glossary of terms used by frithjof schuon - Sophia Perennis

of Intellect and of Reality; this amounts to purely and simply denying the possibility of a
knowledge other than the experimental and sensory. On the dogmatist side, on the
contrary, it is necessary to guard against the danger of underestimating the role of
experiment within the limits where it is valid, for even thought based on an awareness of
principles can go astray on the level of applications, and that precisely through ignorance
of certain possible modes, without such misapprehension however being able to affect
knowledge in a global sense. It is self-evident that dogmatism – whether rightly or
wrongly so called – has value only insofar as the immutability of its axioms derives from
that of principles, hence of truth. [SW, Orthodoxy and Intellectuality]
Doubt: Doubt is nothing else but the void left by absent certainty and this void readily
makes way for the false plenitude of error. [LT, The Alchemy of the Sentiments]
Ecstacy (Samadhi): The word “ecstasy” can include several meanings, depending on the
mode or degree of rapture; but in every case it indicates a departure from terrestrial
consciousness, whether this departure be active or passive in character, or rather,
whatever may be the combination of these two characteristics. [LS, A View of Yoga]
Ecumenism (true and false): There is a false ecumenism, as sentimental and vague as
you please, which to all intents and purposes abolishes doctrine; to reconcile two
adversaries, one strangles them both, which is the best way to make peace. True
ecumenism can exist only on two levels: either it involves an understanding between the
religions which is based upon their common interests in the face of a danger that
threatens them all, or it may call into play the wisdom that can discern the one sole truth
under the veil of different forms. [LT, The Problem of Qualifications]
Ego: The ego is at the same time a system of images and a cycle; it is something like a
museum. The ego is a moving fabric made of images and tendencies; the tendencies
come from our own substance, and the images are provided by the environment. We put
ourselves into things, and we place things in ourselves, whereas our true being is
independent of them. [LAW, Man in the Universe]
The ego is, empirically, a dream in which we ourselves dream ourselves; the contents of
this dream, drawn from our surroundings, are at bottom only pretexts, for the ego desires
only its own life: whatever we may dream, our dream is always only a symbol for the ego
which wishes to affirm itself, a mirror that we hold before the ‘I’ and which reverberates
its life in multiple fashions. This dream has become our second nature; it is woven of
images and of tendencies, static and dynamic elements in innumerable combinations: the
images come from outside and are integrated into our substance; the tendencies are our
responses to the world around us; as we exteriorise ourselves, we create a world in the
image of our dream, and the dream thus objectivized flows back upon us, and so on and
on, until we are enclosed in a tissue, sometimes inextricable, of dreams exteriorized or
materialized and of materializations interiorised. The ego is like a watermill whose
wheel, under the drive of a current – the world and life – turns and repeats itself
untiringly, in a series of images always different and always similar. [GDW, Seeing God
Everywhere]
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