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| The Ebullio of Meister Eckhart |
Thinking outside the box?
When most people say we should think
outside the box they don't really mean it. I believe they are
saying, “Think about how we can make a bigger, better box.”
Conventional opinion makers do not want the box to go away. It is
the box that contains them and their comfortable world. Thinking a
little bit at the edges of the box might help reinforce the box but
they really don't want a different box. Employing people to examine
the box will help find potential weaknesses in the box so it can be
strengthened.
The box is the materialistic
worldview. Few in authority really want to go to a place that
contemplates anything except this cozy and predictable box. Even
though there may be ominous signs of danger, growing evidence that
the box is crumbling, abandoning the box is unthinkable.
Ancient Rivers
On the other hand when considering the
perennial wisdom we speak of rivers not boxes. Great rivers of
history, philosophy, and politics flowing into the valley of human
consciousness. Twenty five years ago a handful of us working in the
Institute for Perennial Studies asked the question; what went wrong
some two centuries or so past, with the western world to bring us to
the brink of nuclear destruction, social deterioration, and the
corruption of our natural world? We went to the rivers for answers.
The ancient rivers of thought are
always in motion. Not rushing mountain steams but turbid outflows,
braided across a vast delta slowly cutting one channel into another,
co-opting the flow of one then in turn being replaced by its
neighbor. There seems to be no beginning or end to the flow but it is
alive with probabilities.
Lately the study of the philosophia
perennis is akin to panning for gold in those rivers. Looking
for a glinting timeless nugget in the immense muck of human history.
Sloshing back and forth through the murky goo of ideas your pan
filled with mud, eyes riveted on the froth hoping for some color to
show. Mining the past looking for answers, the tiny nugget of
thought that will bring all the jumble of information together.
Colliding one school of thought into another in an binge of
eclecticism, searching for a “unified field theory” or the
Philosopher's Stone we become particle physicists of history.
Although an interesting process we
should not mistake the method for the answer. There really is little
new under the sun. Our search for a perennial wisdom may find us
using novel tools that are resident to our times but if our
assumptions are correct about the nature of a perennial wisdom then
finding it's message should not be so difficult.
Yet the elucidation of the obvious is
sometimes challenging. If it is the amalgam of a materialist
worldview and the allied cultural appendage of modernism
that is our
problem, then the antidote should become evident.
Beyond Schrodinger's Cat
I have fallen victim to some of these
distractions and perceived paradoxes. Examining first this position
then another trying to balance myself in the course of the last 25
years. Through all of that two things stand out. One is my new
appreciation of quantum theory that may be the climax of materialist
science. The second proposition is a line from “The Herald ofPerennialism”
we wrote in 1987; that there is an eternal and “...deep
relationship between God, people, and values”. This is the message
of the perennialist but the basis of this message was not stated at
the time. I want to fill in that gap.
Perennialism is a theistic system
that believes in eternal renewal. The statement “God was here at
the beginning, He is here now, and He will always be here” supplies
a workable transcendent foundation. The perennial wisdom then is the
struggle of people to apply this timeless truth onto the playing
field of common reality.
A hazy outline of God has been seen
forever. Throughout all of human culture there has been an attempt
to understand the substance of a vision that the shamans would see.
We tried to make sense of fuzzy pictures and uncertain outlines
detected by sincere mystics. When we gave those abstractions names
like Osiris, Avalokitasvara, or Quetzalcoatl we were seeing Lord
Christ who in a thus far unique event briefly appeared to us in human
form. The fact that we have called God by various names is neither
disrespect nor evil it is only an incomplete interpretation of the
nature the visions our shamans, scholars, and others were having of
this complex trinitarian non-locality.
The role of perennialism is twofold.
To understand the dynamic process of revelation God gives us and
secondly support cultural activities that will influence the
potential form of perennial restoration.
Illustration: "Trinity", 4"x6", gouche, D S Reif, 2010
