Quotations relevant to the Path

[Mimesis]

"Death is the punctuation for life"

- Jonathan Dollimore

[Nefastos]

"Another story about "the lama on the head" was told me by a Dugpa lama. [...] A nun, it is said, was advised by her spiritual teacher to imagine him seated on her head when meditating. She did so accordingly and was so succesful that the weight of the venerable lama who was a well-fed, tall and stout man, gave her great pain. [...] When paying another visit to her guru he asked if she had carried out his instruction and imagined that he was seated on her head. "I did, 'Precious One,'" answered the nun, "and indeed, your weight became so painful, that I changed places with you and sat on your head myself."" – Alexandra David-Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Chapter 7: Mystic Theories and Spiritual Training, p.273-4.

Now, while the author takes this purely as a "coarse joke", much more concerning the process of occult reversal & the shaktic ideas of the dugpa sect can be read from the anecdote if thus chosen. For does not the same author write in the very same chapter also that:

"This alternative transposition of subject and object is effected a number of times." (ibid. p.276)

and:

"One must discover the white in the black and the black in the white." (ibid., p.278)

[Mimesis]

“Beneath this mask, another mask. I will not stop peeling off all these faces.”

- Claude Cahun

[obnoxion]

"Do you know, Fontanes, what astonishes me most in this world? The inability of force to create anything. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the spirit."

- Napoleon to his Minister of Education-
(J.C. Herold: "The Mind of Napoleon")

[Mimesis]

"....Sometimes we, however, are not ourselves the prime movers in our destinies. Sometimes we are moved onward by hands unseen and forces either too bright or too sinister to even contemplate with any degree of reason. They must be faced with only the instincts of the natural survivor, the warrior and the poet."

- Selim Lemouchi

[Nefastos]

"Seeds are never beaten into the unbroken ground but sown in the tilled soil."
– William Quan Judge: On Argument

[obnoxion]

Religion is not a special function of man's spiritual life, but it is the dimension of depth in all of its functions.

- Paul Tillich -

[Mimesis]

"To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. Once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle."

- Carl Gustav Jung

[Nefastos]

"A woman is comforted with the birth of her son, her body is eased of a burden; but if she could prophetically read his history, how ill a man, perchance how ill a son, he would prove, she should receive a greater burden into her mind."

– John Donne: Devotions, XIII meditation

[Mimesis]

The dramatic is not expository, narrative or explanatory in its language. It cannot be paraphrased or simply understood. Its meaning is understood in its emotional colouring, that even the torturous brings with it.
Like with all incantations, you have to initially learn them without knowing exactly what they mean. This makes something sublime, when it is given grandeur and mystery, however common the experience.
Something is only sublime when you can’t quite fully understand it.

- Germaine Greer [paraphrased]