7 Quotes by Tom Cheetham

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.

The world is too much for us. Rationality as we have come to know it works by ignoring most of experience: laws are arrived at by selective abstraction.

Perhaps we can think of fundamentalism as a stifling, an asphyxiation, and constipation of the soul.

Having Khidr as a master gives the disciple a transcendent dimension. It confers a 'personal, direct, and immediate bond with the Godhead' . . . Each disciple becomes what Khidr is, the center of the world.

Corbin was a Platonist, and his theory of knowledge is “illuminationist.” All knowledge comes from above by means of a vision of, or union with the archetypes, the Platonic Forms. The “giver of Forms” is the Angel.

The symbol is not an artificially constructed sign: it flowers in the soul spontaneously to announce something that cannot be expressed otherwise. It is the unique expression of the thing symbolized as of a reality that thus becomes transparent to the soul, but which itself transcends all expression.