7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
1/9
Travel Meditations[1]
by
Frithjof Schuon
Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 12, Nos. 1 and 2. (Winter-Spring, 1978).
World Wisdom, Inc.
www.studiesincomparativereligion.com
Many questions arise simply because man lets himself be enticed into the domain wherequestions lie, instead of keeping firmly to the domain of certainty, If a man is confused by
something, he should first of all come back to the certainty that it is not this world as suchwhich is important, but the next world, and above all that God is Reality; and he should say to
himself: in the face of this truth, which in principle is the solution to all questions, this or that
question just does not arise; it is enough if he has the Answer of answers. And then God will
give him a light also for what is earthly and particular.
* * *
The Prophet said: Guard yourself against suspicion, for the devil seeks to arouse discord
amongst you, or something of the kind. One ought never to brood, if only because the
unintelligible or the absurd belongs to the stuff of which the world is made. One should say to
oneself in the face of some apparently insoluble difficulty: first of all everything, every
occurrence, has a cause, whether we know it or not; our ignorance takes nothing from it and
adds nothing to it. Secondly: this cause makes no difference to the truth that God is Reality;
what is, is, and what is not, is not. A man sometimes lets himself be overcome by bitterness,
because he has allowed the corresponding spiritual possibilitythat of sobrietyto be
altogether crowded out by his dreams and pleasures; but he who meets his fellow men with
magnanimity and at the same time maintains a certain coolness towards the worlda kind of
anticipation of all disillusionment, a foreknowledge of the nothingness of all that is earthly, a
refusal to dreamwill not be taken unawares by some unexpected bitterness breaking in
upon him and will not be despoiled of the irreplaceable good of love. Know man and know
thyself; only God is good.
It often surprises me how deeply most men are sunk in phenomena, how much they identify
themselves with their own everyday world of appearances, and how little strength of
imagination they have; this surprised me even as a child, in so far as I was capable of noticing
it; I did notice it without any doubt, for otherwise I should not so often have felt myself to be
as one standing outside, disinterested, as it were an onlooker. For the contemplative man the
experience of vastly different worldsthe West, Islam, the Red Indianscan and must have
a particular spiritual significance; the forms become transparent; they act as supports, yes, but
they are no longer confining. What is distraction for one can for another be soaring flight.
* * *
http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Travel_Meditations-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx#_ftn1http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Travel_Meditations-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx#_ftn17/28/2019 Travel Meditations
2/9
What is distraction for one can for another be recollectedness, penetration, the way to oneself.
This holds good for all dealings with forms. In my youth I used to call this standpoint, of
which I was very conscious, an exteriorization with a view to interiorization. In a word:
Whatever we may love, it ends in the sacred if we grasp it aright and so to speak think it out
to the end. The quintessence of all values is the sacred.
* * *
We men have no scale of measurement such as would permit us to know what we are; we donot know, when we are somewhere or another, who it is that is there. But when God resounds
in our Heart, then we know that God is therethat He is there where we are. We may not
know whether we be good or bad, but we know for certain that God is God.
* * *
In the spiritual life one must jump over ones own shadow; that is, from the human point of
view, the liberating miracle. And scarcely anyone can do it.
Be surprised at nothing; it would be a waste of time. For there is nothing that could infringe
this truth, or even call it in questionthe truth that God is Reality. All else is indifferent,
however hard it may be for us to take this standpoint.
Men are forever swaying to and fro between the consciousness of being divine manifestation
and the commandor the necessityto submit to God. Thus there are many confusions,
misunderstandings and false presumptions: man often thinks he is absolutely good because in
his genius he manifests something divine; he forgets that man as such is always man. So is it
with civilizations also: they are at the same time good and not good, they are struck down on
account of the bad they contain, but survive the blow because they are good and divine.
Caesar was divine, and yet a man.
* * *
If one really knew that God is God, and that only God is God, then one would know
everything else. Therefore, whenever the juggling tricks of the world cause doubts about this
or that to arise in us, we must take refuge in the all-truth that God is Reality. It would indeed
be strange if we knew and understood all possibilities from the outset. On the plane of
phenomenawhich is also the plane of darkness and therefore of contradictionto see
through all the artifices of My on this plane from the outset would simply not be human.
Firstly, we must find our joy in God, not in the world; it follows from this that we must not
be disappointed if we do not find our joy in the world.
Secondly, we must surrender ourselves to God, and judge the world from the standpoint of
this surrender. We must not let the absurdity of the world sap our blood so that we are turned
away from our surrender to God.
Thirdly, we must not forget that the evil enemy provokes absurdity in order to bewilder us
and turn us away from God. Our surrender may not, cannot depend on our understanding all
riddles; it is unconditional, depending only on the Truth of truths. Surrender to God was there
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
3/9
before the existence of the world, and before we ourselves existed. We do not create it, we
enter into it; it is our deep, eternal Being.
Our trust in God must protect us from doubts about the world; it must be stronger than all
absurdity. Otherwise it would be as if we had doubts about the Truth of truths, whereas in
fact this Truth is our real Being.
Pure Truth, pure Being, pure Inwardness.
In the ego there is something which invites the diabolic. In other words, in the egoin so far
as it is not actively penetrated by Godthere is something diabolic. That is why one cannot
find a definitive modus vivendi with God on the basis of this wavering ego, why one cannot
complacently hang onto God by a thread. One must constantly see afresh through the ego
this impermanent, absurd fabricand in seeing through it, one must overcome it, and so in a
certain sense re-create it. One must always be aware of the relativity of the ego, so as not to
slip into a false and unstable existential plenitude.
The ego would like to have a definitive and wholly logical relation-ship to God and the
world, but the world is far from purely logical, and Gods logicif one may use such a
termtranscends that of man and sometimes shatters it.
* * *
A journey is not merely a movement from one place to another, but also a movement from
oneself to oneself; in this way every journey is a pilgrimage, every journey leads to the holy
shrine of the Heart. Whether or not a journey is a success depends not so much on whether
we achieve this or that as on whether we overcome ourself and leave behind us a piece of the
lower self, on whether we overcome something which in reality is not ourself at all.
* * *
We look forward to something with joy; then someone comes and spoils our joy. That should
not be, for God is always present with all His liberating Truth and all His redeeming
Goodness, and also with all His bliss-imparting Beauty. Behind the veil of things His pure
Being lies hidden like a golden sound.
* * *
If only it were easier for a man to do what most people are incapable of doing, namely to step
outside himself and to see himself from outsidean outside that is in reality the inside! Then
he would be standing in a vast, silver silence and he would see his ego as something quite
small; as something strangled, seething and noisy.
What makes spiritual realization so difficult is that the ego is inverted, as if turned inside out,
a stranger to Reality. Within this inversion it is not so difficult to chase after mirror-
reflections of Reality, if the corresponding gifts are there; but to step out of this invertedness
into the openthat is difficult, humanly speaking.
There is something vengeful and self-destructive in man which, once it is awakened, refusesto draw back and seeks to submerge and utterly consume everything; there is something
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
4/9
Luciferian in the vengefulness, which would shatter a life for the sake of a yes or a no, as
though there were no greater pleasure than the feeling that one has been wronged. But in a
certain sense only God can be wholly right, and it is to Him, not to men, that we must bow; in
other words, if we sometimes have to bow to men and magnanimously meet them half-way
not by renouncing justice and truth, but by surmounting the offence as such and acting in
terms of love of our neighborthis is above all because we owe it to God, because we arenot nearly good enough to lay a total claim to our rights; we cannot make a divinity out of
revenge because of some unrecognized right or some unrecognized truth and take vengeance
on the world and on ourselves, indeed on existence in general and so, in a fashion, on God.
Only God is good, and in a certain sense one can do absolute and total wrong only to God.
Before God man always has enough sin within him to enable him to retain his consciousness
of guilt, even when he has suffered an injustice. A man may be right, but there is already as it
were a wrong in the ego. The key to all this is the quite simple but immeasurable and
inexhaustible Truth of truths, namely: there is no divinity except the One God.
Men have greed and hardness in them, and against this the Prayer takes its stand like a
cooling, extinguishing and at the same time unshakeable strength. Whereas greed is hot andaggressive, hardness is cold and shuts itself off; it is selfishness toward ones neighbor and
indifference towards God; it is the lukewarmness and greyness of the worldly man whosesoul fritters itself away in petty, noisy everyday trivialities, being without unifying warmth
and liberating beauty and love; such a soul is not music, but chatter or clatter; and that is the
complement to greed, which like a beast of prey is ever insatiably on the prowl for new
victims for its lusts.
Next comes the evil of sloth, the neglect of God and of the last things; and then, as a natural
complement, the evil of haste, restlessness, dissipating curiosity and constrictive tension; man
lets him-self be tossed about by the world and never achieves rest or release except in sloth
which wants to know nothing about God and Eternity and kills the soul.
The root of all evil lies in mans unwillingness to rise above himself; and this holds also for
the evil of mediocre, woolly and uncontemplative thought, for prejudice and illogicality, in
short, for the incapacity to distinguish the true from the false and the essential from the
unessential. People think as far as they like to think, and no further; the ego thinks, but this
thinking does not enlighten the ego, it does not step outside it and show it its nothingness.
There is also the evil of superficiality or outwardness: the in-capacity to be, instead of merely
acting and thinking; the inability to separate oneself from form and movement and to take
hold of being; or in other words, persistence in doing, not in being; in form, not in content.Thus man remains in dividedness, in I and world, far from contemplative recollectedness
and far from all unity.
We have already said above that thinking does not step outside the ego; now we say that in
the case of the outward man the inner-most Self can only be grasped by thinking, and the
same holds true for Being.
* * *
There is something diabolic in the dream-stuff of the world, a demonic something that sets
pitfalls for us and would like to bring us down or would like to push us into the whirlpool ofself-destruction,but behind all that stands God, who wishes to put our faith, our consistency
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
5/9
and our integrity to the test and who does not withhold His Grace from us so long as we are
open to it; His Will is that we should achieve victory over ourselves, for our souls belong to
Him alone.
Once again: that we should sometimes forego a little of our own right in order to help our
neighbor to his feet is something that we may not necessarily owe to our neighbor, but weowe it certainly to God.
God does not primarily want our right to prevail, but His Right; ours can well be scanted, if
His Right comes thereby all the more powerfully into its own. For indeed our right can have
meaning only if it is His.
It is Gods right to possess our souls, to possess them completely, whether we suffe r wrong
on this account or not. Gods right is that which brings us, in one way or another, to God.
This too can be said: God looks after our rights; we cannot look after our own little rights
better than He does. Man cannot assert his rights without putting himself slightly in thewrongat some level or othersince God alone is totally in the right. To be sure, a human
right can be a divine right, insofar as Gods Truth and Gods Honor are at stake. There are
not words enough to describe all of this exhaustively.
When it is said: Judge not that ye be not judged, this does not mean that we should not use
our God-given powers of discrimination to judge things aright, but merely that we should not
let ourselves be led by passion into unjustly condemning them; the meaning is: judge as you
yourself would wish to be judged, that is, from the standpoint of truth and with as much
indulgence as possible; I do not say: with all indulgence, for love of ones neighbor must
never be allowed to falsify the truth. We may and must see the extenuating circumstances
which are therewhich means that they are in the very nature of thingsbut we have no
right to invent such circumstances; that is an essential distinction. There are also extenuating
circumstances which are too general to have any weight; to take them into account would be
to con-fuse different planes; but justice is, above all, to put each thing in its proper place.
* * *
It is quite natural that the more perfect should sometimes suffer at the hands of the lessperfect, but not that he should reproach the world for the existence of imperfection; for what
is, must be. We must give a folly its true name, but we cannot reasonably wonder at the
existence of fools; and if there are fools, then there must also be follies. It can moreoverhappen that through some inward folly we provoke our neighbor to some outward folly; how
foolish he is will depend on how foolish we are.
All evil ultimately comes from mens having forgotten their beings; they no longer repose in
pure being, they are no longer conscious of it, but are completely yoked to their doing and let
things pull them and push them this way and that. Men do not even know any longer what
existence is, nor do they know that they carry a skeleton about with them and that they are
locked up in the prison of their five senses; still less do they know what lies in the centre of
their souls, namely the Kingdom of Heaven and the Glory of God, and that they have only to
go through a door to escape from the noise of the ego and the world and to be in a golden
quietness.
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
6/9
Rest in Being and trust in God. Live inwardly and trust in God.
Rejoice in Being and in the inward, and trust in God.
Rest in Being: not in doing, not in change.
Live inwardly, not outwardly, not in forms.
Rejoice in Being and in the inward: not in doing and in the outward.
Or again: the harmony between consciousness of Being and inwardness is joy. Breathing out
symbolizes consciousness of Being, breathing in symbolizes inwardness.
* * *
Mans customary play of thoughts is not being but doing and existing, escape from being and
severance from being; it is movement, not essence. The play of thoughts is not what is
innermost, not pure consciousness, not innermost witness, not centre, but form and
outwardness, hardening and scission, duality and not unison.
The play of thoughts is joy in this or that, not joy in being nor in the centre, the innermost;joy in things, not joy in Joy.
Men flee from Being and Self; they veil pure Being with existence and action, just as they
veil the innermost Self with the ego and with things. But with God is pure Being which
reconciles all opposites.
We have to realize an equilibrium between finite and Infinite. This equilibrium can only
proceed from the Infinite, only be determined by the Infinite; the finite, the creature, cannot
find the equilibrium, has no scales of measurement for it. For these scales of measurement
could only come from Mercy.
A hundred years ago some poet racked his brains over some worthless play; somewhere in
the world someone is dreaming of success, a statesman is greedily absorbed in some petty
project; yesterday a Zen monk swept the floor-boards in Kyoto; and today, quite near, a
cricket chirps in the grass. The world is mad.
One might object that every being, every man, is so completely locked into a narrow world of
experience, in a picture-book, in a dream. Yes and no, and in a certain sense: absolutely not! I
have seen venerable men in whom one could perceive no trace of being locked into a dream-
world, nor any trace of aridity; they looked as if they had experienced everything that can be
experienced and as if they were conscious of all possible limits and of the Unlimited.
* * *
The inward man stands timelessly before God; for him there are no questions and no
problems other than standing before God and waiting for God. It is the outward mans duty to
abstain from what is meaningless, harmful and evilwhile at the same time accomplishing
what is meaningful, useful and goodand to trust in God.
The outward man lives in the multiple, the inward man lives in the One. The outward man
would like to involve the inward in his doubt and restlessness, but the inward man must
nonetheless determine the outward, quite unconditionally and without his asking why,whence and whither. For the inward is the anticipation of all answers and solutions; it is pure
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
7/9
answer; in it there is no hesitation and no dividedness. The Inward transforms everything
outward into a victory; it is so made that everything outward be-comes for it a way to the
Centre and to the One.
For things and events either say: even so is the One, yet infinitely more wonderful; or else:
since the world is so injurious, turn unto the One!
Sometimes God lets things happen which for the moment are incomprehensible to us, in
order that in one fashion or another they may become for us a path to the Inward. The absurd
lies in the fabric of the world side by side with the intelligible; God alone is the Meaning.
The more we repose in pure Being and partake of pure Being, the more the gulf is bridged
between I and not I. Love thy neighbor as thyself: that means, hold to pure Being. It also
means: the rift from which all oppositions arise closes only in the Inward, only in the Self.
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
* * *
This is essential in the spiritual life: that our attitude towards the world and our neighbor
should be a giving and not a taking, not an expecting. He who does not depend on what is
pleasant is likewise independent of what is unpleasant; he who masters the one also masters
the other. Bitterness cannot take us by surprise when it is already anticipated in our attitude
towards the world; when it is already there from the outset, but in its proper place; when it is
no true bitterness but merely a just appraisal of the limited and the ephemeral; when it is non-
acquiring, non-pleasureseeking, and when it is balanced by giving and willingness to give.
A journey only has meaning when it is a journey to God: and when it is that, then all is well.
Even if we do not understand the world, because in it good and evil are too interwoven, too
finely interspun, too ramifiedwe know that only God is good; and if we seek our refuge in
God, then God will give us such understanding of things as we need.
* * *
In a certain sense man is always in danger from God on account of his hypocrisy, because he,
man, claims to be or to know some-thing which in his actions he belies; what wonder is it,
then, if God, the Forbearing, sometimes shows him, with regard to what he pretends to
believe or to know, that he neither believes nor knows it?
Be in God, that He may be in us. If God is not in us, and does not act in us, that is because we
are not in God.
And if we saw all the beauties of the world: what could we find in the world more beautiful
and more delightful than we have already found in God? And what disappointment can be
greater than that which we have already experienced in being separated from God? And
again: what right have we to happiness in the world if we do not already have our happiness
in God?
Between God and man there is a kind of game of hide-and-seek, a losing each other only to
find each other once again; a game between appearance and reality. This is becauseeverything earthly wavers, because only God is God.
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
8/9
* * *
There are dissonances in life which we find unintelligible and unbearable because they have
the Evil One for author. It is be-cause they come from the Evil One that they are what they
are.
In reliance upon God there lies a great mystery or miracle. This is the key to spiritual
unfolding; inward repose in God, outward reliance upon God, abandoning things to the
Divine Wisdom and Goodness; we should place our cares in His hands and take out rest in
Him like a carefree child. Be inwardly with God, and He will be outwardly with you. Even so
the Prophet said: Whoso protecteth God in his heart, him will God protect in the world.
In life we may indeed seek refuge in the great, but again and again find ourselves face to face
with pettiness and, when it wounds us, we run the risk of answering it with pettiness: for this
is its very nature, to entice man into its own narrowness. Greatness we have only from God
and in God, for everything truly great is so through God; in Him alone lie our refuge from the
mortal pettiness of the world and our answer to the petty. When the petty, the futile assailsyou, do not be petty and futile yourself, but be great through thanking God for this
experience, which shows you once again that worldly things are petty and futile; and submit
your case to God, without tormenting yourself with questions. Do not try to puzzle things out
on their own meaningless level, do not seek to compel what is meaningless to have a meaning
and do not be meaningless yourself; but take things by their root, which lies in your own self;
do not contend with the petty, but understand why it is the petty and why it is there and must
be there; remember what greatness is, and give your neighbor greatness where you can; for
every being is bound up with God and so has greatness in him; pettiness is only a darkening
cloud and an outward din.
In the All-Holy Truth and in pure Prayer there is no narrowness and no bitterness, but only
breadth and soft, cooling peace.
* * *
The world as such cannot make us happy; why do we remain rooted in the world and bear it a
grudge for not giving us what it does not possess? Why do we strive with it, as if we would
compel it to give what it cannot give, precisely because it is the world? There are two way of
dying: one is natural death, which in itself offers no solution, and the other is taking up ones
abode in God, the perpetual remembrance of Him, Who is not of this world.
The realization of the not-I cannot take place without the I; make the ego perfect through fear
and love, activity and trust, and through veracity; persevere in rightly oriented
recollectedness, and on this basis meditate on the not-I, in so far as you can grasp it, and in so
far as it is given you to do so.
The difficult thing is to step outside the dream-stuff of the world --a stuff that is as
immeasurable as starry space itselfinto the golden silence. In this dream-stuff all opposites
are contained, good and evil, joy and sorrow, day and night, and at the same time it is itself
night in the face of the One Eternal Day.
7/28/2019 Travel Meditations
9/9
And this dream-stuff could not harm us, it would be nothing at all, but for the egothe I
whose contradictory repetition in countless living creatures is the best evidence that only the
Self has Reality and that only in the Self are we what we are in Reality.
The difficult thing for the spiritual man is that he has to live on two planes: on the one hand
he has to recognize the dream-stuffin which he himself as I is inwovenfor what it is,and as it were set it aside; and on the other hand, within the dream-stuff, he has to
discriminate rightly between things, solve those problems which need to be solved, and give
his neighbor his due.
Man fluctuates, moreover, between spiritual pretension and spiritual right; it is loathsome to
overreach oneself in prating about things with which one has no real God-given connection;
at the same time our spirit has a right to all that it can really grasp, in the measure that it has
in fact the power to grasp it, and in the measure that it is willed by Divine Providence.
* * *
I and world: the one needs the other. Not only does the ego need the world as content and
means of nourishment, but also the world is incapable of doing without its complement, for it
wants to be experienced, and is insatiable in its craving to be experienced; it is in its nature to
do everything it can to keep alight the fire of the ego; or, differently considered, to maintain
the ice of the ego in its coldness and hardness; in short, to prevent our escaping from its play.And that is why we should be surprised at nothing that the cosmos dazzles us with.
At the same time the dream-stuff world is already in a sense undone from within, for all its
images that attach us to itself testify to That which it is not and which is infinitely more than
it; That which it would like to hide, and yet must reveal, on pain of having no existence.
There is only one Being; there is only one Witness, one Beholder; and there is only one Joy,
which reposes in Itself and at the same time in a profusion of Self-giving, showers down in a
thousand forms and movements.
NOTES
[1]These are extracts from a diary written during a journey in North America, 1963.
(Editors Note).
http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Travel_Meditations-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx#_ftnref1http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Travel_Meditations-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx#_ftnref1http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/Public/articles/Travel_Meditations-by_Frithjof_Schuon.aspx#_ftnref1