Perennial philosophy

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all,

" Perennial philosophy " requires Absolute Truth, if we go by the

wisdom of adepts and scholars. Which is not say that it requires

limitation to absorb the Absolute. In the Perennial Philosophy, as

opposed to the (p)erennial philosophy, the frame of reference is

necessarily the Absolute, Truth, and objective spirituality. The

seeker doesn't get to make anything essential up!

regards,

" The true basis of symbolism is, as we have said, the correspondence

linking together all orders of reality, binding them one to the

other, and consequently extending from the natural order as a whole

to the supernatural order. By virtue of this correspondence, the

whole of Nature is but a symbol. " -- Rene Guenon

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The objective and unique Principle, discerned in the mind, presents

itself first of all as transcendent; but It is equally immanent in

the objective world, otherwise the world would instantly be reduced

to nothingness.

The subjective and simple Principle, realized in the heart, presents

itself first of all as immanent; but It is equally transcendent in

relation to the empirical subject--the ego woven of images and

tendencies--otherwise the ego as such would be identified with the

absolute Subject, with the divine Self.

Perceiving the Self in intellectual discernment, we perceive

objectively the Essence of our own subjectivity; and realizing it

unitively in our heart, we realize subjectively the Essence of

objective Reality, thus the unique and transcendent Real.

Firstly, the Principle is real; It is Reality itself. Secondly, It is

both immutable and living, or absolute and infinite; It is therefore

the Absolute and the Infinite, the Void and Totality. Thirdly, It is

conscious, powerful, loving; It is at once Spirit, Cause, Goodness.

Fourthly, It is at once, first, last, outward, inward; It is at once

the Origin, the Result, the Manifested, the Non-Manifested. But It is

always the One. -- Frithjof Schuon

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In competition with the people of Atlantis, were the people of the

Hyperborean cycle, who spread across the Earth in waves that included

the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic invasions of Europe, the Northern

invasions that led to the founding of ancient Greek culture, the

Aryan invasion in India, the settlement of the Middle East and

Persia, and the founding of Chinese civilization.

All of the major civilizations of world -- the Central American

(Mayan), Northern European (Norse-Slavic-Celtic), Southern European

(Greco-Roman), North African (Egyptian-Carthaginian), Middle Eastern

(Babylonian-Assyrian-Persian), Indian, and Chinese -- thus have their

root in one common civilization. That civilization is the

civilization of Tradition. When men possessed Tradition, they lived

in a state of bliss and perfect harmony with the universe and natural

law. As they lost their homeland, and interbred with the lesser

people that inhabited the Earth, their culture became diluted and

they began to enter into cyclical decline.

Key to the structure of a Traditional civilization is the idea of

caste. Caste is not a limiting factor, but it is a system of social

organization that is designed to let each man best find a method of

expressing who they are. There are four castes in every traditional

culture, from the Irish-Celtic-Druidic to the Hindu Brahmans. There

is the emperor-king, who is a servant of the divine, and who sits

above all caste, and there is a religious caste that serves him.

There is a warrior caste that enforces social order. There is a

merchant caste that tends to material needs. And there is a worker

caste that performs physical labor. These castes each have symbolic

representations -- gold for the highest, followed by silver,

copper/bronze, and iron/lead/stone.

Similarly, the two races of men -- those within Tradition and those

without -- have symbolic representations in other fundamental

dichotomies: male/female, light/dark, white/black, good/evil,

North/South, sun/moon, sky/earth, and the like. In Hermeticism and

alchemy, for instance, this relationship becomes mercury/sulfur, and

the " gold " that the Philosopher's Stone is supposed to reveal is the

Lost Emperor and Secret King of the Golden People.

Society is declining in cycles of the castes. In the beginning, the

golden caste -- the religious caste -- ruled. It's rule was followed

by that of the warrior caste. Currently, we are living in a time of

the rule of the merchant caste. In time, society will degenerate to

the rule of the worker caste, and then society will self-destruct,

being consumed in fire in a final battle between the forces of

Tradition and the forces of " progress " and anti-Tradition. When the

final " progressive " society is destroyed by fire (my guess is nuclear

fire, but that's just my guess), from the ashes will arise the Secret

King -- the true Emperor that once ruled over the regions of the

Arctic -- and he will restore the Earth to the Golden Age. Those

familiar with Norse myth can think Ragna Rokkr, Baldur, and the

release of spirits from Valhalla.

Each cycle of the caste is characterized by its particular vice.

Without an Emperor-King, the religious caste loses its center, and

cannot function. Without a religious caste to control it, the warrior

caste collapsed society into feudalism and war. The merchant caste

used this as an excuse to turn them out, and then plunged

civilization into an age of greed. The worker states that emerge will

be characterized by an age of slavery.

Given that decline is inevitable, there is no question of reversing

history. However, one cannot abandon society to " progress " , either.

One has to stand up among the ruins of civilization and conduct one's

self according to the codes of honor that have been lost, and one

must constantly fight against the suicidal destuction that society is

hurling itself toward. By standing up and conducting one's self

properly according to one's caste, one transcends one's current

material form and becomes a spiritual entity that will be

reincarnated in the final confrontation and destroyed to restore to

the world its original form. By transcending material reality one

becomes eternal and immortal. -- Bill White

The civilization of the modern West appears in history a veritable

anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less

completely, this civilization is the only one which has developed

along purely material lines and this monstrous development, whose

beginning coincides with the so-called Renaissance, has been

accompanied, as indeed it was fated to be, with a corresponding

intellectual regress; we say corresponding and not equivalent,

because here are two orders of things between which there can be no

common measure. This regress has reached such a point that the

Westerners of today no longer know what pure intellect is; in fact

they do not even suspect that anything of the kind can exist; hence

their disdain, not only for eastern civilization, but also for the

Middle Ages of Europe, whose spirit escapes them scarcely less

completely. How is the interest of a purely speculative knowledge to

be brought home to people for whom intelligence is nothing but a

means of acting on matter and turning it to practical ends, and for

whom science, in their limited understanding of it, is above all

important in so far as it may be applied to industrial purposes ?

--Rene Guenon

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It is often supposed that in a traditional society, or under tribal

or clan conditions, which are those in which a culture of the folk

flourished most, the individual is arbitrarily compelled to conform

to the patterns of life that he actually follows. It would be truer

to say that under these conditions the individual is devoid of social

ambition. It is very far from true that in traditional societies the

individual is regimented: it is only in democracies, soviets, and

dictatorships that a way of life is imposed upon the individual from

without. In the unanimous society the way of life is self-imposed in

the sense that " fate lies in the created causes themselves, " and this

is one of the many ways in which the order of the traditional society

conforms to the order of nature: it is in the unanimous societies

that the possibility of self-realization - that is, the possibility

of transcending the limitations of individuality - is best provided

for. It is, in fact, for the sake of such a self-realization that the

tradition itself is perpetuated. It is here, as Jules Romains has

said, that we find " the richest possible variety of individual states

of consciousness, in a harmony made valuable by its richness and

density " , words that are peculiarly applicable, for example, to Hindu

society. In the various kinds of proletarian government, on the other

hand, we meet always with the intention to achieve a rigid an

inflexible uniformity: all the forces of " education " , for example,

are directed to this end. It is a national, rather than a cultural

type that is constructed, and to this one type everyone is expected

to conform, at the price of being considered a peculiar person or

even a traitor. It is of England the Earl of Portsmouth remarks, " it

is the wealth and genius of variety amongst our people, both in

character and hand, that needs to be rescued now " : what could not be

said of the United States! The explanation of this difference is to

be found in the fact that the order that is imposed on the individual

from without in any form of proletarian government is a systematic

order, not a " form " but a cut and dried " formula " , and generally

speaking a pattern of life that has been conceived by a single

individual or some school of academic thinkers ( " Marxists " , for

example); while the pattern to which the traditional society is

conformed by its own nature, being a metaphysical pattern, is a

consistent but not a systematic form, and can therefore provide for

the realization of many more possibilities and for the functioning of

many more kinds of individual character than can be included within

the limits of any system. --Ananda Coomaraswamy

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One of the false foundations of the democracy is the vote, that

should be ideally a collective judgement of the art of governing.

Now, nobody, sincerely, would defend the peculiar idea that the

majority would be intellectually qualified and with enough knowledge

on what is administration and government to be in conditions of

exercising a judgement.

Kept the due proportions, such supposition equalitarist would be

equal to affirm to that everybody is qualified, for instance, on a

medical subject. A real situation would illustrate very well such

absurd. A person is seriously wounded. Dozens of onlookers observe

afflicted the event. Which could be the plausible criterion to

determine who can help the wounded? Naturally, the ones that are

qualified for such, that is, doctors or nurses. A voting would be

entirely irrelevant, because the majority is never qualified for the

medical function, as well as it is not for the administration.

If the reasoning is valid for a wounded person, it is evident that if

we take in account the destiny of millions of individuals, that is

what happens in the case of elections for the government, we can see

that the irresponsibility is the more complete imaginable.

We would have a variety of examples of the nonsense of the

" democratic " foundation that affirms the superiority of the majority,

in other words, that an opinion of a larger number of individuals is

superior to other, defended, for instance, by a qualified minority.

How to sustain that 200 bottles of cheap wine, only because of its

number, is superior to an only wineglass of high quality? Or, then,

how to affirm that 1450 individuals, of the most varied professions,

less the physics, will be more qualified that an unique specialist to

solve a subject of quantum physics?

In the origin of the Democratic Illusion is the denial of the natural

hierarchy, whose clearer expression is in the Hindú Doctrine of

Castes, hierarchy that settles down from top to bottom, that is, from

the highest quality, the spiritual, until the least high, in other

words, the material. The mentors of the modern democracy based it

precisely on what exists of more roughly material and quantitative.

The denial of the qualitative superiority and of the hierarchy begins

at the end of the Medium Age, more precisely by the year of 1313,

with the destruction of the Order of the Temple by Felipe the

Beautiful, then King of France. This monarch ordered to surround the

Pope's palace, that died humiliated few days after such insult.

Felipe, the Beautiful, decides then to force the nomination of a

submissive pope, easy to his greed and to his political projects,

what will be impossible under the authority of a real Sumo Pontífice.

The denial of the priestly superiority (typical attitude of rioted

Kchatriya) implicates the denial of the Unique, or God. But,

respecting the logic, is it possible to defend such denial? -- Rene

Guenon

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the traditional view of authority is based on the concept of

hierarchical order, that connects nobility (the privilege of rank, an

emblem of outer order) to profundity (compassionate wisdom or piety,

an emblem of inner order). There is no outer order (or Beauty)

without inner order (or Virtue), no legitimacy of hierarchy unless

premised upon the spiritually-ordered structure of reality, which

proceeds from the subtle to the gross, from spiritual substance to

material form, in a ³great chain of being² (to use Lovejoy¹s

celebrated phrase). According to this view, reality is hierarchical

because (as the etymology, hiero-arche, of divine origin, implies) it

is spiritually ordered, that is to say, ranked according to the

degree of its spiritual luminosity which manifests in our primordial

natures as piety. It is this ordering that confers social

cohesiveness and preserves natural order. And by ³untuning that

string², as Shakespeare observes, ³hark! what discord

follows²(Triolus and Cressida, Act 1, Scene 3). The degrees of

reality are not to be understood in an outward or superficial sense

as, for example, by equating rank with any external badge or emblem

of affiliation such as race, temporal power or ideology. Instead,

rank corresponds to inner states and spiritual stations, and the

authority that rank confers is related to the spiritual sensibilities

inherent in that rank. These sensibilities relate to the vertical

dimension of reality that connects nobility to profundity, the need

for freedom to the desire for union. This is the foundation of the

key principle of ³noblesse oblige², an aspect of the Islamic

principle of Amanah or Trust. It is the subordination of human

governance to the divine law that establishes the ruler¹s right to be

obeyed. There is a reciprocity between governance and obedience,

between authority and its due. Authority resonates as inner beauty or

virtue, as sacred knowledge or ³gnosis², and as the wisdom of

compassion or love. This resonance is what enables the spiritual

receptor within each of us to authenticate authority and to attune us

to its harmony that we identify as sacred. This respect for one¹s

innate abilities (contrast Eco¹s suggestion that tradition implies

critical stagnation or irrationalism) is implied in traditional

scriptures that eschew coercion in matters of faith (³There is no

compulsion in religion²: Qur¹an: 2, 256), but this is counterbalanced

by a necessary appreciation of the legitimate role of spiritual

authority (³He who has no Shaykh has satan for his guide²: Bayazid

Bistami). Here, tradition does not advocate a blind adherence to

anyone claiming authority. True authority is to be recognized by

intellectual discernment, and exudes its own perfume, of rigor and

compassion, found in all the great spiritual messengers and teachers.

If traditional doctrines can be easy to misinterpret, traditional

practices can be even more difficult to implement appropriately,

hence the necessity of a guide. While fascist misreadings of

tradition tend to emphasize the role of blind adherence to authority

and correspondingly diminish the role of the intellect, tradition in

fact teaches that the intellect is the spiritual receptor which can

perceive (in Frithjof Schuon¹s well-known phrase) ³the metaphysical

transparency of things². It is thus the criterion of discerning the

sacred and of intuiting authority. In the traditional view, the

intellect is the lamp that lights our world, that perceives created

reality as ³charged with the grandeur of God², from whence it

springs. The intellect is akin to an eye which becomes aware of

itself through its seeing. Knowledge is therefore experiential, not

merely discursive. In the words of Machado: ³The eye you see

is not an eye because you see it. It is an eye because it sees you.²

- M.A. Lakhani

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....modern science displays a certain number of fissures that are not

only due to the fact that the world of phenomena is indefinite and

that therefore no science could come to the end of it; those fissures

derive especially from a systematic ignorance of all the noncorporeal

dimensions of reality. They manifest themselves right down to the

foundations of modern science, and in domains as seemingly " exact " as

that of physics; they become gaping cracks when one turns to the

disciplines connected with the study of the forms of life, not to

mention psychology, where an empiricism that is relatively valid in

the physical order encroaches strangely upon a foreign field. These

fissures, which do not affect only the theoretical realm, are far

from harmless; they represent, on the contrary, in their technical

consequences, so many seeds of catastrophe. --Titus Burckhardt

Psychology of the modern kind defines itself by its inability to

distinguish between the psychic plane, the arena in which the more or

less accidental subjectivities of the individual ego come into play

in the depths of the subconscious, and the infinite realm of the

spirit which, in terms of the human individual, is signalled by the

capacity for the plenary experience and which is thus marked by an

" inward " illimitation and transcendence. The muddling of the psychic

realm of the subconscious with the mystical potentialities of the

human soul and the infinite reaches of the Intellect has given birth

to all manner of confusions. There is indeed a science which reveals

the way in which the play of the psyche can communicate universal

realities; this is one of the fields of traditional pneumatologies.

But, and the proviso is crucial, such a science cannot flourish

outside a properly-constituted metaphysic and cosmology. In this

context the following passage from Burckhardt deserves the closest

attention:

The connection with the metaphysical order provides spiritual

psychology with qualitative criteria such as are wholly lacking in

profane psychology, which studies only the dynamic character of

phenomena of the psyche and their proximate causes. When modern

psychology makes pretensions to a sort of science of the hidden

contents of the soul it is still for all that restricted to an

individual perspective because it has no real means for

distinguishing psychic forms which translate universal realities from

forms which appear symbolical but are only vehicles for individual

impulsions. Its " collective subconscious " has most assuredly nothing

to do with the true source of symbols; at most it is a chaotic

depository of psychic residues somewhat like the mud of the ocean bed

which retains traces of past epochs.[72]

The confusion of the psychic and the spiritual, which in part stems

from the artificial Cartesian dualism of " body " and " mind " , was

discussed by René Guénon at some length in The Reign of Quantity. The

confusion, he said,

appears in two contrary forms: in the first, the spiritual is brought

down to the level of the psychic; in the second, the psychic is...

mistaken for the spiritual; of this the most popular example is

spiritualism...[73]

The first form of the confusion thus licenses a degrading

reductionism and relativism, often as impertinent as it is

inadequate. The " sinister originality " of psychologism lies in its

" determination to attribute every reflex and disposition of the soul

to mean causes and to exclude spiritual factors. " [74] This tendency

is often partner of a relativism whereby everything becomes

....the fruit of a contingent elaboration: Revelation becomes poetry,

the Religions are inventions, sages are " thinkers " ... infallibility

and inspiration do not exist, error becomes a quantitative and

" interesting " contribution to " culture " ... there is... a denial of

every supernatural, or even suprasensory, cause, and by the same

token of every principial truth. -- Oldmeadow

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To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless

one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man...nothing is

fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore

centered on it. Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing

to be measured in turn...all human landmarks disappear; once cut off

from the Divine, the human collapses. --Frithjof Schuon