(New excerpts from Al Jawhar Al Ahmar are being added in the form of continuous updates.)
Excerpts from Book A (Al Jawhar Al Akhdar)
(1992-1993):
The word: Darkness. The meaning: Light.
The word is light enveloped in darkness.
Darkness is the light's guise in the world of senses.
There are three essential forces superior to any other force:
Al Hayyat (Life), Al 'Ishq (Love), Al Iman (Faith).
'Ishq (Love) outweighs life.
Iman (Faith) outweighs both love and life.
Iman(Faith) and 'Ishq (Love), however, are two streams springing from one source and one in their essence.
No man is without fault, and if he were, it would be a manifestation of arrogance (toward God).
Wherever you believe to have caught sight of such a man, do not make him a judge over you, for he would be distracted (from tawhid [the oneness and exclusiveness of God]) and distract you.
Excerpts from Book B (Al Jawhar Al Ahmar)
(2003-2007):
Beauty is a garden to dwell in.
Rivers flow in it and grapes grow on its soil.
The eye that loves beauty recognises it no matter what its form or appearance. And eventhough its price is melancholy, it is the purpose of sweetness and the purpose of bitterness and the reason for things to exist.
"Be and there is": "Be" is the river longing for the beauty toward which it flows and "There is" are its shores in the eye beholding the beauty it creates.
I relate of beauty that is is withheld and withdrawn, a wild fruit in the secret garden of modesty, like a pearl in an oyster or like a light only the blind can see.
I relate of the obvious that it is concealed so as to safeguard its nature, and of that which is concealed that no appearence can change it.
Nothing is as clear as the question we refuse to answer.
Had I sacrificed you to follow the path of my desires so as to be with you, I would have reaped the fruits of Paradise in this world in which they would have meant nothing and my love for you would have vanished.
Eat thus and drink and behold dusk and dawn so you may not be deceived that you could last!
One is Allah and one with HIS own ONENESS.
There are those who love life and there are those who love death.
The love of life for the sake of life is a love impure.
The love of death for the sake of death is a love impure.
What is pure love?
The love of the Beloved for the sake of the Beloved.
I have knowledge of YOU
Through YOUR knowledge of me,
And equally is YOUR knowledge of me caused by my knowledge of YOU and so is the reverse.
All worlds in between are vanities of perception.
Everything created is bound to the law that it cannot survive itself.
The self is innately striving after the mitigation of suffering. It is this condition which makes it difficult to separate truth and falsehood, to differentiate between essence and appearance.
Due to the determination of all senses by selfhood, deceit is innate in perception.
The self cannot endure loneness.
Therefore it is forced to permanently sacrifice its actual endeavours and the actual aim of its striving.
The self is enchained by the yoke of the self.
Due to the shallowness of perception in the world of senses the self is bound to deny its cognition. Thus its own knowledge is denied to it.
Caused by the determination of action and intellect by purpose thorough cognition cannot be achieved nor can there be purity of cognition.
Overcoming this condition is the aim of seeking truth by overcoming the self but can never be fully achieved.
This is the nature of life in this world in which the self cannot exist without the self and cannot exist out of itself.
(Leaving some dreams behind can ease one's load. Yet, sin is born from the wish not to suffer.)
Living in dark times, the self is oversensitised to the dark aspect of things.
Caused by this nature, in dark ages peoples' intentions are dark, for how can you be expected to respond in a language other than that in reaction to which response is given.
A change of language, however, can under certain conditions mean a change of perspective and resulting from that, a change of reality.
This is the power of language.
Love does not endure, for the self endures not.
But love freed of the self endures and outlasts the self.
The way to overcoming the self is the way from the lower states of the self to the higher states of the self the highest of which is called the ESSENCE or the SELF OF SELF.
The path leading upon this way is a mirror extended into the inward.
The nature of truth is such that none but truth can perceive it.
A dream told me:
When you search after the pearl
At the deepest ground of the sea--
Either will it slip out of your hand
Or you yourself shall slip out of your hand.
I am a wave created by a force I do not know
Though it lives in me.
Guided by the stream, I do not know where I am steering
The purpose of what happens to me,
I do not know.
Whoever choses to follow me, is the like of me.
"La taqulu: Khaibat ad-Dahr fa inna Allahu ad-Dahr"
This says: "Do not say: A disappointment of time, for it is the Divine WHICH is time (and time is of the Divine).
To the finite, time is its language.
Time's verdict to it is the verdict of the Divine, for the Divine manifesting ITSELF in its language manifests ITSELF in time though the DIVINE ITSELF has nothing to do with time.
IT is neither time nor un-time but timelessness.
Time is ITS ultimate aspect which includes both time and un-time, the perpetual and the finite; the eternal by means of finity and the finite as succeeding modes of the eternal.
Neither is death ITS price nor is life but IT is priceless.
Attempting to rediscover the once-written,
I am unable to retrace it,
For not only the present but also future and past
Change continuously.
The two worlds in inseparable embrace:
The one endlessly interwoven universe
Both of them constitute;
In life there is a part of infinity
And in death there is a part of finity.
In the inner world of DIVINE BEING
Our cosmic personalities are transformed into
A part of everything existing.
My heart is weary after every union with a woman,
For how far is she away from me
And how much does this union manifest separation!
How far is it from the union with ultimate reality
Eventhough it is this (union) which it manifests!
How shallow is her depth, how short does it fall
As compared to that of the Beloved's ecstatic beauties
While, yet, it is the key to its mystery
Deeper than depth,
More burning than passion,
Eternally barring the seeker from any access,
From any way of escaping it,
Of escaping the totality of his own destruction.
How can I find union else than by means of union?
But can I see Allah else than through Allah?
Truly, those are right
Who say:
No one knows Allah but Allah.
The mark of true spiritual sovereignty: generosity of the mind.
The mark of the high civilisation: Being beyond time.
The high culture is imperishable. The mark of the lower culture: shortlivedness.
The lower element is arrogant and affected, enclosed and imprisoned in the microcosm of its own world.
The higher element is balanced, stoical and serene, open to all impressions without anxiety, for affected attitude, arrogance and narrowness of perception have their source in anxiety which has its source in uncertainty, instability, ignorance and fear but the unshakeable, balanced and serene has its source in superiority.
What is time and space? Perception.
Space is time and perception is consciousness.
One does not exist independently of the other nor does it come into existence entirely through dependence.
Intellect is the measure perceiving dimension.
Al 'Aql-e-Surkh (Al 'Aql al Ahmar), the Red Intellect, is that dimension which is immeasurable and in which time and space are contained, the time- and spaceless pearl of supreme existence, the intellect that does not maifest itself by perceiving but by being perceived, free of consciousness and the dimensions of perception but not isolated from them, neither caused by dependence nor without dependence, neither with not without them, containing (everything) but never entirely contained )in anything).
Existence is the dialectical co-response between itself and its negation both of which in their origin as well as in their last end are one and the same quality.
In the hour of triumph and in the hour of ruin:
Follow the call to prayer and observe the five daily prayers' omnipresent rhythm, for happiness lies in equanimity, and so does success.
Therefore greet both wealth and poverty, blessed fortune and disaster, joy and suffering with the same equanimity, for neither wealth nor poverty, neither blessed fortune nor disaster, joy nor suffering nor your own life have anything to do with you.
This equanimity of the spirit is the basic pillar of sumud (perseverance) being the foundation upon wich superiority rests.
Discard the notion what I do were what I wished to do and where I live were where I wanted to live:
The hand launches the arrow within the radius of its strength and in correspondence to the laws of gravity, wind and kinetics and the arrow meets its goal within the narrow radius of a destiny which is the product of those laws and others.
These laws are meaningless but their goal is attained.
Freedom is the ability to bear pain without being corrupted by the sensation of suffering.
The spririt is freedom, the body its chain.
As both are conditions of each other (spirit body and body spirit or psycho-soma and soma-psyche) and as the entity they constitute is an inseparable one with their separation being the negation of both, there is no room for duality.
Hence freedom is attained through the fulfilment of necessity.
Necessity is truth manifest, for truth is manifested in necessity.
Necessity is the objective aim of a process or a chain of processes reaching beyond the satisfaction of immediate need, neither innately different from it nor innately identical with it.
These processes linked to and dictated by the requirements of their objective aim produce a result which we perceive as destiny (Al Maktoúb).
Its instrument is the manifestation of the objective aim of these processes in the actions of those forces subject to them and those causal to them (Al Qadr) being the summary of the human and the divine, of future, present, past, cause and effect forming an organic entitity; a holistic one.
As truth is not always found in that which seems the most credible, necessity is not always found in that which seems the most obvious.
Truth is mirrored in pragma though pragma is not identic with truth, for the pragma of the Red Intellect is beyond the cognitive ability of man.
Identity is response to necessity with the objective of its fulfilment being the strategy of the self to link truth to pragma, its restricted mirror.
It is thus not of dogmatic but of pragmatic nature, instrumental to purpose, hence elastic and extremely flexible and, in correspondence to its own nature, never completely attained.
The self is not only the chain but also the way to overcome the chain and the supreme instrument in this process.
The world in the mirror of the eye:
The powerful exert their power.
The wealthy exert their wealth.
The rich exert their richness.
Every class exercises domination by the means it is given and puts up resistance against the classes dominating it by the means it is given.
The oppressed is despised for being subject to oppression and defamed for being oppressed.
Thus grows the pyramid driven by endeavour.
God exerts judgement.
HIS supreme endeavour resting in its own course and in itself steers and moulds, like the course of the stars, the fate of everything alive: GOD IS NEVER ABSTRACT.
The course of things is bound to a law of motion that is extremely rigid, and it is this rigidity which man perceives as clarity and logic.
Every given set of impulses causes a particular given set of reactions and cannot cause another.
It is his illusions that prevent man from recognising reality and it is his illusions that are his only instrument in recognising reality.
Allah is the motion and its law.
Omnipotence lies in the yoke that is cast upon itself.
In existing, I am myself and my self's existence and at the same time their negation.
In other words: In that I exist, I also do not.
It is these two components which are the core and the principal characteristica of existence.
The contradiction between existing and non-existing is the field of tension within which being occurs.
Waste not your doubts on the questionable but act upon that about which there is no question!
The logical is not the rational but the evident.
Being, reflected by the eye, is beyond both eye and reflection but what the eye reflects is the eye's being and thus, though that which is seen is beyond the eye and its faculties, the act of seeing and the existence of the eye itself cannot be isolated from the innate composition of this selfhood and its faculties nor shall it ever be free of them.
The lesser sin, under the dictate of circumstances may serve the omission of the greater one.
Allah alone knows the weight of things, and hence certain righteousness is certain prejudice.
Beauty is a garden to dwell in.
Rivers flow in it and grapes grow on its soil.
The eye that loves beauty recognises it no matter what its form or appearance. And eventhough its price is melancholy, it is the purpose of sweetness and the purpose of bitterness and the reason for things to exist.
"Be and there is": "Be" is the river longing for the beauty toward which it flows and "There is" are its shores in the eye beholding the beauty it creates.
I relate of beauty that is is withheld and withdrawn, a wild fruit in the secret garden of modesty, like a pearl in an oyster or like a light only the blind can see.
I relate of the obvious that it is concealed so as to safeguard its nature, and of that which is concealed that no appearence can change it.
Nothing is as clear as the question we refuse to answer.
Had I sacrificed you to follow the path of my desires so as to be with you, I would have reaped the fruits of Paradise in this world in which they would have meant nothing and my love for you would have perished.
Eat thus and drink and behold dusk and dawn so you may not be deceived that you could last!
One is Allah and one with HIS own ONENESS.
There are those who love life and there are those who love death.
The love of life for the sake of life is a love impure.
The love of death for the sake of death is a love impure.
What is pure love?
The love of the Beloved for the sake of the Beloved.
A nomad travelling in the shade of my self, I say of this generation, as I relate of those who passed away before us and shall be revived after us, that our errors are our greatest achievements, perhaps our only ones.
There is a state of the eye at which it is blinded by light and there is a state of the ear at which it perceives a contradiction when it hears the same word in two different contexts.
When I and my shadow conferred, we decided to deceive the world by appearing as two different beings.
This roused a smile in the light of which we are and which we are:
"If it is only this turban",
Nasr-ad-Din said,
"Let me give it to you--
Then you read for yourself
While you can't."
The friend, in demonising the enemy, exposes
his own shallowness.
The seeker, torn to and fro between two radicals
cannot be consistent:
If the world is a current that revolves between the poles
of two extremes,
the vacuum between them
is God.
The repression of a particular element, potential or disposition does not make it a negative one nor does its promotion or unrestricted exertion make it productive.
Wisdom is to opt
for the lesser
of two evils.
I relate of love that the most sacred of all which is sacred is profanised when exercised without devotion and that the water that washes away every impurity and the fire that liberates the flame of all illusions to those who profanise is becoming impurity and illusion itself.
They who enter the hidden ahram with the soul of a thief, their hearts shall be stolen and destroyed without tears.
Let me relate of the chivalry of the spirit that love is not obedience but devotion.
Reality, like the suwar of the Quran, has different levels of meaning: It has a direct, literal implication; it is at the same time a metaphor; it has a deeper, inner meaning; it has a level of meaning which is mystical and esoteric; it has a pragmatical level of meaning.
There has been the assumption that later revelations may contradict or alter former ones; there is not one word in Allah's revelation that contradicts another but each sura, each aya, each letter is a condition of the other as Ali (r.a.) is a condition of Muhammad (s.a.w.s.) and Hassan and Hussain (r.a.) are conditions of Ali (r.a.) and of one another, as I am a condition of myself and of you, of that which we were, which we shall be, which we become or may have been.
(And meaning becomes fathomable only in the light of the conditions, which are the prism in which it crystallizes itself.)
The primary impulses which give rise to the sexual taboos by which they are now governed are in no way accidental but go back to necessities in the primeval history of mankind.
With the increasing number and diversity of the descendands of the single mother common to all mankind comes an increasing complexity of their genetic structure, which goes together with an increasing similarity in their DNA (a process which is reflected in the nature, complexity and relationship between their languages, all of them being variations of one language as all existing DNA strings are variations of one [original] DNA). This requires the combination of elements of genetic heritages as diverse and as different from one another as possible in order to guarantee a successful, healthy and thus biologically efficient reproduction of the species. Thus it is that endogamous cultures decline into extinction and exogamous cultures spread.
It is this diversity of biological heritage which is the motor of the species' further development, which is quite the reverse of the conditions of the same development in its earlier stages:
Understand the root of the taboo that emerges at the moment when it becomes inevitable:
Behind every law there is a pragmatical aim.
Hukm (law) does not come into being before 'illa (its reason and basis) emerges.
May it be known to the courageous that there are two kinds of danger: such danger as is productive and such as is counter-productive.
Of these, the latter is to be avoided and the former to be braved.
There is no courage without this recognition, for what is courage but the correct evaluation of necessity and consequence in acting thereupon.
And thus courage reveals itself as sense of purpose.
Freedom, as the highest act of awareness, is the exilation of the self in application of ma'arifa (deeper knowledge), for the self-filled is the unaware and the unaware is the un-free.
The highest freedom, then, is the ability of the self to dispose of the self without the requirement of external pressure:
Freedom is the science of the hidden.
Among the ages you pass through, there shall be an age at which you are in rebellion not against others but against yourself, not against the external world but against the universe that lives in you as your own inner world, making you what you are and constituting the very core of the image you have accepted as the image of things and –reluctantly- settled to adopt as the image of your self.
It shall then, for the first time, be truly shaken, and you shall rise to question everything you unconsciously made peace with in order to be at peace with that image, which comes to you as your own reflection.
This is a state as inevitable as it dangerous.
It is the state at which you truly become what you are and the tide of your true birth.
It is the star of the destiny which you recognise as your own or into which you settle, and forever after, how ever much you may desire it to be otherwise, you remain the creature of that destiny and the slave of the man or the woman you settled to be.
Who, then, are we indeed?
Only in those years shall you be able to find an answer. And that answer shall be confirmed in the throes of death, when your being culminates in the unspeakable and you see that the path and the ocean you call finity and infinity, filled up with itself and true to itself entirely, is entirely made up of itself.
Does then the world rotate and does history evolve?
It rotates in itself round itself and evolves of itself into itself.
Its motion is internal, not external, as there is no external motion where there is nothing external and no exterior reality where there is no exterior, and the breaking of the cycle is the cycle itself.
The only condition that makes a given state unchangeable is ignorance, for sluggishness is not apathy and fear is overruled by the certainty of danger.
The man in whom greatness is to be found must be one of enormous weaknesses, for there is nothing else from which to draw the strength of which grandeur results but profound weakness the sublimation of which is the civilisatory effort per se.
To those who make oaths: may they abstain from making an oath of restraining their hearts, for the heart is where God dwells, and God is beyond man.
The logos is a shadow of Allah among shadows.
Exalted and high and sublime beyond logos is HE WHO is the spark of all rivers, the spring of all oceans: ALLAH.
The root of every root is O (zero).
Life, as a function, is a status quo.
The logos is its own negation.
As the basic current of (every) reality is the paradoxon, the paradoxical is the basis of the logical faculties.
Yet, these faculties reject nothing as firmly as the paradoxon.
Thus, the function of logos is to veil reality so as to prevent or counteract the cognition of the obvious.
Throw a stone and not it but you shall be in motion.
Sometimes the veil is the eye itself.
The spirit craves knowledge of all forms of being but the mind being a construct of circumstances and of the adjustment to them, aims to restrict its journey of states by fixing it on locality –both mental and spatial- and alienating the self from the variety of possibilities that are its origin.
The product of this act, which can be successful only at a superficial level, is the logos, and the self is thus the rebellious prisoner of the logos and in this form mirrors the antagonism between the senses and that which they reflect, perceived by itself as the split in all
things.
The world in the mirror
Of the eye:
Oppression has bared
Its fangs.
The Emperor
Stands naked.
His garment
Is prejudice.
The sole threat
To keep in place
This order
Is the thread
Of illusion.
Mutual illusion
Drives the wheel
Of shame.
Nothing else
Hinders you
To see.
I am the mirror of the most irreconcilable contradiction.
Hence, I am the mirror of truth.
Offer part of you or all, in accordance with what is demanded and in the measure of what is welcome, fear not your finity nor the finity of that which remains of you, for finity is Allah’s vision of everything existing.
Embrace and be embraced, share and receive of that which is in your nature as much as your nature requires, as much as is required of it.
Live, in every part of your thought, in the essence of your thought, in the truthfulness to it, and be whole.
The great achievement of the civilisatory process (which is at the same time its precondition):
Detachment from the ego.
Its dynamic: cracking down identity and reconstituting identity on the basis of the cognitions gained in this process.
The way society must go is the way that must be gone by the individual within it in the civilisation of his selfhood (ana’iya).
Allah causes you to go where you go in order for you to become who you are becoming.
The supreme intelligence, in permanent dialogue with ITSELF, is the cosmic subject which is ITS OWN object.
ITS aim is beyond categories, but ITS means, the instruments designed to achieve the aims of ITS COSMIC BEING, are entirely pragmatic.
The condition of the lower category cannot dictate the state of the higher, but by embracing and becoming one with it (fana'), it becomes part of it and hence denominator of its own denomination.
Again, there arises in this age the question of the true faith.
To this, I answer: True faith does not discriminate in matters of faith.
The word is merely the fabric in which the message is clad.
My way is merely my way, and your way is yours.
As there is nothing but God, the heart that seeks TRUTH shall not err.
Remember that taking the word itself for its meaning is the first deterrent to understanding it and the ego's comfort in non-understanding is the second, while lacking awareness of those two deterrents is the third.
True faith abandons itself for the sake of Allah.
The world in the mirror
Of the eye:
Desparation creates shallow zeal
And people are blinded
By suffering.
The requirement for the elevation of their spirits:
Learning to see
Through suffering.
This moment alone,
The moment when this quality occurs,
Is the quantum leap of the mind,
The key to the high culture
And the key to the triumph of those
Whom suffering
Does not defeat.
Their pain, then
Shall heal
And their plagues,
The scourges
Of their time,
Shall fade away
Like barren trees,
Cease
Like words that have lost
Their meaning,
Sink into past
And perish.
Wherever a higher structure appears,
the lower structures shall bind it.
The lower is set to overtake the higher.
Wherever a higher system emerges,
in the lower systems it finds its mortal challenge.
Wherever a higher category breaks through, the lower categories are its enemy, bound to destroy it, for one are they that grows into a thousand in challenging the one.
Conscience at all times is a hostage to its negation and is thus undermined by the illusion of immediate gratification, which is nothing else but a disguise of gratification withheld in the service to the anti-social driving forces that are the creators of this illusion and at the same time (due to their innermost nature) deny the reality of gratification.
The enslavement of the self by both illusion and the net of outer realities is the vital agent of this process.
Where the lower driving forces are employed in the service to the higher purpose and the lower categories in the service to the higher system, a powerful reality emerges.
Only under such conditions shall the quantum leap that translates one category into another occur.
How do we speak of higher and lower as everything springs from the same source and derives from the same process of which it is one constituent among other constituents?
What is characterised as higher and lower is not the element itself but its context, that is: its effect within the context given.
Classification, as a function of the logos, is an illusion that serves to express the un-namable.
Am I teaching the unity of opposites?
No, I am teaching their correlation.
What about this style of argumentation, which permanently seems to affirm and deny at the same time?
At the same time that I embrace my existence, I can also deny it. Yet, in another statement or attitude, that which is expressed in it is something independent of me, for my existence is not EXISTENCE (as such) and my non-existence is not NON-EXISTENCE (as such).
In the higher stages of cognition culminating in that state which is its final one, the limits of the thinkable are crossed and left behind as are the limits of the expressable, and all negations become one affirmation.
I say of tribe and nationhood that its bond is not a bond of ethnicity nor one of shared biological heritage but it is the culture, the custom and the code of conduct by which we are united, you in your way and we in our way, of which the tribe, the nation, the ummah (the greater nation) and its identity is born.
Consolidated by the bond of language or transcending language, these are the pillars on which it rests and with which it rises or falls.
It is not language but culture and way of life of which unity springs;
Those of one language may be divided, those of one culture cannot.
Such is the nature of the High Civilisation: Divided by language, by culture melted into one.
The High Civilisation absorbs and appropriates.
From affiliation, it goes on to larger affiliation,
from the great entity
to the greater entity,
from unity in diversity
to greater unity in larger diversity,
acquiring an ever-growing, ever-greater capacity
of absorbing, appropriating,
embracing and being embraced
and thus
nourishing in its ever-fertile womb
the fruit that yields tomorrow’s High Civilisation.
The path of the lower civilisation leads from division into greater division,
from the narrow margin to the narrower margin,
from ethnocentricism to genocide and ethnic warfare,
dealing itself the wounds from which it bleeds out
and is dried out by its own nature like a well
whose water, instead of feeding the thirsty,
is poured into hot sand
in the endeavour to nourish a mirage.
The graveness of forbidding the allowed outweighs the graveness of doing the forbidden
in due recognition of its nature.
A wife’s principal rejection of polygamy assumes the form of a principal self-censorship,
an act of principal denial, that takes effect whenever she approaches an undistorted understanding of her husband’s nature, as opposed to her own as well as to the idealised image she has designed of herself and of him, and whenever thus the illusion of marriage crumbles to give way to the recognition of marriage as what it is.
The upholding of an illusion, which by outgrowing its need, has proven itself to be obvious
is a conscious self-deceit the price of which is the absence of fulfilment.
The absence of fulfilment, innately, is a price that is never paid by one alone, and its lethal root lies in this self-censorship solely, which principally denies itself the claim of fulfilment
within the realities of the world as it is.
The innate ploygamous potential in the human male is a natural mechanism of regulating a disturbed equilibrium the periodic occurence of which cannot by natural means be excluded
and is, therefore, a genetic potential which, though requiring restriction by culturally acquired disposition, cannot be, as a whole, discarded.
Polyandry, rooted in a consciousness that is ignorant of the reproductive functions and being a cultural rather than an innate, genetically inherited feature, becomes obsolete with the progressing evolution of consciousness and with the emerging awareness of cause and effect in the process of reprodcution.
With this awareness gradually, quasi subcutaneously, undermining the foundations of the old order, polyandry deteriorates into the shared possession of a human property integrated into a set of rules and conventions by means of which this order itself is being transformed into its opposite in that its outward forms, in thorough contradiction of the reverence they originally expressed, are now becoming the very mechanism by which the role of the woman as a subject gender is enforced.
It is at this stage that polyandry, having outlived the code and notion of which it sprang, becomes a chain to be cast off in the act of liberation.
The same is true of the Arab pantheon.
This is the historic moment when Islam, as we know it, emerges.
Superior is Allah’s wisdom over the shallowness of human reason rooted in the world of senses, and superior is Allah’s purpose over the self-aimed shallowness of human ends so easily exhausted.
Whatever you are, the first word you ever speak shall reveal it,
for the flame emerges out of itself, burns of itself and dies by itself,
and though it is true that they are contained in it,
neither water not air can reproduce it.
What are the reasons and the most important elements in prayer?
For the ritual prayer, it is the spiritual and physical discipline and the rhythm that establishes the rhythm of the days, the cohesion of the mind that provides the foundation for the inner cohesion of the High Civilisation.
For the dhikr, it is the communion of spirit and body with their origin, the oneness with all that has been created in a moment that spans past, present and future and in which, exemplary, this oneness is made palplable and experiences stronger and profounder than any other experience though there is no experience which is not part of it, facet of it and manifestation of it nor shall there ever be, as the lowest is also the highest and the most profane is also the most sacred; the communion of that which has been created with that which creates, their unity and oneness in the meditation on being which is, en miniature, being itself.
Thus, the individual dhikr is an expression and an experience of cosmic dhikr, which is the inner core of the universe.
For the du’a, it is the articulation of need which is the source of its awareness and reflection, helping to understand and establish priorities and contexts, creating an awareness of urgency where urgency exists.
Hence: prayer guards against alienation.
The core of the mind’s alienation from the spirit, of the body’s alienation from the soul,
of the dream’s alienation from conscious awareness, of the law’s alienation from its reason,
of the instrument’s alienation from its purpose and the creature’s alienation from creator and creation alike: the alienation of labour, which brings about the alienation of economy and the alienation of basis from superstructure.
It paralyses productivity and turns it into a cancerous cell destroying its own vital organism by means of uncontrolled growth and the ecology within which it occurs and which is its precondition and frame of subsistence by means of denial of this correlation and of the organic nature of things, hence of the holistic oneness of being in all its components and all that exists.
It is this attitude which is referred to as kufr (denial or concealing of the obvious). Its mark and cornerstone (foundations they of the Babylonian Tower):
the replacement of natural by artificial demand
and thus, the disclocation of productive energies
in an economy disfigured and disproportionate,
which, thereby, has become
an antagonism to itself.
Herein lies the first and primary contradiction the restitution of the cycle of being in the equilibrium of creating force and forces created, the reconciliation of inner and outer, higher and lower form and reality and the re-volution of the culture being tantamount to the evolution of the High Civilisation must aim at and, eventually, resolve.
Humanity is the milk of life to those who are denied it.
Let me say that the human condition is simple, and that it is not to decline being so,
for of all its dispositions, it is this which is the saviour of its truth.
With the complexity of its manipulation by the codes that conceal the true aims of the law they enforce, comes a web of interwoven complexities to which oppressor and oppressed resort in order to deny the fact of oppression.
The subject’s complicity in their own repression of which they are often unconsciously aware and unaware consciously by the act of assimilating the belief system and the conventions that support it, is not innate but dictated by the fear of truth for fear of its consequence.
What is this truth?
Truth, I relate to you, is a desert.
Every grain of sand adds to its a vastness.
Its code is the inner voice that is aware of itself.
In the starkness of its justice and in the sheerness of its necessity, it is beginning and end
and in its infinity harbours the dimension of depth that is beyond either, outlasting their limits and ends.
Measured on the single grain, it is lost.
Restricted to vastness alone, it is overlooked.
Thus truth, I relate, is an ocean.
Whatever is not part of it shall be swept ashore and left to decay.
Seek not that which is not in you if you seek to find but that which does not need be revealed save by itself, and know it.
Thus, my sister and my brother in suffering, seeker of that which is for you to be sought, shall you find redemption and the answer, the reason and the source of complexity and the springwell of truth in the oneness of being, the DEITY and MOST BELOVED, in the simplicity of your nature, in which, in OMNIPRESENCE, IT DWELLS.
Divine revelation is like a dream.
To every dream, there are a thousand interpretations.
According to your own state, God will bring upon you interpretation of the kind and in the form which is appropriate to it.
This is the body of the scriptures.
Clearest among them is the Quran, and in it, too, there is interpretation.
The dream and the revelation itself is trance and ishraq (knowledge not attained and not attainable by formal means, ancient, unique, overpowering and objective, most specific speech of the one to the one and most general truth manifest in everything and everyone, thus indivisible and omnipresent in the moment that is the sole possession of lover and Beloved in their communion with no witness save the universe the unchanging infinity of which, in its eternal cycle, it reflects, born of it, giving birth to it, being itself and another and one, one, one).
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I have no doubt that any erroneous notion, any unnecessary connotation implied in these thoughts shall eliminate itself in the course of history so their essence shall manifest itself all the stronger, and I call you to embrace this awareness with the whole of your heart.
There is no need for anxiety, for the unnecessary, the unrequired, the arbitrary and the capricious shall not last, as the only thing lasting is the dust.
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All I am, I am through loss.
All knowledge is due to ignorance.
Praise be to deprivation!
It is the source of all rivers.
O would that you, my flame
Were to turn against yourself
(In your lower aspect)
To consume me
(In your higher aspect,
In the imperishable and intransient)
So as to create yourself
Of my destruction!
I followed the call
Of HIM THAT called me
And in my own flesh I encountered HIS spirit
And in my own heart I encountered the being of HER THAT confirmed
The truth of the word HE had spoken
In TRUTH
I immersed my spirit in YOUR river
And sacrificed love for love’s sake,
For the Lover to the Beloved must sacrifice
Everything
Even love itself
At all times I call upon your spirit
Not to become to itself
A captive
At all times I call upon the law
Not to become by obedience
Dismantled
At all times I call upon love
Not to become ist own
Captor
I followed the TRUTH I knew not
And found what I knew not to seek,
For the voice that calls is also
The voice
That responds
I left my self to its transience
And became you and I, Shukriya
In love beyond love,
Life beyond life,
ONE OF ONE
My flute plays in the reeds
And I endure
In the ONE THAT ENDURES
Like the dust
I left behind the world I knew
I sought your trace
I called your name
I drank your breath and breathed your tide
Through YOU I lived, in YOU I died
My eye drank YOUR light
Till it broke in its sight
I lost my self in YOU
And perished
