for the Absolute, the One. What of the Many? As the succeeding sentence in Forgotten Truth puts the question, “How can we [hold our truth to be the Truth] when others see truth so differently?” As I think back on the matter, this is one of the two issues on which the Perennialists have helped me most. The other is the character of the modern world, which I shall take up in my closing section.
THE RELATION BETWEEN RELIGIONS
Having found Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim (as well as Christian) teachers I had grown to revere, there was no way I was going to privilege one religion over the others. The question was where (within them) was there an absolute I could live by. (It needed to be an ontological absolute, not just a moral absolute, like tolerance or the golden rule, for only ontological realities wield objective power.) I knew that such an Absolute couldn't be slapped together from pieces gleaned here and there, for it was obvious that the power of the historical revelations derived from their respective patterns, or gestalts. To think that I could match such power by splicing chi [spiritual energy], say, to pratiyasammutpada [literally, “dependent arising”] and the logos made about as much sense as hoping to create a great work of art by pasting together pieces from my favorite paintings. Or creating a living organism from a heap of organ transplants.
The alternative seemed to be to find a single thread that runs through the various religions. This, though, ran into the problem of essentialism. Who is to say what the common essence of the world's religions is, and how could any account of it escape the signature of its proponent's language and perspective?
Caught as I was in this impasse, the Perennialists called my attention to a third possibility that resolved it: Don't search for a single essence that pervades the world's religions. Recognize them as multiple expressions of the Absolute, which is indescribable. One reason it is ineffable is that its essence is single, and knowing requires a knower and a known, which means that we are already in duality. The more understandable reason, though, is that descriptions proceed through forms, and the Absolute is formless.
This solution to the problem of the One and the Many has satisfied me since it first came to view, but I have had to recognize that it is not widely available because most people hear formlessness as lack. To them, if formless things exist at all, they are vague and abstract. Others, though, see matters differently. To distinguish the two types of people, Perennialists call the first type esoterics and the second exoterics.
The lives of exoterics are completely contained in the formal world. For them the formless is (as was just noted) abstract at best. It is incomplete. Lacking in important respects, it is not fully real. Esoterics, on the other hand, find reality overflowing its formal containers into formlessness, though this puts the cart before the horse. Because the formless is more real than the formed, the accurate assertion is that the formal world derives from the formless. The logical argument for the esoterics’ position is that forms are finite and the Absolute is infinite, but for genuine esoterics the formless is more than a logical inference. It is an experienced reality. Through a distinctive mode of knowing (variously called gnosis, noesis, intellectus, jnana, and prajna) esoterics sense the formless to be more concrete, more real, than the world of forms. This is incomprehensible to exoterics because they conclude that an absolute that lacks formal divisions must lack the qualities those divisions fan out. But for esoterics, not only are those qualities in the Absolute; they are there in superessential, archetypal intensity and degree. Opposite of abstract, the Absolute is superconcrete.
I said that the Absolute is indefinable, but we need indications of its character, and these are what the great revelations provide. In doing so, they resemble telescopes that “triangulate” the Absolute like a distant star. What in varying degrees of explicitness they all proclaim is that the Absolute is richer in every positive attribute we know—power, beauty, intelligence, whatever—than we can possibly imagine. This all the major religions assert, and we can understand the logic of their claim. For the only satisfying reason that can be given for the way things are is that it is best that they be that way, so the mind instinctively attributes to what is ultimate the best that it can conceive. The alternative is to accept meaninglessness to some degree.
The consequence of this approach for the relation between religions runs something like this. As the superconcrete Absolute includes all forms, it can deploy them at will. In anthropomorphic (which isn't to say inaccurate) idiom, it chooses to do so in the great formal constellations we call revelations, crowding as much of itself into each as is possible under the formal limitations that finitude exacts. Because the esoteric takes the Absolute to be the formless source of these revelations, he or she can endorse their plurality as alternative voices in which the Absolute speaks to be understood by different audiences.
While this format gave me exactly what I was looking for—(a) an Absolute (b) that didn't require that I rank order the religions I work with—it carries a stubborn consequence. There is no way to satisfy both parts of this two-fold desideratum on the formal, exoteric plane. To which hard truth Perennialists add: If it is necessary to choose, it is better to adhere to the Absolute as truly and sufficiently disclosed in one's own revelation than to displace it with the “civil liberties” principle of religious parity, which is no more than a personally arrived at guide for conduct. Somewhere within these last two sentences I sense myself as parting company with my liberal friends in “the wider ecumenism,” for they seem willing to reshape the forms of the great, originating revelations to two ends: politically, to reduce conflict by rounding off their sharp corners and rough edges, and theologically, to improve on their truths by learning from others. For my part, believing as I do that each of the enduring revelations already contains “truth sufficient unto salvation,” I am not enthusiastic about tampering with them. The project smacks of precisely the sort of human fiddling with the revelations that Perennialists find themselves charged with when their position is mistaken for (a) the cafeteria approach or (b) articulated essentialism.
Continuing with the last point, the chief objection to Perennialism that I hear is that its universalism rides roughshod over differences. I suspect that many such critics would shift their attack from Perennialism's (presumed) New Age all-is-oneism to its (actual) conservatism if they understood that everything that esoterics say about such things, universalism included, presupposes the formed/ unformed distinction I have outlined. I was a universalist long before I encountered Perennialism. Where it changed my thinking was in persuading me to balance my universalism with an equal regard for the differences that distinguish revelations. Schuon's Transcendent Unity of Religions really is transcendent—radically so in being formless. In our “formal” life, forms are decisively important; so important that the forms of revelation should be respected. The cosmologies and social mores of their day (which they assume) are negotiable, but for spiritual insight we do better to plumb their pronouncements than tinker with them. For those forms are not incidental to the clarity of the message they convey, which clarity accounts for their historical power.
So much for religious pluralism. What of the modern world? Jacob Needleman warned us that for Perennialists “the study of spiritual traditions [is] a sword with which to destroy the illusions of contemporary man.” What are those illusions?
CRITIQUE OF THE MODERN WORLD
As long as the issue was the relations between religions, Perennialists was the appropriate name for the thinkers I identify with. When we turn to their view of modernity, it is their other appellation—Traditionalists—that makes their point.
It does so because Traditionalists consider the ethos by which people lived before the rise of modern science to be on balance more accurate than the scientistic one that has replaced it. Not (to repeat the point just mentioned) its science, which has been superseded, or its social mores, but its ontological vision. I wrote Forgotten Truth to celebrate that vision; and I wrote its sequel, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, to expose the Procrustean epistemology—again, scientistic—that has caused traditional truth to be largely forgotten. I say forgotten rather than refuted, for there has been no refutation, merely an exchange of traditional ontology for one that derives from an epistemology that (in the short run, at least) caters to our material wants and wish to control, “the Old Adam.” There are, of course, oceans of historical and psychological reasons for the West's having made this exchange,