René Guénon and Titus Burckhardt

There has been occasion elsewhere to call attention to the initiatic symbolism of a “navigation” across the ocean (representing the psychic domain), which must be crossed while avoiding all its dangers in order to reach the goal; but what is to be said of someone who flings himself into the ocean and has no aspiration but to drown himself in it? This is very precisely the significance of a so-called “fusion” with a “cosmic consciousness” that is really nothing but the confused and indistinct assemblage of all the psychic influences. [R. Guénon]

Click here to read Guénon’s chapters, and click here to read Burckhardt’s.

If the medicine of the traditional civilizations knows nothing analogous to modern psychotherapy, this is because the psychic cannot be treated by the psychic. The psyche is the realm of indefinite actions and reactions. By its own specific nature, it is essentially unstable and deceptive, so that it can be cured only by resorting to something situated “outside” or “above” it. [T. Burckhardt]

Original contents from The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, translated by Lord Northbourne, Sophia Perennis, 2001; and The Essential Titus Burckhardt: Reflections on Sacred Art, Faiths, and Civilizations, World Wisdom, Inc., 2005.