Dana Sawyer is professor emeritus of philosophy and world religions at the Maine College of Art and author of biographies of both Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith. His primary expertise is in Hinduism and Buddhism but for more than twenty years, his work has focused on comparative mysticism, theories of the “perennial philosophy,” and the value of psychedelic experiences in the study of mysticism. Most recently, he has published an assessment of Aldous Huxley’s theory of psychedelic mysticism for the Centre of Aldous Huxley Studies (2019) and an essay in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2021) on four common errors in scholarly critiques of the perennial philosophy. Sawyer is currently working (2022) on a book-length revisioned description of the perennial philosophy. He lives in Blue Hill, Maine with his artist wife, Stephani, and has two daughters from a previous marriage, Sophie and Emma.
