Wounded Consciousness

Wounded Conscience is an essay on the distortions of mind in civilizations that have remained in the past and not participated in the festival of change. Although it owes its existence to personal experience in the Iranian-Islamic world, I think that the scope of this book is not limited to that world alone, and in a way, it concerns most civilizations whose mental structures are still bound to Tradition and have difficulty digesting modernity. We people of the periphery live in a time of contradictions between different blocks of knowledge. We have fallen into the crack between incompatible worlds that push each other away and mutually disfigure each other. When undertaken with mental clarity and without resentment, this duality can enrich us, improve our registers of knowledge, and broaden our range of sensitivities; whereas when excluded from the critical field of knowledge, the same duality causes stagnation, cripples our vision, and, just like in a broken mirror, disfigures the reality of the world and spiritual images. -Daryush Shayegan-