F RITHJOF   S CHUON   A rchive


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Selected Books by
Frithjof Schuon

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A Resource On Frithjof Schuon's Life & Teachings

Extract from “The Divine Name as Answer”

The supreme Name, like the Shahādah, is an answer. It answers the world, and it answers the ego; every time the world holds up before us one or another of its masks, let us answer: Allāh; and every time the ego puffs itself up, let us answer: Allāh.

The world is a vast current of forms; the ego is its living kernel, which vivifies illusion with its blood. The Name, like an icebreaker, traverses the current of forms, this hardened web of world and ego, which at the same time consists only of mist. The world is the nothingness that hides itself behind a thousand masks; each of these masks wants to draw the ego away from God. The ego is a drop of the Self that has become ice, mask, and nothingness, and yet at the same time remains itself; this is its inner contradiction.

God has given us His Name so that we might become once again what we are; the Name melts our ice, removes the mask, and vanquishes the nothingness. When the ego swells up, it forgets its Self and wants to become a mask; it denies its profound otherness and professes its belief in the delusive current of forms. And the nothingness is as it were a mask of God; to vanquish the nothingness means to see God behind all things.

Life, with its two dimensions of past and future, is our participation in the current of forms, our inwovenness in the world; whoever answers the world with Allāh and the ego with Allāh answers life also with Allāh. World, life, ego: in the center is the supreme Name, which nothing can withstand.

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