ovde - vera znanje mir

vast. He published two long lyrical poems in German in his early years, and in his later years
wrote almost one hundred poems in English.
As a young man in Paris, Schuon became interested in Islam, and he embarked on a rigorous study
of Arabic, first with a Syrian Jew and later at the Paris mosque. He visited North Africa several
times in the 1930’s and became a disciple of the Algerian Sufi Shaikh Ahmad Al’Alawi. He
married in Lausanne in 1949. He and his wife were given a plot of land with an orchard and
vineyard in Pully, a suburb east of Lausanne, where they constructed their home. They traveled
widely in Europe, making trips to France, Germany, Belgium, Holland England, Italy, Spain,
Turkey, and Morocco, and visited the United States several times.
During the 1950’s, the Schuons had contact with North American natives who visited Paris and
Brussels, and they traveled to the Lakota tribe of the Sioux nation in 1959, where they were
officially adopted into the Red Cloud family. Later he was also adopted into the Crow tribe. The
Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy (1990) are a collection of his writings and
paintings which poignantly present the pathos and spirituality of the Plains Indians. In his last
years he lived in Indiana, and he died of a protracted illness in Bloomington in 1998.
Schuon said that his role was to bring back the concept of the Absolute in a world become
relativized. His had a deep abiding sense of the sacred, manifested outwardly by his serious mien
and highly dignified manner. [Whithall Perry, “Perspectives”] “Imagine a radiant summer sky and
imagine simple folk who gaze at it, projecting into it their dream of the hereafter; now suppose
that it were possible to transport these simple folk into the dark and freezing abyss of the galaxies
and nebulae with its overwhelming silence. In this abyss all too many of them would lose their
faith, and this is precisely what happens as a result of modern science, both to the learned and to
the victims of popularization. What most men do not know – and if they could know it, why
should we have to ask them to believe it? is that this blue sky, though illusory as an optical error
and belied by the vision of interplanetary space, is nonetheless an adequate e reflection of the
Heaven of Angels and the Blessed and that therefore, despite everything, it is this blue mirage,
flecked with silver clouds, which is right and will have the final say; to be astonished at this
amounts to admitting that it is by chance that we are here on earth and see the sky as we do.”
[Understanding Islam, p. 137]
All of Schuon’s work re-affirms the traditional metaphysical principles, explicating the esoteric
dimensions of religion, penetrating mythological and religious forms, and critiquing modernism.
He clarified the distinctions between exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religious tradition and
uncovered the metaphysical convergence of all orthodox religions. The essential theme of
Schuon’s writing, as summarized by Martin Lings, is this: the Sole Ultimate Reality of Absolute,
Infinite Perfection and the predicament of man, made in the image of that Perfection, an image
from which he has fallen, and to which he must return on his way to the final reintegration into his
Divine Source.
“Intelligence, by which we comprehend the Doctrine, is either the intellect or reason; reason is the
instrument of the intellect, it is through reason that man comprehends the natural phenomena
around him and within himself, and it is through it that he is able to describe supernatural things –
parallel to the means of expression offered by symbolism – by transposing intuitive knowledge
into the order of language. Then function of the rational faculty can be to provoke – by means of a
given concept – a spiritual intuition; reason is then the flint which makes the spark spring forth.
The limit of the Inexpressible varies according to mental structure: what is beyond all expression
for some, may be easily expressible for others.” [“Norms and Paradoxes in Spiritual Alchemy” in
Sophia, vol. 1, no. 1 1995]
On the nature of sacred Books, he says, “that is sacred which in the first place is attached to the
transcendent order, secondly possesses the character of absolute certainty and, thirdly, eludes the
comprehension and power of investigation of the ordinary human mind…. The sacred is the
presence of the centre in the periphery, of the motionless in the moving; dignity is essentially an