Perennial Philosophy: Reloaded with Dana Sawyer

Friday, December 6  from 7 - 9 pm

(This program will be recorded and sent to registrants)

Sawyer previously wrote biographies of Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith, seminal writers of the perennial philosophy (along with Alan Watts, Frances Vaughan, Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, and Ram Dass), which is the theory that there is a particular spiritual experience common not only to the world’s religious traditions but all of human spirituality.  Aldous Huxley considered this experience, involving a sense of our spiritual oneness with reality, not only a latent capacity within each of us but our planet’s greatest undeveloped natural resource—bringing us closer to the world around us by providing an experiential platform for connection.  Sawyer’s lecture, based on his new book, offers specific answers from the perspective of the perennial philosophy to such questions as ‘Who are we?  What is the meaning of life? And Why do altered states of consciousness, including those triggered by psychedelic drugs, have real value for daily life?’

Dana Sawyer is professor emeritus of religious studies and world religions at the Maine College of Art & Design and an adjunct professor in Asian Religions at the Chaplaincy Institute of Maine. He is the author of numerous published papers and books, including Aldous Huxley: A Biography, which Laura Huxley described as, "Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked."