Knowledge and the Sacred - Seyyed Hossein Nasr

 

Highly recommended: This lecture, Knowledge and the Sacred, was given upon request of Huston Smith when he taught at Hamline University in Minneapolis. Professor Nasr's lecture is based upon his book, Knowledge and the Sacred, which was a compilation of material from his Gifford Lectures.

  Part 1 - 48 minutes
  Part 2 - 40 minutes


Also:

The Heart is the Throne of the All-Merciful

From the 2001 Paths to the Heart Conference at the University of South Carolina.  Professor Nasr's key-note address touches upon the universal doctrine of the heart as the center of the human microcosm in all its levels, from the vital to the emotive to the intellectual and spiritual. It deals with methods of reaching the heart, primarily through prayer, drawing from the teachings of Islam, Christianity and other religions.


Part 1  - 33 minutes

Part 2 - 30 minutes

Inward *and* Outward

"God is at once the First (al-awwal) and the Last (al-akhir), the Outward (al-zahir) and the Inward (al-batin). By function of His outwardness He creates a world of separation and otherness and through His inwardness He brings men back to their Origin. Religion is the means whereby this journey is made possible, and it recapitulates in its structure the creation itself which issues from God and returns unto Him. Religion consists of a dimension which is outward and another which, upon the basis of this outwardness, leads to the inward."  -Seyyed Hossein Nasr

full article here

From "Man and Nature: Permanence Amidst Apparent Change""

"It is often forgotten that before man began to view his relation to nature only from the aspect of change and impermanence, he had become himself inwardly detached from the immutable principle of the Intellect, the nous, which along with revelation is the only factor that can act as the permanent and immutable axis for the machinations of human reason. With the weakening of gnostic elements in Christianity the rational faculty of Western man became gradually estranged from the twin sources of immutability, stability and permanence: namely, revelation and intellectual intuition. The result was on the one hand the nominalist trend, which destroyed philosophical certainty, and on the other this reduction of man to the purely human cut off from any transcendental elements, the man of Renaissance humanism." - Seyyed Hossein Nasr

full article here