Donnie Darko
Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
Sartor Resartus
by Thomas Carlyle 1833-4
[Bk 1 Ch X] ‘To the eye of vulgar Logic,’ says Teufelsdröckh, ‘what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eyes of Pure Reason what is he? A soul, a Spirit, and Divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the Loom of heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden in he under that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is skywoven, and worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?’
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Ibn al-Arabi was convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the true reality: “God made the creatures like veils,” he explained, “He who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as real is barred from His presence.” Thus - as seemed to be the way of Sufism - what started as a highly personalised spirituality, centring on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal conception of God….
