Michael Davison

“To become a Compassionate One is to become the likeness of
the Compassionate God experiencing infinite sadness over
undisclosed virtualities; it is to embrace, in a total religious
sympathy, the theophanies of these divine Names in all faiths.
But this sympathy, precisely, does not signify acceptance of
their limits; it signifies rather that in opening ourselves to them
we open them to the expansion that the primordial divine sym-
pathesis demands of them; that we increase their divine light to
the maximum; that we "emancipate" them-as the divine
Compassion did in pre-eternity-that is, emancipate them from
the virtuality and the ignorance which still confine them in their
narrow intransigence. By thus taking them in hand, religious
sympathy enables them to escape from the impasse, that is, the
sin of metaphysical idolatry. For this sympathy alone renders a
being accessible to the light of theophanies. Mankind discloses
the refusal of the divine Names in many forms, ranging from
atheism pure and simple to fanaticism with all its variants. All
come from the same ignorance of the infinite divine Sadness,
yearning to find a compassionate servant for His divine Names.
The Gnostic's apprenticeship consists in learning to practice
fidelity to his own Lord, that is, to the divine Name with which
he, in his essential being, is invested, but at the same time to hear the precept of Ibn •Arabi: "Let thy soul be as matter for all
forms of all beliefs. " One who has risen to that capacity is an
• arif, an initiate, "one who through God sees in God with the
eye of God. "Those who accept and those who decline are
subject to the same authority: the God in function of whom you
live is He for whom you bear witness, and your testimony is
also the judgment you pronounce on yourself.”
― Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi

“There are gods,’ he said, ‘there is Divinity. The countless grotesque, tragic, false, and crude religions are only sensory organs, ways our world touches what transcends and creates us. They are the insect’s antennae, the grub’s palps, the open eyes of soothsayers, through which we touch? attract? drive off? murder? love? the divinity that approaches. The eternal schizophrenia of religions, tangled in rites and interdictions, stained with visions and blood, inverted against conscience and happiness, and preaching another conscience, another happiness, is like a parricide who wants his father to be king, and kills him to become one himself. Religions are madness, and yet they are the only way, since they are the only way out of our world that the mind (our organ to detect gates and exits) can imagine, the only great purpose for which the universe lives. Because an enormous conspiracy in the world is being plotted against our being: everything, the pencil we touch and feel as hard, the pain that darts through our molars, identical days, the fact that every morning we open our eyes in the same room with the same things in their places, the sun that never suddenly turns green – everything wants to convince us, against all evidence, that existence actually exists, that the world is real, that we are truly living in a true world. That we should be calm, that we should be born, that we should live, that we should die comfortably. But how can the wall exist in front of me? In a single second when the voices in your ears stop, in one pure moment of meditation, all of the demented propaganda collapses, and we begin to shake the bones of our minds awake, trampling down madness with madness. Because everything and everyone, however monstrous or distorted, whether motionless in catatonic dances, rounding their circular retina, clanking rat skulls at the waist, crowned with human teeth, or spit on with gold and myrrh – these images themselves are phantoms produced by neurons, along with acetylcholinesterase. Gods and demons, with cannibalistic mouths or with no mouths at all, say the same thing, always the same thing: You are not from here. Here is not your kingdom. You must leave, you must find your world, the world where you have been and where, without your knowing, you long to be. You have to search for the exit, this is the purpose of your life, for the rules of the game at the level where you are. Everything conspires to convince you that there is no exit, and truly an exit does not exist until you search for it. And in a way, the searching is the exit, as though the space you move through with hope and faith were to harden behind you, and construct your exit tunnel, your own, open only to you, like a pore that spreads suddenly in the flower-petal skin of Divinity. No sect, no church can take you there directly. Prayers and postures cannot help. Churches are like dreams: the vein of ore runs thin through many strata of useless sediment. The art of belief is the art of sorting. But everything in a rite is a sign, an indicator, flickering under centuries of perversion: a wonder, a hallucination, a catastrophe, a bearded face in a triangle of rays – here, there is nothing to find, but from here, you can begin to search. Wonders exploding like a carpet of bombs over Judea. The billion faces of Krishna, permitted for a moment to a few human eyeballs. Turquoise giants, god-goddesses, from the brain of he who listens to Bardo Thodol. Koans and mandalas and the Great Vehicle and the Lesser Vehicle and the light of Tabor and interior prayer. All of the techniques of ecstasy, all of the alkaloids of sacred plants and those distilled (coca and angel dust and speed and acid and grass and Jacob’s ladder and smack), all dreams, all mantras – all of it leads here, to this hall, and you have all arrived here by searching along one of the endlessly multiple paths.”
― Mircea Cărtărescu, Blinding

“Lonely's a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell and then makes the sunshine seem even brighter after it travels along. Like when you're far away from home and you miss the people you love and it seems like you're never going to see them again. But you will, and you do, and then you're not lonely anymore.
Lonesome's a whole other thing. Incurable. Terminal. A hole in your heart you could drive a semi truck through. So big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddamn world can fill it up because you dug it yourself and you're digging it still, one lie, one disappointment, one broken promise at a time.”
― Steve Earle, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive

“But what I want to say is this: this will happen to everybody at some point - a deconstruction of the known self. It may not necessarily be a death, but there will be some kind of devastation. We see it happen to people all the time: a marriage breakdown, or a transgression that has a devastating effect on a persons, life, or health issues, or a betrayal, or a public shaming, or a separation, or someone loses their kids, or whatever it is. And it shatters them completely, into one million pieces, and it seems like there is no coming back. It’s over. But in time they put themselves together piece by piece. And the thing is, when they do that, they often find that they are a different person, a changed, more complete, more realized, more clearly drawn person. I think that’s what it is to live, really – to die in a way, and to be reborn. And sometimes it can happen many times over, that complex re-ordering of ourselves.”
― Nick Cave, Faith, Hope and Carnage