It’s natural – or we should better say, it’s the expected outcome of our socialization as a self in a world – to find ourselves inside something that seems very real. From those early days, our tribe is busy orienting us to its worldview, beliefs, and way of life, instructing and shaping us into a conscientious member. By the time it’s all finished – with the corners tightened and the cracks papered over – we won’t know the difference between construct and Reality.
To illustrate this, my diagram depicts a “self” in its “world,” where we feel very solid and our world seems very real.
For many of us, this will be where we live out our days: managing an identity and believing the world – that is to say, agreeing intellectually with its representation of the way things are and committing ourselves emotionally to its truth.
The identity we often struggle to manage is actually a duality, with a center (self) and a boundary (world). One doesn’t exist or have any meaning without the other.
As our self develops and the world around us changes, we can suffer from confusion and disorientation. In earlier and more traditional societies, each time this happened our tribe could be expected to come with its rituals, interventions, and wise counsel to help us find our center in the world once again.
Historically this custodial responsibility for linking us back to the tradition, worldview, and life-ways of our tribe was handled by religion (religare, to link back). This is less often the case anymore, given the erosion of religion’s credibility in the Age of Science and its tendency toward otherworldly distractions.
Religion’s influence has actually gone in the opposite direction from its original design intention of facilitating healthy identity development across the lifespan, to the point now where “this world” is to be renounced, forsaken, and finally left behind for the Real Deal somewhere else and later on.
Thankfully, the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality, which is the underground stream to all those overland tributaries of religion, has conserved and further cultivated their original charter of linking back, re-centering, orienting identity to the social roles and responsibilities of life in this world.
While the religions typically turn the focus of attention elsewhere, Sophia Perennis invites our contemplation on two normally invisible thresholds in the self-world construct of identity. In fact, the very notion that self and world are the center and boundary of a social construction is a central insight of wisdom spirituality.
What we ordinarily regard as solid (self) and real (world) are merely the subjective and objective orientations, respectively, of our personal identity, centered by the ego. Only as consciousness is looped back upon itself does it become self-conscious inside its own world boundary. Understanding this “makeshift” or constructed nature of self-and-world gradually brings those two aforementioned thresholds into view.
This is also where the difference between wisdom spirituality and otherworldly religion is most obvious.
The first of these thresholds is within the self, at the point where consciousness drops away from its center (at the ego) and descends the Essential Depth of Being itself. Also called the Ground of Being and the grounding Mystery of existence, this mystical dimension is the deeper oneness in all things, with each thing manifesting its power but in the disguise of a limited temporal form.
In a variety of meditative and contemplative techniques perfected over the millenniums, Sophia Perennis reminds us that our center of identity, which puts on and takes off the roles that match us to our age-appropriate responsibilities of life at each stage, might also be surrendered for a deeper experience of ineffable Mystery, boundless presence, inner peace, and authentic life.
Give it a name if you need to. Call it God if you want. Personify it as a god that you can worship and obey. But just know, this is your mind’s way of scooping a bucket from the Living Stream of Mystery.
A second threshold is at the boundary of our world. The illusion for a normal socialized identity conceives of the world as “all there is,” expanding outward ad infinitum. As more discoveries push the limits of knowledge farther out, our world grows in size. And while that is true, the threshold at the boundary of our world is not the limit of what we know against what we don’t know yet.
Beyond our world, according to Sophia Perennis, is not just larger possible worlds but the Consilient Unity of all beings. Also called the Web of Life and the living Universe, this ethical dimension is the higher wholeness of our interconnected existence, the harmony of the Whole.
As consilience refers to a “leaping together” of centered individuals, the emphasis is on the unique contribution of each to the universal order. This synergistic effect plays across the Web of relationships in an exponential fashion, amplifying and unifying the myriad elements into a dynamic complexity. The Web is a vibratory, living, sentient, self-conscious, and transpersonal Whole.
Our intentional participation in the Consilient Unity of existence is only possible to the degree we are able to “see through” our personal world to Ultimate Reality, pulling aside its veil of meaning, getting over ourselves, and joining the harmony of the Whole.
The difference between Sophia Perennis and the religions on the matter of salvation couldn’t be more stark. While the religions prescribe a rescue mission for the self out of its world, the perennial tradition of wisdom spirituality teaches the principles and practices for dropping into the deeper oneness of Being and celebrating our place in the higher wholeness of all beings.
Sages, prophets, and mystics through the ages have been saying that what we seek is already within us and all around us. We just need to open our eyes and really see.
Tracts of Revolution 