Perennial Wisdom for Our Time?
The contradiction lurking in the title of my essay is a succinct expression of both the horror of our times, as we will see, and the germ of a future, as yet unsuspected, emerging from within the horror. I have written about this mystery in many essays, formulated in many styles of discourse available to us today. In this essay I address a transformation of a world-wide living pair of irreconcilable opposites that we are all inhabiting. The West privileges the surface of life, spirit being sent to oblivion while the traditional East privileges spirit, downgrading surface reality as unreal, or a dream to be overcome. The Western perspective is “embodied” in our technological civilisation while the Oriental perspective is “embodied” as the perennial wisdom. I claim in this and my many other essays that an unheard-of transformation is occurring in the “background” relationship between the two worlds—one in which the knowledge of each perspective alone is no longer adequate to the task of bringing us into accord with the transformation.
My essay can be found here.
