Perennial Philosophy as Embodied Folk Science

July 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie

‘Perennial Philosophy’ uses the strategies of comparative religion and comparative anthropology to identify common themes running through diverse cultural traditions. Although originally coined by Leibniz, the term has become more widely associated with Aldous Huxley, whose book by that title attempted to distil the wisdom of the world’s religions into an essential set of perennial truths. The perennial philosophy movement includes such figures as Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Martin Lings, Fritjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, Marco Pallis, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Jacob Needleman. The extensive research on comparative mythology/psychology/philosophy carried out by Ken Wilbur, and referred to by him as ‘integral psychology’ is a modern reworking of this idea and ideal.

I would argue, however, that rather than illuminating some transcendent truth or pattern outside of human cognition, an ‘ultimate reality’ if you will, Perennial Philosophy and its cognates (Traditionalism etc.) might better be thought of as ‘embodied folk science’, that is, the body of knowledge we, as humans, create to explain the ‘big picture’ of human existence using the meagre tools of human sense and cognition. The degree of correspondence in the world’s great religious and philosophical tradition is not an indicator of a hidden truth, but a reflection of what truths are constructed when the tools for answering the big questions are common sense and common embodiment.

Posted in Huxley, Aldous, Naive Physics, Perennialism, Universals, Wilbur, Ken | No Comments »

The Extended Space of the Illuminated Mind

September 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

One of the most common experiences of the mind is that it is an object, like other objects in the real world, located in space, and existing at, or centred on a particular point. We routinely intuit our consciousness and cognition to be located in this single place, exactly here, precisely now. This point is also usually felt to be located at the centre of lived experience; we are the centre of our little worlds. However, there is another conceptual understanding of the mind which uses a very different spatial metaphor, this understanding relating to a correspondingly different form of consciousness to that of the little world and the central point. This formulation does not imagine the mind located within space, or even as somehow expanding, contracting, or moving through space, but rather that space and mind are, in some way, co-terminous. Space, in this model, is not an inert, unstructured void in which the mind occupies a distinct bounded region, but space is mind. Most commonly found in developed metaphysical systems, this metaphor reverses the Kantian proposition that space is a function of mind. The notion of an identification of mind with space as opposed to mind existing at a singular point in space correlates with states of consciousness often referred to as ‘enlightenment’ (which is itself a metaphor for the existence of a brightly lit space in which knowledge is visible). This enlightened space/mind features in a range of metaphysical practices and religious traditions including ‘divine union’, ‘advaita’, and which Newberg (1999) generalised as a sense of ‘Absolute Unitary Being’ (AUB). It may be said to be part of the perennial philosophy indicated by Huxley and others. Neurological evidence for this relationship between space, mind, and a sense of AUB comes from the work carried out by Michael Persinger who used ‘Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation’ (TCS) to affect part of the brain which contribute to our sense of physical location in space. When subjects were affected in this way their subjective experience was of feeling a sense of unity with the world.

Posted in Enlightenment, Huxley, Aldous, Kant, Immanuel, Light, Newberg, Andrew, Persinger, Michael, Space, Unity | No Comments »