Does The Perennial Philosophy Reveal the True Purpose of Religion?

Religion gets a bad rep in the modern world of rapid scientific progress. Many liberal, educated, materialistic people dismiss religion as an outdated artifact, belonging to a formerly ignorant world. Over one billion people now identify as atheist/secular.

When taken at face value, it’s no major surprise that we’re so dismissive of religion, particularly those of the Abrahamic variety. The apparent existence of some all-powerful deity that will either save us and let us into paradise/heaven or send us to hell when we die doesn’t exactly seem plausible.

Therefore, it seems folly to live our lives in accordance with some shaky doctrine that sets our moral codes. Nor does it seem comprehensible to a rational educated mind that people have waged and continue to wage wars over these beliefs.

The Perennial Philosophy

With that said, an overlooked aspect of religion is its use as a set of symbols for realizing greater truths about the nature of existence. In his exquisite 1946 book, The Perennial Philosophy, English writer Aldous Huxley elucidated what he felt was the common truth behind every religion.

According to Huxley, the perennial philosophy—the single metaphysical truth that ties together religions as disparate as Taoism and Islam—is nothing other than the realization of man’s true nature as equivalent to the nature of divine Reality. You can substitute divine Reality for Tao, nature, Brahman, God, Logos, or whatever term you deem suitable.

Huxley goes as far as saying that the ultimate reason for human existence is to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Coming to this realization, however, is no mean feat. We, humans, have a proclivity towards ego-centered desires that is incredibly hard to shake. As the Buddha said in his Four Noble Truths, the cause of suffering is selfish craving.

The people who have grasped the truth of the perennial philosophy have been so few in number that they’ve taken on the mantle of certain titles, whether that be Buddha (awakened one), sage, prophet, or saint.

According to Huxley, knowledge of the truth pointed at by many religions can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the “thou” from the “That”. (In reference to that old Sanskrit phrase, Tat Tvam Asi: thou art that.)

In fact, exponents of the perennial philosophy, when forming some of the teachings of the world’s religions, have insisted that man’s obsession with being a separate self is the most formidable obstacle in knowing God.

My Thoughts on the Perennial Philosophy

As an agnostic, The Perennial Philosophy was a profound book that definitely caused me to view religion in a different light. My agnosticism tends to veer towards taking materialism as the ultimate truth, but I’ve always had a nagging feeling that this might not be the case. Hence my openness to ideas such as those espoused in Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and other non-scientific pursuits of truth.

As an aside, if something is non-scientific, that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid or real. Science is only concerned with systematically studying phenomena in the physical world through observation and experiment. What can science ever truly know about abstract, subjective feelings that arise within consciousness like love and empathy? You might come up with an incredibly detailed set of metrics to measure how much love someone feels, but the metrics and their measurements aren’t the same things as the feeling of love.

This is why we all need to become scientists of our own minds and consciousness if we are to really get the full picture about the nature of who we are and how we relate to the universe. Self-inquiry and meditation, both ancient methods arising from a time before the Scientific Revolution, essentially ask us to conduct experiments on our own consciousness.

I think it’s easy to shit on most religions when we take their teachings at face value (perhaps with the exceptions of some Oriental religions). We forget that words are symbols and that many religious teachings were meant to be taken as analogies rather than literal truths. Sadly, the priests, rabbis, popes, bishops, imams etc all forget the analogical nature of religion too.

With regards to me attaining the realization of my own being as equivalent to the divine or the Tao, well, I have a strong sense of identity as a separate self and I’m very attached to all the egoic manifestations of that separate self: my love of football, my anxiety, my enjoyment of spicy food, hell, even my enjoyment of books about the nature of reality!

I feel like realizing the type of mysticism Huxley talks about in his book is something quite beyond me at this point in time.

The intellectual and spiritual appeal of this perennial philosophy is undeniably strong, though. How beautiful it would be if this feeling of separation from other beings and from the universe itself was ultimately an illusion. How nice it would be to let go of the fear of death in the knowledge that dying is simply walking home, to paraphrase Ram Dass.

Meditation and Psychedelia as Ego-Tamers

The chasm between the appeal of this perennial philosophy and my own identity as a separate self is too large right now but I am open to the possibility of it narrowing. I am too absorbed in the details and problems of my ego-driven existence to even want to part with that identity, despite the suffering it often causes. It’s like I want to realize this perennial truth, but I don’t want to let go of who I think I am.

Even a self-centered Average Joe like me has had glimpses of that transcendental selflessness that is hinted at by the perennial philosophy. While meditating deeply, I’ve sporadically had experiences in which there was no “me” as a separate self at all. There was just consciousness.

I have never taken psychedelics, but I have researched them extensively. And if I’ve learned anything from my research, it’s that a high enough dose of the right psychedelic is like strapping yourself to a rocket that launches you away from your ego identity, whether you want to be launched or not.

Ultimately, I believe Huxley himself felt similar to me. He was a smart and open-minded person and he was attracted by the perennial philosophy but perhaps too stuck to his identity as a giant of the world of literature.

This ego attachment was, I would hazard a guess, a large part of what Huxley tried to overcome when he took mescaline and detailed his experiences with such vividness, clarity, and poetry in the Doors of Perception.

I fully intend one day to take a large enough dose of psychedelics so as to temporarily abandon my identity as a separate self and see where it takes me; whether I can glimpse the perennial philosophy.

Even a glimpse of truth is better than never seeing things as they really are.