The Adversaries of the Sophia Perennis
...The
rationalists and the fideists are not the only adversaries of the Sophia
Perennis: another opponent — somewhat unexpected — is what
we could term "realizationism" or "ecstatism": namely
the mystical prejudice — rather widespread in India — which
has it that only "realization" or "states" count in
spirituality. The partisans of this opinion oppose "concrete realization"
to "vain thought" and they too easily imagine that with ecstasy
all is won; they forget that without the doctrines — beginning with
the Vedanta! — they would not even exist; and it also happens that
they forget that a subjective realization — founded on the idea
of the immanent "Self" — greatly has need of the objective
element that is the Grace of the personal God, without forgetting the
concurrence of Tradition.
We must mention here the existence of false masters who, as inheritors of occultism and inspired by "realizationism" and psychoanalysis, contrive to invent implausible infirmities in order to invent extravagant remedies. What is surprising logically is that they always find dupes, even among the socalled "intellectuals"; the explanation for this is that these novelties come to fill a void that never should have been produced. In all these "methods," the point of departure is a false image of man; the goal of the training being the development — patterned after the "clairvoyance" of certain occultists — of "latent powers" or of an "expanded" or "liberated" personality. And since such an ideal does not exist — more especially as the premise is imaginary — the result of the adventure can only be a perversion; this is the price of a supersaturated rationalism — blown up to its extreme limit — namely an agnosticism devoid of all imagination.