Monday Blogcrawl

When I stroll around Sydney I often note the number of churches that have closed, the buildings turned into something else. I suppose it is inevitable; the western world has ceased to be interested in joining, and communal worship seems to be one of those things we have left behind. But still, sad to see whole communities disappear as their members enter nursing homes and their buildings fall into disrepair. I should start a theodiversity movement which seeks to restore forgotten sects and cults and ensure a diverse religious landscape. In the meantime, here are some things that might interest you from the World Wide Web:

Lots of argument this week about the behaviour of Buddhist monks in Thailand

• An ancient Buddhist trail in Shanxi province in China. Meanwhile, Peter Hannam at the Sydney Morning Herald suggests tourists visit the ancient Buddhist sites of Henan.
• Reincarnation Stories brings us a nice little rundown on reincarnation in popular culture.
• Ebay gets nervous about witches, with sync.co telling us they are about to ban the sale of hexes, potions and other things witchy.
• America is on continually shaky ground when it comes to interfaith religions, and Eboo Patel wants to get kids of different religious backgrounds together - from Stanford Social Innovation Review.
• The seven laws of attraction spelled out.
• Quest books has an interesting-looking new title on people who have left their church communities behind.
• A hidden camera goes inside the top-secret prayer circle at the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City - fascinating!
• Looks like Lisa-Marie Presley has abandoned Scientology - the Village Voice brings us details.

Aldous Huxley - The Perennial Philosophy

I am using Aldous Huxley's extraordinary book The Perennial Philosophy for my chapter on the uses of Buddhism in Western self-help.
I have never read it before, and will admit that it's a little heavy-going. It's one of the most peculiarly constructed books - quite a post-modern artefact. There are long passages of reflection and explication, chunks of quotation from the spiritual classics to illustrate his proposition, and then snatches of quotation from other spiritual traditions that further flesh out his theme.
I am surprised, however, by the relative sophistication of his understanding of Buddhism. At first I was put off by the generalisations he was making about the tradition (asserting its godlessness etc.), commonplace observations that have become cliches by now. But he soon delves into it much more deeply, trying to find a place in Buddhism for soul and God so that he can fit it into his scheme of a universal spiritual philosophy that unites humanity. In fact, some of his equivalinces and comparisons are quite clever, but perhaps that's because I agree with them.
The Perennial Philosophy was written in 1945, by which time Huxley was well and truly in his mystic phase having dabbled in the Vedanta school of Ramakrishna (to which he introduced Christopher Isherwood). It harks back to an old idea that there are core similarities that unify all of the religious traditions, and so point to a unified creative source that might be called God. It had been an idea much vaunted by the earlier Theosophists.
It was a reasonably popular book, and became immensely influential on the New Age scene. It was one of those books that was rediscovered and taken up with great enthusiasm by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Huxley sought to prove to Christians that spiritual truth existed in all the great religious traditions, and that the West had as much to learn from the East as vice-versa. In many ways it was a re-statement of the American Transcendentalist  philosophy of the late nineteenth century (for more on that, read Richard G. Geldard's excellent The Essential Transcendentalists).