terry

promoting islam is a real contribution to becoming a mystic while trashing islam has no positive value in any context...

wake me when young westerners start leaving capitalism...

lol... and god didn't make little green apples and it don't rain in indianapolis in the summertime I've already posted more than enough proof of the absurdity of your remarks, which are about equivalent to saying the clinton's order babies like pizza to have sex with and eat...

rumi tells the story… …Of muhammed as a child of nine or ten. He was sent to the countryside for seasoning, as boys were in those days, to learn the ways of desert pastoralists. One afternoon young muhammed was tending his flock of sheep when a yearling took off into the brush and ran away. He chased after it through thickets and brush for over an hour until the animal fell, bleeding and exhausted as he was himself. He now had to pick it up and carry it back to the flock through the brush in the dark. He looked at the creature with tears in his eyes and said to it, “I understand why you did this to me, my dear one, but why oh why did you do this to yourself?” God, observing this, said, “One day this boy may become a prophet.”

aloha, Can't find a forum here to discuss my topic and am somewhat dismayed to find no sufis here. Any sufi bums around? The classic in the field is toshihiko izutsu's "taoism and sufism" but I would enjoy discussing anything by ibn arabi, william chittick, henry corbin or tom cheetham in relation to the parallels between the mystical nondualism of islam and that of taoism. terry

the other world, the imaginal world… might as well post this here, I guess… The spiritual world is difficult to think about concretely, as the concrete world is opposed to it. We have to make distinctions even to think about it. What was seamless to our ancient ancestors is dualistic to us now, we need to conjure up another world to encompass it. Those familiar with the yi jing may be able to “grasp” this other world as the upper trigram, with the lower trigram symbolizing the material world as we know it, the world of seeming and politics. The upper world is one of merit, virtue, spiritual wayfaring and advancement. While the mystic who dwells there is not particularly interested in advancement, it is the nature of the place to change, for better or for worse. In the yi we have pairs of opposites at every juncture: yin yang at the basic level and then increase and decrease, danger and clarity and all the oppositions of the hexagrams. Upper and lower are distinguished in terms of virtue, whether base or elevated. Goodness, kindness, generosity, sincerity, honesty, and so forth are esteemed and honored in the upper trigram, and given power. In the lower trigram we see the world of money, physical force, lies, opinion, persuasion, advertising buying and selling; the world of individual advantage, competition and the struggle for existence. The world of life and death, generation-corruption. The world everyone knows and believes in. The other world, upper world of the upper trigram, the imaginal world of the mystics and the mental “clearing” of the philosophers, was simply taken as reality by our ancestors, which is why we have their legacy in scripture, song and story; and which is fundamentally built into all our languages. Linguistic science has tried hard to build up language from basic nouns and verbs referring to sensory inputs and find that language is at root metaphoric and mystical, resonant with archetypes and primordial preconsciousness. We are in the position of needing to rediscover things that were quite evident to the greeks, ancient confucians taoists and zen maters, the hebrew prophets, egyptian hermetics etc etc. Unfortunately for us the enlightenment tradition has taken us far from the symbols used in ancient times, embedded in consciousness and language though they still are. There have been visionaries even into the modern era who composed travelogues of this other world, blake, dante, swedenborg. They all used their own metaphoric language but swedenborg’s effort to transpose this transcendent world into mundane imagery is worthy of notice. Swedenborg used christian imagery but altered it to suit him, abandoning the trinity altogether and composing a new narrative much more congenial to neoplatonism. And as henri corbin has noted, swedenborg’s visions are similar the sufism of suhrawardi and ibn arabi, and to the vast literature of spiritual romances in persian. These maps and visions are not significant of themselves, they are important because they may show us the way to begin to make sense of our own inner terrain, and enable us to navigate by means of inspiration and intuition the ways of god as she appears as her divine names, as patience and mercy and beauty and might. In the upper world as visualized by swedenborg the lord is the spiritual sun, the source of truth/light and goodness/warmth. Heaven and hell are composed of angels, the spirits of the dead. They are ranked and located in spiritual spacetime by their virtues, the demons who enjoy like amusements in their hells and angels of similar minds in their various heavens, where they live much as we do in towns and with jobs and recreations and so forth only perfected. Swedenborg works this out in great detail but what I am concerned with is to transpose his ideas into a contemporary sensibility of this space essentially lost to us as a culture, or at least point the way. So. my friends, try look at he world with the added sense that each individual human has a place and destiny in a great field of virtue, and that like minded people are graded and associated with their kind. That the good live in a community of similar good people and that the demonically inlined seek their own level as well. Swedenborg additionally saw this gradation and collection as a whole in the form of a great man, a human figure which in the aggregate was the lord, from the toenails to the eyebrows. The mundane world is where we may make progress toward where we will find ourselves in the afterlife. We choose here to hang out with lowlifes or to seek the company of the wise and virtuous. If you have ever felt yourself more connected to ancient virtue than to your contemporaries, you may be able to relate to what I am saying. The point, however, is to assert that people of virtue are more connected to their angelic counterparts than they are to their mundane families and friends. Henry corbin’s central insight was what he called “the angel out ahead.” Every being - even god - has an angel leading them on. Their own personal angel, one’s character as fate (“character is destiny” said mystic heraclitus). Students of the yi jing know that everything is in constant motion, constant flux; anicca, or impermanence. The individual is not a static snapshot of an existing thing but a dynamic work in progress at all times. We are as we are drawn.

from the dionysian vision of the world, friedrich nietzsche Dionysian art is centered on the play with intoxication, with the state of ecstasy. There are two powers above all else that elevate the naive men of nature to the self-forgetting of intoxication: the drive of springtime and narcotic drink. Their workings are symbolized in the figure of Dionysus. In both states, the principium individuationis is sundered and the subjective disappears entirely before the erupting force of the generally human, indeed, the common-to-all, the natural. The festivals of Dionysus not only forge a union between man and man, but reconcile man and nature. The earth offers up its gifts freely, the wildest beasts approach peaceably; the flower-garlanded wagon of Dionysus is drawn by panthers and tigers. All the enclosing boundaries laid fast between persons by necessity and contingency disappear: the slave is a free man, the noble and the lowly-born unite in the same Bacchic choruses. In ever-greater throngs, the gospel of "the harmony of worlds" rolls from place to place. Singing and dancing, the human manifests himself as member of a high, more ideal commonality; he has unlearnt walking and speech. But more: he feels himself enchanted and he has actually become something other. As the animals speak and the earth gives forth milk and honey, so there sounds out from him something supernatural. He feels himself a god; what else lives only in his power of imagination, he senses now within himself. What are images and statues to him now? The human is no longer artist, but has become artwork; he is as ecstatically and exaltedly transformed as before he saw the gods transformed in dreams. The artistic force of nature, no longer that of a human, now reveals itself-a nobler clay, a more precious marble here is kneaded and hewn: the human. This human, formed by the artist Dionysus, stands in relation to nature as the statue does to the Apollonian artist. Now, if intoxication is nature's play with the human, then the Dionysian artist's creating is play with intoxication. If one has not experienced it oneself, this state can only be grasped by analogy: it is similar to dreaming and at once feeling the dream to be a dream. Just so, the servant of Dionysus must himself be intoxicated and at the same time lying in wait behind himself, observing. It is not in alternation between clarity and intoxication, but in their entanglement, that Dionysian artistry shows itself.

from the liner notes back of another side of bob dylan "i could make you crawl if i was payin' attention" he said munchin' a sandwich in between chess moves "what d' you wanna make me crawl for?" "i mean i just could" "could make me crawl" "yeah, make you crawl!" "humm, funny guy you are" "no, i just play t' win, that's all" "well if you can't win me, then you're the worst player i ever played" "what d' you mean?" "i mean i lose all the time" his jaw tightened an' he took a deep breath "hummm, now i gotta beat you"

from gabriel marcel, the mystery of being What are we to understand by an ideal city? Let us put aside every characteristic that belongs specifically to a material city. What remains is the idea of a place where people live together and where exchanges of goods and services of all sorts take place. Certainly, when we talk of such exchanges, we evoke once more an image of physical transactions. I bring along some banknotes and I buy an object which has a stated price. But, after all, there are other exchanges of an infinitely more subtle kind. I go into a museum, for instance, and I bring with me a certain number of ideas, or rather a preliminary grounding of experience, which enables me to understand, or rather to appreciate, works of art that might otherwise have left me indifferent. It may be objected that it is improper to speak of an exchange in this instance, since I give nothing to the work of art; but that is only true from a grossly material point of view. There is a deeper sense in which one can say that the work is enriched by the admiration it inspires and that it undergoes, in a sense, a real growth and development. This mysterious phenomenon which cannot, of course, leave any palpable traces belongs, in a way, to the ideal city. Let us notice, in passing, that a town, when it deserves the name of a town, and is not a mere juxtaposition of buildings, has itself something of the function of the museum; it offers spiritual nourishment to those who live in it, and they in their turn help on the growth of what one might call its spiritual substance. Let us see how these very simple remarks can throw some light on the notion of the ideal city itself and on its connections with the notion of truth. As always, we have been tempted to cling to a physical representation. Just as the city of stone or wood is laid out to get the best light available, so we have imagined the ideal city as constructed in such a fashion that it can be illuminated by a truth that is external to it. But the relationship is not the same in both cases ; where the city of stone or wood seems to have a prior existence in itself without the light being a necessary constituent part of that existence, the ideal city, as we have glimpsed, does draw its verv existence from that other light which is truth. This certainly gives us only a very abstract and general grasp of what we are talking about, but it is enough to show how impossible it would be to represent the ideal city in an objective fashion. The best image, indeed, that we can here evoke that city by, is the simple one of a discussion about ideas in which both the conversationalists are so interested in their topic that each forgets about himself, which is to say, really, about the personal impression that he is making on the other; for the tiniest touch of self-complacency would lower the tone of the discussion. The very soul of such discussions is the joy of communicating, not necessarily the joy of finding that one's views agree with another’s; and this distinction between communication and agreement has great importance. It is just as if two climbers were tackling the same hill, up different approaches ; allowing that the climbers can communicate directly with each other, at any moment, through portable radio or television sets. But there is something paradoxical in this situation, even when our imagination has grasped it properly. Truth is at once what the two conversationalists, or the two climbers, are aware of striving towards and it is also what pushes them up their hill ; which is to say that it is at once in front of them and behind them, the love of truth may be a sort of mysterious joy in moving against this intelligible background, within this intelligible setting? Though the joy certainly is a precarious and threatened one.

think of all the hockey stick graphs showing great changes in the last hundred years, most obviously population... the history of the human race is reaching a crescendo... patterns will not keep repeating on historical time scales... only question is how fast the lemmings go off the cliff... and how complete the mass extinction

from gabriel marcel, the mystery of being: …there is one obvious point that can be made here it is that after I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a painful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it; the essential quality of this consolation lies in the fact that, by opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle. But what sort of struggle was it? Let us recall some points we have previously made. We cannot properly talk of a struggle against the facts; for let me repeat it, the facts have no existence or power that is intrinsic to themselves; we ought to talk, rather of a struggle against oneself. Here again we find that ambiguity in the notion of the self which I have so often remarked on: the self that is all desire has been fighting against what I shall from now on call the spirit of truth. But what is it in the self that feels this consolation, this sense of liberation, which is certainly felt when a painful truth has been recognized? Can we think of this spirit of truth as itself capable of feeling joy or of feeling pain? And on the other hand is it not a contradiction in terms that the desiring self, which has in a sense been conquered in the battle, should feel a strange satisfaction in its own defeat? Must we at this point insert some third, mediating term shall we speak of a self which is neither the desiring self nor the spirit of truth? But who can fail to recognize that this dissociation within the self is artificial and that we cannot isolate, in order to transform them into distinct entities, the various aspects of a single life, which is, precisely, the life of one self? What we have to grasp and we can only succeed in doing so by exorcizing every deceptive metaphor is that, in the light of truth, I succeed in diminishing that permanent temptation that assails me to conceive reality, or to represent it to myself, as I should like it to be. In the light of truth, in the presence of truth; it is just however obscure this may seem as if this truth possessed a stimulating power, as if it were able to purify me, as a sea wind can or the piney tang of the forests.

from de mello, song of the bird THE SPIRITUAL HEART ATTACK Uncle Tom had a weak heart and the doctor had warned him to be very careful. So when the family learned that he had inherited a billion dollars from a deceased relative they feared to break the news to him lest the news give him a heart attack. So they sought the services of the local pastor, who assured them he would find a way. "Tell me, Tom," said Father Murphy, "if God, in his mercy, were to send you a billion dollars, what would you do with if?" "'I'd give half of it to you for the Church, Father." When he heard that, Father Murphy had a heart attack.'

One of the aspects of the misuse of names as symbolic substitutes for actual realities is the problem of labeling. Like "muslim" or "taoist" or "sufi" or whatever. I am a [your identification here]. And if I am identified, then I am going to identify you in a similar fashion. You blanky blank. In positive terms, we have our genuine shared humanity. THE DIVINE IMAGE (william blake) To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, All pray in their distress, And to these virtues of delight Return their thankfulness. For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Is God our Father dear; And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, Is man, his child and care. For Mercy has a human heart Pity, a human face; And Love, the human form divine; And Peace, the human dress. Then every man, of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine: Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, Turk, or Jew. Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too. We nonetheless dismiss the human form and focus on the heathen, turk and jew. This labeling is deliberately reinforced by elites and politicians who benefit by social stratification, or imagine that they do. Like russian/trumpy disinformation which stokes hatred between any groups that can be opposed in order to keep people's minds off of being systematically exploited and especially to keep them from combining in their own interests. Disruptive ignorance is promoted and moderating good sense marginalized, algorhythmically. Vivekenanda thought that every individual should have their own religion. If everyone is an individual, no one is special. Labeling people and identifying with labels just enables people to buy into conflicts. People can hold grudges for centuries if the conditioning is maintained. Anyhows, here's a story about labeling I thought interesting...gabriel marcel wrote this in 1951 so the bureaucratization by the state has been superseded by capitalist controllers via social media.... from the mystery of being, marcel ...the essential point to grasp now, is that in the end I am in some danger of confusing myself, my real personality, with the State’s official record of my activities ; and we ought to be really frightened of what is implied in such an identification. This is all exemplified in a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour by a young Rumanian called C. Virgil Gheorgiu. In this extraordinary novel, we see a young man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father- in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew; he has no means of proving that he is not a Jew. He is labelled as such. Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S. He is now docketed as ‘Pure Aryan, member of the S.S’. He contrives to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and stuffed with rich food ; but a few days later he is put into prison ; according to his passport, he is a Rumanian subject. Rumanians are enemies; ergo . . .Not the least account is taken of what the young man himself thinks and feels. This is all simply and fundamentally discounted. At the end of the book, he has managed to get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family hope to enjoy a happy reunion. Then the curtain rises for the Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond the Iron Curtain. But the small family group appeals to American sentimentality, and a photograph is taken. ‘Keep smiling’, in fact, are the last words of this interesting novel…

op cit Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous. Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs officers met him, years later. ‘You can tell me now, Nasrudin,’ he said. ‘Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?’ ‘Donkeys,’ said Nasrudin.”

Excerpt From: Idries Shah. “The Sufis.” One day Nasrudin was sitting at court. The King was complaining that his subjects were untruthful. ‘Majesty,’ said Nasrudin, ‘there is truth and truth. People must practise real truth before they can use relative truth. They always try the other way around. The result is that they take liberties with their man-made truth, because they know instinctively that it is only an invention.’ The King thought that this was too complicated. ‘A thing must be true or false. I will make people tell the truth, and by this practice they will establish the habit of being truthful.’ When the city gates were opened the next morning, a gallows had been erected in front of them, presided over by the captain of the royal guard. A herald announced: ‘Whoever would enter the city must first answer the truth to a question which will be put to him by the captain of the guard.’ Nasrudin, who had been waiting outside, stepped forward first. The captain spoke: ‘Where are you going? Tell the truth — the alternative is death by hanging.’ ‘I am going,’ said Nasrudin, ‘to be hanged on those gallows.’ ‘I don’t believe you!’ ‘Very well, then. If I have told a lie, hang me!’ ‘But that would make it the truth!’ ‘Exactly,’ said Nasrudin, ‘your truth.’

perhaps some spiritual bicarbonate of soda for that tummy

let me see, what was the subject here? oh yes, taoism and sufism... religions god no need to say more, eh?

lol lol my yoke is easy, my burden light yeah it was a dig, I knew you couldn't do it... not even three! pretty sad... it's the meanings that are important, bra...not the words... blah blah blah abracadabra

People in hawaii drive me crazy with their talk of spooks, walking wide around grave yards and going all weird about "iwi" or bones. There are valleys people won't go into, lava tubes are avoided. "Sacred" places "protected" from "outsiders." One classroom at kohala high had to be exorcised by religious kupuna over some knockings and furniture moving and wild tales. The people involved were mollified by the rituals and the classroom no longer suffers from psychic phenomena. I was amazed and disheartened at the educated and otherwise reasonable people (my wife and her friends) who took this nonsense seriously. Just more signs of the apocaplypse like anti-science and magic and ghosts. All distractions from the Real, which also thrives on imagination. I don't doubt you experienced something. We are very intuitive and who knows how we know things. Not from spooks though.

AJAHN CHAH "Only one book is worth reading, the heart." "We don't meditate to see heaven, but to end suffering." "A visiting Zen student asked Ajahn Chah, How old are you? Do you live here all year round? I live nowhere, he replied. There is no place you can find me. I have no age. To have age, you must exist, and to think you exist is already a problem. Don't make problems, then the world has none either. Don't make a self. There's nothing more to say." "Why are we born? We are born so that we will not have to be born again." "If you want to wait around to meet the future Buddha, then just don't practice (the Dhamma). You'll probably be around long enough to see him when he comes." "Whatever we do, we should see ourselves. Reading books doesn't ever give rise to anything. The days pass by, but we don't see ourselves. Knowing about practice is practising in order to know." "Remember you dont meditate to get anything, but to get rid of things. We do it, not with desire, but with letting go. If you want anything, you wont find it." "Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with moustache. You won't be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you." "Do not be a bodhisattva, do not be an arahant, do not be anything at all. If you are a bodhisattva, you will suffer, if you are an arahant, you will suffer, if you are anything at all, you will suffer." "You are your own teacher. Looking for teachers can't solve your own doubts. Investigate yourself to find the truth - inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important." "Outward scriptural study is not important. Of course, the Dhamma books are correct, but they are not right. They cannot give you right understanding. To see the word anger in print is not the same as experiencing anger. Only experiencing yourself can give you the true faith." "These days people don't search for the Truth. People study simply in order to find knowledge necessary to make a living, raise families and look after themselves, that's all. To them, being smart is more important than being wise!" "Once a visitor asked Ajahn Chah if he was an arahant. He said, I am like a tree in a forest. Birds come to the tree, they sit on its branches and eat its fruits. To the birds, the fruit may be sweet or sour or whatever. The birds say sweet or they say sour, but from the trees point of view, this is just the chattering of birds." "Someone commented, I can observe desire and aversion in my mind, but its hard to observe delusion. You're riding on a horse and asking where the horse is! was Ajahn Chah's reply." "If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good." "Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." "Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation." "Just know yourself, this is your witness. Don't make decisions on the strength of your desires. Desires can puff us up into thinking we are something which we're not. We must be very circumspect." "But this is like some sort of sweet fruit: even though the fruit is sweet we must rely on contact with and experience of that fruit before we will know what the taste is like. Now that fruit, even though no-one tastes it, is sweet all the same. But nobody knows of it. The Dhamma of the Buddha is like this. Even though it's the truth it isn't true for those who don't really know it. No matter how excellent or fine it may be it is worthless to them."

from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article on gabriel marcel 7. Primary and Secondary Reflection The distinction between two kinds of questions—problem and mystery—brings to light two different kinds of thinking or reflection. The problematic is addressed with thinking that is detached and technical, while the mysterious is encountered in reflection that is involved, participatory and decidedly non-technical. Marcel calls these two kinds of thinking “primary” and “secondary” reflection. Primary reflection examines its object by abstraction, by analytically breaking it down into its constituent parts. It is concerned with definitions, essences and technical solutions to problems. In contrast, secondary reflection is synthetic; it unifies rather than divides. “Roughly, we can say that where primary reflection tends to dissolve the unity of experience which is first put before it, the function of secondary reflection is essentially recuperative; it reconquers that unity” (Marcel 1951a, p. 83).

from the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy article on ibn ‘arabi 3.3 Imagination Imagination (khayâl), as Corbin has shown, plays a major role in Ibn ‘Arabî’s writings. In the Openings, for example, he says about it, “After the knowledge of the divine names and of self-disclosure and its all-pervadingness, no pillar of knowledge is more complete” (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 2:309.17). He frequently criticizes philosophers and theologians for their failure to acknowledge its cognitive significance. In his view, ‘aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability. In contrast, properly disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God’s self-disclosure in all Three Books. The symbolic and mythic language of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away with reason’s strictures. What Corbin calls “creative imagination” (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in Ibn ‘Arabî’s vocabulary) must complement rational perception. In Koranic terms, the locus of awareness and consciousness is the heart (qalb), a word that has the verbal sense of fluctuation and transmutation (taqallub). According to Ibn ‘Arabî, the heart has two eyes, reason and imagination, and the dominance of either distorts perception and awareness. The rational path of philosophers and theologians needs to be complemented by the mystical intuition of the Sufis, the “unveiling” (kashf) that allows for imaginal—not “imaginary”—vision. The heart, which in itself is unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at one beat seeing God’s incomparability with the eye of reason, at the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ânl-, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, “that which differentiates”. These two demarcate the contours of ontology and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being (perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real, as Ibn ‘Arabî often says, is the One/the Many (al-wâhid al-kathîr), that is, One in Essence and many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity, limitation, and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination, the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine faces. He who stops with the Koran inasmuch as it is a qur’ân has but a single eye that unifies and brings together. For those who stop with it inasmuch as it is a totality of things brought together, however, it is a furqân…. When I tasted the latter…, I said, “This is lawful, that is unlawful, and this is indifferent. The schools have become various and the religions diverse. The levels have been distinguished, the divine names and the engendered traces have become manifest, and the names and the gods have become many in the world”. (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 3:94.16)

hawaii... sharks behave differently in different waters... maybe they bite people who don't have aloha

reasonable is a stretch... I'm amazed how many people believe in magic and ghosts as really existing things ("beings") and not imaginary figments. Especially the demons, the monsters under the bed. Giving these imaginary beings credence seems dangerous to me, as though the mind had autonomous contents and we were at the mercy of some powerful being arising from our subconscious. None of these beings are real, not even ourselves. There is Only One Real Agent.

lol explain it to me give me seven on your nasrudin and I''ll give you seven on mine even a rookie should be able to give three