On Truth & Untruth

Posted on by toomajj

Who is He that all the birds sing His name, whose dark light has befallen the fallen! What can be said about Him without whom nothing can be said! What can be thought about Him without whom nothing can be thought? And what name can be given Him who is the Great Pronouncer of all names?!

Are we not closer to Him in our silence than in our words?! In the Face of The Absolute everything burns but the Supreme Silence, that sublime abyss from which we have arisen and to which we shall return, the ever veiled abode of that Sole Dweller of the Void. It is in the seductive charm of that Black Magician that we roam as if freely; we are passing nomads in the imagination of a child.

Behold you tired traveler of time, the path you walk ends in your heart. You are the home you have so much missed. You but not you, You are the veiled face of the One. Drop the mask of time and shine in glory.

I am far too outside this world, of its concerns and consolations. But from the heights of truth, from the mountaintops that pierce the dense clouds of illusion, history and identity, I stand alone and see not what’s below but what is above, the ineffable and ineffaceable glory of Khorshid. Up here even the loudest uproars of the earth can’t reach. You may perceive my shadow but I am veiled with the Light of the Supreme Silence. This world with all its horizontal curiosities and irrelevant questions is nothing but a shadow of a shadow, a refracted Light of the One. Yet here I am standing beyond all reflection and refraction, beyond world and people.

There is a partial truth in the claim, of superficial observers, that religions are means of consolation, but so too are man-made sciences and philosophies: Sciences produce abstract notions and thought stirs them until they solidify into a rigid block of merely accepted beliefs about the world and reality. These abstractions have veiled the face of the One who is Itself the source of all abstractions, and hence Itself the most concrete of all. Religion, too, veils the Face but does so only to protect Its sanctity and also to shield the mass from the fatal radiation of the Face; but unlike tradition the modern veilings introduced by our sciences and scholars made us forget the Face and its sanctity altogether. We mistook the veil for knowledge! This is so because the majority of men rather forget their ignorance than confess to them. But our worldly engagements, no matter how intense they are, will always allow for occasional rifts in which we become world-loose again and remember that despite all appearances we never really know anything at all, that what we think we know is nothing but ideas of our own making. We see, if at all, not only that we are essentially nothing in particular, but that we can never truly become anything, for we are ourselves occasions for all becomings: We ourselves are the veil.

What nowadays passes for knowledge is nothing but the accumulation of verbal notions in the memory; and that is why the learned men and women of today that take so much pride in the size of their baggage of verbal notions are worse off, in their being, than when they started. These so-called educated and cultured men and women come out of their cults, academia, with a flattened intelligence and outlook that cannot recognize, by its nature, anything above their purely horizontal comprehension, or rather incomprehension, that operates only in the plane of subjectivity. Knowledge that doesn’t transform and elevate man’s being, adding to the weight of his presence, an addition imparted vertically and from above rather than learned horizontally and from below, is no knowledge at all. This modern education introduces only mental deformities that pull down the objective intelligence unto its knees, to the level of mere subjectivity and sentimentality which is nothing but the madhouse of competing beliefs and opinions.

The Real, The Absolute, is the most concrete of all; everything else is mere abstraction. Hence, the secretum secretorum: Insofar as I am the individual I do not know The Absolute, and insofar as I know The Absolute I am not the individual.

Oh, deluded man, seek only the consolation of the One. Seek the blessed moment that contains all moments, the permanent actuality of the Self within which we are but crawling possibilities. Behold that blessed moment where His eye burns your “I.” It is that dark light of the Self which conceals Itself by revealing the world. When you wake up in the lower darkness follow the light into the higher darkness where He dwells.

In a phenomenal world man is nothing but a phenomenal man, a passing appearance that veils the permanent essence.

This world is nothing but the bottom of a well. The way out is upwards and not forward. You seek the rope of salvation in vain; you are the rope of salvation. Pull this rope with the longing of the heart. Your ascent is indeed the walls’ descent. Oh my dear essence, you have always been in The Open. The well in which you found yourself was the world you imagined around yourself. You are the sun hypnotized by the lure of its reflection in the well. Lose this petty identity of yours and attain to Supreme Identity.

Spiritual ascent is like the ascent to the surface of air-bubbles in water: Your human individuality is nothing but an apparent form, the bubble, while your essence is the air seeking to merge in its source. The liberation of air at the surface coincides with the extinction of the bubble, the form, the human you. Thus, the summit of spiritual realization is the total Liberation of the essence which comes from the total extinction of the form and individuality as such. Fear not reaching that surface, for it is the bubble that bursts, not You. Fear not that Blessed Moment, for your mortality is nothing but a veil over your immorality.

Every object is both a door to heaven and a door to hell. It is a door to heaven through its essence and a door to hell through its form. Through the essence we ascend toward Unity; through the form we fall and sink into diversity. Seek not what is looked at but the source of all looking, that descending ray of The Sacred Look who is captivated by its own eternal Self-disclosure.

Lord, please forgive my forgetfulness.

World is the shadow of God

Posted on by toomajj

This world is the shadow of God; it is not a thing, not an existent entity; rather, it is the lack of a thing, lack of light, as are all shadows.

Our relation to the absolute principle is paradoxical from the point of view of our mundane intelligence: First, there is nothing but God; but then, we are separated from Him! How can this be?!

Well, paradox and contradiction did not keep physicists to develop quantum physics which is a very successful science though it will always appear paradoxical to our mind. What seems paradoxical in one level of reality resolves itself into unity in a higher level of reality. God is paradox-free.

How can a shadow understand the object of which it is a shadow?!

We ask: If God is everything, then how can we be separated from Him? Well, from the point of view of God, a contradiction in terms since God is absolute and owns all points of views at once, there is no such thing as separation; even our existence is only a pure possibility for God and never a concrete reality, much similar to the way dream characters are real relative to one another but only subconscious possibilities relative to the dreamer.

God is everything and yet we are separated from Him! But this is not really a paradox since the two situations cannot be realized simultaneously: The second condition follows if and only if the first condition is not fully satisfied, or realized if you will. We feel separated from God as long as we don’t truly believe that He is everything; but once we have realized that God is everything, then we won’t feel any separation; our separation too is nothing but God himself appearing as void.

Our feeling of separation is not a result of God’s absence but an adverse effect of an acute case of forgetfulness: The Fall is nothing but a fall into forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is the original sin; salvation and return to His bosom is a possibility always in the here and now, something immediately realized once we realize He is all that there is, that I am Him, my thoughts and feelings, my pain and suffering, my hopes and worries, my joy and happiness, are all Him and nothing but Him. Then we cease to fight, for any fight would be a fight with Him, a fight with our own being. True surrender is the most intelligent decision we can ever make.

A concise way of articulating our relationship with God is this:

My being is God’s knowing 

The Blanket of Truth

Posted on by toomajj

Don’t ever think that you are not home. You are home and you always been home because you are the home. This human life of yours to which you think you belong, this apparently vast cosmos in which you think you reside, all this is just the scenery. Your dearest attachments, your identity and personality, too, are in the scenery.

You have accepted too much and assimilated too little. You take from your soul what is concrete, the spirit, and add to the world what is abstract, matter. You steal the reality of your spirit and attribute it to the world. You have drained your own blood to color this world. My friend, you have forgotten the safety code: The traveler doesn’t get attached to the scenery. Shit happens, but what’s it to you?!

You are blinded by the blanket of truth. Fear not the faces and demons pained on the blanket. Fear only your own suffocation. Don’t see the faces; see the blanket. Don’t crawl deeper into your paranoia, just remove the blanket; remove it and see that you too were just a painting on that same blanket. Wake up and see that this reality of yours, your thoughts and memories, your beloved character, this whole universe and its objects, are all drawings on that one blanket. You are that blanket. Don’t confuse yourself with the folds and wrinkles, for the whole of this world is nothing but your folds and wrinkles.

You are home, and you are home alone, for you are already everyone and everything.

The Metaphysics of The Orchestra

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As the symphony is a whole emerging from the harmonious cooperation of parts each serving its proper function within the creative process, the violin’s melody is itself another whole emerging from the harmonious cooperation of the body parts of the violinist. The violinist is itself an orchestra. It is false to see the musician simply as the person playing an instrument: In the mastered musician the instrument has become an extension of his body, a new organ which he uses to dance with the orchestra.

The reciprocal relationship between the musician and the orchestra can be seen as one being the enlarged image of the other. It is in virtue of the cooperative reciprocity between the one and its image that the creative process leads to fruition. The conductor is the central figure through whom the various rays of melody are harmoniously reflected into the focal point, the symphony. The macrocosm and the microcosm being reflections of one another in different scales must coexist for the production of an ordered and functioning whole.

The conductor projects the concealed composer into the orchestra making him present through his work. I the same fashion the saint or the prophet, too, is an agent through which the Godhead is reincarnated onto the stage of our lives reminding us of the underlying unity and purpose of this orchestra, that is to see the other as an extension of our own bodies, and hence to love the neighbor as we love ourselves.

Where everyone wants to become the conductor or the soloist no orchestra can take shape and no symphony can be heard. The personal interests and benefits of the parts must be subordinated to the function and beauty of whole. The success of an orchestra is guaranteed only through the selfless tyranny of the conductor.

To Be Present

Posted on by toomajj

Every event in our lives is a gift that we will some day unwrap and appreciate. The very being of the moment, the ceaseless flow of conscious experience within which this life-world is given, is the primordial revelation of the One; we only take it for granted, as if it were our own consciousness; little do we realize that we too, along with the world, are known in and through consciousness which is always transcendent to all subsequent knowledge, including our self-knowledge.

There is only one unquestionable, brute fact that defines life and world: Impermanence. Our sciences, religions, philosophies, our state of knowledge and technology, all change; they have no absolute reign. But impermanence is the very nature of phenomena. What is ironic of human existence is that we accept and entertain all kinds of fiction with no trouble at all but we have not been able to accept and cope with this one brute fact. All the pain and suffering comes from our tantrums in the face of the inevitable, the impermanence of all things. So much for man as the rational animal!

When we judge a situation we are viewing it from our particular state of mind at the moment of judgment. Whether things are good or bad depends on our values at that moment. What we judge now as the worst mistake of our life may in a few years turn out to be the best gift of life, and then again the worst mistake when we judge it after a decade. If we are rational and reasonable animals, then we must see that judgment is the most futile epiphenomenon in nature. An act propagates endlessly into the inaccessible future; it has no end result, and hence no intrinsic value expect against the background of our our values and expectations.

One may object and bring the example of murder. But we ought to be objective and detached from our passions: A man who hates murder is more likely to commit murder when what he loves is destroyed. If we do not like murder here in America it is because we forget our democracy is founded upon the genocide of Native Americans, and this is for all great empires that ended up creating great men and women in history who transformed the masses. It would be a good research project for us to investigate and see how many people are being killed in poor countries for us to enjoy the little things of our everyday lives in developed countries!

And how about the murder of animals; it is perfectly justified as long as we like meat, though we prefer others do the murder for us. Thus, every single one of us is in one or another, directly or indirectly, involved in and benefiting from, whether physically or spiritually, some murder somewhere in history. But so far it was only the physical murder that concerned us, since we believe only in the physical reality; but there is more: On a daily basis we murder dreams, crush human spirits, and commit murder against ourselves by food and medication.

The pain and suffering will continue as long as our individual interests and benefits come before our objective intelligence which is really our consciousness of impermanence and the source of humility. This is so because the inevitable part of life, the impermanence, constantly gives and takes away, and hence constantly puts our egos under stress and strain. Insofar as we identify with the ego which is the inertia of the mind we won’t be able to face the inevitable and at once enjoy it. Ego is the cancer of the soul, and only divine radiation can eliminate it.

The good is Him; the bad is Him

The pleasure is Him; the pain is Him

In pain and pleasure, in hell and heaven, I am always with Him

If you have come to take Him away then take Him away, for this too is Him

He is the here and the away

He is both the Being and the Non-Being

It is not that we are made to suffer: Suffering is there in the world as the blue of the sky is there in the world; we feel the suffering only because we identity with it, thinking that it is ours. Both pain and suffering arise from our attachment to phenomena: Pleasure comes when our attachments are present and safe; pain comes when our attachments are being taken away. But attachment to and identification with the impermanent is suicide, for there is no pain without pleasure and no pleasure without pain. Suffering comes to an end only when we all learn to prefer peace to pleasure, unity to individuality, Oneness to mine-ness, God to ego.

What we must learn, and what spiritual traditions speak of, is precisely the art of facing the inevitable and undergoing impermanence. What is the original sin but lack of patience, and what is lack of patience but the reign of the ego, the snake of the Eden? If an object falls due to its mass, man falls due to its ego. The Fall is not so much the fall from heaven which is the eternal present given by the One. Our fall, the real fall, consists in our forgetfulness of still being in heaven and in His presence.

The existential angst of modern man, which is the vertigo of this apparent fall, comes from resistance against the inevitable. The return to the One, that is accepting the impermanence, is in the heart’s act of embracing Its present to us, and Its present which is Its presence is none other than the present, the now, which is indeed the primordial present. Thus, to be with the One is to be fully in the present, that is to be perfectly committed nihilists. It is often the case that our seeking the One makes us farther away from Him.

Meister Eckhart, a 13th century Christian mystic and theologian, says:

“A man must become truly poor and as free from his own creaturely will as he was when he was born. And I tell you, by the eternal truth, that so long as you desire to fulfill the will of God and have any hankering after eternity and God, for just so long you are not truly poor. He alone has true spiritual poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, and desires nothing.” 

The Zen Master Nan-Sen says:

“Do not strive to seek the truth; only cease to cherish opinions.”

The Sufi Master Bayazid Bastami says:

“Knowledge of truth cannot be attained by seeking; but it is found only by those who seek it.”

To seek God in heaven, in church or mosque, in the saint and the prophet, is like seeking a picture of him who is always already present with us. To be with the One is to stop looking for Him and seeing Him in the very Being of everything in and around us.

Breast & Phenomenology of World

Posted on by toomajj

Dated November 3rd, 2013 

The world that we know is just a saying; it is pure hearsay. We know of it from the mouths of our so called world-professionals, from scientists, psychologists, cosmologists, philosophers and theologians, who have confused their inquiries about the world with the world itself; as if they cannot know the simplest fact, that inquiries about the world are really parts of the world, already embedded inside the very world they try to explain.

For any inquiry to initiate, the subject of inquiry must already be given, however vague and mysterious its manner of givenness. The subject of inquiry always precedes the inquiry itself. World, too, is always there beforehand we subject it to our methods of inquiry. The world is pregiven. The pregiven world is what I wished to see. No one put it better than Edmund Husserl when he wished to communicate to the philosophers how science has gone off course and missed its original goal of grounding the world: “Sciences meant to understand the world are themselves lost in the world.”

Besides the fact that the world is pregiven and must be present and presented precisely as world in the background of any inquiry, even the world that is known and explained within a particular mode of inquiry is always a function of the adopted methodology. All inquiries are erected upon and made possible by methodology. And methodology always determines what is given and what is not, and among what is given it determines what matters and what does not. So nature gives itself to us depending on the methods we choose to interrogate it. This is the most crucial point that the mass fails to grasp when they so enthusiastically take the scientific worldview as fact and put it as the ground of their existential and social self-perceptions, as if the universe of cosmologists existed apart from cosmologists themselves. It is a matter of logical distinction that what is seen, and known, depends on the instrument and the subject of inquiry. What we experience when we touch a breast is completely different from what we experience when we see it, smell it, taste it, etc; it is only later that the mind synthesizes these different perspectives to be of one and the same breast. Universe as we take it to exist is a pure mathematical construct consequent to Galilean mathematization of nature. Or to put it more precisely, nature as we know today is a product of the 17th century differential calculus created by Newton and Leibniz.

Nature is what we take it to be. I restate what I learned from quantum physics: To measure is to filter. Measurement is an instance of making something known, focusing on the object; this comes about at the cost of eliminating the rest, putting out of focus everything else. More precisely, to measure is to filter out all other alternatives until only one remains. But measurement, and all observations, do not just put out of focus; they have to destroy the alternatives in order to arrive at the intended object. This is because nature at its heart is a whole and not something essentially divided. To single something out one has to commit genocide against the rest. The energy that is released in splitting the nucleus of an atom is not the energy of the parts but the energy that keeps the whole together as a whole which is a million times greater than the sum total of all individual masses.

And it has happened to fall on our age that certain echoes of this saying called the world are stronger than others; they are shouted into our ears. Alas, we cannot hear it, for we are still busy with that breast.

Yin-Yang: The Geometric Equivalent of The Golden Ratio

Posted on by toomajj

I have discovered that Yin-Yang and Golden Ratio are different representations of one and the same metaphysical principle. The metaphysical principle of our interest is Unity Within Duality which states the complementary character of conflicting tendencies. This is of course similar to the Hegelian trinity in his interpretation of history: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.

After giving a short account of Yin-Yang and Golden Ratio I proceed to prove their equivalence. Since after a year of research I have found no one else who has discovered this equivalence I stick a copyright notice at the end of the article just for the publication purposes in case the finding turns out to be of significance.

Yin-Yang and Golden Ratio are the two representations of the principle that maximally opposing tendencies, or aspects, complement one another to form a unity: The former represents it geometrically and the latter represents it numerically.

Yin-Yang in Chinese philosophy is the geometrical expression of the following concept: The apparently opposing and contradictory tendencies complement one another; being interconnected they add up to form a unity. In the Yin-Yang symbol a whole circle is divided into two maximally opposing aspects. The two aspects enjoy maximal opposition both in color and orientation: The color of one cut is the negation of the color of the other; and the orientation of one is the inverse of the orientation of the other.

YinYang

Notice that the two opposing sides have the same shape; they are the opposites of one another only in the attributes color and orientation. In other words, one side is the negation and inversion of the other side. But this cannot be done with just any shape; not every shape can be inverted and then added to itself to form a perfect circle which represents unity.

Golden Ratio is a number in mathematics; it has the numerical value of 1.61803398875…. When the ratio of two quantities is this number we say that they are in golden ratio. This number has huge significance in mathematics because it is the corner stone of spiral geometry which is observed everywhere in nature. It is also the limit of the Fibonacci Sequence. In fact when the ratio of two lengths is the golden ratio they have an inherent tendency to make up harmonious and beautiful structures.

golden-ratio

It is time to see how Yin-Yang and Golden Ratio are equivalent to one another, both being the representations of one principle.

We saw that Yin-Yang represents the idea that maximally opposing aspects add up to form a unity; each aspect is both the negation and the inversion of the other aspect. Numerically speaking, one being the inverse of the negative of the other. Let us try to represent this idea numerically, using number instead of shape: We need a number that when maximally opposed to itself, namely first negated and then inverted, can be added to itself to form a unity which is represented by number 1.

We don’t yet know if such number exists, but it will soon be proved that it actually does. First remember that by negation of a number of course we mean its negative, -2 being the negative of 2. By inversion we mean the inverse of the number, 1/2 being the inverse of 2; thus, the inverse of the negative of 2 is -1/2; but notice that when we add 2 and -1/2 we get 3/2 and not 1. We are after a number that gives us 1.

Let us call our desired number x and try to write down the concept behind Yin-Yang in the language of numbers and see if such number exists: We have x as our number; negate it to get -x; invert the negation to get -1/x. To express Yin-Yang is to add up these two numbers and have them equal 1. Thus, the algebraic equivalent of Yin-Yang would be the equation [x+(-1/x)]=1 which can be simplified as the following:

X – (1/X) = 1

This already looks like Yin-Yang :). For those with mathematics background this equation should blow their minds; it is none but the infamous equation that is the very definition of the Golden Ratio: Golden Ratio is the exact solution, and the only solution, of this quadratic equation. You will soon see that the second solution is just the negative of the inverse of the Golden Ratio, its maximally opposing complement which we call the Golden Complement. Let’s call this equation, the algebraic form of Yin-Yang, the Golden Equation since its solutions are the Golden Ratio and the Golden Complement; thus, this equation has two solutions in real numbers:

X – 1/X = 1               The Golden Equation (Equivalent of Yin-Yang in Algebra)

First Solution:        X1 = 1.61803398875…              The Golden Ratio       

Second Solution:   X2 = -0.61803398875…            The Golden Complement

X1 + X2 = 1             The Golden Equation in terms of its two complementary solutions

The first solution is the Golden Ratio and the second solution is interestingly the inverse of the negative of the first solution, namely the Golden Complement. See that the two solutions corresponding to the two complementary aspects of Yin-Yang add up to unity, hence completing the Yin-Yang equivalent in algebra. Notice that the Golden Complement has the exact same decimals as the Golden Ratio itself which is the reason why the decimals cancel out in the Golden Equation, hence leading to unity.

We saw that there actually exists a unique number whose inverse of its negation can be added to it to become unity, the number 1, hence expressing the Yin-Yang principle in the realm of numbers, and this unique number is none but the Golden Ratio, the solution of the Golden Equation. Thus one side of Yin-Yang corresponds to the Golden Ratio and the other side corresponds to its maximally opposing counterpart, the negative of its inverse which is the Golden Complement, and the two adding up to unity by definition. Only the Golden Ratio has this property, and one can see as we showed above that the principle behind Yin-Yang, leading to the Golden Equation in algebra, is the very definition of the Golden Ratio.

Digression:

{Notice that the two solutions of the Golden Equation, which correspond to the two maximally opposing aspects of Yin-Yang, have these two interesting properties:

 X1 + X2 = 1                     X1 × X2 = -1

If these two solutions, the Golden Ratio and the Golden Complement, are considered to be the diagonal elements, or eigenvalues, of a 2×2 matrix called the Golden Matrix G, then G is an orthogonal matrix with determinant -1 and trace 1, hence:

Det(G) + Tr(G) = 0

Which is only an interesting observation besides our main point.}

End of Digression

Therefore, the principle that the maximally opposing tendencies complement one another and form a unity is represented geometrically as Yin-Yang and algebraically as the Golden Equation X-1/X=1 whose two solutions, corresponding to the two aspects in Yin-Yang, are the Golden Ratio and the Golden Complement. We saw that of all numbers one and only one, the Golden Ratio, has this property. More precisely, the Golden Equation X-1/X=1 is the algebraic equivalent of Yin-Yang from which the Golden Ratio is extracted.

Yin-Yang is the Golden Equation in geometry. Golden Equation is Yin-Yang in algebra.

This equivalence between Yin-Yang and Golden Equation which I discovered in the fall of 2013 has blown my mind to this day. Who could guess that the Golden Ratio is Yin-Yang in numbers while Yin-Yang is the Golden Ratio in geometry! Fascinating.

*[Note for the mathematician: In constructing the Golden Equation, the algebraic equivalent of Yin-Yang, I assumed a bijection from plane shapes to real numbers, hence defining the equation over R, the field of real numbers. Naturally a bijection from the inverse and the negative of a shape would fall onto the inverse and negative of numbers. Thus, in constructing the bijection from Yin-Yang to real numbers the only proper way of translating maximal opposition, namely both negation and inversion, would be to use both the additive inverse and the multiplicative inverse of a number, the only possible ways of defining opposites among real numbers, hence the field properties of the Commutative Division Ring R. In other words, the only way to translate the relation between the two opposing aspects of Yin-Yang is to relate a real number to the multiplicative inverse of its additive inverse, hence mapping the two different operations present in Yin-Yang, namely the spatial inversion and color-negation. It is seen that the only number whose multiplicative inverse of its additive inverse can be added to itself to become unity is the Golden Ratio.]

Copyright © Tomaj Javidtash and NOEMAYA, 12/30/2014

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