The Perennial Philosophy is defined by its author as “The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.” With great wit and stunning intellect, Aldous Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains them in terms that are personally meaningful.
An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the “divine reality” common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley
“The Perennial Philosophy,” Aldous Huxley writes, “may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.”
With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.
From its earliest days, America served as an arena for the revolutions in alternative spirituality that eventually swept the globe. Esoteric philosophies and personas—from Freemasonry to Spiritualism, from Madame H. P. Blavatsky to Edgar Cayce—dramatically altered the nation’s culture, politics, and religion. Yet the mystical roots of our identity are often ignored or overlooked. Opening a new window on the past, Occult America presents a dramatic, pioneering study of the esoteric undercurrents of our history and their profound impact across modern life.
Correction, 10 a.m., 4/10/2020: In our broadcast, we incorrectly said CDC director Robert Redfield was affiliated with the Church of Christ Scientist. He is not.
One thing that’s been helping some people get through the pandemic is their faith. The Church of Christ Scientist was founded in 1866 in Boston and looks to prayer for healing. Lance Madison is part of the church in Washington state, and he spoke to KUOW’s Angela King.
Lance Madison: Christian Science is based squarely on the Bible. The founder of the church was a New England woman named Mary Baker Eddy. And she was a devout Christian and lifelong student of the Bible and was driven to find deeper answers to the problem of human suffering, and what she called the problem of being. Jesus words, “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also,” are to us a promise of healing for us right here and now. And she took those words to heart, and Christian Science believes that healing in the spirit of Jesus, words and works is instrumental to Christian practice.
Angela King: What are the church’s teachings about medical interventions, for example, like the use of antibiotics?
Madison: What’s important to us is that each individual be healthy, well and safe. And that’s how we understand God to have made all of us. Our church does emphasize that members and their families must make their own choices, responsible choices about health. We generally look to prayer for healing because it involves not only a physical cure, but meaningful spiritual and moral growth and renewal. And we do respect medical professionals and share their desire to heal, to relieve suffering. And we respect the official guidance and public health directives, especially at a time like this.
King: You talk about healing when a church member becomes ill. What are the recommendations?
Madison: Again, our goal is the health and well-being safety of each individual. But Christian societies are accustomed to turn to God in prayer first, because we felt from our own experience that this kind of rigorous prayer is not only effective, but it can be transformative. Our church does have a care system to support individuals who need healing. A Christian Scientist can call on a Christian Science practitioner to pray with them and or a Christian Science nurse to provide non-medical nursing, such as feeding and bandaging. So in a contagion context, such as we’re facing now, clearly we think that it’s important to respect the official requirements and also just be aware of the practical concerns of our neighbors. It’s a simple matter of adherence to the golden rule, treating others as we would want to be treated right.
King: But if you are not seeking straight medical treatment that you might receive from a traditional hospital, how can you reassure members of the community that this may not be a problem for your neighbor?
Madison: Folks need to be assured on this. My observation is that Christian Scientists and Christian Science churches are very, very law abiding and considerate of their neighbors. We respect the recommended closure as a social distancing, the hygienic guidelines.
King: But some may argue that you’re not helping the community by not seeking out traditional medical treatment.
Madison: Well, I think, again, we’re not talking about just doing nothing. We find that our prayerful spiritual treatment is effective. And I think the record supports that. I think alleviating fear is doing something. And that, in fact, is what other religious representatives are trying hard to do.
Angela KingMORNING NEWS HOSTAngela King is the local host of Morning Edition. She’s been a part of the northwest news scene since the early 1990s. A proud University of Washington alumna, with degrees in broadcast journalism and American ethnic studies, she started her career as a news writer in Seattle, before becoming a reporter and anchor in Seattle, Portland and Albuquerque.More stories from Angela King »
Kim ShepardANNOUNCERKim Shepard is an announcer at KUOW. In addition to being the local presence during national programs, she also voices many of the sponsorships you hear on KUOW and on our podcasts.
My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly on the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”
Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.”
During these short, dark days let’s remember this ancient Christmas knowledge that illumination always follows darkness & that with love and compassion we will re-light our nations & lives…
Today is Christmas Eve, a connection to some of the most ancient of all known northern European shamanic traditions. Like people living in the north for millennia, we continue to embrace them with regional, national, and religious tweaks.
It occurs during the week of the shortest day and longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere, when ancient holy men and women lit “yule logs” to push back the darkness and implore the gods or nature to bring back the light of summer.
“For as both December and January were called Guili or Yule, upon Account of the Sun’s Returning, and the Increase of the Days; so, I am apt to believe, the Log has had the Name of the Yule-Log, from its being burnt as an Emblem of the returning Sun, and the Increase of its Light and Heat.”
When Louise and I lived in Stadtsteinach, Germany, Herr Mueller led us up a mountainside deep into the Franconian forest on Christmas eve in 1986 where our community had covered a pine tree with candles: we sang carols and he read aloud several bible verses.
He later told me that in ancient times the German shamans would set the tallest tree afire to re-ignite the sun and bring back longer days.
This concern with the shortest day of the year and being able to identify when the sun would begin to lengthen the days, heralding the return of the growing season (and food!), probably accounts for the “calendar stone” arrangements found across every northern hemisphere continent. The most recent was found under 40 feet of water in Lake Michigan and dates back 9,000 years.
Many traditions that tie Christmas back to the earlier “pagan” European religions it co-opted still exist.
Christmas carols, for example, started out as a pagan winter ceremony called “wassailing” to help fruit trees survive the winter and insure a good harvest the following year. By the middle ages it had turned into a Christmas-associated version of trick-or-treat where poor people would sing a song and demand money or food from their wealthy neighbors. As British historian and jurist John Seldon (1584-1654) wrote:
“Wenches … by their Wassels at New-years-tide … present you with a Cup, and you must drink of the slabby stuff; but the meaning is, you must give them Moneys.”
Which gave further ammunition to Oliver Cromwell in justifying his 1647 ban on Christmas celebrations. (Some argue he’s been reincarnated as a Texas Republican politician. /s)
Another European tradition has to do with mistletoe, one of the few plants that actually stays alive and bears fruit through the winter. Because of its ability to defy the dark days, it was thought to increase fertility and put in the beds of couples hoping to conceive. From this came the tradition of “kissing under the mistletoe.”
Christmas itself is supposed to be the celebration of the birth of Jesus, but if you match up the times of events associated with his birth it’s a virtual certainty it wasn’t in the winter. But indigenous people from every northern hemisphere continent had shamanic ceremonies and celebrations associated with pushing back the winter darkness and returning the sun to full illumination.
Early Christian governments, seeing it was impossible to stamp out these holidays and celebrations, simply overlaid them with the Christ story, bringing us the celebrations and traditions we have today.
For example, Norwegians tell the story of their 10th century King Hákon the Good, who’d been raised as a Christian in England and wanted to bring that religion to his homeland. As Norwegian historian Snorri Sturluson wrote in his book Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway:
“He had it established in the laws that the Yule celebration was to take place at the same time as is the custom with the Christians.”
For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.
The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.
Their reindeer livers metabolize and thus neutralize the compounds that poison humans, but leave the psychedelic Muscimol largely untouched. Thus, reindeer urine on fresh snow is powerfully psychedelic.
Arctic shamans, around this time of the year, would leave batches of dried amanita mushrooms out in the snow for the hungry reindeer, who consider them a delicacy. The shamans would then follow the reindeer as they danced and played (high on the ’shrooms), gathering the fresh yellow snow to make into a holiday grog.
This was also the time of the year that the father of the gods in Norse religion, the long-white-bearded Odin, would ride his eight-legged horse Sleipnir (pronounced “sleigh-near”), bringing good people small gifts made by “Odin’s men” in Asgard, his arctic retreat. The story seems to have morphed as it traveled out of Norway and Sweden from men to elves, and from eight legs to eight reindeer.
Odin controlled the powers of Thunder and Lightning, “Donner” and “Blitzen” in today’s Germanic and Scandinavian languages.
There are also multiple goddess connections to this holiday, reindeer, and the Santa story, as Judith Shaw documents here.
The indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, the Saami, believed that when the sun — characterized as a female deity named Biewe — went dim in the winter she was sick. They put fat over their doorways to nourish Biewe and bring the sun back to its full glory; they also sacrificed white reindeer in the hope the ceremony would revive Biewe. When white reindeer weren’t available, they sacrificed other animals decorated with white ribbons.
The reindeer’s favorite food, the amanita mushrooms, look like the clothing shamans (and Santa!) wore, red with white trim and white spots. They’re rotund: you could call them “chubby.” Thus, Santa represents the mushrooms in arctic cultural lore.
Amanitas grow under pine trees because their mycorrhizae or fungal filaments that extend underground transport minerals from the soil into the roots of the pine trees, who return the favor by transporting carbohydrates from year-round photosynthesis in their needles back down through their roots into the mycorrhizae to nourish the mushrooms.
Amanitas are only found under pine and spruce trees because of this symbiotic relationship that keeps them both healthy. And to this day pine and spruce are pretty much the only trees we use to decorate our homes this time of year.
While Christmas Eve was the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, it also held the greatest promise for an entire new year to come.
Indigenous European and Siberian Shamans and their communities would light their pine trees with candles, put a light symbolizing the north star (identifying the axis around which our world revolves) atop their trees, and consume their reindeer’s-yellow-snow drinks on these darkest nights.
Intoxicated — or allowed to enter the spiritual realms — by the amanita psychedelic from the reindeer urine, these ancient shamans used the powers of spirit and nature to fly into the sky to visit the spirit world and resurrect the longer and warmer days for their people, bringing back the “gifts” of spiritual illumination, healing, and the renewal of life.
Several of our modern religions, including Judaism and Christianity, hold this survival and renewal of light and life at the core of their winter solstice holy days.
During these short, dark days and long nights let’s remember this ancient knowledge that illumination always follows darkness, and that with love and compassion we will re-light our nations and lives.
Merry Christmas and warmest regards for whatever holidays you and yours may celebrate (or not) during this holy and transformational season.
May all your dreams and good works be realized as our sun’s eternal energy returns to full life in our part of Earth this coming New Year…
New Thinking • Dec 24, 2023 Ronnie Pontiac was the personal research assistance for Manly P. Hall at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles. He is author of American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World. He is coauthor with Tamra Lucid of The Magic of the Orphic Hymns: A New Translation for the Modern Mystic. Here he describes the history and the many meanings attributed to the ancient Orphic tradition. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:10 The first counter-culture 00:18:54 Ancient Greek culture 00:24:12 Renaissance interest 00:28:04 The Orphic hymns 00:30:40 Magic of the hymns 00:43:37 Recitation of hymns 00:54:33 Influence of Orphic tradition 01:00:13 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. (Recorded on November 3, 2023)
In the pursuit of spiritual growth and self-realisation, one often encounters various barriers that hinder the expansion of consciousness. These barriers, though subtle, can have a profound impact on our journey towards higher awareness. Let’s explore some of the common obstacles and how to transcend them.
The ego, though essential for our sense of self, can become a significant barrier to higher consciousness. When we overly identify with our roles, possessions, and achievements, we limit our true nature. By recognising the transient nature of these attachments, we can begin to dissolve the ego’s dominance.
Fear often keeps us bound to our comfort zones, preventing us from exploring new realms of consciousness. This fear may stem from the unknown, fear of failure, or fear of losing control. To overcome this barrier, we must cultivate courage and embrace uncertainty as a gateway to growth.
Holding onto rigid beliefs and judgments about ourselves and the world around us creates a narrow lens through which we view reality. True consciousness requires an open mind, free from preconceived notions. By practicing non-judgmental awareness, we can expand our perspective.
The attachment to specific outcomes can blind us to the beauty and wisdom present in the present moment. When we let go of rigid expectations, we open ourselves to the flow of life and allow for unexpected, transformative experiences to unfold.
Past traumas and unprocessed emotions can create energy blockages, preventing the free flow of consciousness. Engaging in practices like mindfulness, meditation, and therapy can help release these energetic knots and facilitate a deeper connection to our true selves.
In our fast-paced, digitally-driven world, constant distractions can hinder our ability to cultivate mindfulness and presence. Creating moments of stillness and unplugging from external stimuli allows us to tune into our inner wisdom and access higher states of consciousness.
Identifying strongly with labels, whether they be related to profession, nationality, or social status, can create a false sense of self. Recognising that these are transient aspects of our existence can liberate us from the constraints they impose.
Often, we find ourselves dwelling on the past or projecting into the future, neglecting the richness of the present moment. Cultivating mindfulness through practices like meditation, deep breathing, and conscious awareness brings us back to the now, where true consciousness resides.
The comfort of familiarity can be a seductive force, deterring us from embracing change and evolution. Embracing impermanence and the natural cycles of life allows for a more graceful flow towards higher states of consciousness.
Relying solely on intellectual understanding can create a barrier to experiencing consciousness on a deeper, intuitive level. Balancing intellectual knowledge with embodied wisdom and intuitive insights allows for a more holistic and profound connection to higher awareness.
Breaking through these barriers to consciousness requires patience, dedication, and a willingness to explore the depths of our being. It’s a journey of self-discovery, a peeling away of layers that reveals the radiant core of our true nature. As we navigate these obstacles, we inch closer to a state of heightened awareness and a deeper connection with the boundless consciousness that underlies all of existence.
Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness.
The British author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). With the publication of “The Doors of Perception” in 1954, Huxley became an early exponent of drug-induced alterations of conscious states, a position he maintained and expounded upon toward the end of his life, as he lost his own visual capacity and the psychedelic movement embraced him warmly.
Good descriptions of trance states are hard to come by. Because the very name “trance” has such spookily provocative connotations we are not tempted to learn about it. One consequence is that those of us who are not easily able to enter such altered states tend to be ignorant of what it actually feels like. We may even be fearful of the implied loss of control. The upshot is a tendency to discount the whole story as a fabrication, so we can remain safely and smugly skeptical. But if we continue to ignore trance, we miss the opportunity to learn from it and to better understand it.
Aldous Huxley’s capacity to enter — at will — the dissociated state he called “deep reflection” is of value because Huxley was a painstaking self-observer. Anyone who cut his novelistic teeth (as I did) on such brilliant books as “Antic Hay” or “Point Counter Point” will share my admiration of Huxley’s wit, his literary elegance, and above all, his interest in interpersonal relationships. He is a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness, which he actively cultivated in the service of his writing. Because Huxley’s interest in the vicissitudes of altered states extended to mysticism and to psychedelic drugs, he is an ideal contributor to our inquiry into the Dream Drugstore. One final point: Huxley was so open that he was willing to collaborate with the hypnosis expert Milton Erickson, despite having his own biases. Erickson’s involvement provides a valuable and welcome degree of objectivity.
Erickson met Huxley in his Los Angeles house in 1950, and they spent the day experimenting together and making extensive notes. Because Huxley’s own notes were lost in the tragic brush fire that later destroyed his home and library, we rely on Erickson’s for a description of Huxley’s deep reflection as a state
marked by physical relaxation with bowed head and closed eyes, a profound progressive psychological withdrawal from externalities but without any actual loss of physical realities nor any amnesias or loss of orientation, a “setting aside” of everything not pertinent and then a state of complete mental absorption in matters of interest to him. Yet, in that state of complete withdrawal and mental absorption, Huxley stated that he was free to pick up a fresh pencil to replace a dulled one to make “automatically” notations on his thoughts and to do all this without a recognizable realization on his part of what physical act he was performing. It was as if the physical act were “not an integral part of my thinking.” In no way did such physical activity seem to impinge upon, to slow, or to impede the train of thought so exclusively occupying my interest. It is associated but completely peripheral activity. … I might say activity barely contiguous to the periphery.
Huxley was able to enter his state of deep reflection in about five minutes. He simply “cast aside all anchors” of any type of awareness and thereby achieved an “orderly mental arrangement” that permitted his thoughts to flow freely as he wrote. When he demonstrated this, Erickson observed that Huxley was completely out of touch with his surroundings, a feature that was amply confirmed by Huxley’s wife, who often found him sitting in his chair oblivious to the world while his behavior was “automatic like a machine moving precisely and accurately.” It took him about two minutes to emerge, after which he described the “timeless, spaceless void” that he had left, and “a total absence of everything on the way there and on the way back and an expected meaningless some thing for which one awaits in a state of Nirvana since there is nothing more to do.”
Huxley could alter the features of the state by autosuggestion or upon Erickson’s instruction. He could see color or he could limit his descent to a lighter level and still retain contact with Erickson. But like subjects in the forbidden zone of lucid dreaming, Huxley tended to be pulled deeper or to exit when his concentration was interrupted by verbal or nonverbal commands. In other words, the introduction of volition, presumably mediated by the frontal cortex, acted in opposition to the trance state.
When he tried to induce auditory and visual hallucinations, Huxley found it difficult to remain in trance unless he built up the hallucinatory scenario by attaching the sound of music to the sense of rhythmic body movement. When Huxley moved the music up to the level of opera so that he could hear singing, he was observed by Erickson to be mumbling.
This constructive process, by which motor commands become the internal stimuli for sensory experience, is exactly what occurs in REM sleep dreaming when oculomotor and vestibular signals generate dream imagery. When this process was going on inside Huxley’s head, Erickson observed changes in Huxley’s head position and in his breathing pattern. By feeling his head turn from side to side Huxley was able to evolve a giant rose, three feet in diameter, from what was at first a barely visible rhythmically moving object.
Several other formal features of Huxley’s trance condition are of interest with respect to the analogy we have drawn with REM sleep dreaming. We first consider the relaxed posture, indicating a step on the path to cataplexy. In full-blown cataplexy, the assumption of a flaccid posture is associated with the inability to move on command and is thus similar to the active motor paralysis of REM sleep dreams. Anesthesia and amnesia were both present in Huxley’s trance, although they tended to be selective, and when Huxley attempted to make them global, his trance deepened. Time distortion, a distinctive component of the orientational instability of dreams, was a robust aspect of Huxley’s altered state.
A most dramatic finding was Huxley’s ability, in 65 percent of the trials, to give the correct page number when passages of his books were read to him.
A most dramatic finding was Huxley’s ability, in 65 percent of the trials, to give the correct page number when passages of his books were read to him. Huxley claimed that he could recall most of his writings at will, so that when he heard a passage he could then mentally read the antecedent and subsequent paragraphs, whereupon the page number “flashed” into his mind. This almost incredible feat of hypermnesia is paralleled in dreaming by the unbidden emergence of characters and incidents from the distant past; it contrasts, significantly, with the loss of recent memory capacity. It is as if the loss of the diminished capacity to record were complemented by or compensated for by an enhanced capacity to play back! The mechanism of this reciprocity must be explained both at the level of regional circuitry and at the level of neuromodulatory balance.
Even more incredible is the description of age regression, the final tour de force of the Erickson-Huxley encounter. I give a passage [included in Charles Tart’s 1969 book “Altered States of Consciousness”]to convey the claim directly and to let the reader decide what to make of it:
He turned back and noted that the infant was growing before his eyes, was creeping, sitting, standing, toddling, walking, playing, talking. In utter fascination he watched this growing child, sensed its subjective experiences of learning, of wanting, of feeling. He followed it in distorted time through a multitude of experiences as it passed from infancy to childhood to school days to early youth to teenage. He watched the child’s physical development, sensed its physical and subjective mental experiences, sympathized with it, empathized with it, thought and wondered and learned with it. He felt as one with it, as if it were he himself, and he continued to watch it until finally he realized that he had watched that infant grow to the maturity of 23 years. He stepped closer to see what the young man was looking at, and suddenly realized that the young man was Aldous Huxley himself, and that this Aldous Huxley was looking at another Aldous Huxley, obviously in his early fifties, just across the vestibule in which they both were standing; and that he, aged 52, was looking at himself, Aldous, aged 23. Then Aldous, aged 23 and Aldous aged 52, apparently realized simultaneously that they were looking at each other and the curious questions at once arose in the mind of each of them. For one the question was, “Is that my idea of what I’ll be like when I am 52?” and, “Is that really the way I appeared when I was 23?” Each was aware of the question in the other’s mind. Each found the question of “Extraordinarily fascinating interest” and each tried to determine which was the “actual reality” and which was the “mere subjective experience outwardly projected in hallucinatory form.”
The question of whether such experiences are “actual reality” or “mere subjective experience outwardly projected in hallucinatory form” is central to current debate that pits “veridical experience” against “false memory” and pits multiple personality against role-playing. Although Huxley’s apparently exceptional ability to enhance recall by altering the state of his brain and our own ability in dreams to relive early experience are clear evidence that memory is state dependent and can be altered, none of the evidence supports the now thoroughly discredited idea that every experience, thought, and feeling is recorded in the brain-mind forever and is therefore theoretically retrievable. And none of it counters the strong positive empirical evidence that memory is easily distorted or even fabricated in response to social demands.
What hypnosis now needs to advance as a science is the application of the scientific principles and techniques that other Huxleys developed, from Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), who championed the theory of evolution as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” to Andrew Fielding Huxley (1917-2012), who advanced the ionic hypothesis of the nerve action potential and won the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, and Hugh Ensor Huxley (1924-2013), whose sliding filament theory of muscle contraction explained how chemical energy is converted to movement.
How, we wonder, would a PET scan of Aldous Huxley’s brain in deep reflection compare with the images collected in outwardly attentive waking, deep sleep, and that most easily obtained altered state of consciousness, REM sleep dreaming? My guess is that it would look more like REM than deep sleep or waking.
J. Allan Hobson was a Harvard psychiatrist who pioneered the first serious scientific alternative to Freud’s ideas about dreams. He was the author of close to two dozen books, including “The Dream Drugstore,” from which this article is excerpted.
