The Principle is essentially Consciousness, Power and Love, thus Life; Love encompasses Beauty, Goodness, Beatitude. These are the undifferentiated aspects of the ESSENCE or of the Principle; they are situated one within the other, each is container and each is content, without intrinsic differentiation. Essays NATURE AND UNITY OF THE PRINCIPLE
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. Essays NATURE AND UNITY OF THE PRINCIPLE
It is true that the word “illumination” can have a superior meaning, in which case it no longer designates a passive phenomenon; unitive and liberating illumination is beyond the distinction between passivity and activity. Or more exactly, illumination is the Divine Activity in us, but for that very reason it also possesses an aspect of supreme Passivity in the sense that it coincides with the “extinction” of the passional and dark elements separating man from his immanent Divine ESSENCE; this extinction constitutes receptivity to the Influx of Heaven – without losing sight of the fact that the Divine Order comprises a “Passive Perfection” as well as an “Active Perfection,” and that the human spirit must in the final analysis participate in both mysteries. sophiaperennis: Gnosis
What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a PRE-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”- falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth – likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic – in the orthodox sense of the term – bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the ESSENCE which by delinition escapes formal constraints. sophiaperennis: What is a philosopher?
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the ESSENCE, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be – and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” – is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Difference between Philosophy, theology and gnosis
In the opinion of all profane thinkers, philosophy means to think “freely,” as far as possible without presuppositions, which precisely is impossible; on the other hand, gnosis, or philosophy in the proper and primitive sense of the word, is to think in accordance with the immanent Intellect and not by means of reason alone. What favors confusion is the fact that in both cases the intelligence operates independently of outward prescriptions, although for diametrically opposed reasons: that the rationalist if need be draws his inspiration from a PRE-existing system does not prevent him from thinking in a way that he deems to be “free”- falsely, since true freedom coincides with truth – likewise, mutatis mutandis: that the gnostic – in the orthodox sense of the term – bases himself extrinsically on a given sacred Scripture or on some other gnostic cannot prevent him from thinking in an intrinsically free manner by virtue of the freedom proper to the immanent Truth, or proper to the ESSENCE which by delinition escapes formal constraints. Or again: whether the gnostic “thinks” what he has “seen” with the “eye of the heart,” or whether on the contrary he obtains his “vision” thanks to the intervention – preliminary and provisional and in no wise efficient – of a thought which then takes on the role of occasional cause , is a matter of indifference with regard to the truth, or with regard to its almost supernatural springing forth in the spirit. sophiaperennis: Profane “thinkers”
However that may be, all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the ESSENCE of things. This ESSENCE is the “Idea” and it confers on things all their perfection, which coincides with beauty. sophiaperennis: Plato
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the ESSENCE, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be – and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” – is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Plato
Apart from the forms of sensory knowledge, Kant admits the categories, regarded by him as innate principles of cognition; these he divides into four groups inspired by Aristotle, (NA: Quantity, quality, relation, and modality; the latter no doubt replacing the Aristotelian ” position.”) while at the same time subjectivizing the Aristotelian notion of category. He develops in his own way the peripatetic categories that he accepts while discarding others, without realizing that, regardless of Aristotelianism, the highest and most important of the categories have eluded his grasp. (NA: Such as the principial and cosmic qualities which determine and classify phenomena, or the universal dimensions which join the world to the Supreme ESSENCE and which include each in its own manner the qualities mentioned above. Aristotle for his part had the right not to speak of them in that he accepted God as being self-evident and his approach was in no way moralistic and empirical; since he accept ed God, he did not consider his categories to be exhaustive.) The categories are a priori independent of all experience since they are innate; Kant recognized this, yet he considered that they were capable of being “explored” by a process he called “transcendental investigation.” But how will one ever grasp the pure subject who explores and who investigates? sophiaperennis: Kantianism
If Plato maintains that the philosophos should think independently of common opinions, he refers to intellection and not to logic alone; whereas a Descartes, who did everything to restrict and compromise the notion of philosophy, means it while starting from systematic doubt, so much so that for him philosophy is synonymous not only with rationalism, but also with skepticism. This is a first suicide of the intelligence, inaugurated moreover by Pyrrho and others, by way of a reaction against what was believed to be metaphysical “dogmatism.” The “Greek miracle” is in fact the substitution of the reason for the Intellect, of the fact for the Principle, of the phenomenon for the Idea, of the accident for the Substance, of the form for the ESSENCE, of man for God; and this applies to art as well as to thought. The true Greek miracle, if miracle there be – and in this case it would be related to the “Hindu miracle” – is doctrinal metaphysics and methodic logic, providentially utilized by the monotheistic Semites. sophiaperennis: Descartes and the Cogito
The “Great Vehicle” possesses a mysterious dimension known as the “Adamantine Vehicle” (Vajrayana); in order to grasp its meaning, one has to first understand what we repeatedly have termed the “metaphysical transparency of the world,” that is to say one has to base oneself on a perspective according to which – to quote an expression of Pascal’s we favor – Reality is “an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere”: it is this circumference and this center which are represented, in the adamantine doctrine, by the Buddha Mahavairochana (in Japanese Dainichi Nyorai) who is at one and the same time – in Vedantic terms – Atma, Ishvara and Buddhi; that is to say Supra-ontological ESSENCE, Ontological ESSENCE and Universal Intellect. This metaphysical transparency everywhere refers the effect back to the Cause without, however, doing away with the irreversibility of the causal relationship; the Absolute is nowise causal in itself, since in reality nothing can be outside It, but it is causal from the point of view of the cosmos which is real only as effect and in virtue of the metaphysical reduction of the effect to the Cause. Thus “all is Atma,” or all is Shunya (“Void”) or Vairochana – or “solarity” if we bear in mind the etymology as well as the symbolism of this Sanskrit name – but no thing is in itself, in its accidentality the “Self” or the “Void” or the “solar Buddha.” sophiaperennis: Pascal
“God is beautiful and He loves beauty”, says a hadith which we have quoted more than once: (NA: Another hadith reminds us that ” the heart of the believer is sweet, and it loves sweetness (halawah)”. The “sweet”, according to the Arabic word, is at the same time the pleasing, coupled with a nuance of spring-like beauty; which amounts to saying that the heart of the believer is fundament ally benevolent becaus e having conquered the hardness that goes with egoism and worldliness, he is made of sweetness or generous beauty.) Atma is not only Sat and Chit, “Being” and ”Consciousness” – or more relatively: “Power” and “Omniscience” – but also Ananda, “Beatitude”, and thus Beauty and Goodness; (NA: When the Koran says that God “has prescribed for Himsel f Mercy (Rahmah)”, it affirms that Mercy pertains to the very ESSENCE of God; moreover, the notion of Mercy does not do justice, except in a partial and extrinsic way, to the beati fic nature of the Infinite.) and what we want to know and realize, we must a priori mirror in our own being, because in the domain of positive realities (NA: This reservation means that we do not know privative realities – which, precisely, manifest unreality – except by contrast; for example, the soul understands moral ugliness to the extent that it itself is morally beautiful, and it cannot be beauti ful except by participation in Divine Beauty, Beauty in itself.) we can only know perfectly what we are. sophiaperennis: FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL AESTHETICS
Beauty, whatever use man may make of it, fundamentally belongs to its Creator, who through it projects into the world of appearances something of His being. The cosmic, and more particularly the earthly function of beauty is to actualize in the intelligent and sensitive creature the recollection of essences, and thus to open the way to the luminous Night of the one and infinite ESSENCE. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Art refers essentially to the mystery of the veil: it is a veil made of the world and ourselves and it is thus placed between us and God, but it is transparent in the measure in which it is perfect and communicates to us what at the same time it dissimulates. Art is true, that is to say a transmitter of ESSENCE, to the extent that it is sacred, and it is sacred, and thus a means of recollection and interiorization, to the extent that it is true. sophiaperennis: THE DEGREES OF ART
Thus beauty always manifests a reality of love, of deployment, of illimitation, of equilibrium, of beatitude, of generosity. On the one hand, love, which is subjective, responds to beauty, which is objective, and on the other hand, beauty, which is deployment, springs from love, which is illimitation, a giving of self, an overflowing, and thus realizes a sort of infinitude. In Being the Universal Substance, the materia prima, is pure Beauty; the creative ESSENCE, which communicates to Substance the archetypes to be incarnated, is the Divine Intelligence, of which Beauty is the eternal complement. (NA: This is the complementarism Purusha-Prakriti, the two poles of Ishvara, Being.) sophiaperennis: Truths and Errors Concerning Beauty
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
There is not only the beauty of the adult, there is also that of the child as our mention of the Child Jesus suggests. First of all, it must be said that the child, being human, participates in the same symbolism and in the same aesthetic expressivity as do his parents – we are speaking always of man as such and not of particular individuals – and then, that childhood is nevertheless a provisional state and does not in general have the definitive and representative value of maturity. (NA: But it can when the individual value of the child visibly over rides his state of immaturity; notwithstanding the fact that childhood is in itself an incomplete state which points towards its own completion.) In metaphysical symbolism, this provisional character expresses relativity: the child is what “comes after” his parents, he is the reflection of Atmâ in Mâyâ, to some degree and according to the ontological or cosmological level in view; or it is even Mâyâ itself if the adult is Atmâ. (NA: Polarized into “Necessary Being” and “All-Possibility.”) But from an altogether different point of view, and according to inverse analogy, the key to which is given by the seal of Solomon, (NA: When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always comprise one or the other of these relationships.) the child represents on the contrary what “was before,” namely what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial and close to the ESSENCE, and this is what its beauty expresses; (NA: We do not say that every human individual is beautiful when he is a child, but we start from the idea that man, child or not, is beautiful to the extent that he is physically what he ought to be.) this beauty has all the charm of promise, of hope and of blossoming, at the same time as that of a Paradise not yet lost; it combines the proximity of the Origin with the tension towards the Goal. And it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man, therefore in conformity with the divine Intention: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life. (NA: “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)) Since we have just mentioned the principle of inverse analogy, we may here connect it with its application to femininity: even though a priori femininity is subordinate to virility, it also comprises an aspect which makes it superior to a given aspect of the masculine pole; for the divine Principle has an aspect of unlimitedness, virginal mystery and maternal mercy which takes precedence over a certain more relative aspect of determination, logical precision and implacable justice. (NA: According to Tacitus, the Germans discerned something sacred and visionary in women. The fact that in German the sun (die Sonne) is feminine whereas the moon (der Mond) is masculine, bears witness to the same perspective.) Seen thus, feminine beauty appears as an initiatic wine in the face of the rationality represented in certain respects by the masculine body. (NA: Mahâyanic art represents Prajnâpâramitâ, the “Perfection of Gnosis,” in feminine form; likewise, Prajnâ, liberating Knowledge, appears as a woman in the face of Upâya, the doctrinal system or the art of convincing, which is represented as masculine. The Buddhists readily point out that the Bodhisattvas, in themselves asexual, have the power to take a feminine form as they do any other form; now one would like to know for what reason they do so, for if the feminine form can produce such a great good, it is because it is intrinsically good; otherwise there would be no reason for a Bodhisattva to assume it.) sophiaperennis: The Message of the Human Body
ESSENCE. (NA: It is in this sense that a Ramana Maharshi could reduce the whole problem of spirituality to the single question: “Who am I?” Which does not mean – as some imagine – that this question can constitute a path; on the one hand, it indicates the incommunicable state of the Maharshi, and on the other the principle of spiritual subjectivity, of the progressive participation in the pure Subject at once immanent and transcendent.) sophiaperennis: Ramana Maharshi
The profound explanation of the myths of the “sinful” woman, “prisoner” of chthonic powers, “ravished” by a demon, “swallowed” by the earth, or even become infernal — Eve, Eurydice, Sita, Izanami, according to case — this explanation doubtless is to be fond in the scission between the male demiurge and the female demiurge, or between the center and the periphery of the cosmos; this periphery being envisaged then, not as the cosmic substance as such, which remains virgin in relation to its production, but as the totality of these productions; for it is the accidents, and not the substance, which comprise “evil” in all its forms. But, aside from the fact that the substance remains virgin even while being mother, it is redeemed at the very level of its exteriorization through its positive contents, which are in principle sacramental and saving; symbolically speaking, if “woman” was lost through choosing “matter” or the “world”, she was redeemed — and is redeemed — through giving birth to the Avatara. And besides, “everything is Atma”; and “it is not for the love of the husband (or of the wife or the son) that the husband (or the wife or the son) is dear, but for the love of Atma which in him”. That is, the feminine element — the Substance — is by definition a mirror of the ESSENCE, despite its exteriorizing and alienating function; moreover, a mirror is necessarily separated from what it reflects, and therein lies its ambiguity. (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, p.53-54). sophiaperennis: Femininity
Fundamentally, every love is a search for the ESSENCE or the lost Paradise; the melancholy, gentle or violent, which often appears in poetic or musical eroticism bears witness to this nostalgia for a far-off Paradise and doubtless also to the evanescence of earthly dreams, of which the sweetness is, precisely, that of a Paradise which we no longer perceive, or which we do not yet perceive. (Esoterism as Principle and as Way, page 138). sophiaperennis: Femininity
The human being is compounded of geometry and music, of spirit and soul, of virility and femininity: by geometry, he brings the chaos of existence back to order, that is, he brings blind substance back to its ontological meaning and thus constitutes a reference point between Earth and Heaven, a “sign-post” pointing towards God; by music he brings the segmentation of form back to unitive life, reducing form, which is death, to ESSENCE — at least symbolically and virtually — so that it vibrates with a joy which is at the same time a nostalgia for the Infinite. As symbols, the masculine body indicates a victory of the Spirit over chaos, and the feminine body, a deliverance of form by ESSENCE; the first is like a magic sign which would subjugate the blind forces of the Universe, and the second like celestial music which would give back to fallen matter its paradisiac transparency, or which, to use the language of Taoism, would make trees flower beneath the snow. (Stations of Wisdom, p. 80). sophiaperennis: Femininity