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tions. “All of Nature speaks of God” 11 , theentire Universe is a sign, a reflection of ainvisible Reality. 12A spiritual vision of the natural world is oneof the essential traits of all authentic spiritualtraditions. Man lives in harmony withthe Cosmos, venerating and respecting it.The men and women of traditional culturesare an integrated part of the naturalenvironment; it is their temple, their placeof worship. They are not the owners of thenatural world; rather they are its custodiansand guardians: “This we know; theearth does not belong to man; manbelongs to the Earth”. 13The second point to take into account inthis context is the necessary distinctionbetween the spiritual world and the psychicor supernatural world. We havealready mentioned the modern neo-spiritualismwhose main characteristic is preciselyits choice of the physic dimensionas an alternative to the spiritual dimension.This is an important distinctionbecause the physic dimension, restrictedonly to the human dimension, shuns andeven tries to substitute the divine experience.14 We live in a modern world characterisedby both materialism and psychism.Both are distant from the spiritual worldand therefore, from what constitutes theessence of humankind and the world’sdifferent spiritual traditions. As FrithjofSchuon has explained so clearly, modernman has ‘usurped’ religious feeling andreplaced it with other idols, one of whichis science. 15 The qualitative vision of theworld has been lost along the way; wehave lost the criteria of spiritual orientationand are stumbling progressively closer tointernal self-destruction. This is one of theobvious signs of the crisis of our civilisationthat has been remarked upon sooften in recent decades.The ability to penetrate nature’s symbolsand reach into the essence of its spiritualdimension requires contemplation, anarchetypical activity that, above all elseand as we have mentioned already,explores the divine origins of phenomena.If we contemplate the natural world viaauthentically spiritual criteria we will seethe universal values that are present. A11 Hugo de San Victor. ‘Omnis natura Deo loquitur’, Eruditio Didascalia, 6.5 p. 176, 1805, quoted in Nasr, Man and Nature, p.10.12 See chap. 1 of The Way and the Mountain by Marco Palllis for an approximation to the sacred character of nature from a genuinelytraditional point of view, pp.13-35.13 The indigenous peoples of the North American Great Plains possess the most existential conception of the natural world. This quotecomes from the famous speech by Chief Seattle, of which numerous versions exist in many languages, pp. 31-32.14 Jung is mistaken when he tries to place the spiritual dimension within the “collective subconsciousness”. A profound criticism ofJung’s thesis can be found in Titus Burckhardt, Modern Science and Traditional Wisdom, in the chapter “Modern Psychology and traditionalwisdom”, pp. 88-10315 Frithjof Schuon ‘Usurpations of religious feeling’ in The Transfiguration of Man, pp. 39-48.49