Rene Guenon & Reincarnation

For a few posts I would like to talk about the French philosopher and metaphysician, Rene Guenon (1886-1951), and his views on both metaphysics and reincarnation. I do not know how many posts this will be and I might even interrupt them with other things. I also am not making any promises about how fast they will get here. I think a quote from one of Guenon's books about the nature of the human spirit would be valuable to put here-even though it is a bit wordy: The "gross state" in fact is nothing else than the corporeal existence itself, to which[...] human individuality belong by one of its modalities only, and not its integral development. As the "subtle state," it includes in the first place, the extra-corporeal modalities of the human being, or of every other being situated in the same state of existence, and also, in the second place all other individual states[...]. It may be said, therefore, that the human being, considered in its integrality, comprise a certain sum of possibilities, which constitute its corporeal or gross modality, and in addition, a multitude of possibilities, which, extending in different directions beyond the corporeal modality, constitute its subtle modalities; but all these possibilities together represent, nonetheless, one and the same degree of universal Existence.

It follows from this that human individuality is at once much more and much less than Westerners generally suppose it to be: much more, because they recognize in it scarcely anything except the corporeal modality, which, includes, but the smallest fraction of its possibilities; much less, however, because this individuality, far from really constituting the whole being, is but one state of that being among an indefinite multitude of other states. Moreover the sum of all these states is still nothing at all in relation to the personality; which alone is the true being, because it alone represents its permanent and unconditioned state, and because there is nothing else which can be considered as absolutely real.

When I come back with the next post I hope to have some thoughts on his thinking about this subject. His vision of reality is really very grand-what he is basically saying in these two paragraphs is that the human spirit on the physical level of reality is only taking in a very tiny fraction of reality itself; and that the physical part is a very small part of universal existence that is mostly made up of non-physical planes of reality. As I go along I would definitely enjoy any comments from anyone who agrees or disagrees with Guenon-or anything else. I will give part of the series away right now -Guenon thought the idea of a human soul coming back to the physical or earth plane time and time again was absurd, so he didn't believe in the 'reincarnation' that people usually think of. I will get into some of the whys in the next post. Peace and be well to anyone stopping by! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Gu%C3%A9non