Perennial Philosophy

As Huston Smith, Arthur Lovejoy, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and other scholars of these traditions have pointed out, the core of the perennial philosophy is the view that reality is composed of various levels of existence—levels of being and of knowing—ranging from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. Each senior dimension transcends but includes its juniors, so that this is a conception of wholes within wholes within wholes indefinitely, reaching from dirt to Divinity.
In other words, this "Great Chain of Being" is actually a "Great Nest of Being," with each senior dimension enveloping and embracing its juniors, much like a series of concentric circles or spheres, as indicated in figure i. (For those unfamiliar with the Great Nest, the best short introduction is still E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed. Other excellent introductions include Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith and Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa, who demonstrates that the Great Nest was present even in the earliest shamanic cultures). [Wilber, 2000]
See: Traditionalism; Prisca Sapientia