Coven Of Mystics Quotes

It is knowledge that binds us; shared wisdom from ages past and new wisdom that we should all seek to embrace. Wisdom is our legacy; our refuge from the world of the ignorant and foolish. We chose this path that we might walk open-eyed into the future... undaunted by fear and lies. ~ Ted Naifeh

For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it. ~ Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey

The Gnostic's passionate adoration of Sophia was known as philosophia – the love of Sophia – a mystical communication with divine feminine wisdom, having little to do with the strictly intellectual, most often masculine, pursuit currently labeled "philosophy. ~ Zeena Schreck

Churces crack me up. They're like money, a conspiracy of faith. Like everyone agreed to believe not only is there a God, but he comes down and checks on folks, so long as they hang in certain places, put up altars, burn lots of candles and incense, and perform sit-stand-kneel and other wacky rituals that'd make a coven of witches look not OCD. Then to further complicate it, some folks perform rituals, subset A, and others folks perform rituals, subset B, C,or D, and so on into an infinity of denominations, and call themselves different things then deny everyone's elses right to heaven if they're not performing the same rituals. Dude. Weird. I figure if there is a God, he or she isn't paying attention to what we build or if follow some elaborate rules, but copping a ride on our shoulders, watching what we do every day.Seing if we took this great big adventure called life and did anything interesting with it. I figure that the folks that are the most interesting get to go to heaven. I mean, if I was God, that's who I would want there with me. I also figure being eternally happy would be eternally boring so I try not to be too interesting, even though it's hard for me. I would rather be a superhero in hell, kicking all kinds of demon ass, than an angel in heaven, waiting around with a beatific smile on my face, playing a pansy harp all day. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being. ~ David C. Downing

Pride is no respecter of persons. The serious thinkers may be humble, and the careless mystics may be arrogant. ~ John Piper

In western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the 'Dark Ages' and the 'Middle Ages'. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rules of the mystics. "Renaissance" means the "rebirth". Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason - of man's mind. ~ Ayn Rand

At least she was creative. Whoever heard of an angel calling a coven leader a magic-stealing twat waffle? ~ Deanna Chase

Ah, yes, Yggdrasil, the great tree of the world. It is the mark of the mystic. Usually this role is reserved for a woman for they are the keepers of magic and the dark arts, but once in a great while a man takes up the role. Woman mystics are known as volva, but Oddr prefers to be called an Angel of Death. He says it sounds less feminine. Oddr's mother, an Angel of Death herself, taught her son her craft. But he also has a great thirst for blood and kills savagely, which makes him a great warrior," Harald explained. Abriel ~ C.J. Adrien

The Jedi were certainly aware of the tremendous potential, but they restrained themselves."
"Precisely what they did with the Force, as some have said. If they had made use of their full powers, the war would have ended in a heartbeat. And the galaxy would be in a different state entirely. For all their purported objectivity, they weren't scientists, they were mystics. For a thousand generations that sufficed. Notions of right and wrong can no longer be dictated by a select group to safeguard some personal vision of the truth. ~ James Luceno

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. ~ G.K. Chesterton

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly. ~ Alan Watts

There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? ~ Peter Medawar

The true, or higher part of the self is always seeking the state that mystics talk about, the state in which we are filled with a universal love and a peaceful euphoria. ~ James Redfield

O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?
In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.

From five sides You move against me,
Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.
To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.

If I come out through sight I see Love
Painted in every form and color,
Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.

If I leave through the door of hearing,
What I hear points only to You, Lord;
I cannot escape Love through this gage.

If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:
"Love, divine Love, hungering Love!
You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me."

If I leave through the door of scent
I sense You in all creation; You have caught me
And wounded me through that fragrance.

If I come out through the sense of touch
I find Your lineaments in every creature;
To try to flee from You is madness.

Love, I flee from You, afraid to give You my heart:
I see that You make me one with You,
I cease to be me and can no longer find myself.

If I see evil in a man or defect or temptation,
You fuse me with him, and make me suffer;
O Love without limits, who is it You love?

It is You, O Crucified Christ,
Who take possession of me,
Drawing me out of the sea to the shore;

There I suffer to see Your wounded heart.
Why did You endure the p ~ Jacopone Da Todi

At its best, a coven is a spiritual community or a mutual aid society of witches who hang out. ~ Mya Spalter

Catholicity seized on man ... and the mystics, transcending all, taught him to ascend on high with the wings of contemplation the Ladder of Jacob composed of brilliant stones, by which God descends to Earth and man ascends to Heaven, till Earth and Heaven, and God and man, burning together in a conflagration of infinite charity, are transmuted into one. ~ Juan Donoso Cortes

Totally isolated from our own culture for long periods, we became vulnerable to forgotten times and tribes re-awakening within us. Our journeys, we found, were to take us simultaneously to some of the least-charted regions of the planet and to the least-charted regions of our own minds. What began for us as the effort to capture a purely objective record of what we saw gradually dissolved into a quest, an odyssey of self-discovery which actually took place amongst the last of the lands of real living kings and queens, dragons and pirates, cannibals and headhunters, mystics and magicians. ~ Lawrence Blair

Morning Meditation

I used to rise early in meditation,
As the ancient saints and mystics,
Looking for peace, bliss, and ecstasy.

Now I awake as the sun rises.
I lie beside her,
Her head and the tops of her shoulders
Revealed from the top of the covers
Where we lay. Her face shines,
As the sun rolls through the bedroom
Curtains and leave her with a mandorla
As if she were the subject of iconography.

I lay in silence as I meditate on the artistry
Of freckles that are perfectly dotted
On her face and shoulders.
I venerate the delicate curvature
Of her lips and nose. Her eyes closed,
Veiled by a composition of lashes
That shroud the green mystery underneath.
As her hair lays dark and graceful
Across the pillows in front of me,
I lay in adoration,
and know there are none like her.

Moses was not even shown God's face,
Yet she has done me one better. ~ Eric Overby

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. ~ James Lee Burke

Mystics love to make things as obscure as possible, I've learned, and never use a sentence when a paragraph of riddles will do. Priests, savants, politicians, and barristers are much the same.

The ambitious believe that if you want people to think you're smart, pose as pretentiously as possible and charge a premium for confusion and wasted time. ~ William Dietrich

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life. ~ Anais Nin

One of the keystones of romantic love - and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics - is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved. ~ Diane Ackerman

Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. ~ Molly Worthen

As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon "moral values." I hold the evangelical truth of our situation to be that contemporary politicized fundamentalists, including first and foremost those aimed at Empire and Armageddon, need us non-fundamentalists, mystics, ecosystem activists, unprogrammable artists, agnostic humanitarians, incorrigible writers, truth-telling musicians, incorruptible scientists, organic gardeners, slow food farmers, gay restaurateurs, wilderness visionaries, pagan preachers of sustainability, compassion-driven entrepreneurs, heartbroken Muslims, grief-stricken children, loving believers, loving disbelievers, peace-marching millions, and the One who loves us all in such a huge way that it is not going too far to say: they need us for their salvation. ~ David James Duncan

A man might spend a lifetime reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences. ~ Charles Le Gai Eaton

The practices and disciplines of building and sustaining community could fill volumes (and has). From mystics to anthropologists, we learn how critical the quality of a community is to the health and well-being of people. Yet, community remains one of the most elusive goals to so many of the Christians and churches in our individualistic Western societies. When we encounter true community, we are not encountering mere healthy relationships of equality and moral uprightness, but we are witnessing, and being invited to participate in, the divine nature of God. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

To pull a man out of the mud, the Just Man must set foot into that mud. To bring back lost souls, he must leave the comfort of his home and seek them wherever they might be. "In every man, there is something of the Messiah." In every man, in every place. The Kabbala says it, the mystics repeat it. To free mankind one must gather the sparks, all the sparks, and integrate them into the sacred flame. A Messiah who would seek to save only the Just, would not be the Messiah. The others must be considered too - they must be prepared. Miscreants need redemption more than saints. And that is the reason - we are told - why Rebbe Nahman braved so many dangers in so many inhospitable territories - alone. ~ Elie Wiesel

What do the few existing mystics still do?
They more or less mold the raw chaos of already existing religion. But only in an isolated, insignificant manner, through feeble attempts. Do it in a grand manner from all aspects with unified efforts, and let us awaken all religions from their graves, newly revivify and form the immortal ones through the omnipotence of art and science. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

And increasingly - you know this and so do I we're losing the youth everywhere. They hate us; they are not interested in having more fears and guilt laid on them. They're not interested in more sermons and exhortations. But they are interested in learning about love. How can I be happy? How can I live? How can I taste the marvelous things that the mystics speak of? ~ Anthony De Mello

In choosing candidates for this challenging way of life, she emphasised intelligence and good judgment ("GOD PRESERVE US FROM STUPID NUNS !! )

. It was her conviction that intelligent people can better be aware of their faults and, at the same time, see the need to be guided. ~ St Teresa Of Avila

The seeker says, "I do not know." That takes honesty. The master says, "I do not know." That takes a mystic's mind that knows things through non-knowing. The disciple says, "I know." That takes ignorance, in the form of borrowed knowledge. ~ Anthony De Mello

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Normal consciousness is a state of stupor, in which the sensibility to the wholly real and responsiveness to the stimuli of the spirit are reduced. The mystics, knowing that man is involved in a hidden history of the cosmos, endeavor to awake from the drowsiness and apathy and to regain the state of wakefulness for their enchanted souls. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

It is possible that in the 21st Century the Earth will not be inhabited by humans. One of the great mystics of India, a very simple man up in the mountains, somebody once asked him about the future. He said there will come a time when you'll walk five miles and you may see a light and you'll be so happy to know another being exists. ~ Ram Dass

Put a man on the brink of the abyss and - in the unlikely event that she doesn't fall into it - he will become a mystic or a madman ... Which is probably the same thing! ~ Apostolos Doxiadis