PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY REVISITED

In his 1945 book entitled Perennial Philosophy, novelist Aldous Huxley states that "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." In the Introduction to the Christopher Isherwood-Swami Prabhavananda translation of The Bhagavad-Gita, Huxley summarizes the four fundamental doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy.

First:  the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness--the world of things and animals and men and even gods--is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second:  human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference, they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning.  This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third:  man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul.  It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth:  man's life on earth has only one end and purpose:  to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.