glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

Prayer: The remembrance of God is at the same time a forgetting of oneself; conversely,
the ego is a kind of crystallization of forgetfulness of God. The brain is, as it were, the
organ of this forgetfulness; it is like a sponge filled with images of this world of
dispersion and of heaviness, filled too with the tendencies of the ego towards both
dispersal and hardening. As for the heart, it is the latent remembrance of God, hidden
deep down in our “I”; prayer is as if the heart, risen to the surface, came to take the place
of the brain which then sleeps with a holy slumber; this slumber unites and soothes, and
its most elementary trace in the soul is peace. “I sleep, but my heart waketh.” [UI, The
Path]
Prayer (aim of individual): The aim of individual prayer is not only to obtain particular
favors, but also the purification of the soul: it loosens psychological knots or, in other
words, dissolves subconscious coagulations and drains away many a secret poison; it
externalizes before God the difficulties, failures and tensions of the soul, which
presupposes that the soul be humble and upright; this externalization – carried out in face
of the Absolute – has the virtue of reestablishing equilibrium and restoring peace, in a
word, of opening us to grace. [EchPW, 52]
Prayer (quintessential): The important thing to grasp here is that actualisation of the
consciousness of the Absolute, namely the “remembrance of God” or “prayer,” insofar as
it brings about a fundamental confrontation of creature and Creator, anticipates every
station on the two axes. It is already a death and a meeting with God and it places us
already in Eternity; it is already something of Paradise and even, in its mysterious and
“uncreated” quintessence, something of God. Quintessential prayer brings about an
escape from the world and from life, and thereby confers a new and Divine sap upon the
veil of appearances and the current of forms, and a fresh meaning to our presence amid
the play of phenomena.
Whatever is not here is nowhere, and whatever is not now will never be. As is this
moment in which I am free to choose God, so will be death, Judgment and Eternity.
Likewise in this center, this Divine point which I am free to choose in the face of this
boundless and multiple world, I am already in invisible Reality. [LT, Man and Certainty]
Pride: Pride limits intelligence, which amounts to saying that in the last analysis it slays
it: it destroys its essential functions, while allowing the surface mechanism to remain
incidentally, as if in mockery. [THC, To Have a Center]
A symbolic notion which includes everything that imprisons the soul in outwardness and
keeps it away from the Divine Life. [TM, The Impossible Convergence]
Pride: that ‘something’ which prevents man from ‘losing his life’ for God. [SPHF, The
Spiritual Virtues]
Pride / Cynicism / Hypocrisy: Both cynicism and hypocrisy are forms of pride;
cynicism is the caricature of sincerity or frankness, whilst hypocrisy is the caricature of
scrupulousness or self-discipline or of virtue in general. Cynics believe that sincerity
consists in exhibiting shortcomings and passions and that to hide them is to be a
hypocrite; they do not master themselves and still less do they seek to transcend
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