The Perennial Philosophy

• Opens stating the anthology of the perennial philosophy will focus on saints, sages, enlightened ones, rather than philosophers and metaphysicians. The latter derive their knowledge secondhand, so to speak, rather than directly and experientially as the former do. The former are loving, pure in heart, poor and spirit, allowing them to tap into the deeply human, or perhaps even transhuman.

  I. That Art Thou

• The Sanskrit tat tvam asi means ‘That Art Thou’. In other words, “the Atman, or the immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman the Absolute Principle of all existence.
• “The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them” (Eckhart). Finding Godliness within oneself suggest more godliness without oneself.
• “This notion [of I as the actor, I as he who experiences] is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman.” (Shankara)
• “The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here.” (Eckhart)
  • Atonement.
• “Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived.” (Theologia Germanica)

II. The Nature of Ground

• “It cannot 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)
  • The One before whom words recoil.

III. Personality, Sanctity, Divine Incarnation

• “What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different than self?” (William Law)
• In crisis it can be easier to deny the self and melt into the mission of the whole. And the saints know that every moment of our human lives are filled with such crises, the decision to choose the way to darkness and death or lightness and life; to follows one’s own selfish will or the will of God.
• “The Mahayanist believer is warned—precisely as the worshiper of Krishna is warned in the Vaishnavite scriptures that the Krishna Lila is not a history, but a process forever unfolded in the heart of man—that matters of historical fact are without religious significance.” (Amanda Coomaraswamy)
  • Except, Huxley adds, that those historical events revealed to us in some sense some means of deliverance from selfishness.
• “For my part, I think the chief reason which prompted the invisible God to become visible in the flesh and to hold converse with men was to lead carnal men, who are only able to love carnally, to the healthful love of his flesh, and afterwards, little by little, to spiritual love.” (St. Bernard)
• “In the present context, it will be enough to call attention to one of the bitterest of aIl the bitter ironies of history. For the Christ of the Gospels, lawyers seemed further from the Kingdom of Heaven, more hopelessly impervious to Reality, than almost any other class of human beings except the rich. But Christian theology, especially that of the Western churches, was the product of minds imbued with Jewish and Roman legalism.“

IV. God in the World

• “This state of ‘no-mind’ exists, as it were, on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over eagerness of the zealot for salvation. … we, as separate individuals, must not try to think [of no-mind], but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it.”
• “When you strive to gain quiescence by stopping motion, / The quiescence so gained is ever in motion. / … And when oneness is not thoroughly grasped, / Loss is sustained in two ways: / The denying of external reality is the assertion of it, / And the assertion of Emptiness (the Absolute) is the denying of it…” (The Third Patriarch of Zen)
• “Do what you are doing now, suffer what you are suffering now; to do all this with holiness, nothing need be changed but your hearts. Sanctity consists in willing what happens to us by God’s order.” (de Caussade)
• Whether eastern or western, an acknowledgement to prefer God’s will, that Perfect Way, and to have no preference otherwise is the way to communion with God.

V. Charity

• “When the springs dry up, the fish are all together on dry land. They then moisten each other with their dampness and keep each other wet with their slime. But this is not to be compared with forgetting each other in a river or lake.” (Chuang Tzu)
  • Huxley likens this slime to our personal desires, self-love, sensual love. It is shallower, though still relatable enough to ‘wet each other with slime’. But there can be no freedom until the wellspring of selfless love is tapped and we lose ourselves in its boundless waters.
• “The soul lives by that which it loves rather than in the body which it animates. For it has not its life in the body, but rather gives it to the body and lives in that which it loves.” (St. John of the Cross)
  • Body ensouled.
• Charity is marked by disinterestedness, tranquility, and humility. Disinterestedness protects against greed for personal advantage and fear of disadvantage; tranquility against the fetters of craving and aversion and a steady will to conform to the Tao or Logos; and humility against the glorification of ego that divides one from his fellow men and God.
• “Heaven arms with pity those whom it would not see destroyed.” (Lao Tzu)

VI. Mortification, Non-attachment, Right Livelihood

• “[Francois de Sales] used to say that the spirit could not endure the body when overfed, but that, if underfed, the body could not endure the spirit.” (Jean Pierre Camus)
• “Listening four or five times a day to newscasters and commentators, reading the morning papers and all the weeklies and monthlies—nowadays, this is described as ‘taking an intelligent interest in politics.’ St. John of the Cross would have called it indulgence in idle curiosity and the cultivation of disquietude for disquietude’s sake.”
• Taoist story of an empty boat hitting your boat, nobody bats an eye. But if that boat had a person in it, you’d hurl insults at them. “If he could only pass empty through life, who would be able to injure him?”
• “When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the spirit laughs for what it has found.” (Anonymous Sufi Aphorism)
• “…and to become a sage, one must get rid of all the rigidities of unregenerate adulthood and become again as a little child. For only that which is soft and docile is truly alive; that which conquers and outlives everything is that which adapts itself to every-thing, that which always seeks the lowest place—not the hard rock, but the water that wears away the everlasting hills. The simplicity and spontaneity of the perfect sage are the fruits of mortification-mortification of the will and, by recollectedness and meditation, of the mind.“
• “But let the hearing stop with the ears. Let the working of the mind stop with itself. Then the soul will be a negative existence, passively responsive to externals. In such a negative existence, only Tao can abide. And that negative state is the fasting of the heart.” (Chuang Tzu)

VII. Truth

• “We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole. In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically defined as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated and harmonized within the totality.”
  • Interesting. Beauty revealed through contrast within the whole.
• “When a mother cries to her sucking babe, ‘Come, O son, I am the mother!’ / Does the child answer, ‘O mother, show a proof / That I shall find comfort in taking thy milk?’” (Rumi)
• “Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to them to be.” (John Smith, the Platonist)

VIII. Religion and Temperament

• “The construction of an all-embracing system of metaphysics, ethics and psychology is a task that can never be accomplished by any single individual, for the sufficient reason that he is an individual with one particular kind of constitution and temperament and therefore capable of knowing only according to the mode of his own being. Hence the advantages inherent in what may be called the anthological approach to truth.”
• To transcend one’s own nature through one’s own nature.
  • “With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization.” (Lankavatara Sutra)
• “There are many theoretical monotheists whose whole life and every action prove that in reality they are still what their temperament inclines them to be—polytheists, worshippers not of one God they sometimes talk about, but of many gods, nationalistic and technological, financial and familial, to whom in practice they pay all their allegiance.”
• “Meanwhile, the interest in religion has everywhere declined and even among believing Christians the Perennial Philosophy has been to a great extent replaced by a metaphysic of inevitable progress and an evolving God, by a passionate concern, not with eternity, but with future time.“
  • Oh no, that’s me. How does one even conceptualize eternity? I suppose the point is it’s beyond conceptualization…
• “The popular philosophy of life has ceased to be based on the classics of devotion and the rules of aristocratic good breeding, and is now moulded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extraverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell.“

IX. Self-knowledge

X. Grace and Free Will

• “All our goodness is a loan; God is the owner. God works and his work is God.” (St. John of the Cross)
• “Lord, Thou has given me my being of such a nature that it can continually make itself more able to receive thy grace and goodness. And this power, which I have of Thee, wherein I have a living image of thine almighty power, is free will. By this I can either enlarge or restrict my capacity for Thy grace.” (Nicholas of Cusa)
  • Free will as the enlargement or contraction to receive God’s grace; turning towards or away from His grace. Sin as a contraction, virtue as enlargement. Appropriate use of free will (this god-like ability) subjects us to God’s will and, paradoxically, makes us both more and less free. More, since the choice is truly ours (?), less because we submit ourselves to the right choice (divine will)
• “Our free will can hinder the course of inspiration, and when the favourable gale of God’s grace swells the sails of our soul, it is in our power to refuse consent and thereby hinder the effect of the wind’s favour; but when our spirit sails along and makes its voyage prosperously, it is not we who make the gale of inspiration blow for us, nor we who make our sails swell with it, nor we who give motion to the ship of our heart; but we simply receive the gale, consent to its motion and let our ship sail under it, not hindering it by our resistance.” (St. François de Sales)

XI. Good and Evil

• “Desire is the first datum of our consciousness; we are born into sympathy and antipathy, wishing or willing.”
  • Then we evaluate, first unconsciously then consciously, labeling good and bad. And later, we discover obligation, you ought to do good, ought not to do bad.
• “The difference between a good and a bad man does not lie in this, that the one wills that which is good and the other does not, but solely in this, that the one concurs with the living inspiring spirit of God within him, and the other resists it, and can be chargeable with evil only because he resists it.” (William Law)
• “People should think less about what they ought to do and more about what they ought to be. If only their being were good, their works would shine forth brightly. Do not imagine that you can ground your salvation upon actions; it must rest on what you are.” (Eckhart)
• “…acts will be beautifully and morally good if [their] being is God-centred, bad and unglued if [they] are centred in the personal self.”
• “We see then that, for the Perennial Philosophy, good is the separate self’s conformity to, and finally annihilation in, the divine Ground which gives it being; evil, the intensification of separateness, the refusal to know that the Ground exists.”

XII. Time and Eternity

• “The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man’s being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit and, through its spirit, with the divine Ground.”
• “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite.” (William Blake)
• “Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organization.”
• “…in this present divided state of the church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and that, therefore, he can be the only true catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. This truth will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the church…” (William Law)
• “Benares (Varanasi) is to the East, Mecca to the West; but explore your own heart, for there are both Rama and Allah.” (Kabir)
• “Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.” (Srimad Bhagavatam, or Bhagavata Purana)
• “He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect.” (Edict of Ashoka)
  • Love this one. Apparently these edicts were written on pillars dispersed throughout India during the rule of emperor Ashoka in ~200BC. During his rule, he was persuaded by Buddhist teachings, and spread them throughout the empire.
• “Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperialism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, first, most human beings accept the same, true philosophy of life; until, second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philosophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place man’s supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution.”

XIII. Salvation, Deliverance, Enlightenment

• Provides the story of the Chandogya Upanishad. Indra (a Deva) and Virochana (an Asura) go to Prajapati to learn about the Self. What follows is successive teachings, starting with the body as self, the psyche as self, the unconscious as self, and finally the superconscious as self. The Asura (demon) stops at the body, and worships that as doctrine. Indra makes his way through the steps until the super conscious. “Rising above the physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind, knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free.”

XIV. Immortality and Survival

• “Good men spiritualize their bodies; bad men incarnate their souls.” (Benjamin Whichcote)

• “More precisely, good men spiritualize their mind-bodies; bad men incarnate and mentalize their spirits.”

• “For oriental theologians there is no eternal damnation; there are only purgatories and then an indefinite series of second chances to go forward towards not only man’s, but the whole creation’s final end—total reunion with the Ground of all being.”

XV. Silence

• Good chapter. Theme is that silence offers an open womb for God’s voice. Author also warns against radio injecting noise, and advertising injecting wantonness, into our homes. First TVs, now smart phones and social media amplify this problem greatly.

XVI. Prayer

• Types of prayer:
  • Petition: asking of something for oneself
  • Intercessions: asking of something for others
  • Adoration: using one’s intellect, feeling, will and imagination in devotion towards God personalized and/or incarnate
  • Contemplation: alert passivity, laying one’s soul open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead
• Contemplation depends, in a way, on all types below it; petition does not depend on the others. Petition can be, and often is, used egotistically.
• “I have hardly any desire, but if I were to be born again I should have none at all. We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.” (St. Francois de Sales)
• “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (third clause of Lord’s Prayer)is repeated daily by millions, who have little intention of letting any will be done but their own.
• Rumi poem about a dervish tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah since Allah never answered with ‘Here am I’. A prophet appears to him with a message from God: “Was it not I who summoned thee to my service? / Was it not I who made thee bust with my name? / Thy calling ‘Allah!’ was my ‘Here am I’.” (Rumi)
• “Is the eye of the soul darkened by its infirmity, or dazzled by thy glory. Surely, it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by Thee. Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which Thou dwellest. Truly I see it not, because it is too bright for me; and yet whatever I see, I see through it, as the weak eye sees what it sees through the light of the sun, which in the sun itself it cannot look upon. … how far art Thou removed from my vision, though I am so near to thine! Everywhere Thou art wholly present, and I see Thee not. In Thee I move and in Thee I have my being, and can it come to Thee, thou are within me and about me, and I feel Thee not.” (St. Anselm)
• “The soul elevates her will towards God, apprehended by the understanding as a spirit, and not as an imaginary thing, the human spirit in this way aspiring to a union with the Divine Spirit.” (Augustine Baker)
  • Soul as female. Soul and spirit; particle and wave; yin and yang; female and male.
  • Yin and yang, while the feminine yin is substantive, it is also intuitive and implicit, while yang is an explicit outward expression of that ground, its process or function. So almost an inverse of soul/spirit. Both have their being in each other, however.
• “By allowing the fear of being ineffectual to enter into the state of prayer, and by wishing to accomplish something myself, I spoilt it all.” (St. Jeanne Chantal)
• “So long as you seek Buddhahood, specifically exercising yourself for it, there is no attainment for you.” (Yung-chia Ta-shih)
• “The highest prayer is the most passive. Inevitably: for the less there is of self, the more there is of God.”

XVII. Suffering

• Evil is always self-destructive and thus temporary.
• “Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation.”
• To be diabolical on a grand scale requires excellence in all virtues except wisdom and charity.
• “…he who bears afflictions with patience has paradise, and he who does not has hell.” (St. Philip Neri)
• “The Bodhisattva’s vow is a promise to forgo the immediate fruits of enlightenment and to accept rebirth and its inevitable concomitants, his labours and the graces of which, being selfless, he is the channel, all sentient beings shall have come to final and complete deliverance.”
  1. Sentient beings, limitless in number, I vow to ferry over.
  2. Passions (klesa) which are numberless, I vow to extinguish.
  3. The Dharma-gates without end (in number), I vow to know.
  4. The supreme Buddha Way, I vow to actualize.
  5. From east-Asian Buddhism. These mirror the four noble truths. Limitless, numberless, without end, supreme (insurpassable). All indicate an infinite quest.
• The innocent suffer because we are all of one body, and they are thus tied to the guilty. An innocent kidney or heart will bear the burdens of a gluttonous stomach, through no fault of their own. When we conceive of individuals as separate, we fall into trouble justifying why the innocent suffer.

XVIII. Faith

XIX. God is not Mocked

• At the shore the bottom is seen, far from shore the depths are unseeable, though that does not mean there is no bottom.

XX. Tantum religio pituitary suadere malorum

• ^ Such great evils was religion able to persuade.
• “Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, self-exaltations, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify the actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.”
• “Right belief is the first branch of the Eightfold Path leading to deliverance; the root and primal cause of bondage is wrong belief, or ignorance—an ignorance, let us remember, which is never completely invincible, but always, in the last analysis, a matter of will. If we don’t know, it is because we find it more convenient not to know. Original ignorance is the same thing as original sin.”

XXI. Idolatry

• “Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness, because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature, and the neglect fosters wickedness in the parts so neglected.” (Thomas Arnold)
• Three main forms of idolatry: technological, political, and moral.
• “…even the highest forms of moral idolatry are God-eclipsing and therefore guarantee the idolater against the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality.”
  • e.g., you could worship truth and justice at the expense of humility and tenderness. Better to worship that which brings all virtue into being.

XXII. Emotionalism

• “The imperfect destroy true devotion, because they seek sensible sweetness in prayer.” (St. John of the Cross)
• “The fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to spiritual sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation.” (St. John of the Cross)
• “Self-reproach is painful; but the very pain is a reassuring proof that the self is still intact; so long as attention is fixed on the delinquent ego, it cannot be fixed upon God and the ego (which lives upon attention and dies only when that sustenance is withheld) cannot be dissolved in the divine Light.”
  • Wonderful
• “Discouragement serves no possible purpose; it is simply the despair of wounded self-love. The real way of profiting by the humiliation of one’s own faults is to face them in their true hideousness, without ceasing to hope in God, while hoping nothing from self.” (Fénelon)
• On the eastern Samsara and rebirth: “If they are ‘lost’, their ‘hell’ is a temporal and temporary condition of thicker darkness and more oppressive bondage to self-will, the root and principle of all evil.”

XXIII. The Miraculous

• Bunch of quotes warning that infatuation with special illuminations, that is miracles, are bodily indulgences and don’t evidence a healthy faith.
• “Because they know nothing of spirituality and regard the material world and their hypotheses about it as supremely significant, rationalists are anxious to convince themselves and others that miracles do not and cannot happen. Because they have had experience of the spiritual life and its by-products, the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy are convinced that miracles do happen, but regard them as things of little importance, and that mainly negative and anti-spiritual.”

  XXIV. Ritual, Symbol, Sacrament

• “For persons who have been brought up to think of God by means of one set of symbols, it is very hard to think of Him in terms of other and, in their eyes, unhallowed sets of words, ceremonies and images.”
• “…the expression ‘a system of teaching’ has no meaning; for Truth (in the sense of Reality) cannot be cut up into pieces and arranged into a system. The words can only be used as a figure of speech.” (Diamond Sutra, Buddha)
• Dulcis Jesu memoria / dans vera cordi gaudia / sed super mel et omnia / ejus dulcis praesentia
  • “‘Sweet is the memory of Jesus, giving true joys to the heart; but sweeter beyond honey and all else is his presence.’ This opening stanza of the famous twelfth-century hymn summarizes in fifteen words the relations subsisting between ritual and real presence and the character of the worshipper’s reaction to each.”
• “Systematically cultivated memoria (a thing in itself full of sweetness) first contributes to the evocation, then results, for certain souls, in the immediate apprehension of praesentia, which brings with it joys of a totally different and higher kind.“
• “…if the sacramental rites are performed and attended for the sake of the ‘spiritual sweetness’ experienced and the powers and advantages conferred—then there is idolatry. less than God; and if the sacramental rites are performed and attended for the sake of the “spiritual sweetness” experienced and the powers and advantages conferred-then there is idolatry. This idolatry is, at its best, a very lofty and, in many ways, beneficent kind of religion. But the consequences of worshipping God as anything but Spirit and in any way except in spirit and in truth are necessarily undesirable in this sense-that they lead only to a partial salvation and delay the soul’s ultimate reunion with the eternal Ground.”
• “The Christ of the Gospels is a preacher and not a dispenser of sacraments or performer of rites; he speaks against vain repetitions; he insists on the supreme importance of private worship; he has no use for sacrifices and not much use for the Temple.”
  • Validate this. Seems a bit onesided.
• “For the Buddha of the Pali scriptures, ritual was one of the getters holding back the soul from enlightenment and liberation. Nevertheless, the religion he founded has made full use of ceremonies, vain repetitions and sacramental rites.”
  • Similar to the perfuming memoria of our bodily and psychic makeup that provokes ignorance, except at a collective scale.
• TO READ: The Gospel For Asia, A Study of Three Religious Masterpieces: Gita, Lotus, and Fourth Gospel, Kenneth Saunders

XXV. Spiritual Exercises

XXVI. Perseverance and Regularity

• “If thou shouldst say, “It is enough, I have reached per-fection,” all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one’s imperfection.” (St. Augustine)
  • Imperfection has its being in perfection.

XXVII. Contemplation, Action and Social Utility