Chapter 15 :Dear Friends

Dear friends,

If we have come this far, stop worrying about yourself. I am trying to do the same. Let us think of some more important things to worry about, like those who are suffering and are truly suffering, not those who have the luxury of debating the relativity of suffering that we all face. We do not face it equally. Coming to grips with this fact has led many people to lose faith. Some of those people are those that have witnessed injustice. Others are those that have felt injustice. Still others are those who have debated injustice. Few among those that have lost faith however, have been able to change the world for the better. Many of us have intellectualized agency itself, in order to diminish the importance of our own actions with regard to that effect. But the fact is, we all take actions that have consequences, and from time to time the consequences are significant, even on a personal level, and sometimes on a broader level than that. Whatever we decide to do in life affects other people. We have power. The fact that we diminish the idea of our personal power is evidence of our fear of it, hence it is powerful. The fact that one can diminish one's own personal agency is evidence of the significance of agency. On the other hand, one can exaggerate the importance of agency to the point of delusion. One cannot be perfect in the evaluation of this question.

If one respects logic, one cannot lose faith completely. If one is to avoid risks, one must live with the idea of risk. Thus one is not entirely safe, not matter how faithful one thinks one is. Faith is having faith anyway. In the same way that courage is not the absence of fear, but action in the face of it. How do we reconcile this with surrender? These are questions that I cannot answer.

If one respects logic one admits that there are questions that one cannot answer. One admits that there is a high probability that since there are always new questions to answer, there is no limit to the knowledge possible. Therefore one cannot know everything. One is human. One cannot also not lose faith. Where there is mystery, there is a logic for faith. Faith and reason always have a point of reconciliation that can be found, when a motivation for reconciliation presents itself.

We have many motives for reconciliation now. Those that speak with both logic and humility about mystery can be trusted. But even logic tells us that we can be fooled by our own logic.

Is it ok to be confused or is it a place to run from or to succeed at ending. It depends whether you have faith. If you have faith and you are confused, you can calm down and sort it out. If you don't have faith in the confusion, you can end it. Either way, you get to decide, you're a grownup. No one said it would be easy.

I am thankful for the suffering that I have in my life, and I am thankful for those who gave their lives both in time and effort, and in early death, so that my suffering is not worse. So that I can experience happiness and freedom. It calls me to work again. Dammit.

I am at a crossroads and I've been at a few of these before, and I am at the mercy of our lord. We all are who have the time to read this. So, take a fresh breath. Go out tomorrow and do something genuinely good, for yourself, for someone else. Stop worrying about yourself. You'll feel better.

Bye for now.

Arif

Chapter 13: Good Morning

So I wake up this morning without any money, nicotine withdrawal, have to work the evening shift - but I am happy. I was unreasonable happy last month, so I am happy to be a bit more ordinarily happy with some nuisances to deal with.

I stopped last at an awkward moment in this somewhat autobiographical journey. Who reads this, I don't know. Why people want to live in the dark, I don't know. But as such, I create some mystery here as a way to self-censor. It creates more mystery here in this writing than it should, but it is meant that way I suppose. I still may only express myself distantly.

If we follow the passage, the sort of tragic drama I was in to last chapter, 'the dark night' - etc. has passed. ok. good. I'm sure if we follow this timeline, there will be another night, no one can say if it will be as difficult.

So, lightly we continue.

I live in the city now. The other day while waiting for a call for dinner at this family of artist siblings, I met a beautiful young woman at the Cafe who listened to me talk about the economic crisis, afterward she gave me a hug. Simple pleasures. I seem to be playing music all the time, sometimes alone, sometimes with a group of talented bohemians. None of us work much, we have little money and we waste a little time with stupid things, but we play a lot, so for that reason, we get better. I put my cowboy hat on the other night, played Angels from Montgomery and Lucky Old Sun. Met a tomboyish and bratty African woman, the youngest of 9 of course, and really enjoyed her brazen style. I love being single.

Lightly we continue, but we can think about light. I decided that maybe I am a complicated monotheist. The African woman told me she is not a monotheist, maybe she is a polytheist or a pantheist. I get the point of monotheism, but I suppose I am not completely hung up on it either.

There is time. Time is God, it is greater than us. It moves everything forward and therefore it creates. It is eternal, always there, a Friend. But Light is God too. Light is everything that is created. Time moves light and creates, in creating, beings arise. As beings arise there is consciousness. In consciousness, there is now a relating, a relating between conscious beings and this light and time.

Sometimes I feel that my whole being is light, actually, and intellectually, I know that it is anyway, but I can feel it filling me. Light as energy to matter, my body not just a clumsy sack of bones, brimming, shimmering light. And then I get a pretty good sleep.

A woman friend decided to instruct me that I am not enlightened. I needn't explain why, there is a bit of history to this misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding because I don't know what 'not enlightened' means anymore than I know what 'enlightened' means. I think it's something that comes up on the way as a lightpost to people seeking to shed some extra baggage, or 'onion layers' of themselves as they like to say, or trying to be happy and they don't know why they aren't, people with restless souls who want something spiritual they feel is lacking. So people with some wisdom speak of enlightenment as if to say, 'hey, this is a good place of dignity, peace, and love that we are being in, and you should come over here.' What is it? It's called 'enlightenment'. But speaking of it is always a kind of blasphemy anyway. People get fixated on the words, because they think it is a label you can get or ascribe, or some sort of spiritual achievement, a rank in the spiritual pecking order, something larger than life.

This is all bullshit, actually. We are all basically 'lighter' than we think spiritually, physically, emotionally, mystically, and states of being are described in reference to that. This has caused much confusion, particularly for young people who are 'spiritual' and 'seeking'.

Lightly... we will continue next time.

Chapter 12: There is no God but...

The first part of the Shahada, the Islamic creed, reads 'there is no god but God'. Contained within the Shahada is the creed of atheism, there is no God. Atheism is the first pillar of enlightenment, the second pillar is faith. This is grossly misunderstood by nearly everyone, especially believers and atheists.

Faith has no purpose where there isn't truth, truth implies a possibility of the real as opposed to the illusory. The purpose of skepticism is to eradicate illusions with the same ascendance of a reality.

One of these illusions is god. However, the truth and what is real as opposed to what is illusory is also known as God. The difference in god and God is the level of humility and honesty of the person who mouths the word. Humility arises in knowing one's imperfections and limits when it comes to understanding truth and reality, in understanding God. Honesty arises in the courage to stay with truth and reality and to speak of it.

When it comes to religious belief, there are many erroneous notions about what god is. It is that way now, and it was that way at the time the Shahada was revealed or discovered. What is different now, is that there are less erroneous notions about the physical world and indeed about our social and mental worlds. There is less need for gods, and just as much desire for God. The desire for God remains because we die. We don't know and can't know what happens to us after we die. If we think about that honestly, it means we can't exactly pin down who and what it is we are as we live; are we mind, body, soul, spirit, consciousness, individuated, connected, alone in the universe and what for? Therefore, with all that science can tell us, we are still and always will be, on an existential cliff with no one to catch us.

So, this relationship between individual and God remains important. But it does not help us on the path to enlightenment if we are just concerned with 'what happens to me' and 'who am I' and 'I need to find myself'. That only leads to comforting words we want to hear, a kind of spiritual pampering.

Truth requires negation. Truth requires discovery. It is one of those yin-yang things. The Tao Te Ching says 'know the yang, but stick to the yin'. So above all, truth requires a belief that it is possible and responsible to exercise discernment, discretion and humility with regard to finding out what is not true (negation) and what is true (discovery). It is not expected either that one can judge an axiom or a fact if it is presented without rationale or evidence, that one can discover or negate as simply as that. This is why one is foolish to look at 'God exists' as an article of faith that is opposed to 'God does not exist'. One simply can't start with either statement.

Instead, tradition has always dealt with such questions with subtlety, or rather we would regard it as subtle because we are in such a fog. The Shahada is part of that tradition. Some people might actually believe that the Shahada gives Muslims the real God over other religions, making Islam the true religion above others. This is the kind of nonsense that belongs in the negation side of the Shahada, it is a god.

In the end it's quite direct and obvious what is going on. The first part offers the possibility of negation in the search for truth, reality, god or gods, faith etc. It offers the possibility of being mistaken, and thus becoming humbled, emptying oneself of illusion. Then it offers the possibility of discovery, if all of these illusions are not god, then what? ....there is no god but.... Maybe the Shahada should have left it to a dot,dot,dot, a wide open space, but emptiness and the Dharmakaya was already a wind blowing from the Far East. Again, it's yin and yang. Nothing and something. From zero to universe in a singularity. Monotheism gives us the fullness of the universe, that which is arising in emptiness as real. As God.

This may seem highly esoteric, arrogant and opinionated. But it is an important discussion.

The problem with theism is that is doesn't practise enough negation. That gives power to religious authorities and ordinary people alike to abuse the power of our ignorance and the power of the possibility of discovery to harm, create suffering and even genocide. Theists need to practise atheism in order to navigate manipulations both coming from others and coming from within themselves. Manipulations that seduce one towards power, be it for control over what is feared, or to acquire what is desired. These seductions displace truth, the connection with reality, for illusions that are more useful than truth in the pursuit of power.

The problem with atheism is that it stops with negation. If we have discovered the means to discover everything, then there is nothing really and truly to discover, it is just a matter of waiting for other people to collect the truth. The problem with atheism is that in all its rationality it cannot bootstrap itself onto reality. It appears to have not been responsible for any of the bad things that have happened in humanity. That also turns out to be a cop-out, for in negation one copes with the question of existential responsibility in the same way the religious cope through duty to God.

Atheism is ultimately a reactionary system, retreating on the difficulties of navigating the tension between discovery and mystery when they go beyond what the atheist fairly arbitrarily decides is a line. The theist also has an unfortunate line, and that stops the theist from asking the questions needed to arrive at truth. The atheist's line prevents them from going further in discovering who they are in relation to the universe, it is undiscovereable. The theists line prevents them from unearthing religious or other comforting delusions they have about themselves in relation to the universe. The tragedy is that in time, their chances pass, and only because people continuously seek comfort and power in gods.

Ultimately that is what the Shahada represents, the tension between discovery and mystery, the struggle to negate illusion, and open space to discover reality. It saddens me that in this day and age when we have discovered so much, many Muslims will negate discovery on the basis of something they were taught by religious authorities. That is not the idea, it is exactly what Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)was fighting against at the time. The tension between mystery and discovery helps us remove the illusions that result in oppression, it allows us to discover dignity in being human.

The best thing that can happen to a theist is for them to embrace atheism without losing faith in God. The best thing that can happen to an atheist is to surrender atheism without embracing illusions. Contradiction in words is a reflection of its opposite in reality.

When we have no last leg to stand on, we can walk together in the reality of a cool spring day. There is no god, but God.