Quotes from Tom Cheetham

It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.

The literal is always abstract ? because reality is so much more than we can ever know or experience or imagine.

The world is too much for us. Rationality as we have come to know it works by ignoring most of experience: laws are arrived at by selective abstraction.

The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise. It is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which itself transcends all expression.

Events, or acts of understanding, are the actions of a subject expressed as a verb, the reality of which derives from the person who conjugates it.3 For

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

Perhaps we can think of fundamentalism as a stifling, an asphyxiation, and constipation of the soul.

The Shaykh had a voice so low one could hardly under- stand him, and murmuring as if to himself, he responded: "The fall is neither a lack, nor a defect, even less a sin; if it had not been for the forbidden fruit of the tree, the inexhaustible possibilities of Being would never have been manifested.

Having Khidr as a master gives the disciple a transcendent dimension. It confers a 'personal, direct, and immediate bond with the Godhead' . . . Each disciple becomes what Khidr is, the center of the world.

Only through the perception of the indissoluble unity of the two faces of being in creation, the poverty of the soul of humanity and of the world, can we perceive the beauty and the animation and the personification of the things of the world. It is only by the continual perception of this beauty-in-poverty that our certainties, our graspings, our hardnesses of heart can be perpetually undone.

Because you were born in a sin that was sinned before you, and Thou you have had fear, great fear, and you have cried, cried because the Earth is immense, cried because the Woman was too beautiful, cried because the Angel was invisible, and because Thou you were Adam, and Adam would want to live.