
The spiritual path requires that we "must pass through the Darkness; this is a terrifying and painful experience, for it ruins and destroys all the patencies and norms on which the natural man lived and depended - a true 'descent into hell,' the hell of the unconscious.: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, 159.
Mulla Sadra has written: "Of all the realities that man sees and contemplates in the world beyond, those which delight, like houris, castles, gardens, green vegetation, and steams of running water - as well as their opposites - the horrifying kinds of which Hell is composed - none of these is extrinsic to him, to the very essence of his soul, none is distinct or separated from his own act of existing." Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth, 165
And Najm Razi tells us this: "Know that the soul, the devil, the angel are not realities outside you: you are they. Likewise Heaven, Earth and the Throne are not outside you, nor paradise nor hell, nor death nor life. They exist in you; when you have accomplished the mystical journey and have become pure you will become conscious of that." in Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 60.
Engraving: The Temptation of St. Anthony, Martin Schongauer, c. 1491. from wikimedia.
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