Customer Reviews

Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

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It's extremely unfortunate that this book, "The Reign of Quantity" is out of print since it's the only book that presents a successful structural critique of "evolutionary" spirituality -- the cutting-edge of western propaganda.

Guenon's insights from the 1940s are even more relevant today since he described so well the nascent New Age scene and it's ability to lure potentially level-headed people into a cloud of deception.

Apparently Ramana Maharshi, the guru and sage promoter of Advaita Vedanta through self-enquiry, called R. Guenon, "the Great Sufi" and Guenon's associates visited Ramana Maharshi.

According to the website www.realization.org Ramana Maharshi stated, "There is no evolution."

Guenon argues this case in the context of the spiritual cycles of space-time based on the ratios 1:2:3:4.

Guenon's degree thesis in France was on the calculus and transcendental values.

"The Reign of Quantity" is the only book that develops the logic that western math, starting with the squaring of the circle, is inherently unjust, disharmonic and representative of the Kali Yuga.

This is the only book that cuts through the b.s. and gives the reader a clear view of current times but at the same time a clear vision of how to cut through these times.

Guenon gives great detail to the disharmonic forces that even call themselves "traditionalists" based on his writing yet are not accurate representatives of his work.

This inaccuracy proved to be the case with the two other so-called "traditionalist" founders -- Schuon and Evola.

Unfortunately Guenon's work has been dismissed by those who have not read him and Guenon's work has been ignored since it is too radical.

Hopefully, after Oxford University Press's forthcoming book on traditionalism, there will be a reprint of "the Reign of Quantity"

drew hempel

Perhaps Guenon's greatest work, this book analyses the metaphysical roots of the crisis of this age, explaining the causes of the present condition to lie in modern civilization's rebellion against tradition -- not just one tradition, but the recurring and perennial tradition of every premodern civilization. The author's penetrating insight into modern science and the results of its monopoly over our age is fascinating. His critique of modernity is grounded in the traditional religious view which views human temporal existence not as an evolution, but a degression culminating in the "signs of the hour" and the emergence of the dajjal or the anti-christ. Guenon's radical critique of the 20th Century will no doubt be unpalatable for those to whom the wisdom of the ancients is ignorance relative to the quantum physics of today; but Guenon was well aware of the intellectual totalitarianism of the modern world-view. His objective was not a mass conversion to tradition. He sought rather to help open the eyes of a small number of people to the realities of the modern world and the illusion of progress. And this he did. A good number of prominent intellectuals were influenced by his works; among them: Huston Smith, Martin Lings, Gai Eaton, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, James Cutsinger, Toshiko Izutsu and host of others. Guenon died in the late 50's in Cairo, Egypt where he lived for almost twenty years as an adeherent of the Muslim faith. His last words were "Allah, Allah".

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times is a masterpiece by the enlightened perennial intellectual René Guénon, and is considered by many of those who can comprehend it to be his magnum opus. That having been said, beware of reading this for the wrong reasons, or with the wrong grounding.

I cannot stress the latter point any further than it has been, but I must say this: If you have never read René Guénon before, do not read this book! To those without proper grounding in Guénon's other works, such as 'East and West' or 'The Crisis of the Modern World', this book will seem full of strange enigmas and asides, and things that may not, on the surface, appear to be related to the topic at hand. However, for those who have read and properly comprehended one or both of those, particularly 'Crisis', what is said here will make far more sense, a great many enigmas will be cleared up, and many things that may have seemed to be off-topic and/or useless information will be put in their proper place in the reader's mind.

I can say little that hasn't been said by other reviewers (or that Guénon didn't say himself!), so instead I would like to devote a few moments to do what they didn't, and clear up any doubts that may've been put in your mind by the two reviewers who didn't recommend 'The Reign of Quantity'.

To answer the one-star review, one person's inability to comprehend something does not make it a waste of your time and money if you can, and no, Guénon's references to the Indian and other revealed traditions are not at all out of place; he points to one unified Truth through all of them (and if you wonder how, when there are so many apparent contradictions between them, keep reading; they're not as contradictory as you might think), and understanding them all in this light is the key to everything Guénon teaches (one might leave it at 'the key to everything'), for he relates everything, as it should be related, back to the one universal Truth that guides all things. In fact, to have omitted the references he made to those revealed traditions would have been irresponsible: The real confusion would come by separating those revealed traditions which point to the Truth from the very Truth by which he makes his arguments; they are all interconnected, and must all be understood.

And as for the three-star review, René Guénon is not relentlessly negative. As other reviewers have stated, he is purely intellectual and not the least bit sentimental, and he is also describing the crisis and downfall of the modern world; the end of a Manvantara. The former may not sit well with many modern readers, since sentimentalism is so prevalent, but as another reviewer stated, "sentimentalism is nothing more than a transpose of a catatonic and truculent rationalism in which the Western man has been drowning since the tide of senility began in 14th century under the guise of 'Renaissance'", and to do the latter, that is, describe the downfall of the modern world, one can do little not to sound 'negative', although he actually does that very well: He describes it in a purely intellectual light, which may come out sounding 'negative' to some, but in the end stresses that the end of the cycle and the very 'malefic' influences he speaks of are nonetheless part of the universal Order.

As for his 'tortured prose', yes, his style of writing is rather unorthodox and can be difficult to get one's head around, but as a reviewer of 'Crisis' put it: "Guenon is probably one of the few authors who uses semicolons and colons more frequently than periods in his ultra-dense prose. His train of thought is difficult to follow but once concentrated upon closely it is apparent how insightful Guenon is explaining his subject." I would add first that part, but by no means all, of it has something to do with the translation. Even with that said, I must say that it is actually, while unorthodox, a wonderful style of writing that has influenced my own greatly. While there are many asides and the basic 'gist' may be made harder to grasp, his preference for stating things in full over 'cutting corners' to reduce wordiness help to explain his point with crystal clarity; to put it another way, he does not sacrifice content or meaning to simplicity (remember his words when he says that he's not trying to make his work accessible to the majority of readers, but to the Elect, and he compromises nothing in that regard; also, to those who've read 'Reign', recall his comments about simplification and modernity).

Also, his 'meaningless' asides are not so at all, unless you lack, as I've said before, a proper understanding of Guénon (read 'Crisis' first!). They serve to give a greater, fuller understanding of the subject, as opposed to the narrow, metaphysically-deprived critique that it would be without them. They also 'connect the dots', if you will, between his various works (in fact, many of them can be seen as a preparation for reading his other works, so if you don't plan to do that, yes, I suppose those of them are literally meaningless for you), and at any rate they enlighten those of us who care to understand his work beyond the topic at hand; they are, to those who understand him, actually a vast treasure-trove of information. His asides are by no means reduced in worth simply because one person cannot understand the author's reason for putting them there, and I hope that new readers of his don't take that comment about them to heart during their reading experience.

And with that, I end this review with an iteration of my dismay that I couldn't give this work 10+/5 stars for the author's brilliant insight and critique of the modern age that has stood fast against the quickly-changing tide of the modern world. René Guénon is quite possibly the most enlightened man to have lived since at least the dawn of the 'modern age' (by his reckoning; c. 1400), alongside other great thinkers such as A. K. Coomaraswamy, and his works shall until the end of our present Manvantara be a bonanza of wonderful information and metaphysics that have their base in the revealed traditional doctrines which, as Guénon spent his life doing, all point to the one universal Truth.

I must admit, it's taken me several tries to work my way through this. Guenon's use of quotes and semicolons to extend the length of phrases ranks here at an all time high. Many sentences here stretch for half a page.

That said, I'm convinced that may be the fault of the translator, as not all of Guenon's works are quite so bad in that regard.

Regardless, I won't dwell much in this short review on the topics of the book itself, for one reason alone: either you are already familiar with Guenon and his definition of Tradition, in which case you don't need my introduction to his ideas and thought streams, or else you are new to Guenon and to the Traditional.

If you fall into the former category, by all means charge ahead into this work and digest it. It will pay off. Quite a few of the chapters - Time Changed Into Space, The Fissures in the Great Wall, and Psychic Residues, to count several - are downright illuminating and thought proviking, provided you've had the proper grounding in Guenonian thought necessary to assimilate the contents of this book.

If you fall into the later category, do not start here. I cannot stress this enough. Between the enormous phrase structure and the complexity of the ideas here presented, you will be turned off. Start instead with the easier-to-digest 'Crisis of the Modern World' or perhaps 'East and West', and then come back to absorb 'Reign.' Your efforts will pay off in your ability to actually comprehend this book.

The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of The Times

Nowadays, there are so many signs of unbalance in our contemporary world that almost everybody is aware that something serious is happening, at many levels. Nor it would be necessary to mention the mockery done with religions and doctrines all over tha world. If the misfortune called communism accomplished its disastrous and devastating role as genocide and destructor of religions, the "democratic liberalism" also accomplished its side in another style: it placed above all the adoration of money, relegating the religions as a type of moral or ethics decoration. The nature, constantly violated and "defeated", manifests clear signs: the global temperature increases and phenomenons as "El Niño" are each year more devastating. The family, as institution, is in undoubtly disaggregation from decades and today we see children not only disrespecting their parents, but challenging them. Even in the vestiments we can verify disturbing signs: the masculine and the feminine less and less is distinguished and, with torn clothes, many seem to search the identification with the poverty, the dirty, the debauchee. Even the duration of things is dramatically abbreviated, at this times of "disposable", denouncing the inconstancy and the remainless, the mischievous consumistic voracity tending to incredible ends. Less and less are distinguished permanent values, principles and foundations. The visible result is the generalization of the unbalance, external and internal. People lives anxious, without understanding the true reasons of this state of things. "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" is a masterly work, without parallel, that investigates and exposes, step by step, all the gears of the plan of "desconstruction" and annihilation of the world, from the so called "Renascence", - that in fact constitutes the death of authentic values much more than the birth of other - until our days, with pseudo-religions, "holistics" movements and "ecumenicals" anything, converging for the establishment of a homogeneity and hegemony of the laica and materialistic mentality today dominating everything and all with hallucinating speed, prefiguring the coming of the "Anti-Christ", whose arrive is foreseen, under different names, by all the authentic traditions. The Institute René Guénon of Traditional Studies since several years dedicates its efforts to the teaching of traditional themes based in René Guénon's work. We indicate as a complement to the reading of this book "The Crisis of the Modern World" and "East and West", of the same author. Luiz Pontual IRGET

Perhaps Guenon's greatest work, this book analyses the metaphysical roots of the crisis of this age, explaining the causes of the present condition to lie in modern civilization's rebellion against tradition -- not just one tradition, but the recurring and perennial tradition of every premodern civilization. The author's penetrating insight into modern science and the results of its monopoly over our age is fascinating. His critique of modernity is grounded in the traditional religious view which views human temporal existence not as an evolution, but a degression culminating in the "signs of the hour" and the emergence of the dajjal or the anti-christ. Guenon's radical critique of the 20th Century will no doubt be unpalatable for those to whom the wisdom of the ancients is ignorance relative to the quantum physics of today; but Guenon was well aware of the intellectual totalitarianism of the modern world-view. His objective was not a mass conversion to tradition. He sought rather to help open the eyes of a small number of people to the realities of the modern world and the illusion of progress. And this he did. A good number of prominent intellectuals were influenced by his works; among them: Huston Smith, Martin Lings, Gai Eaton, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, James Cutsinger, Toshiko Izutsu and host of others. Guenon died in the late 50's in Cairo, Egypt where he lived for almost twenty years as an adeherent of the Muslim faith. His last words were "Allah, Allah".

I consider Guenon's masterful 'Reign of Quantity' to be the most important book I have ever read. My own well-thumbed copy is dog-eared, scored and annotated throughout, and is pretty well falling to bits from all the handling it's received.

Why do I value it so highly? Because it gives us THE BIG PICTURE, the larger context in terms of which we can come to understand the madness that is raging all around us and sweeping humanity to its destruction.

In addition, by demonstrating to us that the relentless descent of the world is a necessary evil as it moves further and further away from spirit and plunges ever more deeply into matter, Guenon enables us to reconcile ourselves to what has always been inevitable.

Read him, and you will understand your world. Fail to read him and you won't. It's that simple.

This is one of the most important books you will ever read.
Not easy reading - maybe the translation made it more difficult.
But absolutely worth the effort.
For those who have the ears to hear.

The Illusion of Ordinary Life as the Degenerative Path to the Catastrophic
From an understanding of Rene Guenon's `The Reign of Quantity'

In modern times we have all accepted a reality based solely on and limited to the five senses. During the past 6,000 years, the period known as the Kali Yuga, our innate abilities to perceive the Invisible Realms have atrophied to the point that most humans are incapable of even a remote awareness of, much less the Joy of interacting with, that which we cannot see, hear, touch, etc.

It is therefore understandable why most simply deny the very existence of such realities. They are not capable of perceiving them. The result of this disastrous defect of our comprehension has produced the ludicrous concept of ordinary life or real life, which in its absolute denial of anything beyond the five senses engulfs us all in total delusion.

Tragically, anything that is perceived beyond the accepted norm is regarded as weird, strange & bizarre, and is consequently relegated to a sort of carnival-freak-show, yellow-journalism state of mind, which derides believers for indulging in childish entertainment and titillation.

Such a deluded error is not only adolescent in its comprehension, but is also the densest of illusion because it ignores the underlying metaphysics that are the actual source of the external holographic matrix which we, in our limited state of consciousness, mistake for reality.

This confused and confining insistence on ordinary life has become more severe as time has drawn us down into the final stages of this cycle of time. As the Veils of Illusion have solidified around us, human consciousness on this planet has successfully degenerated into the aggressively empty, heartless, consumer society we currently inhabit barely half-alive.

The term `get real' is symptomatic of the toxic soup our brains are submerged in. We are mired in an integrated perceptual structure, a gestalt, an invisible sea of delusion that so completely permeates our thinking and our consciousness that we do not even begin to realize how cut off we are from our true nature and the multitude of Myriad Worlds. Rene Guenon uses the term multiple states of being.

We have become engulfed in 'quantity', in enumeration. We are devoted to measuring the endless surfaces of what we imagine to be solid matter. We have lost all connection to any truth beyond what we have come to accept as the human state. Frightened by what we consider non-human, or above human, supra-human, we term these experiences unreal and, to our great detriment, allow only what we judge to be real and sensible into our hologram.

Thus we have fallen into density and allowed our consciousness to be programmed and brainwashed. Human consciousness has become limited to the point of extinction.

The progressive degeneration of science and philosophy has brought us down to a common, as in mediocre, level of understanding of this world. In thus reducing everything to human terms, we have moved from rationalism to materialism. We are not merely human.

We are the precious fragments of Isness projected into Time and Space through the data-collecting vehicle that can be described as human, but is not limited to that. This gestalt of ignorance of our true being has, as Guenon brilliantly says, penetrated and impregnated the whole nature of the individual. We are completely submerged in our ignorance.

We have locked our consciousness in a very small, moldy, dark basement - a frequency prison created by us. This acceptance of quantifying surfaces as the be-all and end-all of knowledge has brought us to mechanism and materialism, and has given the priesthood of this absurdly limited so-called science an inordinate and totally undeserved control over our lives.

We believe almost anything our blinded-by-science hierarchal PhD priesthood imposes upon us. Despite the fact that these factual scientific oh-so-holy proclamations change almost daily in a never-ending mega-ego battle for warlike intellectual dominance and desperation for funding, we hang on to every soap-opera word of the latest ivory tower edicts.

Rene Guenon tells us that truth in modern times has been lost and replaced by utility and convenience. Science is no longer the pure search for truth, but the slave of commerce and industry. Science has become the servant of our consumer cravings and is dependent on producing profitable results for its survival.

Rather that holding these minions of corporate industry in high esteem and allowing them to dictate the atmosphere of our very being, these unfortunates who have been blinded-by-science should be regarded as what they are - beings whose God-given ability to perceive what lies beyond the five senses has atrophied, become functionally extinguished, and is now dead & gone!

Like stubborn children competing with each other for parental attention, these priests of science have become so blind that they are incapable of considering any idea outside of their own ego driven turf. They seem to have lost the ability to think in any other way.

The measurement of that which can be registered by the five senses, in the guise of modern science, may indeed go on ad nauseum forever; but in doing so, leaves us all skating on the thin ice of a miasma of amnesia - and in no way reflects the totality of existence.

The quantification of the material world without an understanding of the
Invisible Realms that support it, which in fact are the actual Source of such apparent solidity, is the degenerative path to the catastrophic conclusion of this cycle of time, the Kali Yuga, our current Age of Conflict and Confusion.

The Reign of Quantity & The Signs of The Times

Nowadays, there are so many signs of unbalance in our contemporary world that almost everybody is aware that something serious is happening, at many levels. Nor it would be necessary to mention the mockery done with religions and doctrines all over tha world. If the misfortune called communism accomplished its disastrous and devastating role as genocide and destructor of religions, the "democratic liberalism" also accomplished its side in another style: it placed above all the adoration of money, relegating the religions as a type of moral or ethics decoration. The nature, constantly violated and "defeated", manifests clear signs: the global temperature increases and phenomenons as "El Niño" are each year more devastating. The family, as institution, is in undoubtly disaggregation from decades and today we see children not only disrespecting their parents, but challenging them. Even in the vestiments we can verify disturbing signs: the masculine and the feminine less and less is distinguished and, with torn clothes, many seem to search the identification with the poverty, the dirty, the debauchee. Even the duration of things is dramatically abbreviated, at this times of "disposable", denouncing the inconstancy and the remainless, the mischievous consumistic voracity tending to incredible ends. Less and less are distinguished permanent values, principles and foundations. The visible result is the generalization of the unbalance, external and internal. People lives anxious, without understanding the true reasons of this state of things. "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" is a masterly work, without parallel, that investigates and exposes, step by step, all the gears of the plan of "desconstruction" and annihilation of the world, from the so called "Renascence", - that in fact constitutes the death of authentic values much more than the birth of other - until our days, with pseudo-religions, "holistics" movements and "ecumenicals" anything, converging for the establishment of a homogeneity and hegemony of the laica and materialistic mentality today dominating everything and all with hallucinating speed, prefiguring the coming of the "Anti-Christ", whose arrive is foreseen, under different names, by all the authentic traditions. The Institute René Guénon of Traditional Studies, (www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/9638) since several years dedicates its efforts to the teaching of traditional themes based in René Guénon's work. We indicate as a complement to the reading of this book "The Crisis of the Modern World" and "East and West", of the same author. Luiz Pontual IRGET

Hoje em dia , os sinais de desequilibrio em nosso mundocontemporaneo sao tantos que quase todos se do conta de que algo graveeste ocorrendo, em diversos noveis. Nem seria necessario mencionar o verdadeiro achincalhe que se faz das religioes e doutrinas por todo o mundo. Se esta desgraca chamada comunismo cumpriu seu nefasto e devastador papel como genocida e destruidor de religioes, o "liberalismo democrata" tambem cumpriu o seu lado em outro estilo : colocou acima de tudo a adoracao ao dinheiro, relegando as religioes como um tipo de "decoracao" moral ou etica. A natureza, constantemente violada e "vencida", manifesta claramente sinais ameacadores ; a temperatura global vem aumentanto e fenômenos como "El Nino" a cada ano se reapresenta mais devastador. A familia, como instituicao, esta em franca desagregacao ha decadas e hoje vemos filhos nao apenas desrespeitando seus pais, mas desafiando-os. Ate mesmo nas vestimentas podemos constatar sinais inquietantes : o masculino e o feminino cada vez menos se distingue e, com roupas rasgadas, muitos parecem ter gosto em se identificar com a miseria, o sujo, o devasso. A duracao mesma das coisas este dramaticamente abreviada, na epoca dos "descartiveis", denunciando deste modo a inconstancia e a impermanencia, a voracidade consumista levada a extremos inacreditaveis. Cada vez menos se distinguem os valores permanentes, principios e fundamentos. O resultado visivel é a generalizacao do desequilibrio, externo e interno as pessoas, que vivem ansiosas, sem compreender os verdadeiros motivos deste estado de coisas. "O Reino da Quantidade e os Sinais dos Tempos" é uma obra magistral, sem paralelo, que investiga e desmascara passo a passo todas as engrenagens do sinistro plano de "desconstrucao" e aniquilamento do mundo, desde a chamada "Renascença", - que de fato constituiu efetivamente muito mais a morte de valores autonticos do que o nascimento de outros - ate nossos dias, com pseudo-religioes, movimentos "holisticos" e "ecumênicos", tudo convergindo para o estabelecimento de uma homogeneidade e hegemonia da mentalidade laica e materialista hoje dominando a tudo e a todos com velocidade alucinante, prefigurando a vinda do "Anti-Cristo", cujo advento esta previsto , sob diferentes nomes, por todas as tradicoes autonticas. O Instituto Rene Guenon de Estudos Tradicionais , Indicamos como complemento a leitura deste livro "A Crise do Mundo Moderno" e "Oriente e Ocidente", do mesmo autor.

Luiz Pontual IRGET