In the Buddhist as well as the Hindu climate, one encounters a mystical altruism that protests against "seeking a selfish salvation": one should not wish to save oneself, it seems, one should at the same time wish to save others, indeed everyone, at least according to one’s intention. Now a selfish salvation is a contradiction in terms; an egoist does not obtain salvation, there is no place in Heaven for the miser. Altruists do not see that in the Path, the distinction between "I" and "others" disappears: any salvatory realization is so to speak realization as such, and this being so, a realization obtained by a given person always has an invisible radiance that blesses the ambience. There is no need for a sentimentalism that intends to come to the rescue of Truth; for with Truth, Love is already given, the circle closes with a transpersonal and infinitely generous Beatitude. Love of the Creator implies Love of creatures; and true charity implies Love of God — of Divine Reality, whatever be its Name. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy  

The question has been asked why Guénon "chose the Islamic path" and not another; the "material" reply is that he really had no choice, given that he did not admit the initiatic nature of the Christian sacraments and that Hindu initiation was closed to him because of the caste system; given also that at that period Buddhism appeared to him to be a heterodoxy. The key to the problem is that Guénon was seeking an initiation and nothing else; Islam offered this to him, with all the essential and secondary elements that must normally accompany it. Again, it is not certain that Guénon would have entered Islam had he not settled in a Muslim country; he had already been given an Islamic initiation in France through the intermediation of Abdul-Hadi, and at that time he did not dream of practicing the Muslim religion. Thus, in accepting a Shadilite initiation, it was initiation that Guénon chose, and not a "path". Essays A NOTE ON RENÉ GUÉNON

We do not ask physicists to be content with an anthropomorphic and naive creationism; but at least it would be logical on their part - since they aim at a total and flawless science - to try to understand the traditional ontocosmological doctrines, especially the Hindu doctrine of the "envelopes (kosha) of the Self (Atma) a doctrine that, precisely, presents the Universe as a system of circles proceeding from the Center-Principle to that extreme limit which for us is matter. For human science does not derive solely from the need to know and to register; more profoundly its origin is the thirst for the essential; now the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone. [Roots of the Human Condition, p. 16-20]. sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Howbeit, if finally the West had need of that messianic and dramatic religion which is Christianity, it is because the average European was an active type and an adventurer and not a contemplative like the Hindu; but the "Aryan" atavism had to resurface sooner or later, whence the Renaissance and modern rationalism. No doubt, Christianity presents elements of esoterism that make it compatible with all ethnic temperaments, but its formal structure, or its moral bearing, had to be in keeping with the fundamental temperament of the West, whether Mediterranean or Nordic. sophiaperennis: Extenuating circumstances for rationalism

If we wish to retain the limitative, or even pejorative, sense of the word philosopher, we could say that gnosis or pure metaphysics starts with certainty, whereas philosophy on the contrary starts from doubt and only serves to overcome it with the means that are at its disposal and which intend to be purely rational. But since neither the term "philosophy" in itself, nor the usage that has always been made of it, obliges us to accept only the restrictive sense of the word, we shall not censure too severely those who employ it in a wider sense than may seem opportune. [NA: Even Ananda Coomaraswamy   does not hesitate to speak of "Hindu philosophy," which at least has the advantage of making clear the " literary genre," more especially as the reader is supposed to know what the Hindu spirit is in particular and what the traditional spirit is in general. In an analogous manner, when one speaks of the "Hindu religion," one knows perfectly well that it is not a case - and cannot be a case - of a Semitic and western religion, hence refractory to every di fferentiation of perspective; thus one speaks traditionally of the Roman, Greek and Egyptian " religions," and the Koran   does not hesitate to say to the pagan Arabs: "To you your religion and to me mine," although the religion of the pagans had none of the characteristic features of Judeo-Christian monotheism.] Theory, by definition, is not an end in itself; it is only - and seeks only - to be a key for becoming conscious through the "heart." If there is attached to the notion of "philosophy" a suspicion of superficiality, insufficiency and pretension, it is precisely because all too often - and indeed always in the case of the moderns - it is presented as being sufficient unto itself. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis

The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates   rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle  , and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. sophiaperennis: Comparison between Plato and Aristotle

It is in fact the Logos which directly rules the world, and thus It coincides with the Demiurge of Plato and of the Gnostics, and no less with the Hindu Trinity of the efficient Gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. sophiaperennis: Platonism   and Christianity

As a result, the "symbolic proof"—we term it thus because its cogency lies in the analogy between the communicating symbol and the truth to be communicated, and not in the logical combination of the two propositions—the symbolic proof, then, serves to actualize a knowledge that is not somehow added from without but virtually contained in intelligence itself. One may even go further and say that the symbolic proof is identified with that which is to be proven, in the sense that it "is" that thing at a lesser level of reality, as for example water proves universal Substance by the fact that it "is" it on the plane of bodily existence. What matters is not to confuse the "materiality" of the symbol with its ontological essence; which is why Hindu doctrine, when it extols the worship of the Deity through a sacramental image, forbids the worshiper to think of the material substance of this image; and it is for the same reason that the North American Indians—those who take the sun as a vehicle of worship—specify that it is not the sun they worship, but the "Father" or "Ancestor" who dwells there invisibly. All the phenomena of nature are proofs of God, as the sacred sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Rationalism, taken in its broadest sense, is the very negation of Platonic anamnesis; it consists in seeking the elements of certitude in phenomena rather than in our very being. The Greeks, aside from the Sophists, were not rationalists properly speaking; it is true that Socrates rationalized the intellect by insisting on dialectic and thus on logic, but it could also be said that he intellectualized reason; there lies the ambiguity of Greek philosophy, the first aspect being represented by Aristotle, and the second by Plato, approximatively speaking. To intellectualize reason: this is an inevitable and altogether spontaneous procedure once there is the intention to express intellections that reason alone cannot attain; the difference between the Greeks and the Hindus is here a matter of degree, in the sense that Hindu thought is more "concrete" and more symbolistic than Greek thought. The truth is that it is not always possible to distinguish immediately a reasoner who accidentally has intuitions from an intuitive who in order to express himself must reason, but in practice this poses no problem, provided that the truth be saved. Rationalism is the thought of the Cartesian "therefore," which signals a proof; this has nothing to do with the "therefore" that language demands when we intend to express a logico-ontological relationship. Instead of cogito ergo sum, one ought to say: sum quia est esse, "I am because Being is"; "because" and not "therefore." The certitude that we exist would be impossible without absolute, hence necessary, Being, which inspires both our existence and our certitude; Being and Consciousness: these are the two roots of our reality. Vedanta adds Beatitude, which is the ultimate content of both Consciousness and Being. sophiaperennis: Rationalism

Within the framework of a traditional civilization, there is without doubt a distinction to be made between sacred art and profane art. The purpose of the first is to communicate, on the one hand, spiritual truths and, on the other hand, a celestial presence; sacerdotal art has in principle a truly sacramental function. The function of profane art is obviously more modest: it consists in providing what theologians call "sensible consolations", with a view to an equilibrium conducive to the spiritual life, rather in the manner of the flowers and birds in a garden. The purpose of art of every kind - and this includes craftsmanship - is to create a climate and forge a mentality; it thus rejoins, directly or indirectly, the function of interiorizing contemplation, the Hindu darshan: contemplation of a holy man, of a sacred place, of a venerable object, of a Divine image. [NA: When one compares the blustering and heavily carnal paintings of a Rubens with noble, correct and profound works such as the profile of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio or the screens with plum-trees by Korin, one may wonder whether the term " profane art" can serve as a common denominator for productions that are so fundamentally different. In the case of noble works impregnated with contemplative spirit one would prefer to speak of " extra-liturgical art", without having to specify whether it is profane or not, or to what extent it is. Moreover one must distinguish between normal profane art and a profane art which is deviated and which has thereby ceased to be a term of comparison.] sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The Hindu, or more particularly the Vishnuite miniature, is one of the most perfect extraliturgical arts there is, and we do not hesitate to say that some of its productions are at the summit of all painting. Descended from the sacred painting of which the Ajanta frescoes afford us a final trace, the Hindu miniature has undergone Persian influences, but it remains essentially Hindu and is in no wise syncretistic; [NA: Whether it be a case of art, doctrine or anything else, there is syncretism when there is an assemblage of disparate elements, but not when there is a unity which has assimilated elements of diverse provenance.] it has in any event achieved a nobility of draughtsmanship, of colouring, and of stylization in general, and over and above this, a climate of candour and holiness, which are unsurpassable and which, in the best of its examples, transport the viewer into an almost paradisiac atmosphere, a sort of earthly prolongation of heavenly childhood. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The Hindu miniature, whether centered on Krishna or on Rama, renders visible those spiritual gardens which are the Mahabharata  , the Bhagavata-Purana, and the Ramayana, but it also conveys musical motifs with rich inventiveness, as well as the contradictory sentiments to which love may give rise in diverse situations; most of these subjects hold us, willingly or not, under the spell of Krishna’s flute. Some of these paintings, in which a maximum of rigour and musicality is combined with a vivid spiritual expressiveness, unquestionably pertain to sacred art inasmuch as the epithet "profane" can no longer be applied to them; spiritus ubi vult spirat. This is a possibility that we also encounter in other domains, for example, when we are forced to admit that the Bhagavad-Gita  , which logically pertains to secondary inspiration, is in reality an Upanishad  , and thus a revelation of a major kind, or when a particular saint, who socially belongs to a lower caste, is recognized as personally possessing the rank of brahman. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

Another type of extra-liturgical art that captivates by its powerful and candid originality is Balinese art, in which Hindu motifs combine with forms proper to the Malay genius; the fact that this genius - apart from the Hindu influence - has expressed itself principally in the sphere of craftsmanship and in that of architecture in wood, bamboo and straw, does not prevent one from seeing in it qualities which sometimes become great art; there can be no doubt that from the point of view of intrinsic values, and not merely from that of a particular taste, a fine barn in Borneo or Sumatra has much more to offer than has the plaster-nightmare of a baroque church. [NA: One can say the same of Shinto sanctuaries, which have been described as " barns’, especially those at Ise.] sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The two Hindu notions of darshan and satsanga sum up, by extension, the question of human ambience as such, and so also that of art or craftsmanship. Darshan, is above all the contemplation of a saint, or of a man invested with a priestly or princely authority, and recognizable by the vestimentary or other symbols which manifest it; satsanga is the frequentation of holy men, or simply men of spiritual tendency. What is true for our living surroundings is likewise true for our inanimate surroundings, whose message or perfume we unconsciously assimilate to some degree or another. "Tell me whom thou frequentest and I shall tell thee who thou art." sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

In saying this, we know only too well that visual criteria are devoid of significance for the "man of our time", who is nevertheless a visual type by curiosity as well as from an incapacity to think, or through lack of imagination and also through passivity: in other words he is a visual type in fact but not by right. The modern world, slipping hopelessly down the slope of an irremediable ugliness, has furiously abolished both the notion of beauty and the criteriology of forms; this is, from our point of view, yet another reason for using the present argument, which is like the complementary outward pole of metaphysical orthodoxy, for, as we have mentioned elsewhere in this connection, "extremes meet". There can be no question, for us, of reducing cultural forms, or forms as such, objectively to hazards and subjectively to tastes; "beauty is the splendour of truth"; it is an objective reality which we may or may not understand. [NA: What is admirable in the Orthodox Church is that all its forms, from the iconostases to the vestments of the priests, immediately suggest the ambience of Christ and the Apostles, whereas in what might be called the post-Gothic Catholic Church too many forms are expressions of ambiguous civilizationism or bear its imprint, that is, the imprint of this sort of parallel pseudo-religion which is "Civilization" with a capital C: the presence of Christ then becomes largely abstract. The argument that " only the spirit matters" is hypocrisy, for it is not by chance that a Christian priest wears neither the toga of a Siamese bonze nor the loin-cloth of a Hindu ascetic. No doubt the " cloth does not make the monk"; but it expresses, manifests and asserts him!] One may wonder what would have become of Latin Christianity if the Renaissance had not stabbed it. Doubtless it would have undergone the same fate as the Eastern civilizations: it would have fallen asleep on top of its treasures, becoming in part corrupt and remaining in part intact. It would have produced, not "reformers" in the conventional sense of the word - which is without any interest to say the least - but "renewers" in the form of a few great sages and a few great saints. Moreover, the growing old of civilizations is a human phenomenon, and to find fault with it is to find fault with man as such. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

The majority of moderns who claim to understand art are convinced that Byzantine or Romanesque art is in no way superior to modern art, and that a Byzantine or Romanesque Virgin resembles Mary no more than do her naturalistic images, in fact rather the contrary. The answer is, however, quite simple: the Byzantine Virgin - which traditionally goes back to Saint Luke and the Angels - is infinitely closer to the ’truth’ of Mary than a naturalistic image, which of necessity is always that of another woman. Only one of two things is possible: either the artist presents an absolutely correct portrait of the Virgin from a physical point of view, in which case it will be necessary for the artist to have seen the Virgin, a condition which obviously cannot be fulfilled - setting aside the fact that all naturalistic painting is an abuse - or else the artist will present a perfectly adequate symbol of the Virgin, but in this case physical resemblance, without being absolutely excluded, is no longer at all in question. It is this second solution - the only one that makes sense - which is realized in icons; what they do not express by means of a physical resemblance, they express by the abstract but immediate language of symbolism, a language which is built up of precision and imponderables both together. Thus the icon, in addition to the beatific power which is inherent in it by reason of its sacramental character, transmits the holiness or inner reality of the Virgin and hence the universal reality of which the Virgin herself is an expression; in contributing both to a state of contemplation and to a metaphysical reality, the icon becomes a support of intellection, whereas a naturalistic image transmits only the fact - apart from its obvious and inevitable lie - that Mary was a woman. It is true that in the case of a particular icon it may happen that the proportions and features are those of the living Virgin, but such a likeness, if it really came to pass, would be independent of the symbolism of the image and could only be the result of a special inspiration, no doubt an unconscious one on the part of the artist himself. Naturalistic art could moreover be legitimate up to a certain point if it was used exclusively to set on record the features of the saints, since the contemplation of saints (the Hindu darshan) can be a very precious help in the spiritual way, owing to the fact that their outward appearance conveys, as it were, the perfume of their spirituality; but the use in this limited manner of a partial and ’disciplined’ naturalism corresponds only to a very remote possibility. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

The monks of the eighth century, very different from those religious authorities of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who betrayed Christian art by abandoning it to the impure passions of worldly men and the ignorant imagination of the profane, were fully conscious of the holiness of every kind of means able to express the Tradition. They stipulated, at the second council of Nicaea, that ’art’ (i.e. ’the perfection of work’) alone belongs to the painter, while ordinance (the choice of the subject) and disposition (the treatment of the subject from the symbolical as well as the technical or material points of view) belongs to the Fathers. (Non est pictoris - ejus enim sola ars est-rerum ordinatio et dispositio Patrum nostrorum.) This amounts to placing all artistic initiative under the direct and active authority of the spiritual leaders of Christianity. Such being the case, how can one explain the fact that during recent centuries, religious circles have for the most part shown such a regret table lack of understanding in respect of all those things which, having an artistic character, are, as they fondly believe, only external matters? First of all, admitting a priori the elimination of every esoteric influence, there is the fact that a religious perspective as such has a tendency to identify itself with the moral point of view, which stresses merit only and believes it is neces sary to ignore the sanctifying quality of intellectual knowledge and, as a result, the value of the supports of such knowledge; now, the perfection of sensible forms is no more ’meritorious in the moral sense than the intellections which those forms reflect and transmit, and it is therefore only logical that symbolic forms, when they are no longer understood, should be relegated to the background, and even forsaken, in order to be replaced by forms which will no longer appeal to the intelligence, but only to a sentimental imagination capable of inspiring the meritorious act - at least such is the belief of the man of limited intelligence. However, this sort of speculative provocation of reactions by resorting to means of a superficial and vulgar nature will, in the last analysis, prove to be illusory, for, in reality, nothing can be better fitted to influence the deeper dispositions of the soul than sacred art. Profane art, on the contrary, even if it be of some psychological value in the case of souls of inferior intelligence, soon exhausts its means, by the very fact of their superficiality and vulgarity, after which it can only provoke reactions of contempt; these are only too common, and may be considered as a ’rebound’ of the contempt in which sacred art was held by profane art, especially in its earlier stages. [NA: In the same way, the hostility of the representatives of exotericism for all that lies beyond their comprehension results in an increasingly ’massive’ exotericism which cannot but suffer from ’rifts’; but the ’spiritual porousness’ of Tradition - that is to say the immanence in the ’substance’ of exotericism of a transcendent ’dimension’ which makes up for its ’massiveness,’- this state of ’porousness’ having been lost, the above-mentioned ’rifts’ could only be produced from below; which means the replacement of the masters of medieval esotericism by the protagonists of modern unbelief.] It has been a matter of current experience that nothing is able to offer to irreligion a more immediately tangible nourishment than the insipid hypocrisy of religious images; that which was meant to stimulate piety in the believer, but serves to confirm unbelievers in their impiety, whereas it must be recognized that genuinely sacred art does not possess this character of a ’two-edged weapon’, for being itself more abstract, it offers less hold to hostile psychological reactions. Now, no matter what may be the theories that attribute to the people the need for unintelligent images, warped in their essence, the elites do exist and certainly require something different; what they demand is an art corresponding to their own spirit and in which their soul can come to rest, finding itself again in order to mount to the Divine. Such an art cannot spring simply from profane taste, nor even from ’genius’, but must proceed essentially out of Tradition; this fact being admitted, the masterpiece must be executed by a sanctified artist or, let us say, by one in a state of grace’. [NA: The icon-painters were monks who, before setting to work, prepared themselves by fasting, prayer, confession and communion; it even happened that the colours were mixed with holy water and the dust from relics, as would not have been possible had the icon not possessed a really sacramental character.] Far from serving only for the more or less superficial instruction and edification of the masses, the icon, as is the case with the Hindu yantra and all other visible symbols, establishes a bridge from the sensible to the spiritual: ’By the visible aspect’, states St. John Damascenus, ’our thoughts must be drawn up in a spiritual flight and rise to the invisible majesty of God.’ sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

But let us return to the errors of naturalism. Art, as soon as it is no longer determined, illuminated and guided by spirituality, lies at the mercy of the individual and purely psychical resources of the artist, and these resources must soon run out, if only because of the very platitude of the naturalistic principle which calls only for a superficial tracing of Nature. Reaching the dead-point of its own platitude, naturalism inevitably engendered the monstrosities of ’surrealism’, The latter is but the decomposing body of an art, and in any case should rather be called ’infra-realism’; it is properly speaking the satanic consequence of naturalistic luciferianism. Naturalism, as a matter of fact, is clearly luciferian in its wish to imitate the creations of God, not to mention its affirmation of the psychical element to the detriment of the spiritual, of the individual to the detriment of the universal, of the bare fact to the detriment of the symbol. Normally, man must imitate the creative act, not the thing created; that is what is done by symbolic art, and the results are ’creations’ which are not would-be duplications of those of God, but rather a reflection of them according to a real analogy, revealing the transcendental aspects of things; and this revelation is the only sufficient reason of art, apart from any practical uses such and such objects may serve. There is here a metaphysical inversion of relation which we have already pointed out: for God, His creature is a reflection or an ’exteriorized’ aspect of Himself; for the artist, on the contrary, the work is a reflection of an inner reality of which he himself is only an outward aspect; God creates His own image, while man, so to speak, fashions his own essence, at least symbolically. On the principial plane, the inner manifests the outer, but on the manifested plane, the outer fashions the inner, and a sufficient reason for all traditional art, no matter of what kind, is the fact that in a certain sense the work is greater than the artist himself and brings back the latter, through the mystery of artistic creation, to the proximity of his own Divine Essence. [NA: This explains the danger, so far as Semitic peoples are concerned, that lies in the painting and especially in the carving of living things. Where the Hindu and the inhabitant of the Far East adores a Divine reality through a symbol - and we know that a symbol is truly what it symbolizes as far as its essential reality is concerned - the Semite will display a tendency to deify the symbol itself; one of the reasons for the prohibition of plastic and pictorial arts amongst the Semitic peoples was certainly a wish to prevent naturalistic deviations, a very real danger among men whose mentality demanded a Tradition religious in form.] sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

Hindu art has in it both something of the heavy motion of the sea and at the same time something of the exuberance of virgin forest; it is sumptuous, sensual and rhythmical; intimately linked with dancing, it seems to originate in the cosmic dance of the Gods. In certain respects the Tamil style is heavier and more static than that of the Aryan Hindus of northern India. Islamic art is abstract, but also poetical and gracious; it is woven out of sobriety and splendour. The style of the Maghreb is perhaps more virile than are the Turkish and Persian styles; but these - and especially the latter - are by way of compensation more varied. Within the field of Chinese art, which is rich, powerful and full of the unexpected and the mysterious, the Japanese style represents a tendency towards soberness and elegance. The Tibetan style is midway between that of the Chinese and the Hindus and is heavy, sombre, at times rough and often fierce; the Burmese and Siamese style is delicate, lively and precious. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

When the arts are enumerated the art of dress is too often forgotten though it none the less has an importance as great, or almost as great, as architecture. Doubtless no civilization has ever produced summits in every field. Thus the Arab genius, made up of virility and resignation, has produced a masculine dress of unsurpassed nobility and sobriety, whereas it has neglected feminine dress, which is destined in Islam, not to express the ’eternal feminine’ as does Hindu dress, but to hide woman’s seductive charms. The Hindu genius, which in a certain sense divinizes the ’wife-mother’, has on the other hand created a feminine dress unsurpassable in its beauty, its dignity and its femininity. One of the most expressive and one of the least-known forms of dress is that of the Red Indians, with its rippling fringes and its ornaments of a wholly primordial symbolism; here man appears in all the solar glory of the hero, and woman in the proud modesty of her impersonal function. sophiaperennis: AESTHETICS AND SYMBOLISM IN ART AND NATURE

There is yet another reason for the antifeminine ostracism of certain traditional perspectives, apart from the question of qualification for a given yoga deemed unique, namely the idea that the male alone is the whole man. There are two ways in fact of situating the sexes, either in a horizontal or in a vertical sense: according to the first perspective, man would be to the right and woman to the left; according to the second, man would be above and woman below. On the one hand, man reflects Atmâ according to Absoluteness, and woman reflects it according to Infinitude; on the other hand, man alone is Atmâ and woman is Mâyâ; [NA: In the various Scriptures there are passages which would allow one to believe that this is so, but which have to be understood in the light of other passages which remove their exclusive quality. As is known, sacred Books proceed, not by nuanced formulations, but by antinomic affirmations; as it is impossible to accuse them of contradiction, it is necess ary to draw the consequences that their antinomianism imposes.] but the second conception is relatively true only on condition that one also accepts the first; now the first conception takes precedence over the second, for the fact that woman is human clearly takes precedence over the fact that she is not a male. [NA: The Shâstras teach that women who serve their husbands seeing in them their God, attain a masculine rebirth and then attain Deliverance, which evidently relates to the maximal mode of the minimal possibility for woman.] The observation that specifically virile spiritual methods are scarcely suited to the feminine psychism becomes dogmatic in virtue of the second perspective which we have just mentioned; and one could perhaps also make the point that social conventions, in the traditional surroundings in question here, tend to create - at least on the surface - the feminine type that fits them ideologically and practically; humanity is so made that a social anthropology is never a perfect good, that it is on the contrary always a "lesser evil," or in any case an approximation. [NA: As for Hinduism, it is appropriate to take into account the fact that, in this ambience, the concern for purity and the protection of things sacred is extreme, sacerdotal pedantism accomplishing the rest and this in respect of woman as well as human categories deemed impure. However, and this proves the prodigious "pluralism" of the Hindu spirit: "A mother is more venerable than a thousand fathers" (Mânava Dharma Shâstra, II, 145); and similarly, in Tantrism: "Whosoever sees the sole of a woman’s foot, let him consider it as that of the spiritual master" (guru) (Kubjika-Tantra).] sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

The morality and mysticism   of the West see carnal sin exclusively in concupiscence, which is one-sided and insufficient; in reality, sin here lies just as much in the profanation of a theophanic mystery; it is in the fact of pulling downwards, towards the frivolous and the trivial, that which by its nature points upwards and towards the sacred; but sin or deviation is also, at a level which in this case is not deprived of nobility, in the purely aesthetic and individualistic cult of bodies , as was the case in classical Greece, where the sense of clarity, of measure, of finite perfection, completely obliterated the sense of the transcendent, of mystery and of the infinite. Sensible beauty became an end in itself; it was no longer man who resembled God, it was God who resembled man; whereas in Egyptian and Hindu art, which express the substantial and not the accidental, one feels that the human form is nothing without a mystery which on the one hand fashions it and on the other hand transcends it, and which calls both to Love and to Deliverance. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

There have always and everywhere been contemplative saints who - without thereby being lazy - have not worked, and all the traditional worlds afford - or did afford - the sight of beggars to whom alms are given without anything being asked of them, except perhaps prayers; no Hindu would dream of blaming a Ramakrishna or a Ramana Maharshi   for the fact that he did not engage in any profession. It is generalized impiety, the suppression of the sacred in public life and the constraints of industrialism that have had the effect of making work a "categorical imperative" outside which - it is believed - there is only culpable laziness and corruption. sophiaperennis: THE SPIRITUAL MEANING OF WORK

"The truths ... expressed [by the Sophia Perennis] are not the exclusive possession of any school or individual; were it otherwise they would not be truths, for these cannot be invented, but must necessarily be known in every integral traditional civilization. It might, however, reasonably be asked for what human and cosmic reasons truths that may in a very general sense be called "esoteric" should be brought to light and made explicit at the present time, in an age that is so little inclined to speculation. There is indeed something abnormal in this, but it lies, not in the fact of the exposition of these truths, but in the general condition of our age, which marks the end of a great cyclic period of terrestrial humanity — the end of a maha-yuga according to Hindu cosmology — and so must recapitulate or manifest again in one way or another everything that is included in the cycle, in conformity with the adage : "extremes meet"; thus things that are in themselves abnormal may become necessary by reason of the conditions just referred to. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

A world is ... a collective and nevertheless homogeneous "dream" whose constitutive elements are obviously compossibles. Subjectivists falsely inspired by Hindu doctrine readily forget that the world is in nowise the illusion of a single individual; in reality it is a collective illusion within another collective illusion, that of the whole cosmos. (The Eye of the Heart, p. 5, note 6). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

[In Hindu shaktism] ... femininity is what surpasses the formal, the finite, the outward; it is synonymous with indetermination, illimitation, mystery, and thus evokes the "Spirit which giveth life" in relation to the "letter which killeth." That is to say that femininity in the superior sense comprises a liquefying, interiorizing, liberating power: it liberates from sterile hardnesses, from the dispersing outwardness of limiting and compressing forms. On the one hand, one can oppose feminine sentimentality to masculine rationality — on the whole and without forgetting the relativity of things — but on the other hand, one also opposes to the reasoning of men the intuition of women; now it is this gift of intuition, in superior women above all, that explains and justifies in large part the mystical promotion of the feminine element; it is consequently in this sense that Haqiqah, esoteric Knowledge, may appear as feminine. [Roots of the Human Condition, p. 40-41] sophiaperennis: Femininity

Indian holly man manifests his love for a Hindu holy man; secondly, this apparently small incident reminds us of the unity of the primordial Sanatana Dharma, which is more or less hidden beneath the many forms of intrinsically orthodox tradition; and this unity is especially represented by the very function of the Jagadguru, who incarnates the Universal Truth. Thirdly, this little incident making a symbolical encounter between a Red Indian priest and a Hindu priest was in fact an act of prayer; and it show us that in prayer all earthly differences such as space and time are transcended, and that in prayer we are all united in one state of purity in one perfume of Deliverance. sophiaperennis: His Holiness and the Red Indian