Perennialism arose from the frequent observation that the esoteric or mystical components of religious traditions—as opposed to exoteric ritual, doctrine, ethics, and the like—call forth strikingly similar descriptions of reality, across cultures and regardless of era. This does not mean all religions are the same. That notion has been naïvely promoted by peace lovers because of its harmonious connotations and because every religion has some variation of the Golden Rule. But it has also been attributed, erroneously, to perennialists such as Huxley and Huston Smith, most recently by religious scholar Stephen Prothero, author of God Is Not One.
That religions are not the same could not be more obvious. Vedantists and perennialists are not so naïve as to postulate a sameness of theology or of truth claims. The coherence they point to is in the realm of inner experience, the domain associated with mysticism. The prolific lay scholar of religion, Evelyn Underhill, defined mysticism as “the science of union with the Absolute,” and the mystic as “the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it.” (From her 1911 classic, Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness,” p. 86.) At the depth of being, they assert, where the individual soul meets the all-encompassing divine, men and women of every spiritual orientation have encountered oneness and have described that revelation in remarkably similar ways.
In other words, while religious customs, rituals, and dogmas vary, all traditions, if taken deep enough, can bring practitioners to essentially the same place—our silent origin, or essence, which transcends all notions of place, all words, all concepts, all theologies. Once again, “Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.” Vedanta has so seeped into collective awareness that the spirit of this premise, if not the literal phrase, is now widely accepted in the United States.
Goldberg, Philip. American Veda (pp. 11-12). Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.
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