Fetching
One moment.
1that is definitively liberated from form.
2It is a very widespread error, at least in the West, to believe that there is nothing more when there is no more form, whereas, in reality, it is form that is nothing and the formless that is everything; thus Nirvana, very far from being annihilation, as certain philosophers have claimed, is, on the contrary, the plenitude of Being.
3From all that precedes one might conclude that one must not act; but that would still be inexact, if not in principle, at least in the application that one might wish to make of it.
4In effect, action is the condition of the individual beings belonging to the Empire of the Demiurge; the Pneumatic or the Sage is, in reality, without action, but, so long as he resides in a body, he has the appearances of action; outwardly he is in everything like other men, but he knows that this likeness is an illusory appearance, and that suffices for him to be really liberated from action, since it is by Knowledge that liberation is obtained.
5Precisely because he is liberated from action he is no longer subject to suffering, for suffering is only a result of effort and, consequently, of action; and it is in this that what we call imperfection consists, though there is in it, in reality, nothing imperfect.
6It is evident that action cannot exist for him who contemplates all things in himself, as existing in the universal Spirit, without any distinction of individual objects, as these words of the Vedas express it: “Objects differ simply in designation, accident and name, as earthen utensils receive different names though they are only different forms of earth”.
7Earth, the principle of all those forms, is, itself, without form, but contains them all in potency of being: such also is the universal Spirit.
8Action implies change, that is, the incessant destruction of forms that disappear to be replaced by others; these are the modifications we call birth and death, the multiple changes of state through which the being must pass that has not yet attained liberation or the final transformation — employing this word transformation in its etymological sense, which is that of passage out of form.
9Attachment to individual things or to essentially transitory and perishable forms is proper to ignorance; forms are nothing for the being that is liberated from form, and that is why, even during his residence in the body, he is in no way affected by its properties.
10“Thus he moves free as the wind, because his movements are not obstructed by the passions.
11“When forms are destroyed, the Yogi and all beings enter into the essence that compenetrates all.
12“He is without quality and without action; imperishable, without volition; happy, immutable, without figure; eternally free and pure.
13“He is like the ether that is spread everywhere and that compenetrates at once the exterior and the interior of things; he is incorruptible, imperishable; he is himself in all things, pure, impassible, without form, immutable.
14“He is the great Brahma, which is eternal, pure, free, one, incessantly happy, not two, existing, perceiving and without end”.
15Such is the state to which the being comes by spiritual Knowledge; thus he is for ever liberated from the conditions of individual existence, he is liberated from the Empire of the Demiurge.
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 49 is a devotional issue: Jehel's essay on Prayer opens it, the Suddha Dharma pages call the whole community to pray for a pilgrim in India, and the literary section closes with an elegy for a dead child. The doctrinal serials — Guénon's Demiurge (concluded) and the chromotherapy course — run between.
Masthead unchanged from Nº 47: the collective collaborators formula, the exchange-control notice, the 1.80-dollar overseas price.
The SUMARIO shows two of the masthead's fraternal orders now writing under their own banners — Suddha Dharma Mandalam and Maha Boddhi Sangha each head their own section — the review functioning as the shared organ of Montevideo's several Eastern-rite groups.
Jehel's 'La Oración' proceeds by numbered conclusions from a single epigraph by 'Sevananda' — prayer as the murmur of Divine Love in the heart. The essay's method — seven deductions, then a litany — is scholastic in form and devotional in content, the director's characteristic register.
The 'final key' is given by Zanoni's words to his wife — 'There are beings whose thoughts and feelings are constant prayers' — from Bulwer-Lytton's initiatic novel, which the circle knew intimately: Sevaka's own 'El Hijo de Zanoni' (a sequel) heads the Kier list on this issue's back cover.
→ thread:zanoni_bulwer_lytton
The closing rollcall — 'Masters like Papus, Philippe (AMO), Ramakrishna' — names Maître Philippe of Lyon (Nizier Anthelme Philippe, 1849–1905), Papus's own spiritual master, under the initials AMO by which the Martinist tradition and this review's earlier lineage diagrams designate him. The three names bind the essay's doctrine of prayer to the run's twin lineages, French and Hindu.
The astrology course pivots from houses to signs: having finished the planets-in-houses cycle (Saturn through Neptune, Nºs 42–48), Surya begins the planets-in-signs cycle again with Saturn, 'the planet of sorrow'. The delineations remain in the Alan Leo textbook mould.
'Situated at the 29 degrees of this sign, the seat of its exaltation' — Saturn's exaltation degree in Libra (the classical 21st degree is often given as 29 in Spanish-language manuals of the period); the course keeps the traditional dignities alongside its modern psychological vocabulary.
'The Pilgrim of the Full Moon' interrupts the Gita commentary by editorial decision — Jehel's footnote says so — to relay news from 'The Suddha Dharma' (Madras, last quarter of 1945): Sri Vasudeva Row, President of the Suddha Dharma Mandalam, was renouncing his office to walk into the interior of India seeking the order's hidden Elders.
The response in Montevideo: collective petitions and meditations in the 'little Temple' of the Guru Subrahmanyananda Ashrama — the Suddha community in Montevideo and Buenos Aires organised as an ashrama under the deceased founder's continuing patronage, with reported manifestations of his presence and a message from Vasudeva Row himself. The page is primary evidence of the group's devotional practice, not just its reading.
The appointed night is 'the Full Moon of May' — Wesak, the Buddha's festival, which the theosophical world held to be the annual convergence of the Masters. Jehel dates the piece 14-4-46, one lunar month ahead: the review is coordinating a hemisphere-distant act of collective prayer to a precise astronomical hour, the same time-discipline its planetary-hours praxis teaches.
Upasika's 'The Way of the Buddha' brings her G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ course ('The doctrine of the Buddha', on the back-cover roster since Nº 45) into print under the Maha Boddhi Sangha banner, signed 'Bikku'. The opening moves — Buddhism as philosophy not religion, Buddhagama, Vibhajja 'those who analyse' — frame the Dhamma in the review's analytic idiom.
The space-meditation — suspend the senses, hold 'Nothing now exists for me', then eliminate space itself — walks the reader through the formless-jhana sequence (infinite space, then nothingness) as a reasoned psychological experiment rather than a scriptural citation: the course's signature translation of contemplative technique into introspective argument.
'I am not an organism; I possess an organism' — the anatta analysis lands on the vocabulary of the review's Western courses (the I as owner of its instrument), and the section closes with the Pali homage formula transliterated as the compositor could manage it: Namo Tassa Bhagavato...
The Demiurge reaches its fourth and final section. Guénon draws the moral consequence — morality is real within the Demiurge's domain and meaningless beyond it — and reaches for the Taoist wu wei: the Sage's non-action that is the plenitude of activity. In La Gnose this essay ended Guénon's debut sequence; the review has now serialised it entire, across four numbers.
'Nirvana, very far from being annihilation… is the plenitude of Being' — the conclusion the review's Buddhist course (three pages earlier in this same issue) will need: the two serials, gnostic and Buddhist, converge on the same doctrine of the formless, and the issue's architecture lets the reader watch them agree.
The chromotherapy course turns clinical: diagnosis before treatment, with the aura as the ideal instrument and — for those without astral vision — face, nails, sclerotic, urine and faeces as colour-indicators. The Mars-red / opposite-blue example applies the planetary correspondences the course laid down in earlier instalments.
The physical methods catalogue is the practical heart of the series: painted rooms, coloured dress, window glass, mineral-salt crystals, colour-corresponding foods, and solarised water — bottles exposed 4 hours minimum, dosed 30 grammes each half hour — the Babbitt/Phasad Jha technique of Nº 48 now given posology.
Astral and mental chromotherapy — projecting visualised colour or dynamised thought into the patient's aura — are underwritten by Calligaris again: his 'Telepatía e radio-onde cerebrali' is cited with page numbers for the plaque that transmits red from 1 metre to 10 kilometres. The course wants its subtle-plane therapeutics to stand on laboratory paper.
The colour-blocking experiments yield an affect-lexicon — violet for pain, blue for pleasure, dark red spotted for excitation, grey for calm — which the course reads as proof that feeling, thought and colour are one vibratory fact: the theoretical bridge to the ten conclusions that follow.
'Pasan los Ángeles' is by Hérib Campos Cervera (1905–1953), the great Paraguayan poet of the Generación del 40, writing from Asunción with an epigraph from Pablo Neruda; the dedication — 'for Lydia and Augusto, in the hour of the passing of their Son' — makes it a consolation elegy. That the review could print a new poem by the leading Paraguayan modernist, dated two months before publication, shows its literary reach across the Río de la Plata.
'The Angels are ours; they are our broken wings' — the poem's angels are the dead and the unlived selves at once, sailing 'the nocturnal channels of the blood'. Its placement after the chromotherapy course's aura-doctrine is an editorial rhyme: the issue ends where clinical vibration turns into elegy.
Signed at Asunción, 15 March 1946 — six weeks before this May number; the review's literary section is running on a fast exchange with the Paraguayan capital.
The G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ plate unchanged; Upasika's course, whose print debut fills this issue's Buddhist pages, still stands on the roster.
Back cover unchanged: the Ateneo Martinist list and the Kier Rose Cross list — the latter's 'El Hijo de Zanoni' by Sevaka closing the loop with the Zanoni quotation in this issue's opening essay.