Home > Work > The Essential René Guénon: Metaphysical Principles, Traditional Doctrines, and the Crisis of Modernity (The Perennial Philosophy Series)
1 " The Hindu doctrine teaches that a human cycle, to which it gives the name Manvantara, is divided into four periods marking so many stages during which the primordial spirituality becomes gradually more and more obscured; these are the same periods that the ancient traditions of the West called the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Iron Ages. We are now in the fourth age, the Kali-Yuga or “dark age”, and have been so already, it is said, for more than six thousand years, that is to say since a time far earlier than any known to “classical” history. Since that time, the truths which were formerly within reach of all have become more and more hidden and inaccessible; those who possess them grow fewer and fewer, and although the treasure of “nonhuman” (that is, supra-human) wisdom that was prior to all the ages can never be lost, it nevertheless becomes enveloped in more and more impenetrable veils, which hide it from men’s sight and make it extremely difficult to discover. This is why we find everywhere, under various symbols, the same theme of something that has been lost—at least to all appearances and as far as the outer world is concerned—and that those who aspire to true knowledge must rediscover; but it is also said that what is thus hidden will become visible again at the end of the cycle, which, because of the continuity binding all things together, will coincide with the beginning of a new cycle. (The Dark Age, p. 3) "
― René Guénon , The Essential René Guénon: Metaphysical Principles, Traditional Doctrines, and the Crisis of Modernity (The Perennial Philosophy Series)
2 " His (Guénon's) motto was vincit omnia veritas, “Truth conquers all”, but implicitly his motto was “Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you”. Implicit in his writings is the certainty that they will come providentially to those who are qualified to receive his message and they will impel them to seek and therefore to find a way. "
3 " On the basis of this universality, which is often known as religio perennis, it was also Guénon’s function to remind us that the great religions of the world are not only the means of man’s salvation, but that they offer him beyond that, even in this life, two esoteric possibilities which correspond to what were known in Graeco-Roman Antiquity as mysteria pava and mysteria magna, the “Lesser Mysteries” and the “Greater Mysteries”. The first of these is the way of return to the primordial perfection which was lost in the fall. The second, which presupposes the first, is the way to gnosis, the fulfillment of the precept, “know thyself”. This one ultimate end is termed in Christianity deificatio, in Hinduism, yoga, union, and moksha, deliverance, in Buddhism, nirvāna, that is, extinction of all that is illusory. And in Islamic mysticism, that is Sufism, tahaqquq, which means realization and which was glossed by a Sufi shaykh as self-realization in God. "