Sociedad Mexicana y Nican-tlaca

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1502629148354359848&q=concheros&pr=goog-sl 

The fundamental intention of every religion or wisdom is the following: first, discernment between the real and the unreal, and then concentration upon the real. One could also render this intention otherwise: truth and the way, prajnâ, and upâya, doctrine and its corresponding method. One must know that the Absolute or the Infinite—whatever may be the names given it by respective traditions—is what gives sense to our existence, just as one must know that the essential content of life is the consciousness of this supreme reality, a fact that explains the part to be played by continual prayer; in a word we live to realize the Absolute. To realize the Absolute is to think of it, under one form or another as indicated by revelation and tradition, by a form such as the Japanese nembutsu or the Tibetan Om mani padme hum or the Hindu japa-yoga, not forgetting the Christian and Islamic invocations, such as the Jesus Prayer and the dhikr of the dervishes. Here one will find some very different modalities, not only as between one religion and another but also within the fold of each religion, as can be shown, for instance, by the difference between Jodo Shinshu and Zen. However this may be, it is only on the basis of a genuine spiritual life that we can envisage any kind of external action with a view to defending truth and spirituality in the world.

It is indispensable to grasp the fact that a rite vehicles a far greater value than a personal virtue. A personal initiative that takes a religious form amounts to nothing in the absence of a traditional framework such as alone can justify that initiative and turn it to advantage, whereas a rite at least will always keep fresh the sap of the whole tradition and hence also its principal efficacy—even if men do not know how to profit thereby.

http://www.sacredweb.com/articles/sw1_schuon.html

We travel through a difficult region here, we wander about on the earth, with an abyss on one side, a ravine on the other. If you do not walk between them you will fall on one side or the other. One can live only in the middle, walk safely only in the middle. — Florentine Codex, book VI, chapter 19.

[ How Humans Can Maintain their Balance on the Slippery Earth ]

In expanding and expounding the phenomenological dimensions of the Sacred, Eliade points out that the Sacred appears in human experience as a crucial point of orientation at the same time it provides access to the ontological reality which is its source and for which homo religiosus (human beings) thirsts. According to Eliade, homo religiosus thirsts for being. In terms of space, the Sacred delineates the demarcation between sacred and profane and thus locates the axis mundi as center. Thus temples and teepees, homes and hearths become sacralized for homo religiosus…

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by Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin
(translated by Miguel León-Portilla) 

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The MYTH of Mexika Human Sacrifice - Kurly Tlapoyawa

Lies of The Conquistadors - Peter Hassler

Did Human Sacrifice Exist Among The Aztecs?

Sobre Los Sacrificios Humanos - Andres Gatica

Los Sacrificios Humanos - Zemanahuak Tlamachtiloyan

Contra La Deformacion Historica-Cultural - Por Nestor Martinez

Native Americans and Sacifice - by James Larking

Intelligence - as the instrument for the attainment of knowledge of the sacred - becomes operative only upon man’s receiving of what?

Inner illumination. [Sacred knowledge] is immediate like that of the senses but not sensous in the usual meaning of this term, thereby negating Descarte’s dualism.

Sacred knowledge is not attainable through the mind but through what?

The heart, once it is purified and the ‘eye of the heart’ and once it is opened.

What has man to do to attain this knowledge (of the sacred)?

He has to brush away all accidents and return to his center which is pure conciousness and knowledge, the eternal essence which survives all change and becoming.

Cogitor, ergo cogito et sum, I am thought [by God], therefore I think and I am.

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also: http://www.livingislam.org/n/ks_e.html & excerpts

One of the basic tenets of the Religio Perennis is that, at the center of each religion, there is a core of truth (about God, man, prayer, mortality, and salvation) which is identical. In other words, in spite of the plurality of forms, there is a common essence. In addition, within each religion, there is also a means of salvation, which is essentially a way of union. This doctrine of essential or transcendent unity has its source in universal metaphysics which (in Vedantic terms) is fundamentally discernment between the Absolute (Atma) and the relative (Maya). According to this doctrine - as represented variously by Shankara (Hinduism), Plato (Greece), Meister Eckart (Christianity), and Ibn ‘Arabi (Islam) - only the Divine Essence (”Beyond-Being”) is Absolute, whereas the Creator or Personal God (”Being”), as the first self-determination of the Divine Essence (”Beyond-Being”), is already within the domain of the relative. The Creator, nevertheless, is “absolute”, with regard to his creation, and in view of this can be qualified as the “relatively absolute”. The Personal God, as originator of creation, is “the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute”. With regard to creation, on the other hand, one can speak of a “reflection of the Absolute in the relative”, and this is the Avatara; the Prophet; the Savior; it is also Truth, Beauty, and Virtue; Symbol and Sacrament. This brings us to the doctrine of the Logos with its two faces, created and uncreated: “the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute” (the Creator or Personal God) is the uncreated Logos; the “reflection of the Absolute in the relative” (the Avatara; Symbol, or Sacrament) is the created Logos. This is already an indication of what is meant by a means of salvation: the religious adherent by uniting himself sacramentally with the created Logos, finds therein a means of uniting himself with the Uncreated: namely, God as such. — William Stoddart

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Chapter 4, American Indian Shamanism

by Frithjof Schuon

By “Shamanism” we mean traditions of “prehistoric” origin that are characteristic of Mongoloid peoples, including the American Indians; in Asia we encounter this Shamanism properly so called not only in Siberia, but also in Tibet—in the form of Bön—and in Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea; pre-Buddhist Chinese tradition, with its Confucian and Taoist branches, is also connected to this traditional family, and the same applies to Japan, where Shamanism has given rise to the particular tradition of Shinto. All these doc­trines are characterized by a complementary opposition between Earth and Heaven as well as by a worship of Nature, which is envis­aged in relation to its essential causality and not its existential acci­dentality; they are also distinguished by a certain parsimony in their eschatology—quite apparent even in Confucianism—and above all by the central function of the shaman, assumed in China by the Tao­-tse and in Tibet by the lamas concerned with divination and exor­cism. If we mention China and Japan here, it is not to incorporate their indigenous traditions summarily into Siberian Shamanism, but to indicate the place they occupy in relation to the primitive tradition of the yellow race, a tradition of which Shamanism is the most direct—though also, it must be admitted, the most uneven and ambiguous—continuation.

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