PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

This book is published in the series Studies in Comparative Religion, which is devoted to 'The exposition of the teachings, spiritual methods, symbolism, and other facets of the religious traditions of the world, together with the traditional arts and sciences which have sprung from those religions.' Its perspective is perennial philosophy and essays by many of its leading exponents appear in this book: Titus Burckhardt, Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Marco Pallis, Frithjof Schuon, Lord Northbourne and Huston Smith. There are four parts to the book: critique, theoria, praxis and reviews of books by Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber and Jorge Ferrer. The authors believe that we live in a desacralised and indeed profane world and that this is reflected in our science and psychology. They espouse a distinctive metaphysic that I have personally found very illuminating. William Stoddart explains this understanding of the threefold constitution of man as consisting of Spirit or Intellect, soul and body corresponding to the Latin spiritus/intellectus, anima and corpus and the Greek pneuma/nous, psyche and soma. In addition, the divine is conceptualised both in terms of a personal God and an absolute divine essence. One can appreciate that these different ontological levels have their own epistemology and that much of modern thought operates at the level of the body and the senses while neglecting or even denying the higher levels of soul and spirit.

Many of these writers are uncompromising in their stance with respect to knowledge and religion, condemning anything that falls short of their rigorous standards. For Schuon, there can be no science of the soul without a metaphysical basis, and this is precisely what is missing from modern psychology, especially insofar as it is based on an empirical and reductionist approach characteristic of modern science. He sees psychology as a usurper of religion with disastrous effects whereby the abolition of guilt 'allows the patient to go serenely to hell.' Guénon writes about the confusion of the psychic with the spiritual, which is undoubtedly an important issue. Burckhardt is concerned about the lack of a higher explanatory principle able to explain the nature of the soul. The contribution by Philip Sherrard on the science of consciousness dates back to a conference in 1992 in Athens, which I attended. I read his books around the same time and his basic argument is that the knowledge of the nature of consciousness does not lie within the competence of the modern scientist who has not attained the highest state of consciousness. The way in which something appears to me depends on my mode of consciousness. The 18 pithy reflections are followed by a more extensive explanatory letter - I do believe that some of these concerns were addressed at the conference, but perhaps not to Sherrard's satisfaction.

The second part covers a wide range of themes relating East and West, science and religion, Buddhism and modern psychology and the whole issue of drug induced mysticism. The five bugbears of modern thinking for the perennial philosophy are psychologism, scientism, evolutionism, syncretism and New Age thought; one can also add reductionism and relativism to this list. The first three have a tendency from this viewpoint to explain the greater the terms of the lesser, which does not allow for emergence. One can most readily see their point when psychology is used to explain the spirit from within its own terms of reference, reducing the spiritual to the psychological. This lies at the root of the perennialist critique of Jung, with some justification. Jung is given credit for taking religion seriously, but castigated for treating metaphysical assertions as psychological phenomena and for statements such as 'the mind cannot establish or assert anything beyond itself.' One suspects that this may have been the meaning of Jung's statement that he knew that God existed as a psychological construct rather than a metaphysical reality. In other writings he seems to go further, but one should remember that he was constantly being criticised by his colleagues as a mystic and was trying to remain true to his calling as a scientist. He was therefore treading a narrow middle path. For perennialists, the intellect enables human being to apprehend absolute reality, so they feel that Jung was implicitly denying the existence of the intellect.

In his essay, Sotillos covers other psychologies from a perennialist viewpoint but also through the lens of his conviction that we are living in the decadent era of the Kali Yuga, a traditional speculative framework that he almost personalises by attributing spiritual trends to its influence. Psychoanalysis becomes a symptom of cultural decay. Scientism imprisons us within the five senses, while syncretism is seen as a parody of synthesis and new age thought as wrenching spirituality from its religious context and producing a counterfeit based more on the ego than the spirit. The same applies to psychotherapy insofar as it aims to restore balance to the ego. Huston Smith produces a succinct summary of the principles of the perennial philosophy (p. 90), while Ken Wilber comes in the firing line for the way in which he characterises the possible integration of pre-modern religion with modern science, especially as he takes an evolutionary view. Segura regards his project as a category error: 'the mixing of metaphysics-based traditional postulates with reason-founded secular science' and therefore a misunderstanding of truth and an assumption that religion is essentially a man-made rational construct. This critique is extended in the book review section at the end, which certainly gives the reader a very different view of these thinkers.

Another key theme is drug-induced mysticism - the mescalin hypothesis of Aldous Huxley. The two essays are by Whitall Perry and Charles Upton. Perry states that 'nothing could be more erroneous than the belief that the magical operation of some external power on the psychic faculties could in itself effect a real and lasting trance mutation of soul, especially apart from all question of suitability and preparation of the vehicle involved.' In other words, there are no shortcuts, and Huxley is confusing the psychic with the spiritual in spite of his erudite background. The interview with Charles Upton is fascinating because he himself was once an advocate of drug-induced mysticism and is now a stern critic. The aim is not so much altered states as altered traits. He is critical of Huston Smith, himself sympathetic to entheogens and who complained that he never regained the initial insight provided by acid. Upton adds that Eliade considered the introduction of entheogens to shamanic techniques as a form of decadence. It seems to me that it all depends on the context and intent.

The third part on praxis is shorter, with an important essay by Coomaraswamy on metanoia or being in one's right mind. This is also relevant to the earlier critique of drugs in that metanoia implies the transformation of one's whole being from human thinking to divine understanding. This is a real change of mind, not simply of state. As a whole, the book makes for bracing reading and shakes up modern complacency by obliging the reader to consider a more metaphysical perspective and exploring the real meaning of sacred psychology. It would be interesting to set this up as a conference.