The Great Wisdom Traditions

 Let the Higher Truth become the Ordinary Truth

The great wisdom traditions or axial religions include both those that emerged during the Axial Age – Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Daoism, Confucianism – and those that arose in ‘secondary breakthroughs’ or second waves of axiality: Christianity and Islam. The mystical core of all of these religions coincide that there is a spiritual infrastructure to the universe that is the ground of all being. In the words of Aldous Huxley, this ‘perennial philosophy’ involves a:

metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being (from the opening page of his classic Perennial Philosophy).

All these axial religions, especially their contemplative core, are different paths to the Absolute. This is what the great advaita Vedanta philosopher-sage Shankara called the ‘higher truth’, which he contrasts with the ‘ordinary truth’ of these religions that claim that only their path to the Absolute is the correct one. It is now time for Shankara’s higher truth to become the ordinary truth.