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| Source: I_Found_BACON @www.Reddit.com |
“One could say that the traditional worlds were essentially good and accidentally evil, and the modern world essentially evil and accidentally good.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr
“When it is dark enough, you can see the
stars." Charles Beard
‘Broadly
speaking, there are two perspectives, which may be called the secular and the traditional.
They are irreconcilable, and they appear, in innumerable guises, whenever a
serious dialogue about humanity and its fate is pursued to ultimate
implications, and whenever we think deeply about the meaning, direction and
purpose of our lives.
In the
secular perspective, reality is History, knowledge is given to us by Science
and happiness by technology, everything is relative, and the criterion of
rectitude is practicality. In the traditional perspective, there’s an eternal
Norm (Haqq/Haqiqa) or Law (Sharia) or Way (Tariqa)---a dharma---from which we
have departed, a Truth, or Wisdom or Simplicity which we have forgotten, and an
Absolute, which may or may not be a personal God, which is alone real, whose existence
we now deny. What is seen from the former as Progress and the multiplication of
human potentials is seen from the latter as dehumanization and impoverishment.
These opposing perspectives, occasionally explicit but most often implicit,
confront each other with growing frequency as the sense of crisis deepens. Their
manners of expression are ramified indefinitely, and into bewildering
complexity.The first perspective, however, is also the world. It is enthroned Power. When we talk about History, Science and Progress, we are talking about this world, our common experience and the forces that shape it. The second perspective is a dedication and a Witness; on its own terms, a Witness of Error, Ignorance and Death. It is powerless, and does not seek power. The first, as active, as history and the force behind it, is predominantly “outer” (zahiri), and proudly visible. It is also the modern mind; it informs secular philosophies and nearly everyone’s fundamental, but increasingly threatened, assumptions about the past and the future. The second perspective, as contemplative, is predominantly “inner” (batini) and intangible. It views outer things, the ever-changing world and the over-flowing river of events, as insubstantial because ephemeral; the divine archetypes alone are real. In its full realization, however, in meditative or ecstatic insight, it perceives a perfect identity of inner and outer, of Self and world, in an eternal present.
Each perspective regards the other, with respect to these last grand alternatives and wherever their encounter takes place, as mistaken about the nature of reality. Our decision about how we shall live our lives will depend upon what we regard or experience as real.’
Marty Glass, Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001: IV
"The traditional vision of things is above all 'static' and 'vertical'. It is static because it refers to constant and universal qualities, and it is vertical in the sense that it attaches the lower to the higher, the ephemeral to the imperishable. The modern vision, on the contrary, is fundamentally 'dynamic' and 'horizontal'; it is not the symbolism of things that interests it, but their material and historical connections. "
Titus Burckhardt: Mirror of the Intellect, Cambridge, U.K: Quinta Essentia, 1987, p.25.
Truth. Goodness. Beauty.
