Books published by Sophia Perennis et Universalis

These inspiring poems address the crucial spiritual quest, with a passionate longing for the Infinite. Facing the pain of existence, bewildering suffering leads to deeper searching and unveiled awareness. From the celebration of beauty to the insight of seers and sages, various tales discuss humanity's condition and the pivotal journey towards new shores of awakening. Enduring much struggle, the arduous path leads to resounding hope and joy, with blissful Eternity triumphant over despair. Aligning with the venerable tradition of verse, these meditations ultimately return to the Absolute, providing profound and radiant vision.

The spiritual life must obviously take psychology into account; if we want to do good and know truth, we will have to understand what in us supports this intent, and what stands in the way of it. But after Jungian Psychology, Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, and Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology, the reader may wonder what remains to be said vis-à-vis psychology and the Spiritual Path. In the author's opinion, what remains is to present a psychology rooted in traditional metaphysics, one that he has termed "Principial Psychology". This psychology is not essentially new; elements of it are to be found in every traditional path; but it has rarely been so explicitly defined. Principial Psychology does have certain affinities with Transpersonal Psychology, and with Integral Psychology as well; all three emphasize the attainment of self-transcendence. The difference is that Transpersonal and Integral Psychology draw various elements from the faith traditions, while Principial Psychology requires that we actually follow one of them. Principial Psychology is based on the premise that the different "faculties" of the psyche that the Scholastic psychologists studied-thought, feeling, will, memory, imagination-as well as the various "archetypes" that Jung discovered but didn't entirely understand, identifiable in some ways with the levels of the human psychospiritual makeup in Sufi doctrine-are psychic reflections of timeless spiritual or metaphysical principles that exist in a world beyond the psychic dimension entirely. In terms of the human microcosm, these principles are the loom upon which the psyche is woven, and the body as well; in terms of the macrocosm, they are the eternal designs that underlie, and guide, the greater universe of which we are a part. From the point-of-view of this science, the whole spectrum of mental illnesses and psychological "complexes" can be seen as based on various wrong or inverted relationships between the faculties of the psyche-imbalances that are produced by, and further reinforce, the misperception and veiling of the archetypal Principles by the tyrannical and deluded ego. Principial Psychology recognizes the goal of human development not simply as the healing of mental illness or a balanced adjustment to social norms, but as the attainment of a state of "ideal normalcy" based on a complete conformation of the psyche to the principles from which it springs-in other words, on the "salvation of the soul". Just as mental health is inseparable from moral development, so self-knowledge is impossible without self-transcendence.

These poems are meditations on metaphysical Truth and the Remembrance of God. Traditional in form, they address themes of the Sophia Perennis, the timeless and universal wisdom underlying the diverse religions. Lyrical and simple in style, they travel through spiritual landscapes, expressing the joy of knowing ¿The Infinite sings through each finite part¿ and ¿The heart¿s eye like a star at midnight sees.¿ The fundamental motif of this book is the journey from conceptual understanding of the Unity of God, seen as the Absolute, the Truth or the Real, to the realization of this knowledge in the spiritual heart; ¿From head to heart he travels on the way.¿ A central metaphor for this journey is ¿the eagle¿s flight.¿M. Ali Lakhani, editor of Sacred Web: A Journal of Tradition and Modernity,writes ¿Barry McDonald¿s poems are distillations of spiritual wisdom,conveyed through images that are spare and resonant, in language thatis lucent and lyrical.¿ And noted Perennialist author William Stoddartwrites ¿¿ excellent in every way: concise poetic lines which capture theessence of metaphysics and spirituality. They express the most beautifulof all messages: Truth and Prayer.¿

As the poet T.S. Eliot said, 'Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?' Our postmodern 'information culture' forces us to be over-cerebral, but it doesn't teach us to think; consequently it becomes nearly impossible for us to imagine a knowledge that is beyond information, much less a Wisdom that is beyond knowledge. We all know what it is to uselessly 'spin our wheels' in barren thought and fantasy; certain valid contemplative disciplines even have as their main goal the pacification of the 'monkey mind', the over-heated brain that prevents us from genuinely living our lives, from being fully present to the world, to each other, and to ourselves. But such pacification can also have a nihilistic side to it. It can subtly fool us into believing that the pursuit of meaning, the attainment of intellectual stability and certainty, is neither possible or desirable - a belief that is of great use to the political and economic Powers That Be in the emerging global society, who are always delighted to hear people express the opinion that there is no such thing as objective Truth, that we can't really know what is real, or if anything is real, beyond our own subjective experience. To the degree that the people start to believe that nothing can be known (our hidden masters reason), they will stop asking embarrassing and inconvenient questions. The notion of objective truth - not to mention Absolute truth - immediately suggests oppression, tyranny and fanaticism to the postmodern mind. Why? Because we have been systematically taught to see things this way by those Social Engineers who construct and impose the terms by which Reality is to be viewed. In order to break free from this socially-imposed subjectivism, we need to remember that Reality is not something determined by belief, but rather that belief is only true when it conforms itself to Reality. If we see nothing beyond this material/social world, we will be forced to take our own subjectivity as the only way to awaken from the social trance, and so fall even more deeply into that very trance, which is precisely a collective subjectivity. But if we know Objective Truth as metaphysical, beyond material nature and human society, then we have begun to catch a glimpse of the One Way Out. The traditional notion of Knowledge maintains that, 1) Truth can be known with certainty, and, 2) that the reason for knowing Truth is to transform our lives from a state of chaotic uncertainty, vulnerable to all the suffering that illusion and impermanence can produce, into one of eternal certainty and stability, where the knower becomes one with the Thing known - a state that goes by the name of bliss. To begin the path toward this bliss, however, we will need to know how to know; and this requires, as the necessary first step, that we know how to take knowledge seriously. As metaphysician Frithjof Schuon put it: 'Knowledge only saves us on condition that it enlists all that we are, only when it is a way and when it works and transforms and wounds our nature, even as the plough wounds the soil'. The shifting illusions of individual and collective subjectivity cannot protect us, and will always betray us. But if we are firmly rooted in that Truth which, in the words of Lew Welch, 'goes on whether we look at it or not', then we have a Protector - one Who is always there, upon Whom we can always rely, and to Whom we can always turn, when we can no longer remedy or deny or escape from the suffering and insecurity of conditional life. So let's begin.