“Promoting Perennial Wisdom
in service to human liberation and planetary thriving”

Humanity stands a spiritual, political, religious, societal, and planetary crossroads, a crossroads of horror and hope. Turn one way, and we fall deeper into ignorance, fear, alienation, and chaos. Turn another way, and we lift ourselves up toward wisdom, love, unity, peace, and hope.

Taking the road toward hope calls us to seed a “new consciousness” where good work can be done and where people can enjoy healthy relationships in the midst of chaotic conditions, fierce opposition, heart-breaking defeats, lack of support, isolation, loneliness, and slander.

For us the “new consciousness” we are talking about is Perennial Wisdom, the Four-Fold Truth at the mystic heart of all the world’s religions. Perennial Wisdom is the antidote to the ”crisis of insanity” and the “delusion of consciousness” infecting civilization.

Perennial Wisdom is the antidote to Einstein’s delusion of consciousness, and what Thomas Merton calls “a crisis of insanity.”

Perennial Wisdom leads us beyond alienation and isolation to integration and unity; beyond fear to love; beyond exploitation of the other to justice for all; beyond violence and war to cooperation and peace; and beyond the zero-sum, winner-takes-all worldview of “us against them” to the nonzero, win-win worldview of “all of us together.”

Perennial Wisdom collapses the divisions between chosen and not chosen, believer and infidel, saved and damned, and leads us to the understanding that we are all one community of seekers. Finally, Perennial Wisdom transcends the binaries of sacred and profane, heaven and earth, Creator, and creation, and allows us to cultivate an awareness wherein we may encounter every mundane, finite, nameable “this” as a manifestation of the infinite, ineffable, and divine That of which we are all a part. (Adapted from “The World Wisdom Bible,” 2017, page xix)

While bearing the stamp of the religion and culture in which any given articulation of Perennial Wisdom arises, Perennial Wisdom can be articulated in four points:

1. 1. 1. All life is a manifesting of nondual Aliveness called by many names: Chiut, Brahman, Allah, YHVH, God Mother, Great Spirit, Dharmakaya, among others.
      2. You have the innate capacity to awaken in, with, and as this Aliveness.
      3. Awakening to Aliveness calls you to live by the Golden Rule – what is hateful to you do not do to another – in service to being a blessing to all the families of the earth (Genesis 12:3).
      4. Awakening to Aliveness and being a blessing comprise your highest calling as a human being.

The first of these four points is the truth of nondual Aliveness. It is on this truth that the other three points rest. Unless and until you experience nondual Aliveness in, with, and as yourself and all beings you cannot meet the challenge and opportunity of this dangerous and dark moment.

All life is a manifesting of a non-dual Aliveness called by many names.

Our preferred metaphor for nonduality – advaita in Sanskrit – is the relationship between an ocean and its waves. While each wave is unique, it is nothing other than an expression of the ocean that waves it. While you would not mistake a wave lapping the shore on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with a wave lapping at the shore on Miami Beach, Florida neither would you imagine that these two waves belong to two different oceans. Both waves, while being unique and distinct from one another, are nothing other than the waving of the same Atlantic Ocean.

Applying the metaphor to ourselves, Perennial Wisdom affirms that all reality is a manifesting or waving of the same Reality/Aliveness call it what you will: God, Brahman, Mother, Tao, Nature, etc. In this way Perennial Wisdom honors your uniqueness even as it holds that each life, no matter how unique, is the happening of nondual Aliveness. Nonduality embraces and transcends duality allowing you to see the uniqueness of self and other in the greater nondual context of infinite Aliveness:

Know and consider the fact that you, in the particular way you are made, are unique in the world, and that no one like you has ever been. For if someone like you had already been, there would be no reason for you to be in this world. Actually, everyone is something new in this world, and here in the world you must perfect your particular being…(Martin Buber, Ten Rungs, New York: Citadel Press, 1995, p. 109)

Perfecting your particular being means seeing yourself as a manifesting of God/Aliveness.

You have the innate capacity to awaken in, with, and as this Aliveness

Perennial Wisdom isn’t a matter of belief but of experience. While you may – especially at first – use the fact that sages, saints, and mystics from so many religions throughout the millennia have affirmed this truth as reason enough for trusting it, ultimately Perennial Wisdom asks you to test the veracity of its teaching against your own experience. While such practices take time to master, the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh offers this guided meditation to grasp the meaning of nonduality or what he calls inter-being:

Imagine you are looking at a blank piece of paper. If you look carefully, you will see a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there can be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So, we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

If you look into this sheet of paper more deeply, you can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even you cannot grow without sunshine. And so, you know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if you continue to look, you can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And you see the wheat that became the logger’s bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When you look in this way, you see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

What is true of this sheet of paper is true of everything, including yourself. That is to say everything inter-is, everything co-exists. (Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step, New York: Bantam, 1992, p. 95.)

Awakening to Aliveness calls you to live by the Golden Rule in service to being a blessing to all the families of the earth

Knowing you are a unique expression of nondual Aliveness carries with it a powerful ethical imperative: the Golden Rule. Confucius was the first to articulate the Golden Rule: “One word which sums up the basis of all good conduct…. loving-kindness. Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself” (Analects 15:23). The Rule appears in every religion in various ways, some negative as Rabbi Hillel’s “That which is hateful to you do not do to another” (Talmud, Shabbat 31a) and some positive as Rabbi Jesus’ “Do unto others what you would have others do unto you” (Matthew 7:12).

The Golden Rule is more principle than law, more compass than map, in that you must decide for yourself how to follow the Rule in any given situation. For us the Golden Rule is a compass. A compass whose True North is the teaching found in Genesis 12:3 to “be a blessing to all the families of the earth.” Notice the text says, “all the families of the earth” and not just those that share your tribe, religion, nationality, ethnicity, etc. In fact, it doesn’t limit its application to human families but to all families: all life on earth. Together, the Golden Rule and the call to be a blessing to all the families of the earth point us to a just, thriving, compassionate, and interdependent world; one that rejects the chaos, violence and zero-sum thinking that threatens us and seeks to build a world of all of us together.

Awakening to Aliveness and being a blessing comprise your highest purpose as a human being

We aren’t alive to subdue the earth and have dominion over nature as Genesis 1:26–28 would have it, but to serve and protect life as Genesis 2:15 proposes. This fourth teaching is, like the others that precede it, axiomatic when you are awake in, with, and as the Aliveness that is all reality. Awakening to Aliveness and being a blessing calls you, us, in the words of the fourth century Talmudic sage, Abaye, to live as a Lamed Vavnik – an individual awake to the Presence of Aliveness, who actively cultivates their capacity to live the Golden Rule and be a blessing to all the families of the earth – human and otherwise, to their fullest.

In the midst of chaos and ever-rising sea of violence, racism, ethno-fascism, apocalyptic fantasies, isolation, despair, and planetary collapse living from the four points of Perennial Wisdom is a revolutionary, life-affirming acts of resistance and courage.