Yes, I think it is useful—in fact essential—to consider the matter of personal affinity with a guide. One must be careful, however, that a supposed "affinity" is not in fact a disguise for the ego just wanting to have its own way! It is obvious that a good...

In professing belief in the Trinity, what Christians are saying—and of course you already know this very well—is that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all, and equally, divine: each is to be regarded, therefore, as uncreated, eternal, omnipotent,...

I certainly did not mean to imply—in my post on the subject of "Vanity"—that we should take no interest in our physical or external appearance. The young woman who had written me, and to whom I was responding, had confessed to being "rather obsessed" with looking at...

Thank you for your kind inquiry concerning my recent pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, and of course for your prayers. The trip was very fruitful indeed, for which of course Deo gratias. My son went with me, and we had a spiritually nourishing, if physically...

You continue to express a keen interest in "levels" and "landmarks" in the spiritual Path, and you write to ask me (not for the first time) about specific "exercises" analogous to the yogic and Sufic "techniques" you have read about in books—exercises a Christian...

The criteria for assessment in my honors seminars are implicit in the syllabus, which describes each course as "a shared conversational inquiry" in which "a premium will be placed on precision, explanation, and defense" and in which "students will be held doubly...

I quote from your message: "You state in your book of Advice to the Serious Seeker (as have other Traditionalist writers) that initiation into spiritual esoterism presupposes adherence to an exoteric path. Yet those who hold the reins of exoteric institutions, at...

I have looked back at the chapter in question—"Axioms of the Sophia Perennis" in The Transfiguration of Man—and I think the solution, though you have already said you do not find it satisfying, is simply that Schuon is writing with a western readership in...

With regard to your question, I am minded to use your own wording and reply koanically: what one must do is to "fight" the mind precisely by "joining with it" so as to "follow it gracefully back to the invocation". In other words, you seem to have set up a false...

Thank you for sharing this very beautiful dimension of the "inner me". It is clear that what you describe afforded you a veridical insight into the nature of things; I have never had any doubts on that score—doubts, that is, about whether you are operating on...