Really enjoying Peter Kingsley, modern Sufi. New one today...
Alone with the Alone https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691058342/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_m2g9Bb12J99GF
Henry Corbin's life work was to serve as a champion of the supreme importance of the individual and of the central place of the imagination in human experience.
“Corbin tells us that the world of the Imagination has been left to the poets in the modern Western tradition. He wanted to reclaim it for philosophy and theology and to place the Imagination at the very heart of human life because he believed, along with Ibn 'Arabi, that it lies at the very center of reality. This is so very post-modern. A turn to the Imagination, or less threateningly perhaps, towards the "literary," characterizes much of Western philosophical and theological thought from at least Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on. Most tellingly for Corbin, Heidegger placed hermeneutics and not abstract logic at the very heart of human being and knowing. But unlike Heidegger who wanted to free it from theology, Corbin turned his hermeneutic gaze back upon a theological vision that is not only Christian, but embraces the entire Prophetic Tradition from Abraham onwards.”
"Ta'wil is, etymologically and inversely, to cause to return, to lead back, to restore to one's origin and to the place where one comes home, consequently to return to the true and original meaning of a text. It is "to bring something to its origin. . . . Thus he who practices the ta'wil is the one who turns his speech from the external (exoteric) form [zahir] towards the inner reality [haqiqat]. This must never be forgotten when, in current usage, ta'wil is said, and rightly, to be a spiritual exegesis that is inner, symbolic, esoteric, etc. Beneath the idea of exegesis appears that of a Guide (the exegete), and beneath the idea of exegesis we glimpse that of an exodus, of a "departure from Egypt," which is an exodus from metaphor and the slavery of the letter, from exile and the Occident of exoteric appearance to the Orient of the original and hidden Idea.
...we can understand that the Spring of Life, the Aqua permanens, is divine gnosis, the philosophia prima. He who purifies himself therein and drinks of it will never taste the bitterness of death. As for the spring of running Water hard by the permanent spring, we may see in it a typification of Logic as being not a part but one of the derivatives (furu ) of the divine science. But this on an express condition that safeguards instead of degrading symbolic perception: it is Logic that must be raised to the horizon of this symbolic perception. In other words: it is not Logic that is the ta'wil of the spring of running Water; it is, conversely, the spring of running Water that is the ta'wil of Logic, that, as such, "leads it back" to its "spring," to its meaning and its truth (haqiqat).”
Assembly of the Birds - Sufi - 1600
Chicken, Goats, Cranes...oh my.
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