The Library
The Library is where you come to ride the rails away from the quotidian, the known, the norm - and enter into the world of the timeless, where you can shed societal expectations and your own personal narrative to discover your true self.
Lined with books from mystical masters of all time periods and paths, here you discover the unifying energy hidden beneath the seeming diversity of the world around you.
Here, you become your true self - and understand that Hobo Chic: As Unique as You Are is a clothing brand is a lifestyle is a journey to the deepest self, hidden within.
Here, you come to appreciated that “within” and “above” are synonymous.
So come in, borrow a book from our shelves, sit down and take as long as you’d like, opening your self to yourself, enjoying quiet jazz, and a cup of Danshube Tea from Tashkent, or a more Western potion from our libation couturier.
What Have They said?
There is a single religion and a single creed for all beings endowed with understanding, and this religion
is presupposed behind all the diversity of rites.
Nicholas of Cusa, d. 1464
In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity . . . In mystic states, we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed.
William James, d. 1910
The needed Copernican revolution in theology involves a radical transformation of our conception of the universe of faith and the place of our own religion within it. It involves a shift from dogma . . . to the realization that it is God who is at the centre, and that all religions of humankind serve and revolve around God.
John Hick, d. 2012
People of a spiritual and contemplative nature continue to appear even in the darkest periods of spiritual eclipse, precisely because the economy of a human collectivity necessitates their existence. Were human society to be without any contemplatives at all, it would simply cease to exist.
S. H. Nasr, b. 1933
How shall you grasp it? Do not grasp it. That which remains when there is no more grasping is the self.
Panchadashi, 14th century
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment; cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.
Rumi, d. 1273
When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work. And when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
Wendell Berry, b. 1934
Deep in the sea there are riches beyond your imagination. But if you seek safety, seek it on the shore.
Saadi Shirazi, d. 1292
Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire, d. 1773
Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom.
Bodhidharma, 5th or 6th century
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.
Marcus Aurelius, d. 180
The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.
Wish for everything to be exactly as it is, and your life will be serene.
Epictetus, d. 135
A dog is not reckoned good because it barks well, and a person is not reckoned wise because they speak well.
Chuang Tzu, 4th century BCE
Socrates found that he was the only one who acknowledged to himself that he knew nothing. In his critical peregrinations around Athens, he called on the greatest statesmen, orators, poets, and artists, and everywhere he discovered the conceit of knowledge . . . he perceived that all of these celebrities were without a proper and sure insight [into their own ignorance], even with regard to their own professions, which they practiced only by instinct.
Socrates, d. 399 BCE