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Shipwreck
For the mystic, spiritual life is about losing. Sufism is called the “tavern of ruin.” It’s not the tavern of getting a better life — one is in the losing business. That is the difference between mysticism and spirituality. If you follow a spiritual path you get something. If you follow a mystical path, it’s a via negativa; you lose something. Eventually, hopefully, you lose yourself. One Sufi saying is: only that which cannot be lost in a shipwreck is yours.
~ From Tarana Wesley
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…society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
~ Antonin Artaud
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We have art so that we shall not die of reality.
~ Nietzsche
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There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
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