The ability of humankind to navigate life through mythology, ritual, archetypes and the symbolic has been damaged by cultural misapprehension as an attempt by corporate media, etc, to imprison our innate consciousness.  Throughout history, many ancient cultures understood the importance of contacting the sacred through symbol and ritual, of personifying and evoking divine energies, which serve as a universal map of human evolution.  Relating to these universal/spiritual   principles brought forth more oneness between people and with nature itself.  There was a unique, elevated wisdom that crossed cultures and like a finely, woven net of psyche, held the planet and it’s people in a sustainable cohabitation.  Sadly we now live disconnected from one another and have driven our planet into a state of chaos and crisis. We are in serious need of tapping into the sacred as a human race.  And while ancient forms of accessing inner knowledge become popular again, there is a responsibility to respect the traditional methodology and seriousness of such.  The art of tarot has the extraordinary ability to project and …

Henry Corbin’s “Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi” found last week in Washington DC. A longer piece forthcoming. “Suhrawardi died a martyr at the age of thirty-eight in Aleppo, whither he ahd rashly journeyed (1191), a victim of the rabid intolerance of the doctors of the Law and of Salahaddin, the fanatic known to the Crusaders as Saladin. Thoguh his life was cut off too soon, he succeeded in carrying out a great design: in reviving in Iran the wisdom of the ancient Persians, their doctrine of Light and Darkness. The result was the philosophy, or rather, to take the Arabic term in its etymological sense, the “theosophy of Light” (hikmat al-Ishraq) to which we find parallels in many of the pages of Ibn ‘Arabi… The effects of Suhrawardi’s theosophy of Light have been felt in Iran down to our own time. One of its essential features is that it makes philosophy and mystical experience inseperable: a philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstacy is vain speculation.”

Early essay by California professor Richard Tarnas on the hidden archetypal meaning of the planet Uranus. “Suddenly,” Tarnas writes, “from this most improbable and scorned source, we had a method of illuminating both the archetypal character and the timing of individual experiences, including non-ordinary states of consciousness such as those mediated by powerful psychoactive plants and compounds”… (Click on the photo to read more)