The Perennial Philosophy

What if beneath the bewildering variety of the world’s religions there lay a small set of
common, universal ideas? What if behind the cacophony of competing truth-claims their lay a unifying silence in which all tensions resolve in mellifluous harmony?

The search for a perennial philosophy is an ancient search. The Rig Veda of ancient India proclaims that “The truth is one – the sages call it by many names.” In the Hellenistic world ancient Greeks and Romans were agog at the bewildering array of spiritual and philosophical systems their conquests revealed to them. Surely, they pondered, these must be a foreground of a deeper universality.

In the European Renaissance of the 15^th century the dream of a unified theory of wisdom found new currency in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence, and in the exalted humanism of Pico della Mirandola’s bestselling Oration on the Dignity of Man. The longing for wisdom is universal, Mirandola wrote, “because it can be retraced in every tradition.”

           Twentieth-century British author Aldous Huxley brought the subject into the mainstream with his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy which the New York Times in its glowing review called, “the most needed book in the world.” Borrowing the phrase Philosophia Perennis from 17^th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, Huxley deftly curated passages from Eastern and Western theologies and wove them together with his own connective commentary. 

           Here are the five core ideas Huxley expressed throughout his writing career:

That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation. Here Huxley articulates the Supreme Being archetype, the universal notion of an ultimate reality or “Ground,” behind all of the names of God – Brahman, Dao, Father, Jesus, Allah, Shakti, Amitabha Buddha, and so on. Whatever it is, it lies beyond the multifarious forms that emanate from it.

The Ground is transcendent and immanent. With this Huxley affirms a key paradox – that ultimate reality is at once beyond and within us. Whether it’s the panentheism of Vedanta, the universal incarnation (and salvation) of progressive Christianity, the Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya, or the Sefirot of Kabbalah, this idea finds expression in theologies everywhere.

That it is possible for human beings to love, know, and become identified with the Ground. Here Huxley illuminates the upward spiral taught in all wisdom traditions – a journey from lower consciousness to enlightenment and oneness.

That to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence. Our hunger for wisdom is not a personal choice but an innate imperative. Like salmon swimming upriver to spawn at the place of their birth, we long to return to the source from which we and all things come and not only understand it, but become it.

That there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed, a Dao or Way, which must be followed, if humanity is to achieve its ultimate purpose. Ancient sages left behind maps, books, and practices which, if followed, would facilitate our awakening. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The perennial philosophy is in all the books we already own.

If Huxley’s right, and I think he is, then all religions are true – as metaphors or maps. At their best, any of them will work. Or as 18^th century Hindu saint Ramakrishna put it, “Many paths to the summit.” But a map is only as good as the traveler. It is we who must do the walking.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the March/April issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here by permission.]

The Pathless Path

             In my many years in and around the edges of the New Thought movement, Unity in particular, I’ve noticed something: We feel a bit like a refugee camp. So many of us have come from other religious perspectives, sects, and movements – former Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and more. We went wandering and ended up here…for now. Something about the non-dogmatic openness of New Thought felt like a safe haven in a world where partisan and sectarian chest-thumping rends peaceful hearts into tatters.

            Here, finally, was a religion for people who didn’t really like religion.

            It turned out it wasn’t a different or better religion we were after – we were after an experience, not an ideology. We wanted the nameless mystery and boundless peace beyond all the names of God. As Stephen Mitchell’s rendering of the 131^st Psalm puts it: “My mind is not noisy with desires, Lord, and my heart has satisfied its longing. I do not care about religion or anything that is not you.”

            I came to New Thought as a philosophy student writing my master’s thesis on Ralph Waldo Emerson. But I didn’t set foot inside a Unity Church until middle age, decades later. Emerson’s nature mysticism and unaffiliated spirituality kept me on the outskirts of any organized movement. I preferred the squawking of a jay from the boughs of a sugar pine to any Sunday sermon.

            The traditions that spoke to me most clearly were Asian traditions – Daoism, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism. There I felt the nameless draw of the pathless land of the soul. The silence of meditation seemed to hold more truth than any doctrine or belief, no matter how eloquently stated or ardently held. Maybe it was just my philosophical training, which taught me to love questions and distrust answers.

            Still, in the family of New Thought I found a sangha, a community of fellow-wanders. If you’re going to make a nest in the tree of mystery, it’s good to have a flock around you.

            My Unity teachers – Rev. Will Newsom, Rev. Wendy Craig-Purcell, and many others – taught me with their focused presence and loving kindness that there was something I had been missing all those years out on my own. And the New Thought community, being as it is nominally Christian, opened that door for me – a door I had studiously avoided. Sure, in college I devoured the Christian mystics because there I found brothers and sisters in mystery. But ordinary, everyday Christianity with its emphasis on the redemptive power of the risen Christ never spoke to me. Until my immersion in New Thought, where I eventually came to appreciate the Christian narrative as yet another metaphor for the perennial philosophy: Here was yet another dying, gift giving god, another incarnation – the eternal, sacred, formless source taking form in the temporal world of impermanence.  

And that if you want to know God, look no further than where you are, and who you are. 

            I’m still not a very good joiner. No matter where I am, I’m an outsider looking in. But I’m eternally grateful for my time in New Thought, and for all the glimmers of truth it has shown me.

            But today I think I’ll go hiking with Li Po, the 8^th century Chinese poet: “The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.”

 [All quotations are from Stephen Mitchell’s The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry.]

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the May/June 2021 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Connectivity

I’m walking from room to room holding my phone aloft like Lady Liberty holds her torch, waiting for the 4G icon to flip back to Wi-Fi. The video I’m streaming keeps buffering, buffering. Then suddenly there it is. The video resumes.

            Whether it’s in our tech or in our soul, we all want better connectivity.

            The word “religion” comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind or connect.” We turn to spiritual practice and our faith-communities to come out of isolation and return to our fundamental oneness. It’s lonely out here being a raindrop, longing for the sea.

            So how do we return to oneness? How can we reestablish our fundamental unity? Maybe it isn’t as difficult as we think. What if we never really lost that primal connection, we only think we have? After all, how can one sever an inseverable tether? The 20^th century teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way: “You are universal. You need not and you cannot become what you are already. Having never left the house, you are asking for the way home.”

            When the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir came to America he was only a boy. His father schooled him in a strict form of Christianity, forcing him under the penalty of the lash to memorize and recite the entire New Testament. After spending a few meandering years at the University of Wisconsin Muir left with just enough scientific training to organize his life-long love affair with the natural world. Eventually winding up in the American west, Muir stumbled into the sacred valley of the Yosemite nestled high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Yosemite was his burning bush. After that, nothing would be the same – not for Muir, and not for the young country his work would inspire.

            Muir often wandered Yosemite alone for weeks at a time with a bag of tea, a loaf of bread, and a volume of Emerson’s essays. Emerson’s neo-Vedanta philosophy, born from his immersion in the Vedas, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita at Harvard University, seeped into Muir’s pores and softened his strict fundamentalist upbringing. He began to distance himself from the small, impoverished God of his childhood, calling it “as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny theater.” Muir found his God in the luminous Sierra Nevada Mountains, calling them his “range of light.”

            Through his writings and advocacy, Muir’s nature mysticism shaped American consciousness, leading to the National Park system and the preservation of wilderness for its own sake – one of the boldest ideas in the American experiment. When Emerson, thirty-five years Muir’s elder, visited Yosemite and met Muir, he offered him a professorship at Harvard. Muir turned it down. How could he leave this cathedral of stone, these hallowed woods, this sacred light?

              Muir found his connectivity in the mountains of California. But we can find it anywhere. God is found wherever the eye falls, at the tip of our fingers, in the sound of each other's voices, in the shimmering sun on the water, in the prescience of our hearts. Finding our connection point is as easy as slowing down, slipping into the eternal presence, and knowing that there is nothing but connectivity. Nothing stands alone. "When we try to pick out anything by itself," Muir wrote, "we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the September/October 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Religions Are Like Boats

What is religion for? Is religion the destination or the vehicle? Is it the purpose of religion to provide pat answers, or help us ask better questions? Are religions fortified bunkers from which we can safely attack the religions of others? This is certainly how some people see it. But what if this fundamentalist perspective misses out on the real purpose of religion?

            I’ve had the privilege of teaching comparative religion and philosophy for 27 years. On the last day of my world religions class I share Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of a poem written by Hafiz, the 12^th century Sufi Muslim poet called “I Have Learned So Much.” It’s a perfect way not only to end our study of Islam, but to summarize the entire course, if that’s even possible.

            What Hafiz captures so beautifully is the Buddhist idea that religions are like boats – they get you across the river, but they are not the destination. Religions are the penultimate step. The ultimate or last step is realization, transcendence, oneness, and embodiment beyond all ideologies and doctrines. Then you come back to the world and get to work.

            I love religions, but I belong to none of them. I love wisdom, but I don’t know what it is. It isn’t even an “it.” I don’t know how to talk about it because, as Hafiz says, “love has turned to ash and freed me of every concept and image my mind has ever known.”

I Have Learned So Much

I have learned so much from God
That I can no longer call myself a Christian,
A Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The truth has shared so much of itself with me
That I can no longer call myself a man,
A woman, or even a pure soul.

Love has befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash and freed me 
Of every concept and image 
My mind has ever known.

Like mystics the world over, Hafiz affirms the fundamentally unknowable nature of God or ultimate reality because whatever ultimate reality is, it is beyond all names and forms. It cannot be thought, it can only be experienced. Religions, therefore, only work as catapults – to throw us out of our ordinary consciousness and into the boundless depths of the sacred.

In another twist on the boat analogy, Hafiz playfully puts it this way in his poem “The Great Religions”:

The great religions are the ships.
Poets the lifeboats.
Every sane person I know has jumped overboard.
That is good for business isn't it Hafiz?

Maybe he’s right. Maybe poetry, especially wry poetry with a sense of humor, is the medium that best strips away our intellectual and tribal defense mechanisms. But to poetry I’d also add ritual, prayer, meditation, service, study, community, reverence, appreciation, and love – especially love. All of these work just as well as poetry in washing us clean and leading us to the table where the divine feast is laid before us by the infinite abundance of the universe.

Maybe even poems do too much. In his essay “Self-Reliance,” ex-Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way: “I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.” Sometimes all of these clever words ruin what was almost ripe.

[This piece was first published in my column "A to Zen" inthe May/June 2019 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]