Video Title: Frithjof Schuon - Of the Cross. Source: RecoveringtheSacred. Date Published: January 1, 2013. Description:
From the book Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, by World Wisdom Books.An excerpt from, "Of the Cross" by Frithjof Schuon:
Read by Emma Clark for The Matheson Trust.
themathesontrust.org
‘To bear the cross’ is to keep oneself close to the cross of existence. Existence has the pole ‘sin’ and the pole ‘cross’, the blind launching into enjoyment and the conscious stopping; the ‘broad way’ and the ‘narrow way’. To ‘bear the cross’ is, essentially, not to ‘swim with the tide’; it is to ‘discern spirits’, to keep oneself, incorruptible, in this apparent nothingness which is the Truth. To ‘bear the cross’ means then to endure this nothingness, threshold of God; and since the world is pride, egoism, passion and false knowledge, it means to be humble and charitable, to ‘die’ and be ‘as a little child’. This nothingness becomes suffering to the extent that we are pride and that it thereby makes us suffer; the fire of purgatory is nothing else: it is our substance which burns, not because God wishes to hurt us, but because it is what it is; because it is ‘of this world’ and in proportion to its being so.
