Sawyer taught religion at the Maine College of Art & Design, lectured at a range of other places including the Esalen Institute, and was a friend of Huston Smith, whose authorized biography he wrote. He also wrote a biography of Aldous Huxley. He knows Traditionalism well, but is not himself a Traditionalist, placing himself half way between René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, who he sees as unusually dogmatic, and Huxley, who—in his view—held that all truths are provisional. He lists the most important influences on his thought as Huxley, Alan Watts, Huston Smith, Frances Vaughan, Stanislav Grof, and Ram Dass.
The book’s main argument is that the Perennial Philosophy is an approach to understanding “life’s bigger questions” that is a permanent part of human thought, and that although its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s has now passed, it still answers life’s bigger questions pretty well, and is still the part of what is taught by many contemporary spiritual teachers. The key concept is the UME or Unitive Mystical Experience.
The book is written in a very accessible style with short chapters and uses many anecdotes to make its points. It is divided into three parts, “Starting Out,” “Looking Deeper,” and “Exploring Specific Topics.” “Starting Out” leads up to what Huxley called the “minimum working hypothesis,” the common ground shared by so many mystics—one way of defining the Perennial Philosophy. “Looking Deeper” takes us through the nature of being and the path to enlightenment. The “Specific Topics” explored in the last part are religion, God, enlightenment, science and knowing, law, psychology, nature and art. Then comes a chapter in “The Perennial Philosophy Today” that lists some major contemporary teachers and explores their positions on particular issues. In all these chapters, Sawyer explains the perspectives of the major Perennialist writers, including the Traditionalists, as one school among others.
The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded is an excellent introduction for the general reader, especially the seeker. It is also an interesting comparative study, though the accessible style and anecdotes that make it appealing to the general reader can become an obstacle for the more specialized reader, who is evidently not Sawyer’s intended audience. Even so, an important book, and recommended.
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