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Perennial
philosophy
“What
is the perennial philosophy? The phrase was coined by
Leibniz but popularized by Aldous Huxley,
who recognized common elements in the mystical
writings of various eras, places, cultures, and
religions, in . . . Vedanta and Hebrew prophecy, in
the Tao Teh King and the Platonic dialogues, in the
Gospel according to St. John and Mahayana theology, in
Plotinus and the Areopagite, among the Persian Sufis
and the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance . . . .
Huxley collected these common elements in a book which
he called The Perennial Philosophy.
About 1955, Schrodinger wrote:
"Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious
volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy
and which is an anthology from the mystics of the most
various periods and the most various peoples. Open it where
you will and you find many beautiful utterances of a similar
kind. You are struck by the miraculous agreement between
humans of different race, different religion, knowing
nothing about each other's existence, separated by centuries
and millennia, and by the greatest distances that there are
on the globe."
Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy is one
attempt to capture in writing this world view, based
on the insights of the mystics. A Treasury of
Traditional Wisdom is another. It's an
extensive compilation of quotations from the world's
religious and philosophical traditions, grouped by
topic, that records many of the mystical utterances
upon which the perennial philosophy is based. These
and other compilations could provide much of the raw
data necessary for a scientific religion. The mystical
statements they contain exhibit such a degree of
agreement and consistency - exactly what we'd expect
if mystical experiences are experiences of an
objective, universal reality - that science could take
them as its raw data and fuse them into a single
system, a scientific religion.”
Arthur
J. D'Adamo, Science Without Bounds: A
Synthesis of Science, Religion and Mysticism,
p. 131, 1997
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