Scandal Quotes

“Among the sufis, one attains purity not by ritual ablution, not by faith and worship, not by deed or merit, but by direct knowledge, experience, certainty, the drunkenness of ecstatic realization. Only this intoxication truly purifies the soul, because with this" wine "one becomes lost, and finds oneself, within the heart. One loses all separative delusions, the dirt of a muffled consciousness, and attains the One. This is to wander nude in the bazaar, like a naked Qalandar. But if the bazaar is shocked, then scandal belongs to the bazaar, not the dervish. Like a drunkard, the suf loses his reputation in the world because the world has lost its reputation with him. The petty bazaar stands accused of hypocrisy; the naked man stands before God.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“Love, then, is the binding power of being, on every level of reality. In fact, love is being and reality: love turning toward love in love with itself. Everything is on this track, and everything being/consciousness/bliss, whether it" knows "itself as such or not. But the soul which awakens and finds itself in the dance: that soul has won the bet.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“The" peace "which Islam seeks in its arts arises not from hatred of the image, but rather from an alchemical spiritualization or sublimation of the senses. All Islamic art implies an Image, but one that cannot be openly stated: the Image of the One. Islamic art asks us to use our Imagination in an active relation between art-object and viewer, to allow the object to evoke our own creative apperception of Oneness.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“Metaphysical truth is scandalous; that is, it violates all the accepted modes of perception, all the ordinary, epistemologically neutral expectations of the sleeping soul. It tears open a curtain and reveals the occult; it unveils a beauty which is" forbidden "only because we ignore it in our stupor.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“To be a '" free lord "in secret is better than being a public slave”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy

“Art has little to do with made things, but rather concerns a state of mind, a way of being, a gesture that cannot be betrayed, a life.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy