Myth is not dead if we still feel in our hearts something of the magic of a year that ends and one that begins, of a cycle returning, beginning again, filled with the power of renewal. This eternal recurrence is the essence of the most ancient myths; that the world has been ordained by divinity to return again and again as an emulation of the divine, and this to eternity.
Category: Mysticism
Wandering Thought # 244
A thinker is one who rides his solitude on lofty wings that take him up over and beyond mountains and cities, giving him eyes to see things those who dwell in society never dream of seeing. For that reason, when he speaks no one understands him, and when he comes back to society he must use the mask to be intelligible. If is both a curse and a blessing to go through the world in such a way, unseen, hidden.
The hyper sensitive will feel guilty for things they did not even do, they are always ripe for submission.
We can never be rid of the mystical impulse because science can never exhaust the mystery of life.
Without love even beauty becomes tiring and ultimately a burden.
This solitude, I cultivated it all my life so that it could, one day, be large enough to contain your presence.
Solitude, my sole companion, the only candle lighting the corners of my heart.
Poetry is the translation of the heat between our bodies, the gravity that pulls even stars from their orbit.
لا شعر يوفيها حقها فلغزها أعمق من كل شعر.
صوفيُّ القلبِ والهوى.
Wandering Thought # 120
When was the last time you felt your body as Eros incarnate, as though the fires of creation itself were leaping out of it and could not be contained? When did you last feel your existence entire as a divine fragment, filled with longing for something infinite, overflowing with an incomprehensible madness and an exquisite harmony? When was it you last felt all the stars in the universe pulsing in your single beat of heart, pulsing and pulsing with an irremediable fire that wants to create over and over the entire universe in the image of your love? A thousand lightning churning together through your body, yet deeply imbued with the stillness of dawn?—Ah listen, just wait and listen, the whole of life is within you, it was for you that the universe was created, it was to embrace you that love was born. It is time to open you heart and feel, and let go of the constraints of your mind. Feel, even if it tears you apart; feel this boundless joy that has been your fate since the beginning of time.
Wandering Thought # 111
The person who is spiritually inclined will find himself drifting away from every day practical matters and the concerns and aspirations of normal society. Thus, in time, the language he uses will no long be sufficient to form a common understanding. He will drift on, as though in a cloud of solitude, but he will be connected to something else, something more inward and less tangible, and also something that cannot be shown to others who would demand a justification for his way of existence. This basic rift has since eternal times marked the existence of the artist, poet, philosopher, shaman and saint separating them from the practical and society oriented folks. This is still at work today in such kind of people, but not without a feeling of guilt more acute than before. When in previous ages this spiritual bent and way of life may have been justified, or even seen as a privilege, today, and under the guise of psychology and capitalism, it is looked upon with a wary eye, and the person labeled as psychologically and economically unsound.
Wandering Thought # 89
A summary reading of the history of myths teaches us how religious even the most atheist of us remains; how the religious lives on in us, in our imagination, ideas, impulses, emotions, motives, narratives of life, etc., irrespectively of what our rational mind believes. We remain worshipers in a temple we no longer believe in its existence. We remain idolators of a power in which we ceased to believe, at the very thought of which we cannot hold our laughter, our cynicism — and what is cynicism if not the pain of a wound? We may know a lot more, we moderns, but we feel a lot less and less profoundly, and the world of our feeling, intuition, and imagination has shrunk in proportion to the horizons which our minds have widened. We know no reverence; we are deeply irreverent. The sacred has been expunged from our rational world, and that is a direct correlation with the way we are handling our planet and ourselves.
Wandering Thought # 71
I can only admit to a divinity that takes pleasure in heightening the individual and affirming difference, one that does not seek to dissolve him in oneness but understands him as an expression of that oneness. The individual grows in power and distinction the more his heart is open to the divine, the more he becomes its channel. He is its unique expression though he already lives in its heart.
Wandering Thought # 60
With the poem the poets barter their way into eternity, and that is all the poets have ever done, consciously or not. But then again, eternity is the intuition for which the poem is the medium and conductor, the activity through which eternity expands inside the poet’s heart. So a moment comes where every poet wonders if the poem is in fact more than a poem, a poetry that goes beyond poetry and overflows into life, under and inside the very marrow of life. The poet intuits eternity as a force of life, or, rather, life as an expression of eternity. The poet, then, driven as if by instinct, wants his life lived in harmony with the eternal, as he begins to experience the true opening of the heart. His relationship with life or what life is for him must now come from his openness to eternity, from his intuition of the absolute. He wants to live the eternal as he relates to life. He glorifies being inasmuch as he feels that that is a state of flowering inside the eternal; being, for him, is a state of absolute openness, of total transparency and a life taken over by the eternal. So the images come of the moth and the flame, of the whirling dervish, the ocean, and the boundless sky, and underneath it all, the silence of God, the eternal.
Wandering Thought # 22
Of all values and spiritual disciplines purity is the one at which all others converge. Purity is the kernel of love and truth, the very fire which flames must spread through the body and its inward layers, cleansing, if we are to be raised to God’s sacred altar, the dome of the dawn sky. Ultimately, to have one’s pulsing heart flowing with a water so pure that it is worthy to reflect the endlessly metamorphosing face of the divine—to become the vessel of the divine flame and wine.
Mysticism & Unity
In many a mystic I found a powerlessness so great that its resolution was in drowning the self in some absolute. The mystic’s powerlessness is felt more deeply than the normal man and that is why its resolution must come in more drastic and extreme forms. What is sought is losing the self since it is too great a burden to maintain. This mysticism is hung up on ecstasy and the ecstatic experience; it seeks ecstasy the way a drug is sought — for it wants the feeling of unity that ecstasy provides. And ecstasy comes under many headlines — the sexual, the ritualistic, the poetic, etc. Nothing bothers this mysticism more than its antipode — the rational mind that insists on its definitions and classifications and that approaches the world as if with armour and gloves. But these are two different reactions emanating from the same need. The fact that they hate each other so much gives them away easily.
There is, of course, another kind of mysticism — a mysticism that comes from the abundance of the spirit, one that is well set up on two feet and that realizes unity and completeness through excess of power. But this is to say that mysticism, as is everything in life, is not itself a given experience. In other words — it is a reflection of the man, his weakness and strength.
At bottom, it is about embracing the world as a unity without forfeiting the self and one’s individuality.
Wandering Thought # 13
What enables or allows the mystical experience is not exactly an access into some higher reality, a revelation of the world’s unity, a penetration into the ground of Being or what is. What I mean to say, the mystical experience is not the affect of something that takes place on the outside, our perception of that outside: when one is happy the world becomes bright, and when sad gloomy, and thus with the mystical experience. Life and its fecundity arrive to such an excess within us that, completely self-oblivious and no longer struggling to maintain ourselves, we are carried with the tide and blend with everything around us. The experience itself is an amalgamation of drunkenness and clarity where the world becomes transfigured through and through. We hear the volcano rumbling within us and erupting, and at the same time envision the clarity and peacefulness of a sky in an autumn lake.
But let us beware of turning that into some ultimate truth — for truth is never a question here—, let us beware of submitting our reason and with it our personal will and individuality with our want to hem ourselves there once and for all. Let us not make the mistake of disvaluing our difference in the favour of some sameness that comes under the headline of oneness. Let us not dismantle the hierarchy of values, the inevitability of rule and obedience. Let us not paint our world colourless and pale by wanting to forfeit that which is peculiarly human — our taste.
Rooted in Love 