Chapter Three


Knowledge Through Prescribed Experience

     Throughout the Middle Ages, European thought stagnated largely because of its conception of knowledge as derived from argument from authority--whether the authority of the Church or the State. Europe languished in intellectual and cultural retrogression during the Dark Ages, while the light of wisdom was preserved and advanced by those they labeled "the infidel Saracen." The reintroduction of the Classical (Greek) Tradition and the Perennial Tradition through the confluence of European and Muslim thought, beginning around 1000 CE, revitalized earlier conceptions of knowledge as derived from experience.

The Perennial Tradition
     Renaissance scholars pored over Classical and Perennialist writings which had been preserved and studied by Moslem scholars. Over time the authority of Plato and other Classical thinkers supplemented that of Aristotle, the Church and the State. The churchmen had interpreted Aristotle in ways to support their own view of knowledge and the re-introduction of Plato and other Perennialist writers laid the foundation for the Renaissance. However, many European scholastics simply dismissed the Perennialist writings as being tainted by occult influence.

     In Roger Bacon's terms, the Middle Ages held argument to be the primary path to knowledge: argument from authority. Experience, the other mode of knowledge to which Bacon refers, was slowly beginning to make its way into Western life. We can get a feeling for the medieval mode of knowledge from the anecdote about the stable boy who heard the scholars arguing about how many teeth a horse had. The scholars consulted Aristotle concerning this weighty issue, while the stable boy went to the barn and counted the actual number of teeth a horse had. After reporting his findings to the learned gentlemen, the stable boy was, of course, summarily dismissed, because experience had nothing to do with knowledge. Knowledge was found in authority and system.

"The mediaeval way of thinking differed fundamentally from ours as solely ideas alone were real, facts and things only in so far as they participated in the reality of ideas." Heinz Gotze, Castel del Monte

     The Perennial Tradition was preserved in its Moslem repository while Europe suffered through the intellectual and cultural retrogression of the Dark Ages. Now this Tradition burst forth throughout Europe by way of scholars and scientists who had carefully studied and imbibed its teachings: Raymond Lully, Alexander Hales, Duns Scotus, Paracelsus, Geber, Albertus Magnus, Pope Gerbert, Pope Silvester II, St. John of the Cross, and others. Anselm, known as Sufi Obdullah el Tarjuman, translated parts of the Encyclopaedia of the Arab Brethren of Purity in his book, Dispute of the Ass with Brother Anselmo.

Experience As Experimentation
     The first steps in understanding that knowledge is achieved through experience were halting and often misdirected. Natural philosophers, who came to be called scientists, began to see that experience as observation was not just a way of developing hypotheses, but a means of describing the actual workings of phenomena. This was the real impact of what came to be called the scientific method--that scientists such as Kepler and Galileo began to assert that their hypotheses not only "saved the appearances" of observable data, but were in fact physically true.

      This was a revolutionary idea; no longer was it argument from theological or political systems of authority, but scientific experimentation--observation and hypothesis-formation--which could determine what is true. The Church was not afraid of the heliocentric hypothesis--it had been around for centuries. It was when this hypothesis--based on the experiential observations of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo--were said to be true that the Church and State began their murderous inquisitions.

      The two slogans of the eighteenth century Enlightenment were:

• Voltaire's Ecrasez l'infame--Crush the infamy
  
  
• Kant's Sapere aude--Dare to know!

It was indeed daring to know in this new experiential mode, for there were still plenty of knees that bent to argument from dogmatic authority who were quite willing to force other knees to bend as well.

     In many of the significant seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophers, there was a hint of the esoteric in their lives and writings. Western scholars had assumed that a totemic figure such as Isaac Newton was above such offensive occult influence--a man of purely materialistic science. It thus came as a shock when in 1936 Newton's manuscripts were auctioned off by his descendants at Sotheby's. John Maynard Keynes summarized what came to light about Newton:

      "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians . . . He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and this is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty." ¹

     Newton believed he was among the few who were privileged to receive the Hermetic wisdom. He dealt in alchemy as a method of discovering truth, and his conception of gravity is directly tied to the Hermetic principle of sympathetic forces, sources of divine energy in the universe.

     But Newton was only one of many philosophers influenced by the Perennialist Tradition. There were periods of decline and resurgence in esoteric investigation, depending on religious and political tolerance. The decade of 1650 to 1660, for example, saw more alchemical and astrological books translated into English than during the entire preceding century.


Enlightening Experience Orchestrated By A Teacher
     The Enlightenment philosophes developed new conceptions of knowledge, influenced by subtle clues provided by Perennialist teachings. For Newton and his followers, experiential observation produced the data and the investigation resulted in generalized principles of measure and number. The Perennial Tradition spoke of knowledge coming through the deliberate arrangement and provocation of the learner's experience by the teacher. The natural philosophers took the first part of that legacy but ignored the second. The development of science as the deliberate arrangement of experience to test a hypothesis was the result--a truncated teaching at best.

     The teachings available to the astute European thinker included such works as Ibn Sabin's Secrets of Illuministic Wisdom and Shahabudin Suhrawardi's Gifts of Deep Knowledge (Awarifu-l-ma'arif) ².  Frederick II von Hohenstaufen, ruler of Sicily, corresponded with Ibn Sabin ³, Roger Bacon cites Ibn Sabin in his own writings, and Suhrawardi's ideas provided the foundation for Dante's works. In his Gifts of Deep Knowledge, Shahabudin Suhrawardi indicates that true knowledge is attained through a spiritual guide prescribing enlightening experience for a seeker. The guide must thoroughly understand the learner's personality and provide the precise kinds of experience which will facilitate understanding and probity.


The Apostasy of Western Thought
      Western thought from this point on is the result of misinterpreting or ignoring this fundamental teaching about knowledge through illuminating experience provided by a spiritual guide. Shahabudin Suhrawardi was able to foretell of the experience of people such as Descartes, the victim of false and truncated teachings.

"If the spiritual advisor (murshid) be not perfect and excellent, the student (murid) wasteth his time. . . . He will seek relief in . . . doubting all that he hath heard or read; and regarding as fable the accounts of holy men who have reached truth (hakikat)."

     Having studied in a Jesuit seminary, the Ecole de La Flèche, Descartes believed he had received the best education available. Yet, he says, he had learned nothing he could call certain. He began his own self-education by disbelieving everything. He supposed that there could be a malignant demon that deceived his senses. Assuming without foundation that he had shed all credulity, Descartes then asserted that he possessed a true self whose reality was proved by its own experience. "I think, therefore I am," Descartes averred. And Western thought has ever since assumed that we possess an authentic self which possesses the power to force reality to reveal the truth.

Descartes' ideas about doubting all concepts and finding proof for his existence in his thinking were actually not original. In his Metaphysics Aristotle says:

"He who seeks to acquire knowledge must first know how to doubt, for intellectual doubt helps to establish the truth."

And Augustine had written:

"If I make a mistake, I conclude that I exist; for he who does not exist cannot make a mistake, so that the fact of having made a mistake is proof that I exist."

Philosophers such as Bradley and psychologists such as Skinner have shown that the concept of the Self or Ego is, at best, problematic and that basing one's understanding of reality on such a slender reed is logically unwarranted.

"You shall become aware, through daily practice, that what you imagine to be your self is concocted from beliefs put into you by others, and is not your self at all." Iskandar of Balk (a Perennialist Teacher) 4

     The Western mind has remained in an arrested state of development by assuming that the Cartesian/Hobbesian/Lockean view of reality is ultimate truth. We no longer need to ask what reality is; it is the booming, buzzing, money-capitalist, technological, scientific, imperialist world that any sane person takes for granted. And life is for the purpose of satisfying all the desires of the self.

The Perennial Tradition Prevails
     Some eighteenth century thinkers--especially American philosophers such as Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson--were able to tap into the dynamic energy of the Perennial Tradition. Their immersion in this older tradition made it possible for them to help create an entirely new nation and establish its foundations on the fundamental civil liberties set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

     Unfortunately, the general mind set resulting from the eighteenth century Enlightenment has produced a series of concepts which are, at best, partial representations of the Perennial Tradition. Perennialist teachers have, for example, spoken of the need to cleanse one's mind from delusions and free oneself from political and social manipulation. Some European philosophes misinterpreted this to mean skepticism and anarchy--and the French revolution was the outcome.

      Pursuing the Cartesian delusion of an authentic, all-powerful self, philosophes believed they could force nature to reveal her secrets. Assuming they could discover truth through their own speculations and observations, they merely produced new dogmas of empiricism, rationalism, materialism, and pragmatism. Their ideas helped to overthrow old forms of ideological and political tyranny, but these were immediately replaced with newer forms of mental and political dictatorship.

     There were essential elements lacking in all this fury of eighteenth century thought:

• Enlightened teachers who had traveled the path to knowledge

• Enlightened teachers who could prescribe specific kinds of experience to assist the seeker develop heightened awareness

• Seekers of truth who did not assume they
  • already possessed the capacities required for a genuine search for truth

  • already knew the truth

• An awareness that seekers can learn very little on their own from their unorganized experience

• An awareness that most seekers are initially incapable of gaining knowledge and must first learn how to learn
  

     The eighteenth century Enlightenment mind set, embodied in the Newtonian world view and its Einsteinian revision, has produced an industrial revolution, electronic and mechanical technology, and improved material conditions for some humans. But we are still suffering from its mutilated reading of the Perennial Tradition. Humans are now afflicted by new political and social tyrannies embodied in globalist monetary capitalism, egomania, and conditioned ignorance.

Recognizing An Authentic Teacher
     To gain knowledge we must connect with new, authentic teachers who can help us return to a genuine search for the truth. But this is not an easy task, since, as Shahabudin Suhrawardi warns, "false teachers and deceived seekers vainly pursue the desert vapor--and wearied return, the dupe of their own imagination."

     The authentic teacher finds the seeker, since "to discover him [the true teacher] is impossible." Our challenge is to recognize an authentic teacher, because our own misconceptions make us blind to a true mentor or lead us to clamor after a false guru who panders to our weaknesses. Very often we are so presumptuous in our self-importance that we approach a teacher with nothing but wrong assumptions. For example, a seeker may worry that a teacher will try to take his non-existent autonomy from him. For such a deluded seeker there is a sure way to distinguish an authentic teacher: any teacher who would accept that seeker is not a true teacher.

"A man knocked at a teacher's door. The teacher asked, 'Who is there?' "The man answered, 'I.' " 'Begone,' said the teacher, 'tis too soon: at my table there is no place for the raw.' "How shall the raw one be cooked but in the fire of absence? What else will deliver him from hypocrisy?" Rumi

     The role of the true teacher has been taken over by society and its rulers. They tell us what truth is and they provide the experiences (art, education, religion, labor, entertainment) that produce in us the belief that the Cartesian-Baconian world of mechanistic materialism is the only reality.

     The concept of a genuine teacher has been driven out by the myth that humans are their own teachers and that unordered experience automatically produces understanding.

     The seeker's path to knowledge is through illuminating experience prescribed by an external or inner teacher. The teacher does not presume that the seeker genuinely wants to gain knowledge, no matter what the seeker claims. The true teacher's approach to knowledge is the very opposite of that developed by some of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Bacon. Bacon's conception of knowledge was to force nature to yield its secrets. The Perennial Tradition teaches that knowledge comes from preparing oneself to discern what is to be perceived in nature--the apparent and the hidden. Only a person who has successfully trod the path to knowledge--the teacher--can assist the seeker to prepare for knowledge. The teacher orchestrates the seeker's experiences so that necessary capabilities are developed according to the proper design and measure.

"Practice may change our theoretical horizon, and this in a twofold way: it may lead into new worlds and secure new powers. Knowledge we could never attain, remaining what we are, may be attainable in consequences of higher powers and a higher life, which we may morally achieve." William James

Learning How to Learn

     One of the major contemporary obstacles to knowledge is the Cartesian mind set that assumes that people are intrinsically capable of knowledge. Most of the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophes assumed that they were already quite capable of discovering the truth, they just had to find the correct mathematical or psychological stratagem required. They had passed over an entire step toward knowledge taught in the Perennial Tradition: that the seeker must first develop the capabilities necessary for discerning truth.

"It might be said that the scientific approach has most often been: 'I shall make this phenomenon yield its secrets', while the Sufic attitude is: 'Let the real truth, whatever it may be, be revealed to me'. "The former is the 'heroic' mode: attempting something with insufficient knowledge, the latter the 'self-evolution' mode: fitting oneself to perceive that which is to be perceived. It eliminates heroism" Idries Shah. The Commanding Self

The first step toward true knowledge--and true spiritual understanding--is to divest ourselves of cultural myths and spend time preparing our minds for a new manner of thinking.

"So remote . . . are these matters [concerning true knowledge] from our ordinary habits of thought, that their investigation entails, in those who would attempt to understand them, a definite preparation: a purging of the intellect. As with those who came of old to the Mysteries, purification is here the gate of knowledge. We must come to this encounter with minds cleared of prejudice and convention, must deliberately break with our inveterate habit of taking the 'visible world' for granted; our lazy assumption that somehow science is 'real' and metaphysics is not. We must pull down our own card houses--descend, as the mystics say, 'into our nothingness'--and examine for ourselves the foundations of all possible human experience, before we are in a position to criticize the buildings of the visionaries, the poets, and the saints. We must not begin to talk of the unreal world of these dreamers until we have discovered--if we can--a real world with which it may be compared."

Evelyn Underhill. Mysticism

     The Perennial Tradition teaches that knowledge of reality is gained through knowledge of self. The Moslem Perennialists harked back to Muhammed's teaching: "He who knows himself knows his Lord." Ibn 'Arabi, a Spanish Perennialist, taught that ordinary persons interpret reality only in the form of their personal beliefs. Hence it is necessary to study oneself--one's beliefs, one's habits of thought, one's preconceptions--in order to gain a truer perception of reality. One way to gain insight into one's self is by studying others.

"Hence man sees in his brother something of himself that he would not see without him. For man is veiled by his own caprice. But when he sees that attribute in the other, while it is his own attribute, he sees his own defect in the other." ⁵

Metaphysical Technology
     The Perennial Tradition possesses an actual technology for helping people develop higher states of consciousness. Books and stories within the Perennial Tradition contain carefully designed elements which act on the reader's psyche (personality and mind) to produce precise effects. The prescribed results vary according to the capabilities of different readers and with a single reader who returns to the material over a period of time. Our scholastic predispositions lead us to look at a book as a simple collection of words expressing ideas. It is difficult for us to conceive of a genuine science contained in Perennialist books and teachings which would be capable of producing evolutionary transformations in human beings.

     The intellectual hangover from the Middle Ages was, as we've seen, a complete reliance on argument as a way to knowledge. This was formalized as scholasticism which led thinkers to believe that any subject could be mastered by an assiduous study of sources and piling word upon word to create a logical system of thought. In every graduate school in the world today, this scholastic method is assumed to be the one true way to knowledge.

     We are just beginning to perceive that the Perennial Tradition possesses a vast science of knowledge of which we are largely ignorant. Our scholastic presumptions make us feel that if there is a "science of knowledge" then a genuine teacher would simply make it available to us in a straightforward manner. But there are elements in us--which this science delineates--which must be dealt with in a prescribed manner and order. For example, if we are truly blind to a higher dimension of knowledge, assuming that our present conception of knowledge is all there is, then we would first have to overcome our obsession with familiar forms of knowledge and acknowledge our blindness and learn to "open our eyes" by stages to discern higher knowledge.

"An alienated man can become sighted if he realises that his heart is blind. He is like a sick man suffering from delirium. So long as he is prisoner to his illness he knows nothing of himself or of his sickness because delirium affects the brain and weakens it.   . . .   When he realizes that his heart is blind, it means that he has gained a bit of sight." The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, Translated by W.M. Thackston Jr.

Regenerated Teachings

      Modern thinkers completely overlook another element of the Perennial Tradition--that teachings must be revitalized relative to the needs of the people and the time involved. A Perennialist teacher selects insights from past and present material in assisting seekers to gain deeper perception. Past teachings in their original form become atrophied and useless. Very often, misguided, self-deluded counterfeit teachers attempt to use these obsolete teachings in their original form and produce nothing but anachronisms and deception.

     The scholastic mind set views obsolete or merely theoretical teachings as a proper foundation for developing what it considers to be new systems of knowledge. It is as though we have come upon a number of prescriptions ⁶ written by a doctor many years earlier. We assume that the prescriptions still have some usefulness and try to apply them to our present maladies. But a genuine teacher provides new prescriptions for what seekers need now. Each assemblage of teachings by a genuine teacher is a temporary formula intended for specific purposes.


He Who Tastes Knows
     True discernment in the Perennial Tradition is not gained through books or arguments, but through experience. Perennialist teachers distinguish between ordinary knowledge and a higher form of knowledge called gnosis, direct knowledge, unveiling, witnessing, and tasting. "He who tastes, knows."

"The knowledge of mysteries is always said to be 'beyond words.' Not because that knowledge cannot be communicated, but because the mode of communication it requires is an initiatory process which leads to seeing with one's own eyes. Spiritual masters are notorious for their elusiveness; they simply will not pass the mysteries along in the form of reports. Rather, their way is to arrange for the mysteries to be learned by direct, personal understanding; they create spiritual environments in which the desired experience may flower."

Theodore Roszak. Unfinished Animal

     Ordinary knowledge through sense perception and reasoning is a necessary part of human experience. But Perennialist teachers point to a higher knowledge which seekers can attain through prescribed experience.

"Understanding can be acquired only by actual participation in the reality." 7

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¹ Quoted in B.J.T. Dobbs. (1975). The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, Cambridge University Press.

² H. Wilberforce Clarke. (1980). Gifts of Deep Knowledge, Awarifu-l-ma'arif by Shahabudin Suhrawardi, London: Octagon Press

³ Hitti, History of the Arabs

⁴ Narrated by Idries Shah in Thinkers of the East
⁵ W.C. Chittick, (1989). The Sufi Path of Knowledge, State Univ. of NY Press, p. 351

⁶ Shahabudin Suhrawardi speaks of the teacher prescribing specific remedies for the seeker's maladies. The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, Translated by W.M. Thackston Jr., London: Octagon Press

⁷ Stewart Edward White, (1937). Across The Unknown