The day is one of the fundamental experiences of our natural existence. The obvious cycle of the sun, the alternation of sleep and being awake provide a link between the life of the body and the great regularity that assigns their successive moments to light and to darkness. Only a simplified abstraction allows us to consider time lived as an homogeneous flow. Our existence, in its proper substance and in its larger environment, is dominated by the rhythm of days and nights. Our very experience of the reality of objects is subject to it: the universe of things depends on the light of day that reveals it. It shrivels and becomes uncertain when night falls, with terror and dreams taking its place. The evidence that appears with the clarity of day is not of the same order as apparitions that arise from the depth of darkness.

One does not have to be a specialist in religious history or the science of symbols in order to yield to the fascinating variations on the meanings of the Holy Grail. This strange vessel was undoubtedly already imbued with secret traditions when from the end of the 12th century to the end of the 13th century it was briefly resplendent with all the glory conferred by legend, before disappearing into the semi-darkness of mystery until Wagner's Parsifal brought it back to light by drawing from it the redemption of the suffering inflicted by Schopenhauer's world.

For eighteen centuries the Christian church believed that the fourth gospel was drawn up by the son of Zebedee, John, when the latter lived in Ephesus in his old age. As Clement of Alexandria suggests (II-III century) the beloved disciple wanted to emphasize the divine nature of the Son of which the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke had marked the historical insertion and the human nature.

To talk about leadership in our times evokes the spectre of those leaders in the thirties and forties who led their nation to disaster, without any consideration for the cost in human suffering and moral degradation which their course involved. Yet, despite the distasteful association, we talk about the need for leadership in various domains of life—education, business, politics—and we look for individuals who are capable of providing such leadership also in civilizations which are committed to the principles of liberalism and democracy. Obviously, there is more than one sort of leader and more than one kind of leadership.

No doubt all are familiar with the story of Abraham, of whom God demanded the sacrifice of his son, Isaac, and who, at the last minute, received from this same God the order not to touch the child since it was by then certain that Abraham would not refuse to do so. Ultimately, as the Bible itself seems to say, was this not simply a test in those remote times when, after all, sacrifice was a common occurrence? And so, perhaps, we might think this is all there is to this story, simply a matter of fear. Nevertheless, how can we not be amazed by the seeming gratuity of such an ordeal? Was not Abraham, and already since a very long time, the chosen one of God? Can we not, then, ask if a more attentive reading of the texts will provide a more substantial message?

“Being is an ocean in perpetual agitation,
Of this ocean people perceive but the waves.
On the apparent surface of the ocean, hidden in them,
Look at the surging waves arising from secret depths!”

One of the leitmotifs of the literature of Iranian Sufism is the “quest for the Orient” (istishraq). It is an Orient that is neither localized nor localizable in the realm of positive geography. It escapes our normal perception; it is the mystic Orient, point of Origin and of Return, located at the “heavenly pole” of the cosmic North. It figures in that geographia imaginalis that is perceived only by the power of the imagination. It is located, then, beyond the devastated lands of this sensible world, lands that incarnate troubled and dispersed hearts for Iranian Sufism.

What is man? “The feather of an angel was brought and tied to a donkey's tail that the donkey perhaps might turn into an angel”.

Thus writes the greatest of all Persian-writing mystical poets of Islam, Maulânâ Jalâladdân Rûmî (1207-1273) in his conversations, Fîhi mâ fîhi, when pointing to the mystery of man's existence : man is able to attain a rank superior to that of the angels (who have no free will and are eternally good) provided he develops his God-given faculties of reason and love; but he can sink lower than a beast if he neglects his spiritual powers and falls a prey to sensual pleasures and crimes owing to the misuse of his rational faculties.