Hi Don,
I’m doing good! Thanks for asking.
Don Bradley wrote: ↑Fri May 20, 2022 6:06 am
To clarify my post above, it's about religious epistemology, not about modern academic models used in the study of the perennial tradition.
Well it is and it isn’t. The more popular advocates of the perennial tradition like Aldous Huxley and Hutson Smith playfully dance around the issue with just barely perceptible nods and sly winks, but at the end of the day you’ll find the perennial tradition is an occultic perspective. I don’t think you can separate it out.
It is present even in the text you quoted:
Huxley wrote:The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. ... It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities.
This is exactly how Renaissance magicians conceived the nature of their craft, it was occultic practitioners that pioneered experimental methodologies over and against the Aristotelian systems that dominated in the Universities. It isn’t a coincidence that Isaac Newton, the man largely responsible for providing the basic physical mechanics that got us to the moon, wrote more about the occult than he did about physics.
Or why Newton’s rival and co-discoverer of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, spent an inordinate amount of money and months of his time scouring western Europe looking for a set of secret notebooks supposedly kept by René Descartes having to do with alchemy.
So when you show me a text that is talking about getting your inner-life properly sorted by being humble in spirit with pure intention and putting it into alignment with your outer-life (properly conducted experiments) and then ask this:
Don Bradley wrote:What more consequential and ultimately promising experiment could we possibly perform?
I’m looking to see if you have a broadsword hanging off your waist with the secret to eternal life hidden in the pommel.
Don Bradley wrote:Given the perennial character of the perennial philosophy--its having existed across millennia and across faith communities--the path to knowledge of ultimate reality in that tradition is open to people of various faith communities, and they are not cut off from that access by the opinion of a modern analyst of the tradition.
But you can’t *do* anything with perennial philosophy until you take it to a level like Guénon did. I’ll show you…
Dr Moore wrote: ↑Fri May 20, 2022 1:34 am
I appreciate Don's post. And DrStak, I used Google search at least 7 times to fully understand that comment. This stuff is all way above my pay grade.
I'll offer an analogy -- the real number line.
Where:
* Integers, or whole numbers, represent things that are objectively verifiable or observable. This is the realm of hard science -- things, facts, ideas which can be replicated through predictive experimentation.
* All of the non-integer real numbers in between (the non-integer rationals and irrationals) represent things or ideas which cannot be replicated through predictive experimentation. Mysticism. Spirituality. Love.
This is too simplistic, but hopefully the basic ideas come across.
Dr.Moore is fundamentally engaged in the same project as Guénon; he is drawing upon a large pool of observation held in common, then translating it into an idiom that is commensurate with a body of science. Dr.Moore is using Number Theory, Guénon is using his own blend of terminology taken from occultic tradition; they may look completely different now, but 400 years ago they would have been peas in a pod.
Or 80 years ago if you party with Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley at the Agape Lodge.