The Eye of the Heart: Metaphysics, Cosmology, Spiritual Life (Library of Traditional Wisdom)

Rating:
Summary: Schuon is a bridge between East and West
Review: Schuon is often a wonderfully complex author, and much is translated from French or German. If you have the patience, his work will never fail to amaze you with the new light refracted from a jewel you had convinced yourself you'd seen from all conceivable angles. He deals in foundations, and any modernist or self-proclaimed secular skeptic or atheist must grapple with his presentations of the Primordial Tradition. This book is a diverse and gripping introduction to his work and incredible mind.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome reveal-ations from the premier perrenialist
Review: Schuon is often a wonderfully complex author, and much is translated from French or German. If you have the patience, his work will never fail to amaze you with the new light refracted from a jewel you had convinced yourself you'd seen from all conceivable angles. He deals in foundations, and any modernist or self-proclaimed secular skeptic or atheist must grapple with his presentations of the Primordial Tradition. This book is a diverse and gripping introduction to his work and incredible mind.

Rating:
Summary: Schuon is a bridge between East and West
Review: The image of seeing with the heart is a powerful symbolism found in many spiritual traditions. It combines a lofty and "abstract" element with one that is profound and "concrete," encompassing the highest as well as the deepest faculties of man. But Schuon is above all a realist, and thus the horizontal plane of what is human-and even all too human-necessarily finds an important place in his writings.

This book brings together some of his earliest articles with the last of those belonging to his metaphysical prose works. Among the latter, "Between East and West" is a particularly interesting description of the flaws as well as the positive characteristics of the "average mentality" found among modern Orientals and Occidentals and their spiritual consequences. In a general way, Easterners are more sensitive to the symbolism or the spiritual intention of things than to the "objective facts" which are more convincing for Westerners. Schuon sets forth with precision and finesse how this contrast or oscillation between "faith" and "reason" shows itself not only among different groups of humanity but also within our individual souls.

One of the singular features of Schuon's perspective-and of a jnanic viewpoint in general-is the absence of a denominational zeal that wishes to convert or a moralizing approach that tends to elevate a particular human style to the level of a goal in itself. Whether one experiences this as a shock or as a relief, Schuon unwaveringly looks at the essential nature of things in all their degrees and modalities. And the immutable reference point is always the sense of the sacred. Reality is sacred, therefore man is a theophany or he lives below himself-in his thoughts, in his actions, in his sentiments and imagination: "...What is 'true' is what opens the door towards the Truth at once transcendent and immanent... There is the symbol and there is the 'fact': now the understood symbol is worth infinitely more than the misunderstood fact."

It is striking to find the same "faith-reason" or "symbol-fact" polarity in the chapter "Intellectuality and Civilization," written in the 1940's, at the beginning of the Schuon opus. Everyone can agree that intelligence is preferable to stupidity, just as truth is superior to error and illusion. The difficulty is that the modern definition of intelligence tends to limit it, either by specializing it into a kind of cerebral virtuosity or by flattening it into mere reason or, worse yet, the infra-reason of existentialism. Thus, as Schuon points out, to its great harm, today's culture ignores the cosmic laws that have always governed humanity. It replaces them with either an "idealism" or a "realism," both misconceived. "The first will always be above collective human possibilities, and the second altogether below them."

Modern man suffers both individually and collectively from the pervasive illness of relativism. Then, precisely because of his malady, he bitterly rails against centuries of saints, sages and pious men before him. The rejection of the religious traditions goes hand in hand with the loss of what Schuon terms "integral intelligence," one that is proportioned to total Truth, which is necessarily eternal and spiritual. To read Schuon is to be reminded that this total Truth is always at hand, for those who seek it with the eye of the heart.