KathyC

“Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“The precision of existence can never be known by the human mind. That's why the goal of every woman and man is to become human, but the purpose of being human is to leave everything human behind.
To discover this precision, one has to stop being a human and start being the mystery of life itself.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift — and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.”
― Peter Kingsley, Reality

“This sounds most perplexingly complex, but in actual practice it is far simpler than it sounds, because the work is not done with the conscious mind, but with the subconscious mind, and it matters very little in what manner the symbols are pitchforked into it, the strange diemon that sits behind the censor sorts them out, picking that which it requires and rejecting all else, until finally a coherent pattern reappears in consciousness that only requires analysis to yield its significance after the same manner as a dream.

A vision evoked by the use of the Tree is, in fact, an artificially produced waking dream, deliberately motived and consciously related to some chosen subject whereby not only the subconscious content, but also the superconscious perceptions are evoked and rendered intelligible to consciousness.”
― Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah