Frithjof Schuon quotes - page 4
Whoever participates in universal Knowledge will regard two apparently contradictory truths as he would two points situated on one and the same circumference that links them together by its continuity and so reduces them to unity; in the measure in which these points are distant from and thus opposed to one another there will be contradiction and this contradiction will reach its maximum when the two points are situated at the extremities of a diameter of the circle; but this extreme opposition or contradiction only appears as a result of isolating the points under consideration from the circle and ignoring the existence of the latter.
Frithjof Schuon
A classic example of a naive dogma is the Biblical story of creation, followed by that of the first human couple: if we are skeptical, we balk at the childishness of the literal meaning; but if we are intuitive − as every man ought to be − we will be sensitive to the irrefutable truths of the images; we feel that we bear these images within ourselves, that they have a universal and timeless validity. The same observation applies to myths and even to fairy tales: in describing principles − or situations − concerning the universe, they describe at the same time psychological and spiritual realities of the soul; and in this sense it can be said that the symbolisms of religion or of popular tradition are a part of our common experience, both on the surface and in depth.
Frithjof Schuon
Man is a divine manifestation, not in his accidentality and his fallen state, but in his theomorphism and his primordial and principial perfection. He is the "field of manifestation" of the intellect, which reflects the universal Spirit and thereby the divine Intellect; man as such reflects the cosmic totality, the Creation, and thereby the Being of God.
Frithjof Schuon
One of the proofs of our immortality is that the soul − which is essentially intelligence and consciousness − cannot have an end that is beneath itself, namely matter or the mental reflections of matter; the higher cannot be merely a function of the lower, it cannot be merely a means in relation to what it surpasses. Thus it is intelligence in itself − and with it our freedom − which proves the divine scope of our nature and our destiny. Whether people understand it or not, the Absolute alone is proportionate to the essence of our intelligence.
Frithjof Schuon
The ego is at the same time a system of images and a cycle; it is something like a museum, and a unique and irreversible journey through that museum. The ego is a moving fabric made of images and tendencies; the tendencies come from our own substance, and the images are furnished by the environment. We put ourselves into things, and we place things in ourselves, whereas our true being is independent of them.
Frithjof Schuon
When the soul has recognized that its true being is beyond this phenomenal nucleus which is the empirical ego and when it willingly holds fast to the Center − and this is the chief virtue, poverty, or effacement, or humility − the ordinary ego appears to the soul as outward to itself, and the world, on the contrary, appears to it as its own prolongation; all the more so since it feels itself everywhere in the Hand of God.
Frithjof Schuon
What animals and man have in common is, first of all, sensorial and instinctual intelligence, then the faculties of the senses, and finally basic feelings. What is proper to man alone is the intellect open to the Absolute; and also, owing to that very fact, reason, which extends the Intellect in the direction of relativity; and consequently it is the capacity for integral knowledge, for sacralization, and for ascension. Man shares with animals the wonder of subjectivity − but strangely a wonder that is not understood by the evolutionists; however, the subjectivity of animals is only partial, whereas that of man is total; the sense of the Absolute coincides with totality of intelligence.
Frithjof Schuon
Intellectual genius should not be confused with the mental acuity of logicians: intellectual intuition comprises in its essence a contemplativity that is in no way part of the rational capacity, this capacity being logical rather than contemplative; now it is contemplative power, receptivity toward the uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.
Frithjof Schuon
Being absolute, the supreme Principle is ipso facto infinite; the masculine body accentuates the first aspect, and the feminine body the second. On the basis of these two hypostatic aspects, the divine Principle is the source of all possible perfection; in other words, being the Absolute and the Infinite, It is necessarily also Perfection or the Good. Now each of the two bodies, the masculine and the feminine, manifests modes of perfection which their respective gender evokes by definition; indeed, all cosmic qualities are divided into two complementary groups: the rigorous and the gentle, the active and the passive, the contractive and the expansive. The human body is an image of Deliverance: now the liberating way maybe either "virile" or "feminine", although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes, for man (homo, anthropos) is always man; the non-material being that was the primordial androgyne survives in each of us.
Frithjof Schuon
Some will no doubt point out that Buddhism proves that the notion of God has nothing fundamental about it and that one can very well dispense with it in both metaphysics and spirituality; they would be right if Buddhists did not possess the idea of the Absolute or of transcendence, or of immanent Justice with its complement, Mercy; this is all that is needed to show that Buddhism, though it does not possess the word − or not our word − nonetheless possesses the reality itself.
Frithjof Schuon
The fundamental solution to the problem of the credibility of religious axioms, and consequently the quintessence of the proofs of God, lies in the ontological correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, that is, in the fact that the microcosm has to mirror the macrocosm; in other words, the subjective dimension, taken in its totality, coincides with the objective dimension, from which the religious and metaphysical truths derive in the first place. What matters is to actualize this coincidence, and this is what Revelation does, in principle or de facto, by awakening, if not always direct intellection, at least the indirect intellection which is faith; credo ut intelligam.
Frithjof Schuon
Love of God is something universal: the term "love" designates not only a path depending on will and feeling, but also − and this is its broadest meaning − every path insofar as it attaches us to the Divine; "love" is everything which makes us prefer God to the world and contemplation to earthly activity, wherever this alternative has a meaning. The best love will be, not that which most resembles what the word "love" can evoke in us a priori, but that which will attach us most steadfastly or most profoundly to Reality; to love God is to keep oneself near to Him, in the midst of the world just as beyond the world; God wants our souls, whatever may be our attitudes or our methods.
Frithjof Schuon
We must distinguish between natural life, which is centrifugal, and supernatural life, which is centripetal; the first pulls the soul away from God and drives it into the world, whereas the second draws the soul away from the world and leads it back to God. Natural or centrifugal life comprises one effect which is dispersion and another which is compression: the profane or worldly man loses himself in the multitude of things, on the one hand, and becomes hardened in his passional attachments, on the other hand. The supernatural life, on the contrary, comprises one effect which is dilation and another which is concentration: the spiritual man is dilated towards the Interior, on the one hand, and is united to the Unique on the other hand, the one being the function of the other.
Frithjof Schuon
One cannot state too clearly that a doctrinal formulation is perfect, not because it exhausts the infinite Truth on the plane of logic, which is impossible, but because it realizes a mental form capable of communicating, to whoever is intellectually apt to receive it, a ray of that Truth, and thereby a virtuality of the total Truth. This explains why the traditional doctrines are always apparently naive, at least from the point of view of philosophers − that is to say, of men who do not understand that the goal and sufficient reason of wisdom do not lie on the plane of its formal affirmation; and that, by definition, there is no common measure and no continuity between thought, whose operations have no more than a symbolic value, and pure Truth, which is identical with That which "is" and thereby includes him who thinks.
Frithjof Schuon
Man has the duty to resign himself to the will of God, but by the same token he has the right to transcend spiritually the suffering of the soul to the extent that this is possible for him; and this, precisely, is not possible without a prior attitude of acceptance and resignation, which alone brings out fully the serenity of the intelligence and which alone opens the soul to help from Heaven.
Frithjof Schuon
Beauty, and the love of beauty, give to the soul the happiness to which it aspires by its very nature. If the soul wishes to be happy in an unconditional and permanent fashion, it must bear the beautiful within itself; now the soul can only do this through realizing virtue, which we could also term goodness or piety.
Frithjof Schuon