Truth does not deny forms from the outside, but transcends them from within.

To believe, with certain 'neo-yogists', that 'evolution' will produce a superman 'who will differ from man as much as man differs from the animal or the animal from the vegetable' is a case of not knowing what man is.

 

Here is one more example of a pseudo-wisdom which deems itself vastly superior to 'those separatist religions', but which in point of fact shows itself more ignorant than the most elementary of catechisms. For the most elementary catechism does know what man is: it knows that by his qualities and as an autonomous world he can be opposed to the other kingdoms of nature taken together; it knows that in one particular respect - that of spiritual possibilities, not that of animal nature - the difference between a monkey and a man is infinitely greater than that between a fly and

a monkey.

 

For man alone is able to come forth from the world; man alone is able to return to God; and that is the reason why he cannot in any way be surpassed by a new earthly being. Among the beings of this earth man is the central being; this is an absolute position; there cannot be a center more central than the center, if definitions have any meaning.

 

This neo-yogism, like other similar movements, pretends that it can add an essential value to the wisdom of our ancestors; it believes that the religions are partial truths which it is called upon to stick together, after hundreds or thousands of years of waiting, and to crown with its own naive little system.

 

It is far better to believe that the earth is a disk supported by a tortoise and flanked by four elephants than to believe, in the name of 'evolution', in the coming of some 'superhuman' monster.

 

A literal interpretation of cosmological symbols is, if not positively useful, at any rate harmless, whereas the scientific error - such as evolutionism - is neither literally nor symbolically true; the repercussions of its falsity are beyond calculation.

 

The intellectual poverty of the neo-yogist movements provides an incontestable proof that there is no spirituality without orthodoxy.

 

It is assuredly not by chance that all these movements are as if in league against the intelligence; intelligence is replaced by a thinking that is feeble and vague instead of being logical, and 'dynamic' instead of being contemplative. All these movements are characterized by the detachment they pretend to feel in regard to pure doctrine.

 

They hate its incorruptibility, for in their eyes this purity is 'dogmatism'; they fail to understand that Truth does not deny forms from the outside, but transcends them from within.

 

Orthodoxy includes and guarantees incalculable values which man could not possibly draw out of himself...

 

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Frithjof Schuon

 

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Quoted in: The Essential Frithjof Schuon (edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr)

Done