Introduction

     The conception that the Perennial Tradition is the single stream of initiatory teaching flowing through all the original, authentic expressions of the great religions and philosophies does not point to an indiscriminate syncretism or a vacuous eclecticism.

     It is important for seekers to realize what a unique approach to teaching the Perennial Tradition embodies. Non-Perennialist books on philosophy, religion, mysticism, or the occult are the results of teachers of a specific era borrowing from the ideas and practices of former thinkers and creating a syncretism of doctrines and procedures which they then represent as their own new system.

     Perennialist teaching material and teaching methods are, on the contrary, the outcome of creative adaptation to contemporary needs of the identical stream of Perennialist truth by the initiated teacher. Certain material within the tradition becomes superseded and a Perennialist teacher does not repeat it just because it had been used at an earlier time.

     Each Perennialist teacher will arrive at a different embodiment of the fundamental truths, not because she is borrowing from her predecessors and building her own idiosyncratic philosophical system on the basis of their ideas, but because the needs of her students, relative to her own time and place in history, require new compilations and techniques. The Perennialist teacher makes genuine contact with the essence of the Perennial Tradition and the originating impulse indicates what and how instructional material is to be created and used.

      The concept of palingenesis graphically illustrates this single stream of initiatory teaching being adapted and reintroduced by each Perennialist teacher. The Greek word palingenesis is a compound which means "coming again into being," or "becoming again." The meaning attached to this word is quite specific, although having a wide and general application. The idea included in it may be illustrated, as is found in the philosophical literature of the ancients who lived around the Mediterranean Sea, by the example of the oak which produces its seed, the acorn, the acorn in its turn producing a new oak containing the same life that was passed on to it from the mother oak--or the father oak. This transmission of an identic life in cyclical recurring phases is the specific meaning of the word palingenesis. Thus the thought is different from the respective ideas contained in the other words connected with the doctrine of reimbodiment. Perhaps another way of stating the specific meaning would be by saying that palingenesis signifies the continuous transmission of an identic life producing at each transformation a new manifestation, these several embodiments being in each case a palingenesis or "new becoming" of the same life-stream.

     In many instances, the immediate disciples of Perennialist teachers do not understand their masters' esoteric teachings, misinterpreting and distorting the genuine precepts, creating a fixed system of senseless dogma. As we'll see in chapter thirteen, this is precisely what occured with Jesus' teachings: his immediate disciples distorted his ideas into a neo-Jewish travesty of what Jesus had taught. It took Paul, a disciple of Jesus by virtue of his mystical experience, to understand the true nature of what Jesus had taught.

     When disciples of a Perennialist master are able to follow in the same line as the original teacher, it is because they have tapped into the Perennialist initiatory current in an authentic way.

      In this book we will concentrate on the Perennial Tradition in Western Civilization, including the Near-Eastern Perennialist ² teachers, but excluding Asian or Oriental sages such as Zoroaster, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Shankara, Patanjali, and others. The extant works of the Asian masters contain innumerable direct references to Perennialist themes.

     Focusing on Western themes, we will review material from a variety of expressions of the Perennial Tradition: Sufism, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Illuminism, ³ Cabala, Alchemy, Magic, Mysticism, and Gnosticism.

     With sound preparation, a seeker can discern whether particular teachers--living or dead--reside within the Perennial Tradition, not by looking for secret hand-shakes, outlandish garb, mysterious rituals, or esoteric symbols, but by discovering distinctive characteristics in the teachers' words and actions. We'll examine the defining themes of the Perennial Tradition in Chapter Two, those concepts and activities which constitute crucial criteria for determining whether a person worked within the Perennial Tradition or was merely touched or influenced by this spiritual legacy.

     One of the extraordinary characteristics of Perennialist concepts and exercises, including those in this book, is that they seem like mere nonsense or imponderable speculation to readers not properly prepared for the subtle dimensions involved.

" Words should not be withheld from the worthy, but the unworthy will be annoyed by the words of real men. The hearts of the unworthy and those who are alienated from reality are like wicks that have been drenched in water instead of oil. No matter how much fire you put to such a wick it will not burn." Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi The Mystical and Visionary Treatises

     The Perennial Tradition teaches a new way of discerning the world, different from ordinary intellect or reason, requiring training in this way of Higher Cognition, and involving both seeing subtle or "invisible" entities and "not-seeing"--freeing oneself from the ordinary visual and mental conditionings. We'll examine the Perennialist conception of knowledge in Chapter Three: knowledge through prescribed experience.

     We've been taught to assume that we can gain immediate and total understanding of anything we read. But the Perennial Tradition teaches that we must be awakened by stages. We might say to a teacher,

"If, as you say, I have foolishly thrown myself from a great mountain height, then why don't you simply teach me how to pull the rip cord of my parachute?"

"Because," the teacher might reply, "you are not only falling to your death, you have also put yourself into a straitjacket, so that you cannot move your arms. I must first help you free yourself from your straitjacket and then help you learn to pull the parachute rip chord to bring you to safety."

     The Perennial Tradition involves actual, not merely theoretical, contact with the spiritual realm. In Chapter Five we examine the means of making initial contact with this world and in Chapter Ten we explore the transcendental experience, Illumination. Chapter Twenty will explicate some of the features of the higher unitive consciousness, beyond initial contact and beyond the inaugural experience of illumination. And Chapter Twenty-One explores the process of transformation into a higher consciousness.

     The Hermetic writings, including the Corpus Hermiticum and the Asclepius, and the Sufi teachings were important elements in Western Europe's re-discovery of the Perennial Tradition beginning in the twelfth century C.E. We'll examine the Hermetic tradition in Chapter Six and explore the "renaissance" or re-birth of Perennialist teaching in Western Europe in Chapter Fifteen.

     The transformative character of Perennialist art and artistic creativity are reviewed in Chapters Eight and Nine. In Chapter Eighteen we'll explore several examples of contemporary literature containing Perennialist strains.

     The Perennial Tradition is the single stream of transformative wisdom which has been given many names. This wisdom is termed sofia (sophia) in Greek and hikma (wisdom) or marifat (deep knowledge) in Arabic. The love of and the search for this wisdom was called filosofia (philosophia), philosophy, by the Greeks. We'll examine philosophia, in Chapter Eleven.

     In Chapter Twelve, we'll discuss how Plato can only be understood if he is recognized as a Perennialist teacher. Jesus as a teacher within the Perennial Tradition is the focus of Chapter Thirteen, including a review of the life and teachings of Marcion, Valentinus, and Origen, who believed that Jesus' teachings had been completely distorted by Roman Christianity.

     Shakespeare's Perennialist-inspired play The Tempest is the subject of Chapter Sixteen; we'll discover that this is a Mystery Play on the order of the Eleusinian Rites.

     Stewart Edward White and Betty White are two of the most important Perennialist savants of the twentieth century; their teachings and activities are reviewed in Chapter Seventeen.

     We're fortunate to have a small number of movies which contain strains of the Perennial Tradition; we'll examine three such movies in Chapter Fourteen.

     You cannot prevent persons merely reading a book, such as this one, and assuming that they "understand" and "grasp" what it says--even if the book is a specially constructed system of training in a process of more-than-intellectual development which can't be understood merely by reading. The most one can say is that spiritual enlightenment involves the development of entirely new organs of perception.

"The Pythagoreans . . . in their conversations and discussion, their notes and records . . . did not use common, vulgar, ordinary language, which could be superficially understood by anyone who heard it, in an attempt to make what they said easy to follow. Instead, they kept Pythagoras' rule of 'holding your peace' about the divine mysteries, using secret devices to exclude the uninitiated and protecting their exchanges of speech and writing by the use of symbols. Unless one can interpret the symbols, and understand them by careful exposition, what they say would strike the chance observer as absurd--old wives' tales, full of nonsense and idle talk. But once they are deciphered as symbols should be, and become clear and transparent instead of obscure to outsiders, they impress us like utterances of the gods or Delphic oracles, revealing an astounding intellect and having a supernatural influence on those lovers of learning who have understood them." Iamblichus. On Pythagoreanism

• Seekers who need information about concepts and practices of the Perennial Tradition
• Seekers who genuinely desire to learn how to learn about Perennialist concepts and practices
• Seekers who have developed initial capabilities and have a genuine desire to develop advanced understanding and proficiency

      Three additional books are complementary to this book and should be read along with or after studying this one:

1. Portals to Higher Consciousness

2. Realizing a New Culture

3. Rediscovering Plato and the Mystical Science of Dialectic

     The Perennial Tradition should help you explore the teachings and activities of savants within the Perennial Tradition. The exercises are designed to throw light on the subtle aspects of the Perennialist world.

     The Perennial Tradition is embodied in the teachings of many different illumined seers over centuries and no single expression can contain the whole. The Perennial Tradition is, among many other things, a process--the development of understanding of Higher Truth. This process takes place within the interaction between a Perennialist teacher and a seeker. The Perennial Tradition is known by means of its total operation--all components which produce Higher Awareness. Hence no one can successfully study the Perennial Tradition entirely from the outside. As a process, the Perennial Tradition is something which a seeker achieves through personal effort, not something which is given to her.

     This book is intended only for those persons who have some connection with the unique supersensible psychic stream through which Perennialist teachings communicate with those few persons who are attuned to this confluence and to an element within each human's psyche which has innate connection to this transcendental current.

     Readers who intellectually grasp the higher awareness elucidated in this book gain a limited understanding of it, while those who follow the book's precepts in experiencing this higher level can achieve a great deal more.

     Perennialist knowledge is actually a highly developed technology which can reveal its successive levels of meaning relative to the degree of preparation of each individual approaching it. While a book such as this can provide an entré into the Perennial Tradition, the complete process can only be made available within a course of study in a specially designed school.

"I have composed this book for polishers of hearts which are infected by the veil of 'clouding' but in which the substance of the light of the Truth is existent, in order that the veil may be lifted from them by the blessing of reading it, and that they may find their way to spiritual reality. Al-Hujwiri. (1055 C.E.) Kashf Al-Mahjub (The Revelation of the Veiled)

Notes:

¹ Perennial: enduring for an indefinite or infinite time; lasting, permanent, never failing, continual, perpetual, everlasting, eternal

² Perennialist: this is a new term I am coining to refer to teachings, activities, and teachers having to do with the Perennial Tradition.

³ Illuminism: Distinguishing Illuminism from Noxious Cults

Illuminism, one of the many embodiments of the Perennial Tradition, as elucidated in this book must be clearly distinguished from false teachings which share similar titles: