Yasmine Ansari

“The Shaykh had a voice so low one could hardly under- stand him, and murmuring as if to himself, he responded: "The fall is neither a lack, nor a defect, even less a sin; if it had not been for the forbidden fruit of the tree, the inexhaustible possibilities of Being would never have been manifested.”
― Tom Cheetham, World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin And Islamic Mysticism

“Human beings... are infinitely diverse and ever-changing in their inward forms.... A human being comes into the world as a potential divine form, but he or she may leave it as practically anything at all—an angel, a saint, a prophet, a devil, an animal, a vegetable.”
― William Chittick

“To be a philosopher is to take to the road, never settling down in some place of satisfaction with a theory of the world, not even a place of reformation, nor of some illusory
transformation of the conditions of this world. It aims for self- transformation, for the inner metamorphosis which is implied by the notion of a new, or spiritual rebirth.... The adventure of the mystical philosopher is essentially seen as a voyage which progresses towards the Light.”
― Henry Corbin

“In the poem, Inanna, unveiled, sees her own mysterious depth, Ereshkigal, who glares back at her. She has an immediate, full experience of her underworld self. That naked moment is like the fifth scene in the Villa of Mysteries where the faun, looking into a mirror bowl, sees reflected back a mask of terrible Dionysus as lord of the underworld. It is the moment of self-confrontation for the goddess of active life and love. Archetypally, these eyes of death are implacable and profound, seeing an immediateness that finds pretense, ideals, even individuality and relatedness, irrelevant. They also hold and enable the mystery of a radically different, precultural mode of perception. Like the eyes in the skulls around the house of the Russian nature goddess and witch, Baba-Yaga, they perceive with an objectivity like that of nature itself and our dreams, boring into the soul to find the naked truth, to see reality beneath all its myriad forms and the illusions and defenses it displays. Western science once aspired to such vision. But we humans do not have such objective eyes. We can see only limited and relative, indeterminate truths. We and our subjectivity are part of the reality we seek to see. Before the vision of Ereshkigal, however, objective reality is unmasked. It is nothing"Neti,neti," as the Sanskrit says and yet everything, the place of paradox behind the veil of the Great Goddess and the temple of wisdom. These eyes see from and embody the starkness of the abyss that takes all back, reduces the dancing, playing maya of the goddess to inert matter and stops life on earth.”
― Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women