THE MULTIPLE STATES OF BEING

one of Guenon’s major works, treats a truly fundamental idea: the soul’s freedom lies in discovering its own nature as essential self-cognition and realising that all other states of knowledge and being are available to it as within itself. The metaphysics presupposed in such a realisation is discussed with thrust, brevity and incisiveness characteristic of the grand traditional style. The Multiple States of Being is the companion to, and the completion of The Symbolism of the Cross, which, together with Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, constitute Rene Guenon’s great trilogy of pure metaphysics. In this work, Guenon offers a masterful explication of the metaphysical order and its multiple manifestations—of the divine hierarchies and what has been called the Great Chain of Being— and in so doing demonstrates how intellective or intrinsic knowledge of what is, and of That which is Beyond what is, is a Way of Liberation. Guenon, the metaphysical social critic, master of arcane symbolism, comparative religionist, researcher of ancient mysteries and secret histories, summoner to spiritual renewal, herald of the end days, disappears here. Reality remains.