The PNEUMATIC is a man who identifies a priori with his spiritual substance and thus always remains faithful to himself; he is not a mask unaware of his scope, as is the man enclosed in accidentality. (GTUFS: PlayMasks, The Play of Masks)
In practice, it suffices to know that to say “yes” to God, while abstaining from what takes one away from Him and accomplishing what brings one closer to Him, pertains to the “PNEUMATIC” nature and assures salvation, all question of “original sin” and “predestination” aside; thus in practice there is no problem, save that which we conceive and impose upon ourselves. The “PNEUMATIC” is the man who so to speak incarnates “faith which saves,” and thus incarnates its content, . . . he cannot sin – except perhaps from the point of view of appearances – because, his substance being “faith” and therefore “justice through faith,” all that he touches turns to gold. (GTUFS: ChristIslam, The Question of Evangelicalism)
The “PNEUMATIC” may incarnate either an attitude of knowledge or of love, although the former manifests more directly his essential nature; he is not necessarily a great sage, but he is necessarily a pure and quasi-angelic man. (GTUFS: EsoterismPW, The True Remedy)
A PNEUMATIC is in a way the “incarnation” of a spiritual archetype, which means that he is born with a state of knowledge which, for other people, would actually be the goal, and not the point of departure; the PNEUMATIC does not “go forward” towards something “other than himself”; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is – namely his archetype – by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity. He becomes rid of them by means of ritual supports – “sacraments”, one might say – not forgetting meditation and prayer; but his situation is nonetheless quite other than that of ordinary men, even prodigiously gifted ones. From another point of view it must be recognized that a born gnostic is by nature more or less independent, not only as regards the “letter” but also as regards the “law”; and this does not make his relation with the ambience any simpler, either psychologically or socially. At this point the following objection has to be parried: does not the “path” consist for every man in getting rid of obstacles and in “becoming oneself”? Yes and no; that is to say: metaphysically it is so, but not humanly because, I repeat, the PNEUMATIC “realizes” or “actualizes” what he “is”, whereas the non-PNEUMATIC realizes what he “must become” – a difference at once “absolute” and “relative” about which one could argue indefinitely. The quality of the born-gnostic involves not only modes but also degrees; there is the difference between the jnani and the bhakta on the one hand and, on the other, differences of plenitude or breadth in the manifestation of the archetype. In any case, the PNEUMATIC is situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis – where there is no “before” or “after” – so that the archetype which he personifies or “incarnates”, and which is his true “himself” or “his very self” can, at any moment, pierce through the contingent, individual envelope; it is therefore really “himself” who is speaking. The real gnostic does not attribute any “state” to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather – through an “instinct for holding back” – to disguise his nature inasmuch as he has, in any case, awareness of “cosmic play”(lila) and it is hard for him to take secular and worldly persons seriously, that is to say, “horizontal” beings who are full of self-confidence and who remain, “humanists” that they are, below the vocation of man. What the natural gnostic seeks, from the point of view of “realization”, is much less a “path” than a “framework” – a traditional, sacramental and liturgical setting which will allow him to be ever more genuinely “himself”, namely a particular archetype of the celestial “iconostasis” . . . “Know thyself” was the inscription written above the portico of the Temple of Delphi; that is, know thine immortal essence but also, by that very token, know thine archetype. This injunction no doubt applies in principle to every man, but it applies to the PNEUMATIC in a far more direct manner, in the sense that he has, by definition, awareness of his celestial model in spite of the flaws which his earthly shell may have undergone in contact with an all too uncongenial ambience. (GTUFS: StudiesCR, Volume 17, Numbers 1 & 2, A Note on René Guénon)
Pneumatic / Psychic / Hylic: The “PNEUMATIC” is the man in whom the sense of the sacred takes precedence over other tendencies, whereas in the case of the “psychic” it is the attraction of the world and the accentuation of the ego that take priority, without mentioning the “hylic” or “somatic” who sees in sensory pleasure an end in itself. (GTUFS: SufismVQ, Paradoxes of an Esoterism)