The Star of Redemption [3]

 ~Franz Rosenzweig

But when philosophy denies the dark presupposition of all life, when it does not value death as something, but makes it into a nothing, it gives itself the appearance of having no presupposition. In fact, all cognition of the All has for its presupposition— nothing. For the one and universal cognition of the All, only the one and universal nothing is valid. 

If philosophy did not want to stop its ears before the cry of frightened humanity, it would have to take the following as its point of departure— and consciously as its point of departure—: the nothing of death is a something, each renewed nothing of death is a new something that frightens anew, and that cannot be passed over in silence, nor be silenced. 

And instead of the one and universal nothing that buries its head in the sand before the cry of mortal terror, and which alone philosophy wants to let precede the one and universal cognition, philosophy would have to have the courage to listen to that cry and not close its eyes before the terrible reality. The nothing is not nothing, it is something. 

Divine Love and Wisdom [3]

~Emanuel Swedenborg

Spiritual warmth and spiritual light flow into and affect not only angels but also us, precisely to the extent that we become receptive. Our receptivity develops in proportion to our love for the Lord and our love for our neighbor. 

That sun itself, or divine love, cannot use its warmth and light to create anyone directly from itself. If it did, the creature would be love in its essence, which is the Lord himself. It can, however, create people out of material substances so formed as to be receptive of its actual warmth and light. In the same way, the sun of our world cannot use its warmth and light to bring forth sprouts in the earth directly. 

The Function of the Dhikr

~Henry Corbin

Of all spiritual practices: meditation on the sayings of the Prophet and on the traditions of Sufism, meditated recitation of the Qoran, ritual Prayer, and so forth, the dhikr is the practice most apt to free spiritual energy, that is, to allow the particle of divine light which is in the mystic to rejoin its like.

The advantage of the dhikr is that it is not restricted to any ritual hour; its only limitation is the personal capacity of the mystic. It is impossible to study the question of colored aphorisms without knowing the spiritual exercise which is their source. Everything takes place, needless to say, in the ghayba, the suprasensory world; what is in question here is solely the physiology of the man of light. 

Najm Kobra set himself the task of describing the cases and circumstances in which the fire of the dhikr itself becomes the object of mystical apperception. As opposed to the fire of the Devil, which is a dark fire, the vision of which is accompanied by distress and a feeling of overwhelming oppression, the fire of the dhikr is visualized as a pure and ardent blaze, animated by a rapid upward movement.