Henry Corbin and Hakim Bey

Seems that traditional religion isn't cutting it. Not knocking traditional religion but I am bored by it. Sure you get out of it what you put into it. Fine. But the muttness approach to religion has led me to this middle ground, the interstitial, that place where they all merge yet are all very much different, both the same and not the same. It was here where I stumbled across Henry Corbin's works via Peter Lamborn Wilson's Sacred Drift. I found this book in a second hand bookstore (now closed thanks to B&N moving in...) and picked it up because it had "Essays on the Margins of Islam" as the secondary title. It has since become one of my favorite books, with pages dog eared, passage after passage underlined, so much so that most passages are underlined. I began seeing religion in a different light.

Wilson references Corbin's works in regards Ismailism, y'know, the Assassins (which, he notes, does not come from the same word as 'hashish' but from...). Corbin's Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, placing three very dense articles into one book, is a mind blower. It is so dense that I continue to revisit it and my brain is still turned to mush trying to tackle it. It's usually only after I quit thinking that it begins to sink in.

But Corbin's work takes those interstitial regions where I find myself and he breaks them open, like the physicist in search of the Higgs boson (the so-called 'God' particle) zipping particles around a particle accelerator, bursting them apart into smaller and smaller bits, deeper and deeper into areas that border on the fringe of non-existence, ethereal, almost mystical in nature.

I'm not talking about the Dancing Wu Li Masters hippy-dippy stuff. I'm talking about that place where it is elusive yet you can almost feel it but the senses fail, the intellect fails and some other form of 'knowing' takes over. It is perhaps intuitive in the sense that years and years of deep seeking have provided a heightened sensitivity to answers that the ordinary mind will miss.

You can't just intuit such things (though you may get temporary glimpses unrecognizable to the unprepared mind/soul). No there is much training, much disicpline, much to build up and, at the same time, lay aside in order to make the mind/soul fertile for such experience when it comes. And it will come.

Corbin's work and, to a lesser degree, Wilson's work (his is much more fun as he embraces those acts of faith deemed hertical with reckless abandon), provides fertile soil to help prepare one's mind/soul for these experiences, even within traditional religious practice but, in general, at that place where mere religion fails to satisfy, when one must journey on alone, beyond the bounds of those things that have traditionally kept us both safe and bound.