Activism
He who performs his duty with no concern for results
is the true man of yoga—not he who refrains from action.
Know that right action itself is renunciation, Arjuna;
in the yoga of action, you first renounce your own selfish will.
For the man who wishes to mature, the yoga of action is the path;
for the man already mature, serenity is the path. (Bhagavad Gīta 6.1-3)
anāśritaḥ karmaphalaṃ kāryaṃ karma karoti yaḥ
sa saṃnyāsī ca yogī ca na niragnir na cākriyaḥ
yaṃ saṃnyāsam iti prāhur yogaṃ taṃ viddhi pāṇḍava
na hy asaṃnyastasaṃkalpo yogī bhavati kaścana
ārurukṣor muner yogaṃ karma kāraṇam ucyate
yogārūḍhasya tasyaiva śamaḥ kāraṇam ucyate
Alongside ataraxy, apatheia, or passionlessness, constitutes the highest Stoic ideal. The modern world has lost the understanding of that state, since "apathy" has taken on a negative connotation, not indicative of the highest state. A fortiori, the modern mind is instead impressed by passion or emotion. The intensity of feeling is the measure of truth. (Cologero, "Esoteric Stoicism")
[In the New World] the activist theme really reaches paroxysmal and almost pandemic heights and completely absorbs the whole of life, whose horizons, moreover, are thereby restricted to the dark and gloom that are natural to wholly temporal and contingent activities. (J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening p. 232)
Work is for the purification of the mind, not for the perception of Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination, and not in the least by ten millions of acts. (Śaṅkāra qtd in A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy pp. 294-295)
Afterlife
If you think that this Self can kill or think that it can be killed,
you do not well understand reality’s subtle ways.
It never was born; coming to be, it will never not be.
Birthless, primordial, it does not die when the body dies.
Knowing that it is eternal, unborn, beyond destruction,
how could you ever kill? And whom could you kill, Arjuna?
Just as you throw out used clothes and put on other clothes, new ones,
the Self discards its used bodies and puts on others that are new. (Bhagavad Gīta 2.18-22)
antavanta ime dehā nityasyoktāḥ śarīriṇaḥ
anāśinoprameyasya tasmād yudhyasva bhārata
ya enaṃ vetti hantāraṃ yaś cainaṃ manyate hatam
ubhau tau na vijānīto nāyaṃ hanti na hanyate
na jāyate mriyate vā kadācin nāyaṃ bhūtvā bhavitā vā na bhūyaḥ
ajo nityaḥ śāśvatoyaṃ purāṇo na hanyate hanyamāne śarīre
vedāvināśinaṃ nityaṃ ya enam ajam avyayam
kathaṃ sa puruṣaḥ pārtha kaṃ ghātayati hanti kam
vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navāni gṛhṇāti naroparāṇi
tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāni anyāni saṃyāti navāni dehī
Whatever the state of being that a man may focus upon
at the end, when he leaves his body, to that state of being he will go. (Bhagavad Gīta 8.6)
yaṃ yaṃ vāpi smaran bhāvaṃ tyajaty ante kalevaram
taṃ tam evaiti kaunteya sadā tadbhāvabhāvitaḥ
The Christians use sundry methods of persuasion, and invent a number of terrifying incentives. Above all, they have concocted an absolutely offensive doctrine of everlasting punishment and rewards, exceeding anything the philosophers (who have never denied the punishment of the unrighteous or the reward of the blessed) could have imagined. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 70)
Devotion
But the fact is that the late appearance of the devotional doctrine in the East is part of a regressive process (it falls in fact exactly within the period known as the "dark age," kali-yuga), it is due to the "covering up" of doctrines that were originally metaphysical, and to the popularization of those doctrines. This can be clearly seen in the case both of Buddhism and Taoism. Only when they both became popular, when they were opened more and more to the masses, only then did the constant features of all that is mere religion, take shape: reliance on the gods to obtain salvation, the transformation into "Divine Persons" of abstract metaphysical principles or of great spiritual teachers, the need of external spiritual help, faith, devoutness, worship and collective ceremonies. Only if it be "providential" to create illusions and to compromise with human weaknesses, only then can the processes that in several Oriental traditions have led regressively to such results—the most typical case is that of Amidism—be considered as "providential." This is one episode of that general involutionary trend of mankind—first in the West, and then also in the East—which today only those who shut their eyes so as not to see, can fail to discern, for it is becoming every day more apparent. The fact of the chronological syntony of Western devoutness with the spread of Bhaktism, Amidism, religious Taoism, etc., this coincidence may have escaped […] the attention both of Orientalists and of Western missionaries, and of the Oriental who takes an interest in Western Christianity; but it is nevertheless obvious, and its real meaning is strictly that which we have indicated. (J. Evola, "On the Problem of the Meeting of Religions")
Let us, however, remember that an existence which derives its objectivity from the mental activity of those who intensely believe in it cannot possibly be the spiritual Ground of the world, and that a mind busily engaged in the voluntary and intellectual activity, which is "religious faith" cannot possibly be in the state of selflessness and alert passivity which is the necessary condition of the unitive knowledge of the Ground. That is why the Buddhists affirm that "loving faith leads to heaven; but obedience to the Dharma leads to Nirvana." Faith in the existence and power of any supernatural entity which is less than ultimate spiritual Reality, and in any form of worship that falls short of self-naughting, will certainly, if the object of faith is intrinsically good, result in improvement of character, and probably in posthumous survival of the improved personality under "heavenly" conditions. But this personal survival within what is still the temporal order is not the eternal life of timeless union with the Spirit. This eternal life "stands in the knowledge" of the Godhead, not in faith in anything less than the Godhead. (A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy p. 237)
Respect Buddha and the gods without relying on them. (M. Musashi, Dokkōdō 19)
仏神は貴し仏神をたのます。（宮本武蔵、独行道・十九）
Prayer or propitiation in most cases is probably futile, at best a belief in divinity misdirected towards beings who are merely superhuman, and not perfect or immortal, and who mostly mind their own business, not ours. Thus the main benefit derived from propitiating the gods, or even The God, would be any self-cultivated subjective effect on the mind of the worshipper himself, i.e., "good karma" through positive mental states involved in the prayer or propitiation. (Paññobhāsa, "On Theistic Worship, Propitiation, and Prayer")
The immortality attained through the acquisition of any objective condition (e.g., the condition—merited through good works, which have been inspired by love of, and faith in, something less than the supreme Godhead—of being united in act to what is worshipped) is liable to end; for it is distinctly stated in the Scriptures that karma is never the cause of emancipation. (Śaṅkarā, qtd in A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy p. 237)
Whether one fashions an idol from wood, stone, metal or pieces it together from abstract concepts is all the same: it remains idolatry as soon as we have before us a personal being to whom we sacrifice, whom we invoke, and whom we thank. Nor is it very different at bottom whether one sacrifices his sheep or his inclinations. Every ritual or prayer speaks irrefutably of idolatry. This is why the mystical sects of all religions agree on suspending all ritual for their adepts. (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §178)
History and Mythology
[I]f God (as in the portrayal of Zeus by the comic poet) woke up out of a long sleep and decided to deliver the human race from evils, one wonders why he sent this spirit of his only to some little backwater village of the Jews? Ought he not to have breathed into many bodies in the same way, the whole world over? The comic poet, to get a laugh, wrote that Zeus awoke and sent Hermes to the Athenians and Spartans. But I wonder, do you not find it a little ludicrous that the Christians take such a premise seriously: that the Son of God was sent only to the Jews. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 105)
The Christians are preoccupied with the question of knowing God, and they think one cannot know God except through the senses of the body. Thus they think not as men or souls think, but as the flesh thinks. Still, I would try to teach them something, slow-witted though they are: If one shuts his eyes to the things of the senses and tries to see with his mind's eye, and if one turns from the flesh to the inner self, the soul, there he will see God and know God. But to begin the journey, you must flee from deceivers and magicians who parade fantasies in front of you. You will be a laughingstock so long as you repeat the blasphemy that the gods of other men are idols, while you brazenly worship as God a man whose life was wretched, who is known to have died (in disgraceful circumstances), and who, so you teach, is the very model of the God we should look to as our Father. The deceit you perpetrate with your ravings about miraculous doings, lions and other animals in double form, and superhuman doorkeepers (whose names you take the trouble to memorize!) and the general madness of your beliefs, are to blame for the fact that you are marked for crucifixion. It is your rejection of true wisdom—that of inspired poets, wise men, philosophers, and the like—that [leads you to execution]. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine pp. 110-111)
Christianity has the peculiar disadvantage that unlike the other religions it is not a pure doctrine, but essentially and mainly it is a history, a series of events, a complex of facts, deeds and sufferings of individual beings, and this very history constitutes the dogma in whose belief people gain salvation. Other religions, in particular Buddhism, have of course an historical supplement in the life of their founder, but this is not part of the dogma itself and merely accompanies it. […] But it stems from the historical character of Christianity that the Chinese mock our missionaries as tellers of fairy tales. (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §177)
A religion which has a single event as its foundation, indeed wishes to make the turning point of the world and all existence out of this one event that happened in a specific place and time, has such a weak foundation that it cannot possibly survive once a bit of reflection descends on the people. How wise on the other hand is the assumption in Buddhism of a thousand Buddhas! This way it does not look like Christianity, in which Jesus Christ has redeemed the world and no salvation is possible except through him—but four thousand years whose monuments stand great and magnificent in Egypt, Asia and Europe could know nothing of him, and those periods with all their magnificence went unseen to the devil! The numerous Buddhas are necessary because at the end of each kalpa the world perishes and the teaching along with it, therefore a new world requires a new Buddha. Salvation is always there. (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §182)
It has been said and said again that the Hellenists and the Orientals—"Platonic" spirits in the widest sense—have been blameworthy in "arrogantly" rejecting Christ, or that they are trying to escape from their "responsibilities"—once again and always!—as creatures toward the Creator in withdrawing into their own center where they claim to find, in their own pure being, the essence of things and the divine Reality; they thus dilute, it is alleged, the quality of creature and at the same time that of Creator with a sort of pantheistic impersonalism, which amounts to saying that they destroy the relationship of "obligation" between the Creator and the creature. In reality "responsibilities" are relatives as we ourselves are relative in our existential particularity; they cannot be less relative—or "more absolute"—than the subject to which they are related. One who, by the grace of Heaven, succeeds in escaping from the tyranny of the ego is by that very circumstance discharged from the responsibilities that the ego entails. God shows Himself as creative Person insofar as—or in relation to the fact that—we are "creature" and individual, but that particular reciprocal relationship is far from exhausting all our ontological and intellectual nature; that is to say, our nature cannot be exhaustively defined by "duty", "rights", or other such related ideas. It has been said that the "rejection" of the Christic gift on the part of the "Platonic" spirit constitutes the subtlest and most luciferian perversity of the intelligence; this argument, born of a misguided instinct of self-preservation, though understandable on its own plane, can easily and far more pertinently be turned against those who make use of it: for if we are obliged at all costs to find some mental perversion somewhere, we shall find it with those who want to substitute for the Absolute a personal and therefore relative God, and temporal phenomena for metaphysical principles, not in connection with a childlike faith making no demands of anyone, but within the framework of the most exacting erudition and the most totalitarian intellectual pretension. If there is such a thing as abuse of the intelligence, it is to be found in the substitution of the relative for the Absolute, or the accident for the Substance, on the pretext of putting the "concrete" above the "abstract"; it is not to be found in the rejection—in the name of transcendent and immutable principles—of a relativity presented as absoluteness. (F. Schuon, The Fullness of God p. 70)
To say that Christ was born of a Virgin, that he had both a divine and human nature, that he raised the dead, that he himself was resurrected, and that he ascended into heaven is clearly not exoterism; it is simply historical facts, just as are the conquests of Alexander, for example; a Buddhist who knows of them must accept them; but to say that these facts prove that only Jesus Christ saves is exoterism. It is obvious that esoterism does not consist in denying the facts on which the exoteric religion is founded; it lies in their interpretation, which refers back to their universal prototypes and to the principles, from which they derive their saving power, or their connection with this power. (F. Schuon, The Fullness of God p. 175)
Every artist has rendered "Nature" by line and by tone, every physicist—Greek, Arabian or German—has dissected "Nature" into ultimate elements, and how is it that they have not all discovered the same? Because every one of them has had his own Nature, though—with a naïveté that was really the salvation of his world-idea and of his own self—every one believed that he had it in common with all the rest. Nature is a possession which is saturated through and through with the most personal connotations. Nature is a function of the particular Culture. (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, V.I.ii)
Initiation
Cut down this deep-rooted tree [the world tree] with the sharp-edged ax of detachment;
then search for that primal Person from whom the whole universe flows. (Bhagavad Gīta 15.3)
na rūpam asyeha tathopalabhyate nānto na cādir na ca saṃpratiṣṭhā
aśvattham enaṃ suvirūḍhamūlaṃ asaṅgaśastreṇa dṛḍhena chittvā
By nature, Mercury and mind are unsteady: there is nothing in the world
which cannot be accomplished when these are made steady. (Haṭha Yoga Pradipika 4.26)
rasasya manasaśchaiva chañchalatvaṃ svabhāvataḥ
raso baddho mano baddhaṃ kiṃ na siddhyati bhūtale
Those who have, instead, abandoned the unrealistic conception of the noncorporeal and who at the same time are capable of considering the spirit as an objective force—an active force, reacting, necessitating, determined, and determining—would not find the thing to be more against nature than if today we were to submit a bandit, Agesilaus, or Epaminondas to a high-tension wire and find that the current would certainly not forgive Epaminondas and Agesilaus for their virtue and electrocute only the bandit, because of his crimes. (J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition p. 98)
Instrumental vs. Consummate Worship
It matters not a bit what one calls the supreme God—or whether one uses Greek names or Indian names or the names used formerly by the Egyptians. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 56)
All externals must yield to love; for they are for the sake of love, and not love for them. (H. Denck, Vom Gesetz Gottes p. 33)
Ceremonies in themselves are not sin; but whoever supposes that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of bread is still in supersition. (H. Denck, Widerruf vii)
So long as the symbol remains, in the worshipper’s mind, firmly attached and instrumental to that which is symbolized, the use of such things as white and variegated vestments can do no harm. But if the symbol breaks loose, as it were, and becomes an end in itself, then we have, at best, a futile aestheticism and sentimentality, at the worst a form of psychologically effective magic. (A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy p. 246)
For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: / But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God. (Romans 2:28-29)
Exoterism is subjective in that it is based on a "way of seeing things"; esoterism is objective in the sense that it is based on the "nature of things". Plenary esoterism is essentiality, universality, primordiality, perennialism. Exoterism tends to complicate and to externalize everything; esoterism, on the contrary, tends to simplify and bring everything inward. "The kingdom of God is within you." (F. Schuon, The Fullness of God p. 173)
Materialism
[Demonic men] say that life is an accident caused by sexual desire,
that the universe has no moral order, no truth, no God.
Clinging to this stupid belief, drawn into cruelty and malice,
they become lost souls and, at last, enemies of the whole world.
Driven by insatiable lusts, drunk on the arrogance of power,
hypocritical, deluded, their actions foul with self-seeking,
tormented by a vast anxiety that continues until their death,
convinced that the gratification of desire is life’s sole aim,
bound by a hundred shackles of hope, enslaved by their greed,
they squander their time dishonestly piling up mountains of wealth. (Bhagavad Gīta 16.8-12)
asatyam apratiṣṭhaṃ te jagad āhur anīśvaram
aparasparasaṃbhūtaṃ kim anyat kāmahaitukam
etāṃ dṛṣṭim avaṣṭabhya naṣṭātmānolpabuddhayaḥ
prabhavanty ugrakarmāṇaḥ kṣayāya jagatohitāḥ
kāmam āśritya duṣpūraṃ dambhamānamadānvitāḥ
mohād gṛhītvāsadgrāhān pravartanteśucivratāḥ
cintām aparimeyāṃ ca pralayāntām upāśritāḥ
kāmopabhogaparamā etāvad iti niścitāḥ
āśāpāśaśatair baddhāḥ kāmakrodhaparāyaṇāḥ
īhante kāmabhogārtham anyāyenārthasaṃcayān
[W]hoever laments the impending loss of this cerebral, merely appearance-related and appearance-enabling consciousness should be compared to the converts of Greenland who did not want to go to heaven when they heard that there were no seals there. (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §139)
The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the necessary absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, [...] for that is what Predestination signifies, notwithstanding that thereby Grace […] is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, IV.ii.vii)
Miracles
Pantheism
All states of being, whether marked by sattva or rajas
or tamas, proceed from me; they are in me, not I in them. (Bhagavad Gīta 7.12)
ye caiva sātvikā bhāvā rājasās tāmasāś ca ye
matta eveti tān viddhi na tv ahaṃ teṣu te mayi
"To take nature as nature, to think nature, to think of nature, to think ‘nature is mine’" is to exult in it; to take unity or multiplicity, this or that cosmic or elemental force, and finally to take all as all, to think all, to think of all, to think "all is mine" is to exult in it—this pantheistic identification is, for Buddhism, yet another sign of "ignorance," a mark of one who "has known nothing," or one who is "a common man, without understanding for the doctrine of the Ariya, inaccessible by the doctrine of the Ariya."
[…]
Thus, the mystical element, rather than being superrational, is often subrational. We are in the playground of the spiritual adventures that take place on the borders either of the devotional religions or of pantheistic evasions, whose manner is the opposite of that of a strict ascesis and of the path of awakening of the Ariya. (J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening pp. 82-82)
The expression ‘the world is its own purpose’ heard so often today leaves undecided whether one explains it through pantheism or through mere fatalism, but in any case it allows only a physical, not a moral significance for it, since in assuming the latter the world always manifests itself as a means to a higher purpose. But precisely this thought, that the world has merely a physical but no moral significance, is the unholiest error, sprung from the greatest perversity of the mind. (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §69)
Polytheism
Arjuna, all those who worship other gods, with deep faith,
are really worshipping me, even if they don’t know it.
For I am the only object and the only enjoyer of worship;
and they fall back because they cannot know me as I truly am. (Bhagavad Gīta 9.23-24)
yepy anyadevatābhaktā yajante śraddhayānvitāḥ
tepi mām eva kaunteya yajanty avidhipūrvakam
ahaṃ hi sarvayajñānāṃ bhoktā ca prabhur eva ca
na tu mām abhijānanti tattvenātaś cyavanti te
[F]or all their exclusiveness about the highest god, do not the Jews also worship angels, and are they not addicted to sorcery, as indeed their scripture shows Moses himself was? (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 56)
Whatever the outcome of the debate over the form of God and the importance of images, the Christians are the losers, since they worship neither a god nor even a demon, but a dead man! Moreover, why should we not worship gods? I mean, if it is accepted that all of nature everything in the world operates according to the will of God and that nothing works contrary to his purposes, then it must also be accepted that the angels, the demons, heroes—everything in the universe—are subject to the will of the great God who rules over all. Over each sphere there is a being charged with the task of governance and worthy to have power, at least the power allotted it for carrying out its task. This being the case, it would be appropriate for each man who worships God also to honor the being who exercises his allotted responsibilities at God's pleasure, since that being must have been licensed to do what he does by God. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 115)
But God is not a man that he should be talked about as a "master." Harm, necessity, and sorrow are irrelevant where God is concerned: he is unaffected by injury, grief, and need. Thus it cannot be irrational to worship several gods; and the man who does so will naturally be worshiping some gods who derive from that greatest God, and will be loved for it. A man who honors what belongs to God does not offend God, since all belongs to him. (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 116)
Going a good deal further than do the Catholics, with their doctrine of vocations, the Indians admit the right of individuals with different dharmas to worship different aspects or conceptions of the divine. Hence the almost total absence, among Hindus and Buddhists, of bloody persecutions, religious wars and proselytizing imperialism. (A. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy pp. 153-154)
Supercosmos ("Beyond God")
Strive and cut the stream!
Dispel sensual pleasures, brahmin.
Knowing the ending of conditions,
know the uncreated, brahmin.
When a brahmin
has gone beyond two things,
then they consciously
make an end of all fetters.
When one does not recognize the near shore,
the far shore, or both;
stress-free, detached,
that’s who I call a brahmin. (Dhammapada 383-385)
Chinda sotaṃ parakkamma,
kāme panuda brāhmaṇa;
Saṅkhārānaṁ khayaṃ ñatvā,
akataññūsi brāhmaṇa.
Yadā dvayesu dhammesu,
pāragū hoti brāhmaṇo;
Athassa sabbe saṃyogā,
atthaṃ gacchanti jānato.
Yassa pāraṃ apāraṃ vā,
pārāpāraṃ na vijjati;
Vītaddaraṃ visaṁyuttaṃ,
tamahaṃ brūmi brāhmaṇaṃ.
The hermetic Work carried to the Red stage is related to the supreme "supercosmic" conception of immortality. This conception is not easy to understand for a civilization that has long lost it; God understood theistically as a "being" and our identification with that being serve as limits beyond which it is absurd to imagine or to want anything else. But in the initiatic teaching the supreme state lies beyond being and nonbeing. According to the cosmic myth of the cycles, in this nondifferentiation, which is identical to the absolute transcendence, even this personal God Himself and all his Heavens are reabsorbed in the moment of the "Great Dissolution." The ultimate perfection of the Work, which has been attained when the Earth has been entirely dissolved and united with the "Poison," means to have succeeded in reaching this outermost limit. At that point no further "reabsorption" is possible. The royal initiate, garbed in Red, is a survivor who remains, even (as in the myth of the cycles) when worlds, men, and Gods go under. (J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition pp. 185-186)
The One must be understood to be unlimited not because it cannot be traversed either in extension or number, but by being incomprehensible in its power. For whenever you understand it either as god or Intellect, it is more. And again when you unify it by discursive thinking, then, too, it is more than you imagine, in being more unified than your thinking of it. For it is in itself, since it has no attributes. (Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.6)
The centre is what the circle originates from, and what it moves round, and which it comes from. And the soul depends on the centre, and carries itself towards it. All souls should move towards it; the souls of the gods always do move towards it. In moving towards it they are gods. God is whatever is connected to that centre, while what is far removed is the common human being and beast.
Is it, then, the centre of the soul, in a way, that we are looking for? Or should one realize that there is something else like a centre in which all 'centres' in a way coincide? And that it is only by analogy the centre of this circle here? For the soul is not a circle like a geometrical figure but rather because 'the ancient nature' is in it and around it, and because souls originate from it and even more because, having been separated, they are wholes. (Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.8)
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