Related Books: Poetry
Related Audio/Video: Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon

Publisher Comments

The poetry of Frithjof Schuon has been called metaphysical music. Every poem in this German/English bilingual collection--drawn from more than three thousand poems written during the closing years of his life--is a true compass pointing the reader time and again to Schuon's fundamental theme: the remembrance of God. These small gems are as profound as the sea and as simple as water itself. Schuon repeatedly traces the journey of a soul which has found its celestial homeland and views the play of this world from the perspective of Eternity. Like the stars, these poems strike the reader as both old and new. They echo the primordial melodies of Being and communicate a message of certitude and serenity for every person who longs for spiritual light.

Schuon's poetry, which possesses both formal integrity and mystical abandon, is the flowering of a soul deeply in love with the reality of God. His poems are born not from mental effort but from a deep interior vision, and he sings of seeing God everywhere in the simple radiant language of one who stands alone before the Creator. The spiritual traveler may carry this book for a lifetime and not exhaust its content because its content is the inexhaustibly beautiful life of the spirit.

"There is no time in the nature of God; / Nor in the encounter with the Lord. / The moment of prayer is eternity-- / It stands in the sky like the morning star; / In the now of the heart lies thy whole life."

About the Author

Philosopher and metaphysician, poet and artist, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) is world-renowned in the field of Comparative Religion and is known as the pre-eminent exponent of the Perennial Philosophy. He was born in Basel, Switzerland, of German parents. He went to Paris as a young man, where he studied for a few years before undertaking a number of trips to North Africa, the Near East, and India in order to contact spiritual authorities and witness traditional cultures. Following WWII, he accepted an invitation to travel to the American West, where he lived for several months among the Plains Indians, in whom he had always had a deep interest. He spent his mature life writing more than twenty books of essays comprising a spiritual message of solar magnitude. The dominant theme, or principle, of Schuon's writings was foreshadowed in his early encounter with a marabout who had accompanied some members of his Senegalese village to Basel for the purpose of demonstrating their African culture. When the young Schuon talked with him, the venerable old man drew a circle with radii on the ground and explained: "God is in the center, all paths lead to Him." This metaphysical truth is the leitmotif of all Schuon's writings, beginning with his first book, the title of which: The Transcendent Unity of Religions is very indicative in this respect.