Light on the Ancient Worlds: A New Translation with Selected Letters (The Library of Perennial Philosophy)
The title Light on the Ancient Worlds may at first seem obvious to many readers of the twenty-first century. We have in mind those who reflexively think of humanity as blazing a trail of ever-unfolding progress and who are convinced that people of today look out as from a very lofty and privileged eminence upon vistas never before beheld by mankind. Such a viewpoint will be brought up short in reading: "Contemporary man has collected a great mass of experiences and is therefore rather disillusioned, but the conclusions he draws from it are so false that they virtually reduce to nothing all that has been gained, or ought to have been gained." If it is not the discoveries and insights of the modern age that elucidate the past, then one may well wonder what this "light" is and where it comes from? The essays presented here all speak to this question. They do so by enunciating the spiritual patrimony, not of the humanity of any particular time or place, but of man as such in light of Truth as such. This patrimony has been variously called in the West, the "perennial philosophy" (philosophia perennis) or the "perennial religion" (religio perennis), and it corresponds to the Sanatana Dharma of the Vedantists.