You Want It Darker

Poor Wayfaring Stranger

Dervishhood

A dervish should have dervishhood and silence.

~ Shams-i Tabrizi, Maqalat 2.111, tr. W.C. Chittick.

Autobiograph

Transcendental longings:



And immanent belonging:

Bring Me My Bow Of Burning Gold...

Monsignor Quixote

Martin And San Miguel

“….Miguel Cruz Hernandez reports that when he visited Martin Heidegger, the latter pointed to the volumes of Unamuno in his library and remarked that Unamuno was the Spanish thinker who had most interested him.”

~ Martin Nozick, Miguel de Unamuno (1971), 7.

If You See Her, Say Hello

She might be in Tangier...



Or in Safi, Morocco, at the qubba of Sidi Shashkal...



Or even at the shrine of Sachal Sarmast, in Daraza Pakistan...



Wherever there is baraka...

Arthur Schopenhauer

If anyone deserves to be the philosopher of the present moment, it is Arthur Schopenhauer.



Irwin Edman's nicely edited volume (from 1928) provides an excellent introduction to the 21st century's most pertinent thinker. Schopenhauer, as it turns out, was only a couple of centuries before his time.

Blake's Question

Our five senses evolved as coping mechanisms in the struggle of organic life to survive in its earthly environment. Science, art, philosophy, religion, and mathematics evolved to compensate for perceived limits to sensual perception. In other words, the human being has the capacity to perceive her own perceptivity.

This second-order capacity invites questions that admit of no easy answers. It is evolutionarily advantageous insofar as it allows us to second-guess sense data; it is proof of the complex nature of the human species. It does not answer Blake's question about the limitations of our knowledge, nor does it eliminate that question.

We are left, once again, to ponder...

Sara Sviri

Tunnel Of Love

San Miguel De Unamuno

But the truth is that my work--my mission, I was about to say--is to shatter the faith of men, left, right, and center, their faith in affirmation, their faith in negation, their faith in abstention, and I do so from faith in faith itself. My purpose is to war on all those who submit, whether to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism. My aim is to make all men live a life of restless longing.

~ Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 349.

Theology

Theology, born with Plato, always takes flight with such promise and ends, without fail, in the death of thought.

The Grand And Holy Experiment

“How should the man of intellect know the sweetness of heartache for the Beloved? He is like a weaver who knows not the arts of war and horsemanship.”

~Mevlana, Diwan, 1331, tr. W. Chittick.