Thread 24695247

It's heartbreaking to realize how much of Perennialism is a scam (built on dishonest foundations at least) which hinges on and exploits people's good natured dreams of pacifism and unity and a love for life. The grand majority of its main figures have bathed in dubious decisionmaking and questionable motivations that point to a more egotistical, materialist project than what typically draws curious people in, and the current's seeming support by TPTB doesn't give it a very good look.
>Schuon tried to start his own tax-free cult in the US and failed. Supposedly was a freemason, but may have failed at that as well. Was not really all that well read nor did he really understand the tenets of sufism to make the kind of claims he did give
>Guénon was another failed freemason who was just fleeing from a western esoteric circle that was not accepting his questionable work. Went to Egypt because he could dupe the Arabs into thinking he was seeking initiation when he just wanted a cozy hideout. Was suddenly revived and astroturfed by co-opted alt currents to steer dissatisfied young men away from action into a world of pseudo-spiritual jargon. A lot of his claims about Sufism and the Vedas are plain wrong.
>Seyyed Hossein Nasr failed at starting his own cult in the US, but at least managed to secure a prestigious position in western academia so he can both hide away from an iranian society that would steamroll him and have a steady stream of bs he could pedal around to uneducated western thinkers, because he had the rare credibility of being able to understand original batini texts and could keep going by introducing and reintroducing key figures (suhrawardi etc). Twisting their words so he could fit them into a hazy system.
>There is never any backlash or signs of the greater zeitgeist discouraging you from looking into any of this, which solidifies its status as ultimately harmless and therefore not so truthful. To the contrary, it is widely supported by UN related agencies, governments (more specifically those guys) under the pretense of peaceful interreligious dialogue.
>The cultist, individualist, delusional stench of theosophy in general

Finally someone else who sees through this nonsense. Yeah perennialism requires the mass misinterpretation of various traditions to the point perennialists are just talking about their own projections.

Ok cool I'm still not worshipping your rabbi m8

I just want to love the world and love my fellow man. I genuinely find that there fewer things that could make me cry than seeing acts of mercy and shared moments of joy between two people who are extremely far away from each other culturally speaking. My heart has a very difficult time with dismissing all of this vastness as mere pointless folly or millions of paths to hellfire. It sounds all so kumbaya and shit, but it's an intense feeling bros. But I know just how silly and detached from reality it ultimately all seems to be.
Apparently the only two paths left are: trusting Plato and Plotinus' claims and believing them to have uncovered some sort of abstract all encompassing universal truth provided that they did have supernatural experiences within those mystery cults of old ; or going back to good old Dogma, even if I was hurt a little bit today by witnessing a group of young fundamentalists smugly making fun of a 19th century humanist' writings on having respect for men of all creeds and being open to having a dialogue about truth, because that's apparently too twee and not dangerous enough to fight against the greater Evil, both immediate and beyond. Sometimes I'm sincerely considering destroying my mental faculties so I can no longer be so neurotic and be at risk of contaminating other people with my little cutesy beliefs where my heart screams louder than my brain, and i'd stop putting more stock in the experiential than in reason.
>>24695252
It's a combination of the experiences being of the utmost intimacy and the religious corpus being of the utmost complexity (requiring learning multiple languages, the ludicrous length of the works, the historical records...etc) which is bound to drive one mad if they were to approach it fully.

>>24695290
The third way is a folk religious approach that adopts the insights of Nietzsche and Jung. You dispense with dogma entirely and value experience, you also understand that different people groups have different trajectories such that the myths they express and rituals they engage in are different. Of course there could always be cynical manipulation of this from someone not genuinely religious, in which case this influence has to be excised.

Thats putting it in too small a nutshell to be honest but I find myself in this position and I find that I respect both the uniqueness of my own tradition and the uniqueness of other traditions. I don’t require copes like faith or dogma or pure reason at all.

>>24695247 (OP)
The problem with materialism is that doesn't mean anything and the world can't be built on facts but values. Otherwise culture disappears and you're left with an empty husk of a civilization. Subjectivist acounts of religion built on hermeneutics can only exist based on the assumption of the variations of culture have a shared origin a la Ranke otherwise Chinese people might as well be from Mars or a dimension outside our immediate consciousness.

>>24695247 (OP)
>My One True Religion™ that I just happened to be born into through chance is right and everyone else's religion is wrong

if you fell for people who took indians seriously that's 100% on you lol

Just assume anyone shilling spiritual anything is a con artist.

>>24695437
>chance
No such thing

I don't care about any of that
I mean you could point out how Guenon was more interested in Hinduism but as Hinduism wouldn't allow himself to be initiated he settled for Sufism
My problem is that I just don't understand why anybody should care about Perennialism as a movement which promotes the idea that all religious traditions stem from the same root and yet for some reason the goal is not to synthesis and reconstruct this original root but rather to dedicate yourself to one religious tradition, preferably by initiation?
It just doesn't make sense

I find it funny that people will write paragraphs criticing men like Schuon or Nasr, but all they can muster about Guénon PBUH is
>uhh he left... yeah...
>he's wrong btw
You do not understand a single thing he said, if you even read anything by him, and yet you have the audacity to come here and ramble about how he is wrong?

>>24695691
So then explain why I'm me and not someone else, and why certain people are born as certain people. Explain why other people in other cultures weren't born into the "right" religion in a way that doesn't involve a birth lottery.

This is a midwit thread if I've ever seen one. The gist of what all of you are saying is
>I'm too much of an effeminate bitch to Be Real, so instead I'm going to hide in all this make believe word salad ''mysticism'' with some extra tear flavored perfume
That's what this is all about, because if you had actually lived as Men, and fulfilled your roles as Men, you would realize the truest and most credible tool for weighing the truth would come from internalizing your interactions with the world after you have strived to achieve a state of balance and purity on all levels, including your dreaded biological and sociological ones. If you're not even trying to ground yourself in the same parameters that the initiates of these traditions you talk about have lived in, that is providing, protecting, toiling, raising...etc, then you're not in a position to make claims about grand Truth, especially not in a universal one that is touching every single person that has ever lived. By living and engaging with the world, you will come to know why certain traditions are inherently more civilized than others, and why certain civilized traditions have a stronger basis in this shared collective reality than purely intellectual/creative exercises. You are the skewed, mutant gene that seems to believe there is some grand wisdom behind a talking gray parrot when every other man that has lived over the past 50000 years would treat it as novelty and move onto the real shit, because you continue to choose to operate in a foggy context that shrouds and buries universal truth, letting you delude yourself into thinking it's all about the smaller details, when they're just pieces of the apparatus. There is no ''fellow man'', everybody already wants to kill you and rape your wife and take your money ; but don't because of the looming threat of punishment. The lawful religions have figured all of this out. You just choose to be a petulant child and justify it with the intellect that you developed due to the coddling luxury you've taken for granted.
>>24695368
>Jung
Reheated already established mystical and alchemical concepts developed by slothful castes with new ''scientific'' lingo because his pride just can't bend the knee
>Nietzsche
Man throws a hissy fit because he can't get his shit together. Surely this world must be so terribly wrong!
So insightful, wow.
And then there's this retard >>24695450

>>24696098
Everybody has already made their choice and signed the pact once they reached puberty. It's all on you. There is a great transformative power within each human being, but 99% of them lack the necessary Love for the infinite to make the right choice and get a move on, because being the way you are is just so nice.

>>24695424
Chinese pipo came from Shangri-La
White pipo came from Agartha
Get over it

>>24695424
wtf am i reading

>>24696394
???

>>24697279
Read it again

>>24696394
all humans come from beyond the earth. so what's your deal?

>>24695872
Why don't you succinctly tell us about Guénon's insights?

>>24696130
So people that use fallible reasoning and don't possess the intellectual means to achieve a truer thinking are on their own? All on them, as you said?

>>24698276
It's not a matter of intellect as much as it's a matter of hearts. Every sane, capable person (i.e not downies) can do it.

>>24696117
Your post is embarrassingly pathetic. You throw out the ever-weak fallacy about ‘real’ men yet don’t even have the balls to understand those you criticise, or criticise those you claim to understand. You’ve bought into the baseless assumptions of the perennialists entirely, and it’s a weak replacement for real character development.

>>24697557
>/x/ tier shit

>>24698581
because agartha is /his/ shit

>>24698570
Very cool of you to not even bother with getting into the how and why. Keep jerking it.

>>24696117
Hey I know you irl

>>24698570
It's a woman you're expecting too much from her

>>24695247 (OP)
btw the guy who bought Guénon a house in Cairo was a rich jewish admirer of his work who then moved to India, studied Advaita from actual hindus and then wrote a book refuting Guénon

Imo the perennialist fallacy is that in order to make sense of this pyramid of different revealed religions, the logical conclusion is that the different religious forms are just noble lies hidding an impersonal metaphysics of which barely anyone was even historically aware of so it does kind of give this sort of scientific pretention of discovering the true meaning of religions through the research of the modern day perennailist, something which the ancients weren't really capable of, at least not to the degree with which Guénon and Schuon would view it. Another funny thing which I noticed is how at least Schuon (though Guénon also implies the idea) had to invent this cope concept of vertical vs horizontal heresies, so something like islam in relation to christianity is a heresy only on the horizontal level but dead sects like the the ancient gnostic heresies are vertical heresies, because they're obviously dead an no one can even join them, you see the same thing with liberal perennialists (ecumenists) like Pope Francis saying how gnosticism is a threat while engaging in mutual worship with people of religions that have been condemned by his own historical Church and saints. It's pathetic.

>>24695290
>I genuinely find that there fewer things that could make me cry than seeing acts of mercy and shared moments of joy between two people who are extremely far away from each other culturally speaking.

I feel this way but only towards my fellow discordians and if it has a psychic dimension to it.

I honestly don't understand how you can feel such an universal empathy. Even though I might sound edgy, I don't think that I can love others and feel empathy for them if there is nothing left to hate and oppose, the great merit of Christian asceticism in this regard seems to be that it replaced hatred for men with hatred for demons so even though the implication of eternal torment for sinners and criminals is there, it still makes you feel pity for them and when you realize how ignorant and stupid they are, it makes sense.

>>24695247 (OP)
>Went to Egypt because he could dupe the Arabs into thinking he was seeking initiation when he just wanted a cozy hideout.
Zero evidence that he wasn’t genuine.

>Was suddenly revived and astroturfed by co-opted alt currents to steer dissatisfied young men away from action into a world of pseudo-spiritual jargon.
schizo nonsense

>A lot of his claims about Sufism and the Vedas are plain wrong
factually untrue

OP, from your lies you are clearly a seething pathetic hylic, instead of troubling yourself with Traditionalism maybe you should be reading Stephen Pinker, he seems more your type.

>>24695728
>I mean you could point out how Guenon was more interested in Hinduism but as Hinduism wouldn't allow himself to be initiated he settled for Sufism
This is just an unsubstantiated rumor. There is no codified for procedure for conversion in Vedic practice but Tantra fully allows for conversion, any westerner can get initiated into Shaiva or Shakti Tantra. Guenon wanted to travel to India but the British denied him a visa.

>yet for some reason the goal is not to synthesis and reconstruct this original root but rather to dedicate yourself to one religious tradition, preferably by initiation?
It just doesn't make sense
It’s best to dedicate to one tradition because the methods it uses have been honed and verified over time, the cream has risen to the top, plus one can receive instructions from qualified persons but there are zero qualified persons to instruct you in something which does not presently exist.

>>24699611
>then wrote a book refuting Guénon
That’s untrue, nothing in his book refutes Guenon

>>24699611
what book is that?

>>24700134
I don't remember the name of the book but it was posted on Cologero Salvo's Réne Guénon facebook group a few years ago, the author is named John Levy

>>24699136
oh yeah? what are my initials?

Whenever someone criticizes perennialism it becomes immediately apparent that they're too A generous tip for retards: The religions must explicitly contradict each other under the perennialist view, otherwise they have no reason to exist.

>>24695252
Yeah, brown peoples' traditions are just wrong, perennialists are thied worldists.

Why do you invent all this nonsense instead of simply reading the Koran and realizing it is true?

Islam states that Christians and Jews, People of the Book, are believers. The Koran address the subject of comparative religion and why we are different religions. The Koran confirms the Torah and the Gospel.

Islam is perfect, it addresses every theological loose end and perfects religion. Christians and Jews debate for centuries, inventing doctrines and condemning each other to Hell, Islam settles this.

The Koran and Sunnah, the Shariah, are the perfect guidance for humanity and government. Every worldly ideology pales in comparison to God's command for humanity.

Islam will soon be the largest religion in the world, in a matter of decades after over 1,400 years. Will you read the Koran then? How long can you ignore Islam? God sent a Prophet, salallahu alayhi wa salam, and it is wise to obey God and submit to God.

>>24701876
>The Koran confirms... the Gospel.
except, you know, the part about Christ being crucified, dying, and rising from the dead. Only the most important part of Christianity...

This OP reads like a cheap attempt of character assassination desu. Low effort when you are attacking the persons

There are some points that could be made against their views but it's not my job or interest. I do like Schuon's book of critique against Guénon

And the anon saying Hindu initiation is open to foreigners is simply wrong and this is stated everywhere by perennialists and indologists, otherwise they would all have been initiated there. One example is Ananda's son who was born outside of india and therefore became catholic. The fact /some/ tantra schools accept foreigners is an exception --- and one could wonder how valid or orthodox are they

If you are born outside of india you have no caste and if you have no caste you cant be initiated

>>24701969
if you are born outside of india you are lucky

>>24701876
If the translations are that quality I'm going to stick with reading Idres Shah in English thanks. I am not learning classical arabic, not even for the shakespeare of poetry.

>>24695247 (OP)
>>The cultist, individualist, delusional stench of theosophy in general
It's very nice to see anons growing out of this stuff. It doesn't take a university degree to see most of the literature they wrote is unsound both philosophically and methodologically. Perennialism is a beautiful dream one must wake up from. It's a philosophy of escapism that makes you long for a world that simply doesn't exist anymore, and likely never existed. At a certain point, the rift between this dream and reality will become too big to ignore, and you will likely realize that trying to address reality and finding a way of inhabiting is becoming more and more of a need. This doesn't imply that the dream of a beautiful, loving, meaningful world is something that you'll be forced to abandon: but this world is not something that has existed in the past or in another metaphysical dimension. It's a very fragile image you bring within you, and the point is trying to conjure something of this imaginary dream pattern into a patternless reality.

>>24701952
> And the anon saying Hindu initiation is open to foreigners is simply wrong
No, the Tantras say openly that initiation into them can be given to anyone and they have no caste or gender requirements and many westerners have been initiated into them before. Its a different type of initiation than the Vedic one with completely different standards and rules.

Here is a quote from a Veerashaiva Guru saying as much, and the same is also true in Shakti Tantrism like Sri Vidya which goes give initiation to westerners

https://web.archive.org/web/20200203175636/http://wildyogi.info:80/en/issue/gauri-interview-shri-chandrashekhar-mahaswamiji-spiritual-teacher-shivaite-tradition

>The teacher watches the student, assesses his level of readiness, and according to this gives him diksha. In Agamas it is said: “Having appraised the level of God energy presence in a person (the devotion of a person) initiation should be given to him.” (“Shaktipatam samalokya dikshaya yojaed amum.”) In this way, in virashivaism and other traditions, based on Agamas, origin and citizenship of a person have no importance

>>24701969
That’s only true of Vedic initiations and not Tantric initiations, it’s factually wrong to claim that about all Hindu initiation.

>>24695247 (OP)
>people's good natured dreams of pacifism and unity and a love for life
lol