My review of 'The Perennial Philosophy'
3 stars
I have a lot of feelings about this one. And I do feel I need to toss in a disclaimer here, I listened to this in audiobook format. Which for me, while I love them, I often don't give them my full attention. And this book is dense, if you really want to pull out all it has in it, it needs one's full attention. Okay, disclaimer over. So large portions of this book is Huxley being far more mystical about a single omnipotent deity than I'm comfortable with. Which, really wasn't bad, and he's certainly never preachy about it, it's just that after growing up in a toxic religious environment I'm not keen on the whole g-d thing. I do see myself as having faith and participating in religious practices, but those that I chose to pursue are all very light on g-d. That said, this is very good. …
I have a lot of feelings about this one. And I do feel I need to toss in a disclaimer here, I listened to this in audiobook format. Which for me, while I love them, I often don't give them my full attention. And this book is dense, if you really want to pull out all it has in it, it needs one's full attention. Okay, disclaimer over. So large portions of this book is Huxley being far more mystical about a single omnipotent deity than I'm comfortable with. Which, really wasn't bad, and he's certainly never preachy about it, it's just that after growing up in a toxic religious environment I'm not keen on the whole g-d thing. I do see myself as having faith and participating in religious practices, but those that I chose to pursue are all very light on g-d. That said, this is very good. I think this is a useful religious piece for people of any faith. Huxley (in a very typical Anglo-American manner) attempts to dig into the mystical/spiritual practices of all the major world religions and find their common threads. I think he does quite a good job, I agree with much of his analysis. That said, not much in this book really struck me as useful for my personal spiritual practices. That's not a lack in the book, but rather I have kind of just already chosen the religious traditions that I find valuable and wish to dive deeply into. However this book works for any reader that's interested in spiritual exploration. This is a great overview, but one should choose a small number of spiritual practices that partake in these common threads and pursue them with persistence.