In the dawn of time before recorded history, Perennialist ¹ sages discovered that the human essence is oneness with the Divine within us--the Higher Self. Thus, the purpose of human life is to realize--become aware and make real--our identity with our Higher Self, the manifestation of the Unitary Quintessence. The Perennialist savants were aware that humans almost automatically succumb to cultural conditioning, developing a false sense of self through the delusion that arises when the mind identifies itself with the physical body.

      Though to sustain ourselves we must act in the physical dimension, these seers ascertained that humans do not need to identify with the physical body, but can see it as a tool which the Higher Self utilizes to teach individuals through their response to terrestrial and transcendent experiences. They taught humans how to perceive and understand the various levels of being.

The Levels of Being
Unitary Being: the Realm of Forms and Higher Being Accessed through dialectical interchange, dialectical theurgy, and dialectical meditation	At the highest level is the Unitary Quintessence, manifesting through all levels of being. The Unitary Quintessence connects directly to the Higher Self.
Spiritual Being: the Realm of the Higher Self	Higher Self or Soul manifests through mind and body
Terrestrial Being: mental and physical phenomena	Supersensible mind and physical body

      Perennialist transformational material issues from the personal experience of Perennialist teachers. It refers to specific procedures which the teacher uses in her own transformational and instructional work. As such, the material contains its own experiential verification. If Perennialist material is read in a desultory manner, it can appear to be nothing but scholastic theorizing. When read with genuine discernment, the writings, images, stories, exercises, and evocations are seen to be based on knowledge gained from personal experience.

or

"A net of words is a great forest where the fancy wanders; therefore the reality of the Self is to be strenuously learned from the knower of that reality." Shankara, The Crest Jews of Wisdom

One of the surest means of distinguishing genuine from spurious teachings about spiritual subjects is to determine if the material provides specific, discernible procedures 2   for replicating the experiences referred to. Counterfeit "spiritual" teachers merely talk about ideas and practices which it's clear they never personally experienced and therefore could not possibly assist a serious reader to master.

      In this essay, we'll examine selected current scientific research which bears on Perennialist teachings concerning personal identification with one's Higher Self. We'll explore current findings and parallel Perennialist teachings that touch on the phenomenon of locating the focus of one's consciousness in "areas" or "dimensions" outside the physical body.

      Many persons in the contemporary world are consciously or unconsciously indoctrinated in the view that only "objective" science--as they describe it--can provide genuine proof for ideas and theories. So only when a new scientific experiment seems to "prove" claims made by Perennialist teachings are they willing to give them consideration. Our exploration of specific scientific experimental findings is not for the purpose of propping up Perennialist teachings. As we've seen, the actual experience of Perennialist teachers on which that material is based provide the soundest verification possible.


Scientific Experiments Concerning the Subjective Sense of Consciousness

      In a recent study by Professor Olaf Blanke and his colleagues from the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL in Switzerland, perturbation of nerve firing in brain areas near where the temporal and parietal lobes meet appeared to cause a variety of distortions of subjective sense of our body in space. Most commonly this was felt as an "out of body experience" where the subjects were looking at themselves from some external perspective or experiencing a "shadow" version of themselves.

      Blanke and his colleagues have been doing research on the neural-correlates of out-of-body-experiences (OOBE) since at least 2002. OOBEs are most common in people who practice meditation, experience sleep paralysis, or sustain certain types of head injuries. Research such as this strives to discover exactly how the brain creates the out-of-body sensation.

     In an early experiment called the "rubber hand illusion," subjects were seated with their right arm resting on a small table. A standing screen was positioned beside the arm to hide it from the subject's view and a life-sized rubber model of a right hand and arm was placed on the table directly in front of the subject. The subject sat with eyes fixed on the artificial hand while researchers used two small paintbrushes to stroke the rubber hand and the subject's hidden hand, synchronizing the timing of the brushing as closely as possible. As a researcher stroked the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, subjects had the vivid sense that the rubber hand was their own. When the rubber hand was whacked with a hammer, they winced and sometimes cried out.

      The illusion shows that a person can locate his focus of consciousness in a non-body element by manipulating a mismatch between touch and vision. When a person's mind sees the fake hand being stroked and feels the same sensation, the sense of being touched is misattributed to the fake.

      Two new experiments in "out of body" sensations have been recently carried out. In England, Dr. H. Henrik Ehrsson of University College London, asked 12 volunteers to wear virtual-reality goggles while they sat in an empty room. A camera behind each participant projected an image of their backs. Thus, the participants viewed their own backs from the perspective of someone sitting behind them.

      Ehrsson stroked each participant's chest with a stick, carefully keeping his arm and the stick out of the camera's view. At the same time, he moved his other arm in front of the camera then dropped it down as if moving to rub the subject's virtual chest. The subjects could see nothing happening to the images of themselves projected in the goggles. Yet, they could feel the stick on their own bodies.

      The result was a disorienting mismatch between the subject's tactile and visual senses. When touched, participants reported they had the experience of drifting outside their own bodies toward the direction of the camera and viewing themselves from behind. To test the illusion further, Ehrsson wielded a hammer, swinging it in front of the camera. Even though the participants felt nothing, they flinched and registered fear through sensors attached to their skin.

      In the Swiss experiment, Dr. Olaf Blanke of Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne asked seven subjects to wear virtual-reality goggles while standing in an empty room. A camera behind each person projected three-dimensional images in front of them. Thus, participants felt as if they were standing behind themselves. When their backs were stroked in sync with the virtual image, participants reported feeling that their consciousness had been transported to the virtual body in front of them. The experiment was repeated with a virtual image of a human dummy and a large rectangular object. Participants' sense of self floated into the dummy, but not into the object.

Locating Our Consciousness
      The "scientific" experiments described indicate that one's locus of consciousness can move outside the body under certain circumstances. Though ordinary culture programs us into the belief that our consciousness is located exclusively in the physical body, it's possible to experience consciousness separate from the body.

      Learning to locate consciousness outside the body may seem to us like an interesting but inessential caprice. Perennialist writings, on the contrary, indicate that learning to locate our consciousness outside the body in the Higher Self is absolutely essential, because allowing ourselves to become fixed in the belief that we are our bodies--locating consciousness in the physical--is a deranged, delusory state.

"If you don't recognize that we're living in the time of a transcendent, spiritual struggle of Truth against devastation and falsehood, you're simply not awake enough to have much hope for survival. At this point in human history, we either overcome our deadly delusions and work to attain the spiritual power of discernment, or the human race will descend into increasing barbarism and ultimate extinction." Otalp Setarcos, The Divulgence

      Since in our essence we are the eternal Higher Self or Soul, to allow ourselves to be deluded into believing that our basic nature consists of the physical body or any other non-eternal element is not merely an unfortunately incorrect belief but a suicidal delusion.

      We become so fixated on physical bodily sensations that we forget how to locate our consciousness anywhere else. This fatal self-deception is called possession ³ by sensual self-indulgence.

      The Perennial Tradition does not teach that sensual pleasures are intrinsically evil, but that obsession with bodily gratification leads to an incomplete and stunted existence. Life involves physical pleasures--and pains--but its essence is far beyond the merely terrestrial; it is oneness with the Unitary Quintessence through identification with the Higher Self.

The Consequences of Self-Delusion

      Possession by the delusion that we are our bodies leads to a plethora of ruinous beliefs and practices:

1. We lose any sense of ourselves as eternal beings, believing that there is nothing after death

2. We concentrate on the present moment, each day for itself and the devil take tomorrow, believing that human existence is all there is to personal reality

3. We believe that we can do whatever we choose, without any consequences, assuming that one is not accountable for his actions

4. We do away with dimensions and elements of Reality that appear to us to be phantasies, creating a barren, joyless "veil of tears"

      Most persons' possession by the delusion that they are nothing more than their physical bodies has lead, in part, to the annihilative world situation today.