illusion – SPECULUM

The content of the universal and primordial Doctrine is the following, expressed in Vedantic terms: “Brahma is Reality; the world is appearance; the soul is not other than Brahma.” These are the three great theses of integral metaphysics; one positive, one negative, one unitive. Let us specify that in the second affirmation, it is important to understand that “appearance” gives rise to two complementary interpretations: according to the first, the world is ILLUSION, nothingness; according to the second, it is Divine Manifestation; the first point of view is upheld by Shankara and Shivaism, and the second by Ramanuja and Vishnuism; roughly speaking, for there are compensations in both camps. The third of the fundamental affirmations in a way marks the passage from the “Truth” to the “Path,” or let us say from the Doctrine to the Method; the soul not being “other than Brahma,” its vocation is to transcend the world. In other words, since the human intellect has by definition the capacity to conceive and to realize the Absolute, this possibility is its Law; from speculative discernment results operative and unitive concentration. To theology is joined orison; “pray without ceasing.” Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

It is all too readily believed that a metaphysical text is a creation of reason because it has the form of a logical demonstration, whereas reason in this case is but the means of transmission. There are mystics who are disinterested in a text because it is logical, that is, because they believe it is necessary to transcend this plane; as if logic were a sign of ignorance or ILLUSION, whereas it is a reflection within our mind of the universal Causality. Essays Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy

Again, if present-day man had at long last arrived at truth, he would have to be proportionately superior to the men of former times, and the disproportion between the two would be well-nigh absolute. Now the least that can be said is that the men of ancient or mediaeval times were neither less intelligent nor less virtuous than modern man. The ideology of progress is one of those absurdities that are as remarkable for the lack of imagination as for the total lack of sense of proportion they display; this is, moreover, essentially a vaishya ILLUSION, rather like that of ‘culture’, which is nothing more than intellectuality stripped of intelligence. (Castes and Races, p.28-30). sophiaperennis: Sophia Perennis and the theory of evolution and progress

Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism are the two great abuses of intelligence, which violate pure intellectuality as well as the sense of the sacred; (NA: By a curious and inevitable backlash, the abuse of intelligence is always accompani ed by some inconsequentiality and some blindness: on the plane of art for example, it is inconsequential to copy nature when one is condemned in advance to stop halfway, for in painting, one can realize neither total perspective nor movement, any more than one can realize the latter in sculpture, without mentioning the impossibility of imitating the living appearance of surfaces.) it is through this propensity that thinkers “are wise in their own eyes” and end by “calling evil good, and good evil” and by “putting darkness for light, and light for darkness” (Isaiah, 5:20 and 21); they are also the ones who, on the plane of life or experience, “make bitter what is sweet,” namely the love of the eternal God, and “sweet what is bitter,” namely the ILLUSION of the evanescent world. sophiaperennis: Skeptical rationalism and titanesque naturalism

To sum up our exposition and at the risk of repeating ourselves, we say that all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and ILLUSION, or between truth and error. If “everything is true that is subjective,” then Lapland is in France, provided we imagine it so; and if everything is relative – in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world – then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds – the “existentialist” and “vitalist” defenders of the infra-rational – have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought. Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence22 do not escape this fatal contradiction: they reject intellectual dis crimination as being “rationalism” and in favor of “existence” or of “life,” without realizing that this rejection is not “existence” or “life” but a “rationalist” operation in its turn, hence something considered to be opposed to the idol “life” or “existence”; for if rationalism – or let us say intelligence – is opposed, as these philosophers believe, to fair and innocent “existence” – that of vipers and bombs among other things – then there is no means of either defending or accusing this existence, nor even of defining it in any way at all, since all thinking is supposed to “go outside” existence in order to place itself on the side of rationalism, as if one could cease to exist in order to think. In reality, man – insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth – is intelligence; and intelligence – in its principle and its plenitude – is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept – whether explicit or implicit – of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the “motionless mover” of every operation of the mind, even when man – reason – makes himself out to be the measure of God. 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, or that the Absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; 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, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses. In our day, it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most “advanced” minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth – as is shamelessly admitted – or rather what usurps its place in man’s consciousness. It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of “science” and of “human genius” man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it. sophiaperennis: Existentialism

We have compared pure intelligence to a mirror; now it must be recalled that there is always a certain element of inversion in the relationship between subject and object, that is, the subject which reflects inverts the object reflected. A tree reflected in water is inverted, and so is “false” in relation to the real tree, but it is still a tree – even “this” tree – and never anything else: consequently the reflected tree is perfectly “true,” despite its illusory character, so that it is a mistake to conclude that intellection is illusory because of its subjective framework. The powers of the cosmic ILLUSION are not unlimited, for the Absolute is reflected in the contingent, otherwise the latter would not exist; everything is in God – “All is Atma” – and the Absolute flashes forth everywhere, it is “infinitely close”; barriers are illusory, they are at the same time immeasurably great and infinitesimally small. sophiaperennis: What is the intellect and Intellection?

The idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to us; in other words, if modern man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple reflection than might appear at first sight. Consequently, before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their ILLUSION would imply, were it nothing but that. sophiaperennis: Kantianism

What good, for example, is Schelling’s correct view of intellectual contemplation and of the transcending of the subject-object relationship in the Absolute, since it is accompanied by the promise of a flat philosophical pseudo-religion mingled with a classical or academic aestheticism of the most banal style? The replacing of the Cartesian Cogito ergo sum by the formula of Maine de Biran: “I act, I will, I exist,” or the Sum cogitans of Heidegger, and so on, is strictly a matter of taste, or of mental ILLUSION; the starting point in all cases of this kind is at bottom merely an ignorance ignorant of itsel f. It may well be asked why thought or action are any better proof of our existence than some sensation or other; it is precisely the intelligence which shows us that many things exist without thinking, acting or willing, for once we see that stones exist, we have no need to invoke thought or action as proofs of our own existence, provided, of course, we admit that we are certain of the objective value of our vision. Now we are certain of it by virtue of the infallibility of the Intellect, and that is a subject which admits of no discussion, any more than does the question of knowing whether we are sane or mad. Philosophers readily found their systems on the absence of this certitude, which is however the conditio sine qua non of all knowledge, and even of all thought and all action. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito

The de facto ambiguity of beauty, and consequently of art, comes from the ambiguity of Maya: just as the principle of manifestation and ILLUSION both separates from the Principle and leads back to it, so earthly beauties, including those of art, can favour worldliness as well as spirituality, which explains the diametrically opposed attitudes of the saints towards art in general or a given art in particular. The arts reputed to be the most dangerous are those engaging hearing or movement, namely poetry, music and dancing; they are like wine, which in Christianity serves as the vehicle for a deifying sacrament, while in Islam it is prohibited, each perspective being right despite the contradiction. That the intoxicating element – in the widest sense – particularly lends itself to sanctification, Islam recognizes in its esoterism, in which wine symbolizes ecstasy and in which poetry, music and dancing have become ritual means with a view to “remembrance”. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART

In order to give an idea of the principles of traditional art, we will point out a few of the most general and elementary ones: first of all, the work executed must conform to the use to which it will be put, and it must translate that conformity; if there be an added symbolism, it must conform to the symbolism inherent in the object; there must be no conflict between the essential and the accessory, but a hierarchical harmony, which will moreover spring from the purity of the symbolism; the treatment of the material used must be in conformity with the nature of that material in the same way that the material itself must be in conformity with the use of the object; lastly, the object must not give an ILLUSION of being other than what it really is, for such an ILLUSION always gives a disagreeable impression of uselessness, and when this ILLUSION is the goal of the finished work, as it is in the case of all ‘classicist’ art, it is the mark of a uselessness which is only too apparent. The great innovations of naturalistic art can be reduced in fact to so many violations of the principles of normal art: firstly, as far as sculpture is concerned, violation of the inert material used, whether it be stone, metal or wood, and secondly, in the case of painting, violation of the plane surface. In the first example, the inert material is treated as if it were endowed with life, whereas it is essentially static and only allows, because of this fact, the representation either of motionless bodies or of essential or ‘schematic’ phases of movement, but not that of arbitrary, accidental or almost instantaneous movements; in the second example, that of painting, the plane surface is treated as if it had three dimensions, both by means of foreshortening and by the use of shadows. sophiaperennis: CONCERNING FORMS IN ART

What we have just said results moreover from the bodily form: first of all, the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be no more than a kind of transitory accident; and then, due to the fact that it is human, it communicates in its own way the same message as the masculine body, namely, we repeat, the absolutely Real and thereby the victory over the “round of births and deaths;” thus the possibility of leaving the world of ILLUSION and suffering. The animal, which can manifest perfections but not the Absolute, is like a closed door, as it were enclosed in its own perfection; whereas man is like an open door allowing him to escape his limits, which are those of the world rather than his own. sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body

The common ILLUSION of an “absolutely real” within relativity breeds philosophical sophistries and in particular an empiricist and experimental science wishing to unveil the metaphysical mystery of Existence (NA: With the aid of giant telescopes and electronic microscopes, if need be. Goethe, when he refuses to look through a microscope because he did not wish to wrench from Nature what she is unwilling to offer to our human senses, displayed a most just intuition of the limits of all natural science, and at the same time the limits of what is human.); those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to be aware, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and that, consequently, present “scientific” information represents a naught beside our ignorance – in short that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare) and that in order to extend our means of investigation to fit the scale of the total cosmos, we would have to begin by multiplying our human senses in mathematical progression, which brings us back to the unlimited, therefore to the inaccessible and the unknowable. (Treasures of Buddhism, p. 41-42). sophiaperennis: Limits of modern science

Modern science, with its denial in practice or in principle of all that is really fundamental, and its subsequent rejection of the “one thing needful,” (NA: “Scientific” atheism is affirmed indirectly by the postulate of empty space and therefore of discontinuity, which, however, cannot be maintained with complete consistency. Now, to deny plenitude and continuity, including rhythm and necessity, or the providential element, is to deny Universal Substance with all its implications of homogeneity and transcendence.) is like a planimetry that has no notion of the other directions. It shuts itself up entirely in physical reality or unreality, and there it accumulates an enormous mass of information, while at the same time committing itself to ever more complex conjectures. Starting out from the ILLUSION that nature will end by yielding its ultimate secret and will allow itself to be reduced to some mathematical formula or other, this Promethean science everywhere runs up against enigmas which give the lie to its postulates and which appear as unforeseen fissures in this laboriously erected system. These fissures get plastered over with fresh hypotheses and the vicious circle goes on unchecked, with all the threats we are aware of. Some of its hypotheses, such as the theory of evolution, in practice become dogmas by reason of their usefulness, if not of their plausibility; this usefulness is not only scientific, it can just as well be philosophical or even political, according to circumstances.(Logic and Transcendence, p. 67). sophiaperennis: Science and Metaphysics

Science claims to be characterized by its refusal of all purely speculative premisses (the voraussetzungsloses Denken of the German philosophers) and at the same time by a complete liberty of investigation; but this is an ILLUSION since modern science, like every other science before it moreover, cannot avoid starting out in its turn from an idea: this initial idea is the dogma concerning the exclusively rational nature of the intelligence and its more or less universal diffusion. In other words, it is assumed that there exists a unique and polyvalent intelligence (which in principle is true) and that this intelligence is possessed by everybody and furthermore that this is what allows investigation to be entirely “free” (which is radically false). sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the workers’ world, with its mechanico-scientific and materialistic psychology, is particularly impermeable to spiritual realities, for it presupposes a surrounding reality which is quite artificial: it requires machinery and therefore metal, din, hidden and treacherous forces, a nightmare environment, incomprehensible comings and goings – in a word an insect-like existence carried on in the midst of ugliness and triviality. In such a world, or rather in such a stage-set, spiritual reality comes to be regarded as an all too obvious ILLUSION or a luxury to be despised. In no matter what traditional environment, on the contrary, it is the problem of the workers, and so also of mechanization, which is devoid of persuasive force: in order to make it convincing a stage world corresponding to it had first to be created, in which the very forms suggested the absence of God; Heaven had to be made to seem improbable and any talk of God to sound false. (NA: The great mistake of those who in Europe seek to lead the industrial masses back to the fold of the Church is that they confirm the worker in his dehumanization by accepting the world of machines as a real and legitimate world and even believing themselves obliged to ‘love that world for its own sake’. To translate the Gospels into slang or to travesty the Holy Family in the guise of proletarians is to make a mock not only of religion but of the workers themselves; it is in any case base demagogy or, let us say, weakmindedness, for all these attempts betray the inferiority complex of intellectuals when they meet the sort of brutal realism characteristic of the industrial worker.) When the industrial worker says he has no time to pray he is not far wrong. sophiaperennis: Science and mythologies

According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical ILLUSION due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory degrees of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those degrees, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. sophiaperennis: Science and Revelations

For the same reasons it also denies Revelation, which alone rebuilds the bridge broken by the fall. According to the observations of experimental science, the blue sky which stretches above us is not a world of bliss, but an optical ILLUSION due to the refraction of light by the atmosphere, and from this point of view, it is obviously right to maintain that the home of the blessed does not lie up there. Nevertheless it would be a great mistake to assert that the association of ideas between the visible heaven and celestial Paradise does not arise from the nature of things, but rather from ignorance and ingenuousness, mixed with imagination and sentimentality; for the blue sky is a direct and therefore adequate symbol of the higher and supra-sensory degrees of Existence; it is indeed a distant reverberation of those degrees, and it is necessarily so since it is truly a symbol, consecrated by the sacred Scriptures and by the unanimous intuition of peoples. (NA: The word “symbol” implies “participation” or “aspect”, whatever the difference of level may be involved.) sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

A symbol is intrinsically so concrete and so efficacious that celestial manifestations, when they occur in our sensory world, “descend” to earth and “reascend” to Heaven; a symbolism accessible to the senses takes on the function of the supra-sensible reality which its reflects. Light-years and the relativity of the space-time relationship have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly “exact” and “positive” symbolism of appearances and its connection at once analogical and ontological with the celestial or angelic orders, The fact that the symbol itself may be no more than an optical ILLUSION in no way impairs its precision or its efficacy, for all appearances, including those of space and of the galaxies, are strictly speaking only ILLUSIONs created by relativity. (Light on the Ancient Worlds, 36-37). sophiaperennis: Science and negation of Transcendence

This extravagant and pseudo-metaphysical opinion is contradicted, in the first place, by the fact that, on awakening, we remember our own dream and not someone else’s; secondly, by the fact that the inconsistent and fluid character of dreams, on the one hand, and on the other, their reference to our subjectives experiences, prove their subjectivity, their passivity and their contingency; and, thirdly, by the fact that, while dreaming, we can perfectly well be aware that we are dreaming and that it is we — and not someone else — who are dreaming. The proof of this is that it may happen that we awaken of our own free will when the development of the dream takes a disturbing turn. On the other hand, no one would think of making an effort to emerge from the waking state — however disagreeable the situation — in the hope of awakening into some paradisial state with the conviction that one had emerged from an accident of one’s own imagination, whereas in reality the terrestrial world would remain what it is. Certainly the universe is, in a sense, an ILLUSION in relation to the Principle, but the objective world is not an ILLUSION in relation to a particular subjectivity on the plane of relativity. (Esoterism as Principle and as Way, p.215-216). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

The de facto ambiguity of this question is in part explained by the fact that the Hindus, who knew what was implied in such matters, have never in their expositions, which are deliberately elliptical and centered on the essential, gone out of their way to offer precisions which seemed to them pointless; but one must not take dialectical syntheses fro mere simplifications and draw absurd conclusions from the doctrine of ILLUSION, an error of which the ancient followers of Vedanta were clearly not guilty, or they would have been common solipsists. Schopenhauer was wrong in thinking that solipsism is logically irrefutable, but right in declaring solipsists to be ripe for the lunatic asylum. (Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, p. 71). 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

Those who are in the grip of ILLUSION do not know, and do not wish to know, that the devil can give them sound inspirations with the sole aim of gaining their confidence, so as to be able finally to lead them into error. and that he can tell them the truth nine times the more easily to deceive them on the tenth occasion, and that he deceives above all those who are seeking the confirmation or fulfillment of ILLUSIONs to which they are attached. (NA: The satanic origin of a message is immaterial when it is beneficent, but the devil will give such a message only to those whom he expects to deceive thereafter, but for which — to say the least — he would have no interest in doing so. In this general context let us recall the fact that according to certain ancient maxims which are well known, “heresy resides in the will and not in the intelligence”, and that “to err is human but to persevere in error is diabolical”.) This applies to visions as well as to auditions or other messages. sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism

… why have Sufis declared that God can be present, not only in churches and synagogues, but also in the temples of idolaters? It is because in the ‘classical’ and ‘traditional’ cases of paganism the loss of the full truth and of efficacy for salvation essentially results from a profound modification in the mentality of the worshippers and not from an ultimate falsity of the symbols; in all the religions which surrounded each of the three Semitic forms of monotheism, as also in those form of ‘fetishism’ (NA: This word is here used only as a conventional sign to designate decadent traditions, and there is no intention of pronouncing on the value of any particular African or Melanesian tradition.) still alive today, a mentality once contemplative and so in possession of a sense of the metaphysical transparency of forms had ended by becoming passional, worldly (NA: According to the Quran the kâfir is in effect characterized by his ‘worldliness’, that is, by his preference for the good things of this world and his inadvertence (ghaflah) as regards those lying beyond this world.) and, in the strict sense, superstitious. (NA: According to the Gospels the pagans imagine they will be answered ‘for their much speaking’. At root ‘superstition’ consists in the ILLUSION of taking the means for the end or of worshipping forms for their own sake and not for their transcendent content.) The symbol through which the reality symbolized was originally clearly perceived — a reality of which it is moreover truly speaking an aspect — became in fact an opaque and uncomprehended image or an idol, and this falling away of the general level of mentality could not fail in its turn to react on the tradition itself, enfeebling it and falsifying it in various way; most of the ancient paganisms were indeed characterized by intoxication with power and sensuality. (Understanding Islam, p.55). sophiaperennis: The Sophia Perennis and Neo-spiritualism