Let's ponder this notion around the motive or nature of happiness. I would gather Schuon is expressing something that is beyond therapeutic or conditional outcome that may accompany any insights through practice. We are not chasing happiness just for the sake of happiness, but perhaps to have a relationship with the Source of it. This is a much bigger deal, and probably beyond what most ask for when they get on a spiritual path. For to encounter the Source is to let go of the self that seeks something for itself, including happiness.
Pedagogical tools to free oneself from the conditional mind has its place, but it can't replace ontology and cosmology. This is why Advaita and some schools of Buddhism are good at pointing the us toward liberation from existence, but not necessarily expressing the full extent of the cosmological drama as to why liberation is part of the story and to what ends it may be for existence. Some may posit that liberation is as Eckhart once stated is to live beyond asking why. And yet we still live with wonder of Truth and the telos it has gifted to us. Does it not still matter to inquire where have we come from?, what are we doing here?, and where are we going?
In his terrific book about Schuon, Patrick Laude says Schuon “criticizes the frequent tendency to reduce Zen to a mere psychology, thereby depriving it of its anchorage in transcendence and its rigorous cultivation of a sense of form. What Schuon criticizes in all these cases is the flattening down of theological dogmas and metaphysical principles but also, and above all, all modes of unconscious profanation of religion resulting from a disconnection from the imperatives of transcendence and the sacred.” In other words, if we remove the transcendent nature of Reality and reduce it to a humanitarian ethos of “feel good” and “be kind”, it can easily get diminished to pseudo-spirituality of sentimentality, therapeutic relief, and bland social justice exercises.
Laude adds,
Truth is associated with discernment. It is distinguished from error that it rejects and extinguishes, as it were. It has to do with adequation to reality. In the absence of such an adequation, nothing is truly possible in the spiritual domain. While many modern spiritual seekers would deem intellectual principles to be foreign to spiritual endeavors, and largely inoperative or useless when it comes to realization, Schuon, like most gnostics from the past, sees the intellectual discernment of Reality as a prerequisite for any grounded and sustainable spiritual life.
Discernment is not done to create more dogmatic principles and negate realization, but to create a “virtual realization of its content.” Laude says, “However, far from any alleged intellectualism or abstraction, Schuon asserts time and time again that a consistent understanding of the Absolute gives rise to imperative spiritual and moral consequences” (emphasis mine). Or as they say: as above, so below.
One of the focal points of Schuon's work is “the oneness of the object demands the totality of the subject.” The exclusive reality of the Absolute requires from us all that we are, including our happiness or even our need to be happy.