RENÉ GUÉNON
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RENÉ GUÉNON

René Guénon was a great teacher for Western Esotericism. The latter was cast to the shadows by the rationalist establishment since the second half of the XVIIth century, and took refuge in an underground jungle, soiled itself with heterogeneous elements, degenerated, became illiterate, a savage, an outsider... In a word, it lost the necessary discipline and the Initiatic rigour that nevertheless continued in the esotericism of other civilizations. It was Guénon's task to rehabilitate it, to give it a purifying bath, to restore it to its original form and content... At least that was Guénon's intention, and one must judge for oneself whether he succeeded or not, and to what extent.

René Guénon (Blois, 1886 - Cairo, 1951)

I sense and feel through my heart that many of the so-called traditional religious forms are good and effective. This does not mean, as the Guénonians think, that any traditional form is good by definition and that therefore all spacial and temporal adaptations of these forms are automatically bad. This Guénonian hypothesis has to do with a certain mythical vision of History: according to it, we are in constant moral, social and religious decline... It constitutes a whole Anti-Enlightenment ideology, socially and politically reactionary. It is indeed a reaction against its opposite, the dominant ideology of Humanity's indefinite evolution... In my understanding Humanity sometimes evolves and sometimes decays, in a non-linear and incomplete way, and it may be that in the essential human issues it continues to be absolutely the same...

A spiritual practice is good if it is effective for concrete individuals, and I think this is a far more reasonable criterion. It is nevertheless true that the newer existing sects do not seem to have the same spiritual quality of the traditional ones, but it would be unwise to deduct any great conclusion from this fact... It would be far more interesting to intuitively understand what this effectiveness is... This understanding would already be the effectiveness we are talking about or at least part of the it. For it is something quite simple, but you will not grasp it with your head...

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