Clive Roberts’s Reviews > The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism > Status Update

One of the other reviewers called this a very dense book, a statement I would agree with, but that is because each page contains a multitude of additional avenues for research. My overall impression so far is that what religion separates, mysticism draws back together —both in the hermetic source of mysticism and in the individual yet universal human connection/relationship with the source—whatever name you use

“Know that the soul, the devil, the angel are not realities outside of you; you are they. Likewise, Heaven, Earth, and the Throne are not outside of you, nor paradise nor hell, nor death nor life. They exist in you; when you have accomplished the mystical journey and have become pure you will become conscious of that.”

“Heaven has always been a metaphor for 7”–The famous zigurat of Babylonia typified the cosmic mountain with seven stories whose colors corresponded respectively to those of the seven Heavens; thus allowing the pilgrim, ritually, to climb to the summit, that is, to the culminating point which is the cosmic north, the pole round which the earth revolves.

This is a new one for me — Psycho-cosmic homologation is the conceptual mapping between the inner human experience (the psyche) and the structure of the universe (the cosmos). It suggests that the mind and the cosmos share the same structural order, allowing the individual to understand themselves by studying the universe, or vice versa.

“Thus the "witness in Heaven" is called the "scales of the suprasensory" (mizan al-ghayb); the beauty of the being who is the witness of contemplation is likewise a means of weighing, since it proves the capacity or incapacity of the soul to perceive beauty as theophany par excellence”

the man of light who speaks through the mouth of Mary Magdalene when…she assumes the predominant role… in the book of the Pistis Sophia, the New Testament of the religion of the man of light: "The power which issued from the Savior and which is now the man of light within us.... My Lord! Not only does the man of light in me have ears but my soul has heard and understood all the words that thou hast spoken..."

the Sages of ancient Persia…the representatives and guardians of this wisdom…in the true sense to their orientation toward the Orient-origin of pure Light. Three centuries before the Byzantine philosopher Gemistus Pletho, Sohravardi's work made a link between Plato and Zarathustra…dominated by the name and wisdom of Hermes. And so the same figure… is that of the heavenly I, the Alter Ego, the eternal partner