I thought I was a man and I sought the other half in a woman. But I had to break to realize that I were not a man but an enclosure. What I perceived as woman was nothing but what I had negated in the Self. The seeking was the gradual breaking, and when the vessel broke the inner and outer space were realized to be one indivisible space only imagined to be divided. My liberation was in my annihilation, and woman was nothing but a figment of my imagination.
We approached the Giver of States in awe and reverence seeking a glimpse of that burning and annihilating ecstasy. Hearing our footsteps a voice came from the Throne of the Void, infinitely near and infinitely far from our ears, “In my perfect justice no state is dispensed in vain.”
“Tell us our Lord, what constitutes your perfect justice?”
From behind Its psychedelic veil our Shaykh spoke thus: “In my perfect justice that which persists in existence subsists in non-existence and that which persists in non-existence subsists in existence.”
“Seek annihilation by not seeking at all, for I am not found by seeking but by seeing, a seeing stripped of all looking, by pure witnessing. The seeing that finds my face annihilates the seeing that finds my trace.”
“Who art thou who dwells in the heart of the Void?”
“My essence is my face and my names are my trace. On whosoever I cast my piercing glance, whosoever has witnessed my Jamaal and blinding brilliance, is at once annihilated in its temporality and reintegrated in my eternity. That is Fanaa, the state I bestow upon my dearest folks.”
Writing has not come easily to me within the past couple of years. I went straight from writer’s diarrhea to a total, painful writer’s constipation. There have been sudden bursts of ideas but none has been able to reach the mother egg so far. This consciousness, this mass grave of ideas in which everything that is and was has been laying from the days of yore where my father was my mother, this unbroken and unbreakable symmetry in which everything seems to be eternally disintegrated and reintegrated, this infinite ocean with its ever receding horizon must have swallowed my aimlessly drifting raft.
There is an uprising in the soul of a sensitive spirit; a gnawing dissent and discontent has crept into the hearts of the people of the city of the heart; these men and woman have quantum jumped between the two extremes of joy and sorrow without ever seeing the light of the golden mean. When the pendulum of the heart crosses the invisible line into the eternal chaos, when the spiritual asymmetry of irregular polygons propagates into mental obsession and physical compulsion, our only savior is the unmoved mover, the origin. A person of this type must experience the origin: he must experience the birth of meaning.
Behind the scenes of religion the prophet pulled me over to the water cooler and whispered into my ears, “To surrender is to be open to meaning.”
Every being strives to return to the lost homogeneity of its primordial state. The collective form of this strife is found in the phenomenon of history and its singular form in the phenomenon of the individual person. For humans, the closest glimpse of the Platonic reflection of that transcendent homogeneity is given in the purity and simplicity of childhood, much like the peasant life that represents the collective form diachronically and the pre-civilization culture that represents it synchronically.
The struggle toward something entails a persistent, however subtle and concealed, consciousness of the end. A progress or evolution of any kind is initiated on the ground of a pregiven impetus and teleology at least potentially present in what evolves. Actuality is the dance of potentiality. Seeing things from above, the common struggle of all existence is a struggle to return to the Ideal; however, it is felt in the form a return only from the inside; from above it is a struggle to remember the Ideal, and at the peak of this holy mountain, the real and the ideal are one and the same. After all, we can only forget what we already know.
“A good flight with a bad landing is still a failure,” the prophet kept whispering with all the intention to annoy me. I went to flight school in my late 20s but I didn’t attend any of the landing trainings. I am a one way flight man; I just like to take off and keep going. Maybe I should’ve become a Falcon driver if there is such a thing.
Outer space has always called for me and it is a perfect one way flight. I remember when I was five I became aware of a passion for going to space. My parents thought I wanted to become an astronaut and advertised me as a bright and ambitious kid! Little did they know that I wasn’t looking at a 9 to 5 or a career in space. I just fancied the idea of being absorbed in total freedom and no sense of orientation. My one desire was to become totally desire-less. But the family didn’t need to know about my ulterior motive, neither would they ever grasp the breadth and significance of it as the prime driving force of my life. They eagerly watched the trajectory of my life with all the pride in the world until Boooommmm, the untold explosion of the noema on August 20th, 2013: the family watched the following crash and burn in awe as did the spectators of the Challenger disaster. A detailed report of the flight and the consequent failure generated by the Omission Commission remains classified to this day except a leaked excerpt stating “the man’s desire was met.”
Even now as a grown ass man I still have a love of deep space, deep space both as the Self and the Other. It is included in my will that my lifeless body be shot into empty space in a disposable capsule so that I can forever fly away from mundane origins and relativities and like my spirit become the origin and the source of all relativities.
I love the moon with its dark side. I love the Truth with its oblivion. Unlike the Pythagoreans, I love the undetermined and the unlimited.
The atheist is a man or woman disbelieving in a god of his own understanding. In rejecting God as an absolute principle of reality, he unjustifiably promotes his own fallible reason to omniscience, a station whose very existence he had set out to refute. Atheism, like relativism, is self-contradictory for merely logical reasons. But perhaps we may offer a few more or less intellectual and esoteric conceptions of God, in the sense of Godhead, as food for thought for those who rather see than believe.
God is:
“The coincidence of all opposites.” Rumi
“An infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Liber XXIV Philosophorum
“The synthetic unity of all antithetic determinations.” Eugen Fink
“The permanent actuality of the Self.” Rene Guenon
“The eternal present.” Don’t Remember
“The undifferentiated and un-differentiable state of consciousness.” Tomaj Javidtash
“Awesome.” Arthur Vandelay
There is a dirt road in the very heart of this city; it goes neither to the north nor to the south, neither to the east nor the west; neither to the northwest nor to the northeast; neither to the southwest nor to the southeast. This is not a road to any other dimension, neither is it a road with any orientation. This dirt road goes back, as it were, to the dimensionless seed of all dimensionality; it is a hidden road to a hidden door opening to where I am before extension and duration shoot forth and apart, before my face is washed away by the swaying waves of time and space.
This painter is not in the paining; this painter is the paining staring into the abysmal mirror of the witness. The painting is the reflection of the painter in the eyes of the witness.
This dirt road, this one right here in the heart of the city of the heart, is quite peculiar, for in this journey I am always already at the destination, so that when I arrive I am there to receive and welcome myself. This dirt road completes a journey that has never begun, and yet it is not complete unless it is begun.
The journey from time to eternity has no duration. Infinity is not indefinite extension, neither is eternal life a mere indefinite prolongation. Stumbling upon my grandeur by way of their fortunate birth, men of relative knowledge see in Me their own ignorance while men of perfect vision see in themselves my absolute Knowledge. The principle of all principles: your partial knowledge of Me is the Other, the universe; your absolute knowledge of Me is your Self.
Temporal life is a transparent veil over the eternal life. The absolute, eternal life has not become relative and temporal; and the relative and the temporal have never come into Being. What constitutes this apparent veil over my infinite depth is always Ideation. Drop all that you see and all that you are, and you will instantly recognize the ever shining face of Truth. No one has reached Me by way of position and accumulation; those who find Me come by negation and annihilation.
The dirt road goes from here and now to nowhere and nowhen; it concludes in an all-inclusive singularity in which all times and places have come together for supper. In this silent orgy all masks are dropped at the door, and both notions of union and separation are left behind the slaying edge of the event horizon. We must become naked to the Spirit before It enters us, and in entering us we enter It: we are thrown into that stateless state Turiya. In that blessed moment all opposites are reintegrated in their transcendent principle. The inside phenomenologist Eugen Fink calls this corner of all corners the synthetic unity of antithetic determinations. Dante knows it as the dimensionless point in which everywhen and everywhere is concentrated. Our Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi sees it as the coincidence of all opposites. What a sobering coincidence! Oh, we threw a play in which the king and the clown are one and the same.
This dirt road is infinitely long and infinitely short; it is not for the sane hearted for whom we have laid the highways of religions and philosophies, the expanding ladder of doctrine. Let us say no more but that every human being is a dirt road and a camouflaged portal to eternity. Access code: neti neti.
This heart of mine knows not where to hide; it is sought as it seeks, and it is found as it finds. This heart falls into ecstasy with every glance of the beloved; my beloved stands on every corner of this Bazaar. This hide and seek is a one man game.
If your right thumb aches and you are interested in our way, visit our one convenient location in that black hole right at the crotch of religion and philosophy; park your self outside the hole, and when you enter don’t decorate the hole.
“The stupid cannot become wise, and the non-existent cannot become existent, nor can the existent go into non-existence.”
Of all beings in this field, the only one capable of turning away from the incessant stream of phenomena, from mundane existence and the life of the field, is human being. This being roams the field while standing on the fence between the two worlds; facing the world he’s standing against The Abyss. But he is standing against the abyss in such a way that one could even say man is the abyss staring into the world.
Every night after a long day of work in the field, after planting my seeds, I takes off this human disguise and withdraw back into that abyss, I return home.
In every man, woman, and child that wakes up from sleep, in all beings starting from the first cause up until now, I alone have been the one returning from the abyss known to you as dreamless sleep. I am the single mover in all movements. I move all things while myself remaining unmoved. I move by a single glance from the abyss, from my transcendent throne: I am the possessor of all masks. I am the Animator. I dwell in eternity and recur eternally.
There is a type among us whose soul suffers much with every small turbulence, as a sensitive tooth does with every wind. In this suffering soul, a layer of spirit is exposed to the harshness of bare existence. The sober soul understands him not, for he/she has not known the spiritual madness for transcendence. This world has no remedy for such souls except a congregation of souls who understand by gnosis the restlessness of a spirit longing for home. Our suffering fellow isn’t aware that he’s been seeking to be restored to the original and primordial state of his existence, that is, to coincide with the archetype of which he is a projection. A dental appointment doesn’t cure this type; he/she needs a transcendental appointment.
A sensitive spirit has residual memories from the good old times its father’s house. This type, coming from that old city of Eidos in eternity, has no tolerance for time and impermanence. This type is the insane one, and his insanity lies in forgetting that the remedies of this world have only an apparent resemblance to the consolations he found in Eidos. The impregnated abyss has come between him and Eidos. How can one bridge a gap that is not even of the nature of space! How can one reach for the Hidden Door that is at once infinitely near and infinitely far!
We suffer from separation, and our only remedy is a bridge, a Logos from Eidos and not a bridge of our own making.
I am trying to help a dear friend of mine, herself a recent breast cancer survivor, to raise money for a breast cancer awareness walk. Any donations are appreciated. Here are the links:
From Nazanin: “Washington DC’s Stride Against Breast Cancer Walk is tomorrow and I haven’t reached my fundraising goal yet. Please help me to reach my goal for this very important cause by clicking bellow. Any donation as low as $5 will count and will be appreciated. Thanks for your support.”
