party. What this book adds is it gives percipients the space to expand and reflect on their experiences at their own pace and in their own words.

Whether you consider that spiritual experience constitutes evidence for the spiritual or not - (or whether you believe material experience constitutes evidence for the material or not) - this book is an important and original contribution to the contemporary literature on transpersonal psychology and applied religious studies.

4 people found this helpful

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Catherine I

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave and rich in anecdote.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 March 2021

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"Breaking Open" is a collection of the accounts of fourteen individuals' Spiritual Emergencies. It is topped and tailed by a sensitive and intelligent commentary by editors the philosopher Jules Evans and psychiatrist Tim Read. Despite describing their own sample pool as being restricted by their white, middle-class and culturally-literate backgrounds there is a tremendous amount of variety in the subjects' experiences. This is not an especially privileged grouping and to dismiss it is as such is a knee-jerk criticism [Disclaimer - I do not personally know any of them.]

Just as it would be meeting a crowd of new people, there are some characters who are more appealing to one than others. I particularly liked the accounts of nightclub-visionary Deborah Martin and the mysterious Rob Charles who movingly describes a childhood locked in fears over how he smelt. It is brave of Jules Evans to add his own account to the fray; he strikes just the right chord of solidarity. Evans' description of the aftermath of an Ayahuasca trip is mercifully less disturbed than others (which can be hair-raising) but contributes to the impression that, despite what the cheerleaders would have us believe, psychedelics fracture the ego in ways which are broadly unhelpful.

However, rather than individual accounts it is the general impression of the collective voice which matters. The phenomenon of the nervous breakdown inflected by spiritual overtones, or conversely the religious experience with a traumatic dimension, is glimpsed as though from many perspectives ranged around a craggy peak. The book is an extremely useful contribution to the steadily-swelling intellectual literature (as opposed to that which sets off on a superstitious footing) which examines this fascinating topic. It is a topic which demands our urgent attention.

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2 people found this helpful

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Elise Wardle MA, Jungian Psychotherapist

5.0 out of 5 stars Losing mind, finding soul

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 May 2021

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My sincere thanks to Tim Read and Jules Evans together with those who shared their most powerful transformative experiences through the journey of awakening. This book is much needed at a time when millions are personally and collectively experiencing spiritual crisis in a variety of different forms. For those who need to know they are not alone, not becoming insane but travelling a journey into losing their 'mind' and finding their soul, it offers guidance and resources whereby we may continue our journeys towards wholeness with insight, the right support and understanding from others who have been where we are, 'worn the t-shirt' and have 'come out the other end'!

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GLC

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2020

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This book is life affirming and even life changing, especially to the reader who has been through a spiritual emergency themselves. Jules himself has a poetic yet warm and open style, and I am now addicted to his weekly newsletters (which you can sign up for on his website). But each of the stories has a resonance that transcends normal literature on this topic and opens your mind to the great vastness of consciousness in all its various manifestations. I would recommend this book to anyone, even if new to the topic. I believe you will come away enlightened and also moved by what you read.

2 people found this helpful

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====

Perennial philosophy - Wikipedia

Perennial philosophy - Wikipedia

Perennial philosophy

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Not to be confused with the book The Perennial Philosophy.

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The perennial philosophy (Latin: philosophia perennis),^{[note 1]} also referred to as perennialism and perennial wisdom, is a perspective in philosophy and spirituality that views all of the world's religious traditions as sharing a single, metaphysical truth or origin from which all esoteric and exoteric knowledge and doctrine has grown.

Perennialism has its roots in the Renaissance interest in neo-Platonism and its idea of the One, from which all existence emanates. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) sought to integrate Hermeticism with Greek and Jewish-Christian thought,^[1] discerning a prisca theologia which could be found in all ages.^[2] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) suggested that truth could be found in many, rather than just two, traditions. He proposed a harmony between the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and saw aspects of the prisca theologia in Averroes (Ibn Rushd), the Quran, the Kabbalah and other sources.^[3] Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) coined the term philosophia perennis.^[4]

A more popular interpretation argues for universalism, the idea that all religions, underneath seeming differences, point to the same Truth. In the early 19th century the Transcendentalists propagated the idea of a metaphysical Truth and universalism, which inspired the Unitarians, who proselytized among Indian elites. Towards the end of the 19th century, the Theosophical Society further popularized universalism, not only in the western world, but also in western colonies. In the 20th century, universalism was further popularized through the Advaita Vedanta inspired Traditionalist School, which argued for a metaphysical, single origin of the orthodox religions, and by Aldous Huxley and his book The Perennial Philosophy, which was inspired by neo-Vedanta and the Traditionalist School.

Contents

• 1Definition
  • 1.1Renaissance
  • 1.2Traditionalist School
  • 1.3Aldous Huxley and mystical universalism
• 2Origins
  • 2.1Classical world
    • 2.1.1Hellenistic period: religious syncretism
    • 2.1.2Roman world: Philo of Alexandria
    • 2.1.3Neoplatonism
  • 2.2Renaissance
    • 2.2.1Ficino and Pico della Mirandola
    • 2.2.2Steuco
      • 2.2.2.1De perenni philosophia libri X
      • 2.2.2.2Influence
• 3Popularisation
  • 3.1Transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism
  • 3.2Theosophical Society
  • 3.3Neo-Vedanta
  • 3.4Traditionalist School
  • 3.5Aldous Huxley
  • 3.6New Age
• 4Academic discussions
  • 4.1Mystical experience
  • 4.2Religious pluralism
• 5See also
• 6Notes
• 7References
• 8Sources
  • 8.1Printed sources
  • 8.2Web-sources
• 9Further reading
• 10External links

Definition[edit source]

Renaissance[edit source]

The idea of a perennial philosophy originated with a number of Renaissance theologians who took inspiration from neo-Platonism and from the theory of Forms. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) argued that there is an underlying unity to the world, the soul or love, which has a counterpart in the realm of ideas.^[2] According to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), a student of Ficino, truth could be found in many, rather than just two, traditions.^[3] According to Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) there is "one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples."^[5]

Traditionalist School[edit source]

The contemporary, scholarly oriented Traditionalist School continues this metaphysical orientation. According to the Traditionalist School, the perennial philosophy is "absolute Truth and infinite Presence".^[6] Absolute Truth is "the perennial wisdom (sophia perennis) that stands as the transcendent source of all the intrinsically orthodox religions of humankind."^[6] Infinite Presence is "the perennial religion (religio perennis) that lives within the heart of all intrinsically orthodox religions."^[6] The Traditionalist School discerns a transcendent and an immanent dimension, namely the discernment of the Real or Absolute, c.q. that which is permanent; and the intentional "mystical concentration on the Real".^[7]

According to Soares de Azevedo, the perennialist philosophy states that the universal truth is the same within each of the world's orthodox religious traditions, and is the foundation of their religious knowledge and doctrine. Each world religion is an interpretation of this universal truth, adapted to cater for the psychological, intellectual, and social needs of a given culture of a given period of history. This perennial truth has been rediscovered in each epoch by mystics of all kinds who have revived already existing religions, when they had fallen into empty platitudes and hollow ceremonialism.^{[8][page needed]}

Shipley further notes that the Traditionalist School is oriented on orthodox traditions, and rejects modern syncretism and universalism, which creates new religions from older religions and compromise the standing traditions.^[9]

Aldous Huxley and mystical universalism[edit source]

One such universalist was Aldous Huxley,^[9] who propagated a universalist interpretation of the world religions, inspired by Vivekananda's neo-Vedanta and his own use of psychedelic drugs. According to Huxley, who popularized the idea of a perennial philosophy with a larger audience,

The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That thou art'); 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.^[10]

In Huxley's 1944 essay in Vedanta and the West, he describes "The Minimum Working Hypothesis", the basic outline of the perennial philosophy found in all the mystic branches of the religions of the world:

That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation.

That the Ground is transcendent and immanent.

That it is possible for human beings to love, know and become the Ground.

That to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence.

That there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed, a Tao or Way, which must be followed, if humans are to achieve their final end.

Origins[edit source]

Main articles: Neo-Platonism and Agape

The perennial philosophy originates from a blending of neo-Platonism and Christianity. Neo-Platonism itself has diverse origins in the syncretic culture of the Hellenistic period, and was an influential philosophy throughout the Middle Ages.

Classical world[edit source]

Hellenistic period: religious syncretism[edit source]

See also: Religious syncretism

During the Hellenistic period, Alexander the Great's campaigns brought about exchange of cultural ideas on its path throughout most of the known world of his era. The Greek Eleusinian Mysteries and Dionysian Mysteries mixed with such influences as the Cult of Isis, Mithraism and Hinduism, along with some Persian influences. Such cross-cultural exchange was not new to the Greeks; the Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Dionysus had been equated as Osiris-Dionysus by the historian Herodotus as early as the 5th century BC (see Interpretatio graeca).^[11][12]

Roman world: Philo of Alexandria[edit source]

Philo of Alexandria (c.25 BCE – c.50 CE) attempted to reconcile Greek Rationalism with the Torah, which helped pave the way for Christianity with neoplatonism, and the adoption of the Old Testament with Christianity, as opposed to Gnostic roots of Christianity.^[13] Philo translated Judaism into terms of Stoic, Platonic and neopythagorean elements, and held that God is "supra rational" and can be reached only through "ecstasy." He also held that the oracles of God supply the material of moral and religious knowledge.

Neoplatonism[edit source]

Main article: Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism arose in the 3rd century CE and persisted until shortly after the closing of the Platonic Academy in Athens in AD 529 by Justinian I. Neoplatonists were heavily influenced by Plato, but also by the Platonic tradition that thrived during the six centuries which separated the first of the neoplatonists from Plato. The work of neoplatonic philosophy involved describing the derivation of the whole of reality from a single principle, "the One." It was founded by Plotinus,^{[web 1]} and has been very influential throughout history. In the Middle Ages, neoplatonic ideas were integrated into the philosophical and theological works of many of the most important medieval Islamic, Christian, and Jewish thinkers.

Renaissance[edit source]

Ficino and Pico della Mirandola[edit source]

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) believed that Hermes Trismegistos, the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, was a contemporary of Mozes and the teacher of Pythagoras, and the source of both Greek and Jewish-Christian thought.^[1] He argued that there is an underlying unity to the world, the soul or love, which has a counterpart in the realm of ideas. Platonic Philosophy and Christian theology both embody this truth. Ficino was influenced by a variety of philosophers including Aristotelian Scholasticism and various pseudonymous and mystical writings. Ficino saw his thought as part of a long development of philosophical truth, of ancient pre-Platonic philosophers (including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus and Pythagoras) who reached their peak in Plato. The Prisca theologia, or venerable and ancient theology, which embodied the truth and could be found in all ages, was a vitally important idea for Ficino.^[2]

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), a student of Ficino, went further than his teacher by suggesting that truth could be found in many, rather than just two, traditions. This proposed a harmony between the thought of Plato and Aristotle, and saw aspects of the Prisca theologia in Averroes, the Koran, the Cabala among other sources.^[3] After the deaths of Pico and Ficino this line of thought expanded, and included Symphorien Champier, and Francesco Giorgio.

Steuco[edit source]

De perenni philosophia libri X[edit source]

The term perenni philosophia was first used by Agostino Steuco (1497–1548) who used it to title a treatise, De perenni philosophia libri X, published in 1540.^[4] De perenni philosophia was the most sustained attempt at philosophical synthesis and harmony.^[14] Steuco represents the renaissance humanist side of 16th-century Biblical scholarship and theology, although he rejected Luther and Calvin.^[15] De perenni philosophia, is a complex work which only contains the term philosophia perennis twice. It states that there is "one principle of all things, of which there has always been one and the same knowledge among all peoples."^[16] This single knowledge (or sapientia) is the key element in his philosophy. In that he emphasises continuity over progress, Steuco's idea of philosophy is not one conventionally associated with the Renaissance. Indeed, he tends to believe that the truth is lost over time and is only preserved in the prisci theologica. Steuco preferred Plato to Aristotle and saw greater congruence between the former and Christianity than the latter philosopher. He held that philosophy works in harmony with religion and should lead to knowledge of God, and that truth flows from a single source, more ancient than the Greeks. Steuco was strongly influenced by Iamblichus's statement that knowledge of God is innate in all,^[17] and also gave great importance to Hermes Trismegistus.

Influence[edit source]

Steuco's perennial philosophy was highly regarded by some scholars for the two centuries after its publication, then largely forgotten until it was rediscovered by Otto Willmann in the late part of the 19th century.^[15] Overall, De perenni philosophia wasn't particularly influential, and largely confined to those with a similar orientation to himself. The work was not put on the Index of works banned by the Roman Catholic Church, although his Cosmopoeia which expressed similar ideas was. Religious criticisms tended to the conservative view that held Christian teachings should be understood as unique, rather than seeing them as perfect expressions of truths that are found everywhere.^[18] More generally, this philosophical syncretism was set out at the expense of some of the doctrines included within it, and it is possible that Steuco's critical faculties were not up to the task he had set himself. Further, placing so much confidence in the prisca theologia, turned out to be a shortcoming as many of the texts used in this school of thought later turned out to be bogus^[ambiguous].^[19] In the following two centuries the most favourable responses were largely Protestant and often in England.

Gottfried Leibniz later picked up on Steuco's term. The German philosopher stands in the tradition of this concordistic philosophy; his philosophy of harmony especially had affinity with Steuco's ideas. Leibniz knew about Steuco's work by 1687, but thought that De la vérité de la religion chrétienne by Huguenot philosopher Phillippe du Plessis-Mornay expressed the same truth better. Steuco's influence can be found throughout Leibniz's works, but the German was the first philosopher to refer to the perennial philosophy without mentioning the Italian.^[20]

Popularisation[edit source]

Transcendentalism and Unitarian Universalism[edit source]

Main articles: Transcendentalism and Universalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) was a pioneer of the idea of spirituality as a distinct field.^[21] He was one of the major figures in Transcendentalism, which was rooted in English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and the skepticism of Hume.^{[web 2]} The Transcendentalists emphasised an intuitive, experiential approach of religion.^{[web 3]} Following Schleiermacher,^[22] an individual's intuition of truth was taken as the criterion for truth.^{[web 3]} In the late 18th and early 19th century, the first translations of Hindu texts appeared, which were also read by the Transcendentalists, and influenced their thinking.^{[web 3]} They also endorsed universalist and Unitarian ideas, leading in the 20th Century to Unitarian Universalism. Universalism holds the idea that there must be truth in other religions as well, since a loving God would redeem all living beings, not just Christians.^{[web 3][web 4]}

Theosophical Society[edit source]

Main article: Theosophical Society

By the end of the 19th century, the idea of a perennial philosophy was popularized by leaders of the Theosophical Society such as H. P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant, under the name of "Wisdom-Religion" or "Ancient Wisdom".^[23] The Theosophical Society took an active interest in Asian religions, subsequently not only bringing those religions under the attention of a western audience but also influencing Hinduism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Japan.

Neo-Vedanta[edit source]

Main articles: Advaita Vedanta, Neo-Vedanta, Hinduism in the West, and Neo-Advaita

Many perennialist thinkers (including Armstrong, Huston Smith and Joseph Campbell) are influenced by Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy and Hindu mystics Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda,^[24] who themselves have taken over western notions of universalism.^[25] They regarded Hinduism to be a token of this perennial philosophy. This notion has influenced thinkers who have proposed versions of the perennial philosophy in the 20th century.^[25]

The unity of all religions was a central impulse among Hindu reformers in the 19th century, who in turn influenced many 20th-century perennial philosophy-type thinkers. Key figures in this reforming movement included two Bengali Brahmins. Ram Mohan Roy, a philosopher and the founder of the modernising Brahmo Samaj religious organisation, reasoned that the divine was beyond description and thus that no religion could claim a monopoly in their understanding of it.

The mystic Ramakrishna's spiritual ecstasies included experiencing the sameness of Christ, Mohammed and his own Hindu deity. Ramakrishna's most famous disciple, Swami Vivekananda, travelled to the United States in the 1890s where he formed the Vedanta Society.

Roy, Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were all influenced by the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta,^[26] which they saw as the exemplification of a Universalist Hindu religiosity.^[25]

Traditionalist School[edit source]

Main article: Traditionalist School

The Traditionalist School is a group of 20th and 21st century thinkers concerned with what they consider to be the demise of traditional forms of knowledge, both aesthetic and spiritual, within Western society. The principal thinkers in this tradition are René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. Other important thinkers in this tradition include Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, Jean-Louis Michon, Marco Pallis, Huston Smith, Hossein Nasr, Jean Borella, Elémire Zolla and Julius Evola.^{[note 2] [note 3]} According to the Traditionalist School, orthodox religions are based on a singular metaphysical origin. According to the Traditionalist School, the "philosophia perennis" designates a worldview that is opposed to the scientism of modern secular societies and which promotes the rediscovery of the wisdom traditions of the pre-secular developed world.^{[citation needed]} This view is exemplified by Rene Guenon in The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, one of the founding works of the traditionalist school.

According to Frithjof Schuon:

It has been said more than once that total Truth is inscribed in an eternal script in the very substance of our spirit; what the different Revelations do is to "crystallize" and "actualize", in different degrees according to the case, a nucleus of certitudes which not only abides forever in the divine Omniscience, but also sleeps by refraction in the "naturally supernatural" kernel of the individual, as well as in that of each ethnic or historical collectivity or of the human species as a whole.^[27]

Aldous Huxley[edit source]

See also: The Perennial Philosophy

The term was popularized in the mid-twentieth century by Aldous Huxley, who was profoundly influenced by Vivekananda's Neo-Vedanta and Universalism.^[28] In his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy he defined the perennial philosophy as:

... 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 to, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.^[29]

In contrast to the Traditionalist school, Huxley emphasized mystical experience over metaphysics:

The Buddha declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality. All he would talk about was Nirvana, which is the name of the experience that comes to the totally selfless and one-pointed [...] Maintaining, in this matter, the attitude of a strict operationalist, the Buddha would speak only of the spiritual experience, not of the metaphysical entity presumed by the theologians of other religions, as also of later Buddhism, to be the object and (since in contemplation the knower, the known and the knowledge are all one) at the same time the subject and substance of that experience.^[10]

According to Aldous Huxley, in order to apprehend the divine reality, one must choose to fulfill certain conditions: "making themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit."^[30] Huxley argues that very few people can achieve this state. Those who have fulfilled these conditions, grasped the universal truth and interpreted it have generally been given the name of saint, prophet, sage or enlightened one.^[31] Huxley argues that those who have, "modified their merely human mode of being," and have thus been able to comprehend "more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge" have also achieved this enlightened state.^[32]

New Age[edit source]

Main articles: New Age and New Age Movement

The idea of a perennial philosophy is central to the New Age Movement. The New Age movement is a Western spiritual movement that developed in the second half of the 20th century. Its central precepts have been described as "drawing on both Eastern and Western spiritual and metaphysical traditions and infusing them with influences from self-help and motivational psychology, holistic health, parapsychology, consciousness research and quantum physics".^[33] The term New Age refers to the coming astrological Age of Aquarius.^{[web 5]}

The New Age aims to create "a spirituality without borders or confining dogmas" that is inclusive and pluralistic.^[34] It holds to "a holistic worldview",^[35] emphasising that the Mind, Body and Spirit are interrelated^{[web 5]} and that there is a form of monism and unity throughout the universe.^[36] It attempts to create "a worldview that includes both science and spirituality"^[37] and embraces a number of forms of mainstream science as well as other forms of science that are considered fringe.

Academic discussions[edit source]

Mystical experience[edit source]

Main article: Mystical experience

The idea of a perennial philosophy, sometimes called perennialism, is a key area of debate in the academic discussion of mystical experience. Huston Smith notes that the Traditionalist School's vision of a perennial philosophy is not based on mystical experiences, but on metaphysical intuitions.^[38] The discussion of mystical experience has shifted the emphasis in the perennial philosophy from these metaphysical intuitions to religious experience^[38] and the notion of nonduality or altered state of consciousness.

William James popularized the use of the term "religious experience" in his The Varieties of Religious Experience.^[39] It has also influenced the understanding of mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge.^{[web 6]} Writers such as W.T. Stace, Huston Smith, and Robert Forman argue that there are core similarities to mystical experience across religions, cultures and eras.^[40] For Stace the universality of this core experience is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition for one to be able to trust the cognitive content of any religious experience.^{[41][verification needed]}

Wayne Proudfoot traces the roots of the notion of "religious experience" further back to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), who argued that religion is based on a feeling of the infinite. The notion of "religious experience" was used by Schleiermacher to defend religion against the growing scientific and secular critique. It was adopted by many scholars of religion, of which William James was the most influential.^[42]

Critics point out that the emphasis on "experience" favours the atomic individual, instead of the community. It also fails to distinguish between episodic experience, and mysticism as a process, embedded in a total religious matrix of liturgy, scripture, worship, virtues, theology, rituals and practices.^[43] Richard King also points to disjunction between "mystical experience" and social justice:^[44]

The privatisation of mysticism - that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences - serves to exclude it from political issues such as social justice. Mysticism thus comes to be seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than serving to transform the world, reconcile the individual to the status quo by alleviating anxiety and stress.^[44]

Religious pluralism[edit source]

Main article: Religious pluralism

Religious pluralism holds that various world religions are limited by their distinctive historical and cultural contexts and thus there is no single, true religion. There are only many equally valid religions. Each religion is a direct result of humanity's attempt to grasp and understand the incomprehensible divine reality. Therefore, each religion has an authentic but ultimately inadequate perception of divine reality, producing a partial understanding of the universal truth, which requires syncretism to achieve a complete understanding as well as a path towards salvation or spiritual enlightenment.^[45]

Although perennial philosophy also holds that there is no single true religion, it differs when discussing divine reality. Perennial philosophy states that the divine reality is what allows the universal truth to be understood.^[46] Each religion provides its own interpretation of the universal truth, based on its historical and cultural context potentially providing everything required to observe the divine reality and achieve a state in which one will be able to confirm the universal truth and achieve salvation or spiritual enlightenment.^{[citation needed]}

See also[edit source]

• Ivan Aguéli
• Archetypes
• Alice A. Bailey
• H. P. Blavatsky
• Titus Burckhardt
• Suheil Bushrui
• Olavo de Carvalho
• Henry Corbin
• Benjamin Creme
• Julius Evola
• Evolutionism
• J.N. Findlay
• The Four Noble Truths
• Gautama Buddha
• René Guénon
• Angus Macnab
• Maitreya
• Meaning of life
• Jean-Louis Michon
• Michel de Montaigne
• Hossein Nasr
• Rudolf Otto
• Whitall Perry
• Kathleen Raine
• Religious experience
• Religious pluralism
• Helena Roerich
• Frithjof Schuon
• Huston Smith
• Mateus Soares de Azevedo
• Edith Stein
• William Stoddart
• Syncretism
• The Teachings of the Mystics
• Traditionalist School
• Transcendentalism
• Transpersonal psychology
• Wilbur Marshall Urban
• Wisdom tradition
• R. C. Zaehner
• Elémire Zolla
• Educational perennialism

Notes[edit source]

1. ^ more fully, philosophia perennis et universalis; sometimes shortened to sophia perennis or religio perennis
2. ^ Renaud Fabbri argues that Evola should not be considered a member of the Perennialist School. See the section Julius Evola and the Perennialist School in Fabbri's Introduction to the Perennialist School.
3. ^ Paul Furlong argues that ‘Evola’s initial writings in the inter-war period were from an ideological position close to the Fascist regime in Italy, though not identical to it.’ Over his active years, Furlong writes, he ‘synthesized’ spiritual bearings of writers like Guenon with his political concerns of the ‘European authoritarian Right’. Evola tried to develop a tradition different from that of Guénon and thus attempted to develop a ‘strategy of active revolt as a counterpart to the spiritual withdrawal favoured by Guénon.’ Evola, as Farlong puts it, wanted to have political influence both in Fascist and Nazi regime, something which he failed to achieve. See Furlong, Paul: Authoritarian Conservatism After The War Julius Evola and Europe, 2003.

References[edit source]

1. ^ Jump up to:^a b Slavenburg & Glaudemans 1994, p. 395.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Schmitt 1966, p. 508.
3. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Schmitt 1966, p. 513.
4. ^ Jump up to:^a b Schmitt 1966.
5. ^ Schmitt 1966, p. 517.
6. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Lings & Minnaar 2007, p. xii.
7. ^ Lings & Minnaar 2007, p. xiii.
8. ^ Soares de Azevedo 2005.
9. ^ Jump up to:^a b Shipley 2015, p. 84.
10. ^ Jump up to:^a b Huxley 1945.
11. ^ Durant & Durant 1966, p. 188-192.
12. ^ McEvilley 2002.
13. ^ Cahil, Thomas (2006). Mysteries of the Middle Ages. New York: Anchor Books. pp. 13–18. ISBN 978-0-385-49556-1.
14. ^ Schmitt 1966, p. 515.
15. ^ Jump up to:^a b Schmitt 1966, p. 516.
16. ^ De perenni philosophia Bk 1, Ch 1; folio 1 in Schmitt (1966) P.517
17. ^ Jamblichi De mysteriis liber, ed. Gustavus Parthey (Berlin), I, 3; 7-10
18. ^ Schmitt 1966, p. 527.
19. ^ Schmitt 1966, p. 524.
20. ^ Schmitt 1966, p. 530-531.
21. ^ Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Restless Souls : The Making of American Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper, 2005. ISBN 0-06-054566-6
22. ^ Sharf 1995.
23. ^ Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1889). The Key to Theosophy. Mumbai, India: Theosophy Company (published 1997). p. 7.
24. ^ Prothero p.166
25. ^ Jump up to:^a b c King 2002.
26. ^ Prothero, Stephen (2010) God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, p. 165-6, HarperOne, ISBN 0-06-157127-X
27. ^ The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, Suhayl Academy, Lahore, 2001, p.67.
28. ^ Roy 2003.
29. ^ Huxley 1945, p. vii.
30. ^ Huxley, Aldous. The perennial philosophy . [1st ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. p.2
31. ^ Huxley, Aldous. The perennial philosophy . [1st ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. p.3
32. ^ Huxley, Aldous. The perennial philosophy . [1st ed. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1945. p.6
33. ^ Drury 2004, p. 12.
34. ^ Drury 2004, p. 8.
35. ^ Drury 2004, p. 11.
36. ^ Michael D. Langone, Ph.D. Cult Observer, 1993, Volume 10, No. 1. What Is "New Age"?, retrieved 2006-07
37. ^ Drury 2004, p. 10.
38. ^ Jump up to:^a b Smith 1987, p. 554.
39. ^ Hori 1999, p. 47.
40. ^ Wildman, Wesley J. (2010) Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion, p. 49, SUNY Press, ISBN 1-4384-3235-6
41. ^ Prothero 2010, p. 6.
42. ^ Sharf 2000, p. 271.
43. ^ Parsons 2011, p. 4-5.
44. ^ Jump up to:^a b King 2002, p. 21.
45. ^ Livingston, James. "Religious Pluralism and the Question of Religious Truth in Wilfred C. Smith." The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 4, no. 3 (2003): pp.58-65.
46. ^ Bowden, John Stephen. "Perennial Philosophy and Christianity." In Christianity: the complete guide . London: Continuum, 2005. pp.1-5.

Sources[edit source]

Printed sources[edit source]

• Soares de Azevedo, Mateus (2005), Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, ISBN 0-941532-69-0
• Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1997), The Key to Theosophy, Mumbai, India: Theosophy Company
• James S. Cutsinger, The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity, Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2004
• Drury, Nevill (2004), The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self, London, England, UK: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-28516-0
• Durant; Durant (1966), Will Durant, The Story of Civilization. Volume 2: The Life of Greece, Simon and Schuster
• Ranjit Fernando (ed.) (1991), The Unanimous Tradition, Essays on the essential unity of all religions. Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 1991 ISBN 955-9028-01-4
• Hori, Victor Sogen (1999), Translating the Zen Phrase Book. In: Nanzan Bulletin 23 (1999) (PDF)
• Huxley, Aldous (1945), The perennial philosophy (1st ed.), New York: Harper & Brothers
• Huxley, Aldous (1990), The Perennial Philosophy (Harper Perennial 1990 ed.), Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-090191-8
• Huxley, Aldous (2004), The Perennial Philosophy (Harper Modern Classics 2004 ed.), Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-057058-X
• John Holman (2008), The Return of the Perennial Philosophy: The Supreme Vision of Western Esotericism. Watkins Publishing, ISBN 1-905857-46-2
• Jacobs, Alan (2004), Advaita and Western Neo-Advaita. In: The Mountain Path Journal, autumn 2004, pages 81-88, Ramanasramam, archived from the original on 2015-05-18
• Perennial Philosophy, Brenda Jackson, Ronald L McDonald, Penguin Group (USA) ISBN 0-452-00144-7
• King, Richard (2002), Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and "The Mystic East", Routledge
• Lings, Martin; Minnaar, Clinton (2007), The Underlying Religion: An Introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, ISBN 9781933316437
• The other perennial philosophy: a metaphysical dialectic, Author Alan M. Laibelman, University Press of America, (2000), ISBN 0-7618-1827-8
• McMahan, David L. (2008), The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780195183276
• "The Mystery of the Two Natures", in Barry McDonald (ed.), Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man, Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2002
• McEvilley, Thomas (2002), The Shape of Ancient Thought
• Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, Authors Harry Oldmeadow and William Stoddart, Contributor William Stoddart, Publisher World Wisdom, Inc, (2010) ISBN 1-935493-09-4
• Parsons, William B. (2011), Teaching Mysticism, Oxford University Press
• Whitall N. Perry, A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom, Louisville, Kentucky: Fons Vitae, 2001
• Prothero, Stephen (2010), God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter, HarperOne, ISBN 978-0-06-157127-5
• Roy, Sumita (2003), Aldous Huxley And Indian Thought, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd
• Schmitt, Charles (1966), "Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz", Journal of the History of Ideas, 27 (1): 505–532), doi:10.2307/2708338, JSTOR 2708338
• Sharf, Robert H. (2000), "The Rhetoric of Experience and the Study of Religion" (PDF), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (11–12): 267–87, archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-05-13, retrieved 2013-05-04
• Shear, Jonathan (1994), "On Mystical Experiences as Support for the Perennial Philosophy", Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 62 (2): 319–342, doi:10.1093/jaarel/LXII.2.319, JSTOR 1465269
• Sherrard, Philip (1998), "Christianity and Other Sacred Traditions", Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Orthodox Press
• Shipley, Morgan (2015), Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America, Lexington Books
• Slavenburg; Glaudemans (1994), Nag Hammadi Geschriften I, Ankh-Hermes
• Smith, Huston (1987), "Is There a Perennial Philosophy?", Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 55 (3): 553–566, doi:10.1093/jaarel/LV.3.553, JSTOR 1464070

Web-sources[edit source]

1. ^ IEP
2. ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Transcendentalism
3. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d "Jone John Lewis, What is Transcendentalism?". Archived from the original on 2013-12-09. Retrieved 2013-05-04.
4. ^ Barry Andrews, THE ROOTS OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST SPIRITUALITY IN NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM Archived 2013-09-21 at the Wayback Machine
5. ^ Jump up to:^a b Melton, J. Gordon – Director Institute for the Study of American Religion. New Age Transformed, retrieved 2006-06
6. ^ Gellman, Jerome, "Mysticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Further reading[edit source]

Traditionalist School

• Martin Lings, The Underlying Religion: An Introduction to the Perennial Philosophy, ISBN 1933316438
• William W. Quinn, junior. The Only Tradition, in S.U.N.Y. Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1997. xix, 384 p. ISBN 0-7914-3214-9 pbk
• Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, Psychology and the Perennial Philosophy: Studies in Comparative Religion (Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2013). ISBN 978-1-936597-20-8

Aldous Huxley

• Huxley, Aldous (2004), The Perennial Philosophy (Harper Modern Classics 2004 ed.), Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-057058-X

External links[edit source]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Perennial philosophy.

• Kabbalah and the Perennial Philosophy
• Slideshow on the Perennial Philosophy
• The End of Philosophy by Swami Tripurari
• Religious Pluralism and the Question of Religious Truth in Wilfred C. Smith
• James S. Cutsinger Perennial Philosophy and Christianity
• OSHO discourses on Philosophia Perennis Archived 2014-01-08 at the Wayback Machine
• Perennial philosophy Essay by Jules Evans, aeon.co

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• Perennial philosophy
• Neoplatonism
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• Nondualism
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