Investigates the present religious and cultural scene from the standpoint of traditional metaphysics and critiques the New Age spiritualities. Presents lore relating to the 'latter days' and the Antichrist from various religious traditions. Drawing on the writings of the leading perennialist thinkers Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon, sketches the particular quality of spirituality proper to apocalyptic times-both its dangers and the opportunities open to it.

Can we really know what UFO's are? The answer is Yes-but only if we study them armed with a kind of knowledge that explains the true and complete structure of the universe-spiritual, psychic, and material-a knowledge that only traditional metaphysics can provide. Science can supply one piece of the puzzle, detective work another, psychic investigation still another. But only metaphysics can put the puzzle together, and give us a complete and satisfying picture of the UFO phenomenon. Cracks in the Great Wall analyzes of the findings of UFO researcher Jacques Vallee and some of his colleagues...

In the religion of Islam the character of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, is the model of human virtue. Orphan, exile, contemplative, successful businessman, long-time faithful husband to one wife, husband to several wives in his later years, statesman, judge, warrior, conqueror, lawgiver, peacemaker, spiritual teacher, Muhammad is the complete man, the exemplar of broad and balanced character whose sunnah (habitual and characteristic way of acting) is the ideal of human behavior for the traditional Muslim world.

Dar-al-Islam is presently under ruthless attack from the...

Mulla Nasrudin, called Hodja Nasrudin in India and Turkey, is the major comic figure in Islamic folklore. Both 'mulla' and 'hodja' mean master, with the connotation teacher; Nasrudin, if he ever existed, was an educated man. The tales of Nasrudin were never told by any great Sufi masters, but somehow the common man began to identify with him. And as various modern writers have pointed out, the tales contain both spiritual symbolism and the sort of paradoxical narrative that can break down our habitual view of reality (rather like the Zen koan) and re-form it on a higher level. This work is...

Ever since the advent of "earth-based spiritualities" in our time, the call to realize the Divine Immanence, to see God in the forms of the natural world and the particular events of our lives, has become paramount. And yet, without a corresponding sense of the Divine Transcendence, we find ourselves drawn towards a kind of glamourized materialism, worshipping visible realities at the expense of the Invisible, taking as our deity a physical planet with a beginning and an end in time, instead of the living and eternal God, Who is before all beginnings and beyond all ends.
This bias toward...

As the poet T.S. Eliot said, Where is the wisdom lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information? Our postmodern information culture forces us to be over-cerebral, but it doesnt teach us to think; consequently it becomes nearly impossible for us to imagine a knowledge that is beyond information, much less a Wisdom that is beyond knowledge.

We all know what it is to uselessly spin our wheels in barren thought and fantasy; certain valid contemplative disciplines even have as their main goal the pacification of the monkey mind, the over-heated brain that prevents us from...

Charles Upton: Human love has fallen on hard times; it has been "officially discredited." Even liberal humanitarianism is not what it used to be; how then can romantic love, which in its origins is essentially aristocratic (in Meister Eckhart's sense when he said "the soul is an aristocrat") find any place in today's world? The truth is, it cannot. The world is too small for it. The place of romantic love is nowhere in this world; its place is in the human soul, whose own proper place is in the eternal self-knowledge of God. Jennifer Doane Upton: The love of God is always secret. For most of...

In the last century, authors and psychologists like Robert Graves, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell reminded us that folklore is often full of deep symbolic truths, truths that the folk themselves are usually unaware of. And they also taught us - just as Plato did, 2400 years ago -- that myth and folklore constitute a philosophical language, where images (as in dreams, holy icons, and symbolic poetry) can carry a great burden of meaning. Few seem to realize, however, that certain works of art conventionally considered to be unconscious products of the folk imagination were quite consciously and...