"Wearing a hijab isn’t inherently liberating – but neither is baring one’s breasts. What is liberating is being able to choose either of these things. It’s pretty ludicrous to think that oppression is somehow proportional to how covered or uncovered someone’s body is. Both sides of this argument present a shallow understanding of women’s empowerment, which only drowns out the substantive challenges facing all women – issues that cannot be encapsulated in a debate about a piece of fabric."
“There are many approaches to Gnosticism… all of them centred on gnosis - direct experience of God - as distinguished from mere knowledge about God. The search for gnosis, or illumination as it was sometimes called, took many odd forms, some of them probably similar to Oriental yogas and some of them using the very same drugs that modern rebels against the slow path of orthodox religion have discovered. Naturally, with such a variety of paths to gnosis, different pilots would land at different ports, each insisting he had found the real New Jerusalem. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway, the priest added cynically, “which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries. But I digress.”
- The Eye in the Pyramid, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
*** Disclaimer: Okay I’m going to commit a crime of intellectual property theft here. But in creation you seek to share, so this is more likely going to sell your book, so spare me the hassle.
"Well, now
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you
Little by little
If suddenly you forget me
Do not look for me
For I shall already have forgotten you
If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land"
