PART ONE
Each age is an age that is dying, or one that is coming to birth. (O’Shaughnessey)
Introduction
In this talk I want to distinguish three kinds of time: first of all the time of history, and the idea that we are now experiencing the end of a huge world cycle of historical time, end times that could possibly be heralding the beginning of a new age. (PART ONE) Secondly, I want to talk about visionary time, the time that belongs to the soul and the inner world, the kind of time that we work with in all forms of depth psychotherapy, regression therapy, and most of all, past life regression. Thirdly, I want to talk about a very special kind of time, the time of the heart.
The Time of History
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. (James Joyce)
The title of my talk is taken from a remarkable book called The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. It was written in 1950 by the religious philosopher Rene Guénon, a Frenchman who was born in 1886 in Blois and grew up in Paris in a fairly conservative Catholic environment. He studied mathematics at the Sorbonne but knew early on that his chief search was spiritual. Quickly disillusioned with the religion of his upbringing, he spent some years of exploring various esoteric schools then popular in France, as well as Freemasonry, but eventually he found his way to the Hindu tradition called the Vedanta, into which he was initiated. Later he converted to Islam, joining a Sufi order. In the 1920s, disenchanted with modernism, and the materialism of western culture in general-one of his early books is called The Crisis of the Modern World (1929)-he moved to live in Cairo, where he spent the remainder of his life, writing many books on religious traditions. He died in 1950.
Guénon had a huge influence on religious intellectuals of his time; scholars like Mircea Eliade, Ananda Coomeraswamy, Heinrich Zimmer and later Joseph Campbell were affected by him directly or indirectly. Many, in both the Western and the Islamic world considered him a Sufi master. Guénon’s followers today are usually called the Traditionalists because, like him, they believe that wisdom is only to be found at the heart of the great spiritual traditions of East and West and that one must become initiated to belong to them. The Traditionalists remain very critical of the degeneration and decadence of most religious forms as they have evolved.
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