Quotes from Peter Lamborn Wilson

Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.

It is extremely obvious to me that the internet is a religious phenomenon

Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head, don't sign up for the armies of anorexia or bulimia - act as if you were already free, calculate the odds, step out, remember the Code Duello - Smoke Pot /Eat Chicken/ Drink Tea.

Onions are sacred to the Yezidis, perhaps because they have many layers and are thus "esoteric.")

Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day- otherwise they would not be "nonordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns you can't stay up on the roof forever - but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred -a difference is made.

To be a '"free lord" in secret is better than being a public slave

It is always morning, the caravan is always departing. All we can do is share the Prophet's prayer - "O Lord increase our amazement" - and set forth into the Bewilderness.

Kidnap someone & make them happy.

And the god of Ahab was called Beelzebub. Nowadays we call him Pir Bub.

The "peace" which Islam seeks in its arts arises not from hatred of the image, but rather from an alchemical spiritualization or sublimation of the senses. All Islamic art implies an Image, but one that cannot be openly stated: the Image of the One. Islamic art asks us to use our Imagination in an active relation between art-object and viewer, to allow the object to evoke our own creative apperception of Oneness.

The blind panopticon of capital remains after all, most vulnerable in the realm of 'magic' - the manipulation of images to control events, hermitic 'action at a distance'.

Metaphysical truth is scandalous; that is, it violates all the accepted modes of perception, all the ordinary, epistemologically neutral expectations of the sleeping soul. It tears open a curtain and reveals the occult; it unveils a beauty which is "forbidden" only because we ignore it in our stupor.

And Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love.

There are some people who do not need fifteen seconds on the Evening News to validate their existence.

Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love.

Divinity in Its Transcendence, the Absolute before any Self-manifestation, cannot be contemplated, for contemplation implies a subject and an object, and the Absolute is beyond all duality, all "place" and all knowing. It is the Mystery, the utterly inscrutable secret in the deepest part of Being, veiled behind all the inmost veils, yet somehow luring and teasing the lover. And the lover waits outside the door, ready to surrender his life at a sign.

Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises.

If modern dervishes are no more than "traditional hippies," still I feel that the world has a secret but absolute need for the presence of such wild free spirits, just as it needs the presence of some wilderness, unplanned, unmanaged, apparently profitless, chaotic as God first made it. (And both of these needs seem to fall under the patronage of the master traveler, Khezr himself).

The drop of rain knows who and what it is as long as it remains a drop. When it falls back into the sea, its origin, it can no longer know.

Love, then, is the binding power of being, on every level of reality. In fact, love is being and reality: love turning toward love in love with itself. Everything is on this track, and everything being/consciousness/bliss, whether it "knows" itself as such or not. But the soul which awakens and finds itself in the dance: that soul has won the bet.

Art has little to do with made things, but rather concerns a state of mind, a way of being, a gesture that cannot be betrayed, a life

For the Sufi Traveler, every journey is the haji, every tajalli is the Kaaba. Every path, if it be properly understood, is the Path; every way, however fraught with difficulty, can be experienced as a "straight" path to realization.

Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.