In pure theosophy there is no question of wishing to remove from God His mysteries by means of unveilings and specifications; for however acute our d… - Frithjof Schuon

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In pure theosophy there is no question of wishing to remove from God His mysteries by means of unveilings and specifications; for however acute our discernments, the divine mystery remains complete by reason of the Infinitude of the Real.

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About Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon ( ; ; 18 June 1907 – 5 May 1998) was a Swiss philosopher and spiritual leader, belonging to the Traditionalist School of Perennialism. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art. He was also a painter and a poet. With René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon was one of the major 20th-century representatives of the philosophia perennis. Like them, he affirmed the reality of an absolute Principle – God – from which the universe emanates, and maintained that all divine revelations, despite their differences, possess a common essence: one and the same Truth. He also shared with them the certitude that man is potentially capable of supra-rational knowledge, and undertook a sustained critique of the modern mentality severed, according to him, from its traditional roots. Following Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabī and other metaphysicians, Schuon sought to affirm the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation. Initiated by Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī into the Sufi Shādhilī order, he founded the Tarīqa Maryamiyya. His writings emphasize the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practicing a religion; he also insists on the importance of the virtues and of beauty. Schuon cultivated close relationships with a large number of personages of diverse religious and spiritual horizons. He had a particular interest in the traditions of the North American Plains Indians, maintaining firm friendships with a number of their leaders and being adopted into both a Lakota Sioux tribe and the Crow tribe. Having spent a large part of his life in France and Switzerland, at the age of 73 moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had a community of disciples.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Isâ Nûr ad-Dîn Isa Nur ad-Din Fritjof Schuon Sheikh Issa Nureddin Ahmad al-Shadhili al-Darqawi al-Alawi al-Maryami
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Additional quotes by Frithjof Schuon

The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and consequently in the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason.

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What is the world if not a flow of forms, and what is life if not a cup which seemingly is emptied between one night and another? And what is prayer, if not the sole stable point − a point of peace and light − in this dream universe, and the strait gate leading to all that the world and life have sought in vain? In the life of a man, these four certitudes are all: the present moment, death, the meeting with God, eternity. Death is an exit, a world which closes down; the meeting with God is like an opening towards a fulgurating and immutable infinitude; eternity is a fullness of being in pure light; and the present moment is, in our duration, an almost ungraspable "place" where we are already eternal − a drop of eternity amid the to-and-fro of forms and melodies. Prayer gives to the terrestrial instant its full weight of eternity and its divine value; it is the sacred ship bearing its load, through life and death, towards the further shore, towards the silence of light − but at bottom it is not prayer which traverses time as it repeats itself, it is time which, so to speak, halts before the already celestial unicity of prayer.

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