Life feels like a game of Snakes and Ladders, but without any ladders.
If someone wants to know what position he enjoys in the eyes of God, he has only to look at what place he gives to God (in his heart and life)
A parent can give a child no greater gift than beautiful manners.
Love becomes perfect only when it transcends itself --Becoming One with its object; Producing Unity of Being.
Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins. No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.
IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works. A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotionalaesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas.
I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.
What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air. . . . It is high time, for starters, that Muslims were able to study the revelation of their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it. . . . Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony
The basis of the First Amendment is the hypothesis that speech can rebut speech, propaganda will answer propaganda, free debate of ideas will result in the wisest governmental policies.