The 2012 Story

transformation. Even today, the modern Maya do ceremonies at cycle endings within the tzolkin-haab calendar. The role of human beings during such times is to consciously facilitate a successful transformation and renewal by willingly sacrificing the dross of the old cycle, sacrificing the illusions that will not be useful in the new cycle. They invoke the day-sign deity of the next cycle, feeding it with prayer and incense, while the old day-sign, ruler of the passing zeitgeist, undergoes a metamorphosis. Fire ceremony has always been the quintessential medium for sacrifice and transformation.

The spiritual teachings for Long Count cycle endings are thus easy to identify, and can be stated as a three-part process: sacrifice, transformation, and renewal. The Maya shaman facilitates the transformation in the role of Sacrificer. On a deep symbolic level he is also the Sacrificed, for his effectiveness is contingent upon his ability to set aside his personal ego so he can be a conduit for a higher purpose. The process is one of individual spiritual transformation in service to a larger analogical transformation of humanity and culture. Change springs from within, beginning with the free-will act of sacrifice made by the individual. These ideas of spiritual transformation at the end of a cycle can be identified at the core of all of the world’s great religious traditions. Whether it be located at the end of a cycle of time or the end of a mortal life, the decision to relinquish illusion defines the future state of the individual soul and the world at large. Notice here that free-will choice is a key.

The intent of these traditions is to initiate the spiritual seeker into a higher level of being, a state of unified consciousness. Attachment to limitations is what gets sacrificed and transformed, recentering the being on a new identity locus, one that is timeless and eternal, rooted in the Divine Ground of all manifestation. Huston Smith in his books The Primordial Tradition and The Religions of Man, Aldous Huxley in his book The Perennial Philosophy, Alan Watts in his book The Supreme Identity, Joseph Campbell in his Hero with a Thousand Faces and in his four-volume Masks of God series—to name just a few of the better-known scholars—identify Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity as having this transformational intent at their cores. They all belong to what is referred to as the Perennial Philosophy. It’s about time that we nominate the Maya for admittance into the Perennial Philosophy, as their tradition not only possesses all the hallmarks of this perennial vision but also provides an astro-theological piece that has been buried in the other traditions and has remained, until now, shrouded.

WHAT IS THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY?

In 1946, philosopher and novelist Aldous Huxley wrote a brief introduction to a new translation of the Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita. The way he framed it, as an expression of universal wisdom, doesn’t seem that surprising to us today, but at the time it was a radical notion. In four doctrinal points that he called “the Perennial Philosophy in its minimal and basic form,” he elucidated the underlying reality of a universally relevant framework of “first principles” that inform all spiritual traditions at their deepest core.⁴ His point was that the ideas contained within the Bhagavad Gita, properly understood in their archetypal and symbolic context, were expressions of that perennial wisdom.

Regarding symbolism, a symbol is not a sign in the same way that myth is not a lie. Ananda Coomaraswamy, art historian and philosopher, wrote:

Symbolism is a language and a precise form of thought; a hieratic and metaphysical language and not a language determined by somatic or psychological categories… symbolism can be defined as the representation of reality on a certain level of reference by a corresponding reality on another… traditional symbols are the technical terms of a language that transcends all confusion of tongues and are not peculiar to any one time and place. Indeed, they are the language of the philosophia perennis.⁵

This understanding of symbolism opens up for the rational mind a whole new way of thinking about the reality of ancient myth, archetypal psychology, dreams, and visions. And luckily, an entire cadre of intelligent thinkers have talked about it. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for example, simplified Coomaraswamy’s intent when he wrote, “The symbol is the revelation of a higher order of reality in a lower order through which man can be led back to the higher sphere.”⁶

In this light, the Bhagavad Gita was, to Huxley, a sacred text that had something of great symbolic significance to say to modern people. Let’s remind ourselves of the ingrained sentiments toward Hinduism that were still in vogue when Huxley was writing this in the late 1940s. First of all, prejudicial Americans were likely to conflate Hinduism with the “Japs” who had just dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor. Second, scholars of religious history were still prone to think of Hinduism as a polytheistic animism filled with superstitions, certainly not a tradition that shared any wisdom with Christianity. Yet Huxley’s point was precisely this, that Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity all share a “Highest Common Factor.”⁷ But in order to see this, you must pierce into the esoteric core of the tradition, beyond the exoteric cultural veils of dogma. The symbolic narrative of myth, although utilizing culture-specific deity names and scenarios, points beyond itself to an underlying (or “higher”) reservoir of gnosis. Here are Huxley’s four definitive points of the Perennial Philosophy, through which all these traditions are linked:

1. The phenomenal world of matter, things, and individualized consciousness are temporary manifestations of an underlying Divine Ground, which is unconditioned, unquantified, infinite, and eternal. All partial realities within the manifest world of form take their being from this Ground, without which they would be nonexistent.

2. Human beings, limited within the state of individualized consciousness (ego consciousness), can deduce that such a Ground exists through rational inference, but it requires a shift of consciousness to directly experience its existence through a direct intuition, or gnosis, that is superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate, nondual awareness is known to mystics throughout the world as a union of the knower with the known.

3. The glimpse of this ultimate center and source of all manifestation is accessible to all human beings and places the limited ego consciousness into correct relationship with the unlimited Divine Self. Each human being possesses this double nature, “a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self.”⁸

4. The highest spiritual purpose and most fully actualized potential of each human being is to realize that the limited ego is a temporary extension of the eternal Divine Self. What should naturally follow from this realization is the organization of life and human culture around this truth, with decisions and goals being made in deference to this unitary, whole-consciousness perspective.

The Perennial Philosophy, the essence of all the multifarious variations on enlightenment, shamanism, religion, and spiritual awakening, cannot be made more succinct and clear. The early appearance of Huxley’s words, some sixty years ago, renders moot 90 percent of the subsequent New Age blathering on spiritual transformation. It’s just window dressing. Huxley’s definitive book The Perennial Philosophy appeared in 1945 and established what should have been a central reference point for everything that came later in the human potential movement. Some writers and teachers did pay homage to the Perennial Philosophy, but many did not. It is said that Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Likewise, and more lamentably, the New Age movement is largely a series of increasingly bad paraphrasings of Huxley. In fact, since the spiritual marketplace is today driven by personality, the cult of ego, we can observe that Huxley’s clear exposition of the Perennial Philosophy has not only been forgotten but inverted. Instead of meeting the challenge of transformation via self- sacrifice, transcending the ego and awakening the higher wisdom, we flock en masse to see the latest Oprah- approved spiritual entertainer at the local megaplex Event Center.

Nevertheless, throughout the 1950s other standout books appeared that complemented Huxley’s early exposition on the Perennial Philosophy. One of great significance was The Supreme Identity by Alan Watts. In his foreword he thanks both Coomaraswamy and French philosopher Rene Guenon for their work on reviving the Perennial Philosophy. I consider myself lucky to have stumbled across a used paperback of this book at a bookstore in the early days of my quest for knowledge. The Chicago suburbs in 1980 was not exactly a place where you’d expect the perennial wisdom to be found, let alone take root. But by age