An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Martin Buber (1878–1965)
A Jewish philosopher of religion, Marin Buber, with a colleague, trans-
lated the Hebrew Bible into German. He wrote 
Ich und Du 
(I and Thou) 
in 1923 and it was translated into English in 1937. Buber explains two 
kinds of relationships humans have, with the world and other people as 
objects, I-It; or an engagement with the others, I-Thou. Both relationships 
can take place with people and things, the distinctions change as the focus 
and involvement alter. We need both.
[W]ithout It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not 
a man.
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We have relationships of both types with nature, with other people and 
with God. We use the world as I-It, but the I-Thou relationship is one of 
meeting. God is taken as separate from the world and humanity, and met 
through grace, not by seeking.
Men do not find God if they stay in the world. They do not find Him 
if they leave the world. He who goes out with his whole being to meet his 
Thou
and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot 
be sought. . . .
Of course God is the ‘wholly Other’; but He is also the wholly Same, 
the wholly Present. Of course He is the 
Mysterium Tremendum 
that 
appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, 
nearer to me than my 
I.
If you explore the life of things and of conditioned being you come to the 
unfathomable, if you deny the life of and of conditioned being you stand 
before nothingness, if you hallow this life, you meet the living God.
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Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
The Perennial Philosophy
expresses just that, Aldous Huxley’s conviction 
that underlying the world’s religions is a common core of wisdom, shared 

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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by all but expressed in different forms. In the book, Huxley brings together 
wisdom from mystics, poets and spiritual teachers, rather than philoso-
phers of religion, to illustrate this ‘Highest Common Factor’ of religions. 
The book begins:
Philosophia perennis – the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the 
thing – the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to 
the world of things and minds and lives; 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 – the thing is immemorial and 
universal.
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