It’s significant that the major characteristics of wakefulness I’ve identified through my research are essentially the same… as the main themes of wakefulness as described in the world’s spiritual traditions. (…[T]hese included union, inner stillness or inner emptiness, self-sufficiency, compassion and altruism, relinquishing personal agency, heightened awareness, and well-being.) This synchronicity validates the insights of spiritual traditions and shows that wakefulness can exist outside spiritual traditions and is more fundamental than the traditions themselves. It suggests that wakefulness exists as a psychological or ontological state in itself. It may be interpreted in terms of spiritual traditions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Theologians and transpersonal psychologists have long debated the existence of a “perennial philosophy,” a common core to the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. According to the perennial view, the same basic truths lie behind all spiritual teachings but they’re expressed in slightly different ways. They’re simply different paths leading toward the peak of the same mountain, though there are some superficial differences between them, of course.

On the other hand, some people dispute the existence of a perennial philosophy, believing instead that spiritual and mystical traditions are independent. There isn’t a common mountain — all the paths are heading in different directions toward different peaks. Any similarities between different traditions are the result of contact or influence…

This seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, even if there was a chain of influence in the way this argument suggests, surely the original teachings would have been altered beyond recognition over centuries of dissipation (similar to a game of telephone), rather than remaining essentially the same. But the best way of verifying perennialism is to look outside spiritual traditions, as we’ve done in this book. Most of the participants of my research had no familiarity with spiritual traditions or practices at the time of their awakenings, but still described them in similar terms to the mystics of many different traditions. (Some of them became familiar with traditions later — in some cases, many years later; in other cases, only to a limited degree.) This strongly suggests that there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.233-234

[T]he physical world is not ultimately separate from its transcendental foundation, and so the perennial philosophy is a non-dualistic view of reality. There is no barrier between the so-called physical and metaphysical dimensions of reality (i.e., between the universe and its transcendent source); the two are a Oneness rather than a duality, and this is in contrast to systems of philosophy or religion that place a firewall between the transcendent realm and the physical world. For Perennialists, the universe arises from the Ground of Being, or, put the other way round, the Ground of Being takes form as the world around us. The One becomes the many, just as one ocean can rise up into multiple waves. Furthermore, and because we too are “waves” on the surface of a cosmic sea, our physical selves also arise from the Ground of Being. The Ground, therefore, is not only the Ground of Being but, consequently, the ground of our being as well.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.33-34

Ever since I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy in my early twenties, I have been drawn to the clean simplicity of the idea. In the passage I’ve quoted above, Steve Taylor provides one of the briefest and most credible responses to the most common criticism from both humanist and religious points of view: that the contemplative traditions, rooted in such radically different religious soils, cannot have anything in common. As Dana Sawyer points out, a few lines on from the passage above, “…human beings have the latent ability to grasp the content of the two previous postulates experientially. That is, we have a capacity, whether we cultivate it or not, to go beyond intellectual descriptions of the Ground of Being (transcendent) and the Oneness of Being (immanent) to the direct experience of these realities, as did the mystics of the past—and as do some mystics today.”

It doesn’t matter, either immediately or ultimately, whether the experience in question occurs within the taught practice of any one religion or philosophy; as Taylor explains above, “there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.” I can testify to this myself: my earliest unitive experiences of inner stillness, emptiness and heightened awareness came around the age of five, long before I knew anything of religious or contemplative teachings in any form.

The simple phenomenology of contemplation – inner experience itself (by which I don’t mean experiences, altered states or spectacular changes in perception, but plain awareness) – will teach the foundational fact of oneness with the ground. Merely to sit still is usually quite enough…