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The Perennial Tradition has
taken many names over the centuries, including Hermeticism,
Philosophia, Neo-Plataonism, Illuminism, Alchemy, Cabala,
Magic, Gnosticism, Esotericism and Sufism. It is the single
stream of initiatory teaching flowing through all the great
schools of mysticism.
But . . . why should we be
interested in learning about the Perennial Tradition?
To answer that question, author Norman
D. Livergood refers the reader to his earlier book, America,
Awake! We Must Take Back Our Country, in which he described
the current condition of the social-political-economic world.
States Livergood: "That book's purpose was to help
people awaken to the reality of what is happening in that
world—beyond the illusory myths of political-economic propaganda
and brainwashing. My thesis was that unless America awakens
it will likely suffer the fate of 1930s Germany: dictatorship,
repression, and imperialistic militarism.
"In a similar vein, The Perennial
Tradition is another wake-up call. It was written to
assist readers to awaken to the Higher Spiritual World."
In addition to providing a history
of the Western embodiment of the Perennial Tradition, Livergood
also describes the process that serious students use to
actually realize--bring to manifestation--their Higher
Consciousness, "through which they are able to contact
Reality in a region of pure Truth. The beginning of this
process is the realization ‘that things are not what they
seem.’
"In a manner analogous to the
forewarning found in my book America, Awake!, we
can say that unless we become aware of the Higher Spiritual
World, we face the prospect of a basically useless physical
existence and a future life--following physical death--of
unpleasant, perhaps anguished reformation of our essence.
About
the Author:
Dr. Norman D. Livergood is an author,
publisher, and teacher living in Vista, California. After
receiving his bachelors degree from Phillips University,
he completed a Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, and a
Doctorate in philosophy at Yale University. His interest
in psychology led him to pursue a masters equivalent in
that field. In 1989 he completed a second doctorate in artificial
intelligence at The Union Institute. He has taught at a
variety of universities across the United States, from Yale
University to the University of California, San Diego. In
1993 through 1995, he served as Professor and Chair, Artificial
Intelligence, at the United States Army War College. Dr.
Livergood has carried out extensive research and published
in the fields of philosophy, philosophy of religion, artificial
intelligence, political-economic philosophy, and distance
learning. He is webmaster of his Internet site: http://www.hermes-press.com.Current
Events/Politics/Social Sciences
Excerpt:
Introduction
"Philosophia Perennis--the
phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing--the metaphysic
that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the
world of things and lives and minds; the psychology
that finds in the soul something similar to, or even
identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places
man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and
transcendent Ground of all being--the thing is immemorial
and universal."
-- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1944
This book provides an entrée
into the Perennial 1 Tradition, the secret
legacy, the single stream of initiatory teaching flowing
through all the great schools of mysticism. Relative to
the time and place in which they work, teachers within the
Perennial Tradition adapt both earlier and contemporary
teachings to meet the needs of their students.
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 by the initiated teacher of the identical stream
of Perennialist truth to contemporary needs. 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 philosophical system, but because the
needs of her students, relative to her own time and place
in history, require new compilations and techniques.
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.
Seekers can understand and
assimilate the dynamic contained in Perennialist teachings
at several different levels, depending on their capability.
An attentive reader, with appropriate goals, preparation,
and motivation, can use this book to develop a heightened
capacity for discernment.
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, and Patanjali. The
extant works of the Asian masters contain few direct references
to Perennialist themes.
Focusing on Western
themes within the Perennial Tradition and teachers, 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.
In Chapter One we
will examine the defining characteristics of the Perennial
Tradition and trace the Perennialist line of transmission,
from the ancient Semitic and Persian savants to modern-day
teachers within the Perennial Tradition.
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, 12th century
C.E.
The Perennial Tradition teaches a
new way of discerning the world, differing from intellect
or reason, requiring training in this new way of cognition,
and involving both seeing subtle or "invisible" entities
and "not-seeing"--freeing oneself from 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 cord to bring you
to safety."
According to the
Perennial Tradition, spiritual development is a step-by-step
process which must occur over a period of time. Unlike intellectual
comprehension, which can occur in one reading (or several
readings) of a chapter or an entire book, spiritual development
involves many disparate skills and insights which must be
acquired in sequence, each building on the ones before.
We must test to see if one step has been achieved before
proceeding to the next. We'll examine the various states
of consciousness related to spiritual enlightenment in Chapter
Four.
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 Eighteen
will explore some of the features of the higher unitive
consciousness, beyond initial contact and beyond the inaugural
experience of illumination. And Chapter Twenty
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 will
examine the Hermetic tradition in Chapter Six and explore
the "renaissance" or re-birth of Perennialist teaching in
Western Europe in Chapter Fourteen.
This overcoming of all the usual
barriers between the individual and the Absolute is
the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both
become one with the Absolute and we become aware of
our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant
mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of
clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism,
in Christian Mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same
recurring note, so that there is about the mystical
utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make
a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that
the mystical classics have, as has been said, neither
birthday nor native land. Perpetually telling of the
unity of man with God, their speech antedates languages,
and they do not grow old."
-- William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience
In Chapter Seven, we'll see
how the invention of language enabled a lower species to
evolve into humans and how language actually creates the
reality to which it points.
We will review the transformative
character of Perennialist art and artistic creativity in
Chapters Eight and Nine. In Chapter Seventeen 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 sophia in
Greek and hikma (wisdom) or marifat (deep
knowledge) in Arabic. The love of and the search for this
wisdom was called philosophia, philosophy, by the
Greeks. We'll examine philosophia in Chapter Eleven.
Jesus as a teacher within
the Perennial Tradition is the focus of Chapter Twelve,
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 Fifteen;
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; we'll review their teachings and
activities in Chapter Sixteen.
We're fortunate to have a
small number of films which contain strains of the Perennial
Tradition; we'll examine three such films in Chapter Thirteen.
You cannot prevent persons
merely reading a book, such as this one, and assuming 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
This book is part of a more
comprehensive curriculum in the Perennial Tradition, which
includes other books and individually prescribed instruction.
The complete curriculum is designed to assist persons at
various levels gain the capabilities required for the unitive
experience:
- 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 gain advanced
understanding and proficiency
This
book, which teaches about and provides exercises in the
Perennial Tradition, has two major prerequisites:
1. Developing critical
thinking skills, gaining self-awareness, and achieving
critical consciousness. At the present time, the only
reliable source for acquiring these prerequisites is
the book entitled Enlightened Thinking.4
You should study that book, developing the prerequisite
capabilities, while assimilating the material in the
book.
2. Gaining
an understanding of how the Sufi embodiment of the Perennialist
Tradition was disseminated in the Western world: The
single book which provides this knowledge is Idries
Shah's The Sufis. You should study that book,
developing the requisite understanding, while working
with the concepts and exercises in his book.
This book 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 5
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 for no particular
section of the reading public but, rather, a specific dormant
faculty within every person.
Readers who intellectually grasp
the higher awareness explored 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. Although a book such
as this can provide an entrée 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, Kashf Al-Mahjub (The Revelation of the
Veiled), 1055 C.E.
_______________________
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:
"Illuminism" from Noxious Cults Illuminism, one
of the embodim
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