Meditations on the 5th dimension of existence
I have lost my tongue between the two worlds, I have felt two depths, and I haven’t found my own I stepped back out of fright, little did I know that it was the rope of the heart pulling me back, and I receded to the soft edge of the world where all dreams begin. … More The Passage of Simurgh
We were not born into a dead world. We were born into a living stream of meaning, and only later taught to mistake its shadow for reality. The world handed to us by scientism is neat and measurable, but at once an utterly lifeless picture framed so tightly that the pulse of Being can no longer be felt within it. And yet we are asked to live there, to love there, to find meaning there.
This essay is a refusal. A refusal to take the model for the living, the map for the land, the shadow for the flame. It is an invitation to reclaim what was never lost but merely loaned out, the living flow of meaning itself, from which all pictures borrow their meanings and by which alone anything is ever real. … More Against the Dead World: An Essay on Meaning, Myth, and the Crime of Taking the Map for the Living Land
What is man as a phenomenon? Is he a being that’s hasting toward non-being, a ghostly figure that has projected all the being he has and he can’t tolerate into and beyond a non-being horizon? Nay. Man is nothing in haste. Man is the very hasting of Being; he is hasting itself and not a being in haste. That’s why he’s always torn, torn in between here and there, for he can’t get that there out of his stupid head. He is as horizontally stretched between the opposite poles of embodiment and self-abandonment as he is vertically stretched between heaven and hell. He is everywhere and everywhen but here and now. He is a lunatic chasing shadows of himself. … More La Fretta dell’Essere: L’uomo e il miraggio del “Là”
We must forget and unsee all that we know and all that we think. We must surrender who we think we are in order to see who we truly are. We must surrender what we think reality is in order to see it for what it truly is. And repetition itself can help us: to repeatedly put the headsets aside, to return again and again to the plain, unadorned real, even when it feels empty or dull. That emptiness and dullness and boredom is the withdrawal symptom of a lifelong addiction to conceptualization and repetitive thinking. Stay with that emptiness long enough and one day vision clears. But for that, all borrowed images must die. All the stories of philosophers, theologians, and scientists must vanish for the true sun to rise before our eyes. All our ideas of truth and reality must die for the One to appear. … More The Letter That Kills, the Song That Heals: When Reality Is Buried Alive in Much Intellectual Chatter
God is lost in the overwhelming and forceful familiarity of the world. Only if for a moment everything became suddenly unfamiliar to us, that we didn’t recognize anything anymore, to such a depth that even sight and the senses failed to provide meaning and concreteness, in that very moment the face of God will spontaneously … More The Last Veil before God’s Self-Disclosure
Now, the opposite movement, the ascent to heaven, is not a matter of fixing things or some sort of a material or metaphysical redemption but a matter of awakening to this whole narrative-construct of our situation and realizing that not only we can’t fix things, but also there’s nothing to fix, that nothing is really broken; and that in the final analysis, there’s nothing truly ours, even the stream of our thoughts and feelings and of the human experience in which we always find ourselves, so we are already totally ok and enough. We are just witnessing. Just like God, we have no power over anything, and nothing has any power over us. … More The Three-Fold Lie
There’s an old beggar in our town; he goes around with a bowl knocking at doors begging for food to ease his hunger. Not everyone treats him well; some yell at him and kick him, and a few feed him for a day or two but no more; but he keeps knocking at those same … More The Forgotten Wealth: A Tale of Hunger, Memory, and Misplaced Identity
What you call hell is you taking this all too seriously, and heaven is your full presence in the play; they are not realities but your perspective on what is! So, drop all this metaphysics; instead, make merry and enjoy the play. … More When God Plays
All is He, and He’s none other than the Self, the very seeing, the very hearing, etc.. So, detecting fault is faulty detecting.” The Shaykh slipped into the golden silence before he continued, “In agreement with our doctrine, what one sees is none other than He (wherever you turn, there’s the Face of God), and He’s none other than the seeing Self, and hence what one sees is none other than the Self. A man who sees defect is seeing himself, and lacking wisdom, he thinks the defect is outside of himself and attached to this or that object or person. Only if he knew the doctrine by heart, and knew that the Self is free of all defects, he’d instantly recognize that in seeing defect he’s not seeing at all. If you can’t grasp the significance of all this, contemplate the two ways the eyes can see and comprehend a doughnut, and that’s the way of the knowers of the truth. And if you abandon even that and rise to the level of the lovers of truth, you’ll see that the lovers care not about the nature of a doughnut but rather drop away their reason to taste and take pleasure in the sweetness of the doughnut. And here’s a little secret for you: the Elect have favored the Boston Cream.” … More Boston Cream Doughnuts
The highlight of my day is sitting in the balcony in the morning hours when the sun shines from in between the surrounding buildings, drinking my hot coffee and smoking a cigarette. Here in the winters of Florence, Italy, my balcony is positioned so that it sees the sun only for 45 minutes in the … More Readiness is All: On The Power of Faith
NOEMAYA 