of muteness chirping, screaming thoughts…

Walking the streets on bare feet

Shoes worn, and thoughts torn

With hopes and dreams, uncertainties,

Cutting through the plans I've sworn

A look about the ringing surround

The flat pitched ground, a silent sound

Of muteness chirping, screaming thoughts

And options run amok, un-abound

I walk the walk, keeping pace

With thoughts that race, without solace

Expressions in my mind bursting my air

But there is no expression on my dusted face

-------------------------------------

Some familiar bend, the journey’s end

Most problems, I've managed to mend

A journey on bare feet, on a much-trodden street-

Yet another journey, with my metaphysical Friend.

Facades

Ponderous wondrous clichés of the sick

The manifesto built via a clamorous trick

Pouches that bear nothing and wombs that go stale

A life that turns vile is a life that’s out for sale

A creakish freakish naivety of the ones who chose to mute

A mono tonic gibberish billowing from the ant’s lute

Of shops that sell a farce, a salesman that but loots

And religious padres who pay nothing, except for empty hoots

A time of crime- of lost dime and broken rhyme

Yet carries this poem some rhythm, chooses to forego mime

The lips are tied albeit, but fingers are what run amok

The clock, welcomes the End, with a pacey strut of tick tock.    

Purpose of Man's Existence

“I have not created the jinn and humankind for any other

 purpose except that they should worship me”

(Qur’an 51:56)

The confusion about the basic framework upon which life should be built, and the varying opinions regarding what is right and what is wrong, stem from a primal ignorance about the purpose of Man’s existence. The views about the reason for Man’s being are discrepant, and the two major branches divulging from a single human mind are based upon whether one is religious or not. Many reasons have been formulated, and a certain number of philosophers have spent most of their working lives in pursuit of defining the purpose of existence. The naïve human mind has been convinced that reason suffices. Yet, for the believer, that is not true. Allah did not need to ponder on the reason given by Iblees for his conceit--for his reason to not bow in front of flesh.

Those few things in life that Man, in reality, pursues, are not definable, and can not be proved to exist by names and numbers; truth, happiness and satisfaction, to name the important ones. What Hazrat Inayat Ali said, then, is getting as close as someone can to these entities in words: “Reason is the illusion of reality.” What we do everyday is visible to us, but it in effect, is a pursuit of the hidden, the undefineable. The ultimate desire behind every physical entity, is the acquisition of “reality”: truth, happiness, satisfaction, and the like.

Yet, this is a discussion not about defining Allah or the truth, as it is clear that such an attempt will be in vain and that its results have already been established by Allah’s clairvoyance: “No human vision can encompass Him, whereas He encompasses all human vision: for He alone is unfathomable, all aware.” (Qur’an 6: 103) The second part of the verse, “whereas He encompasses all human vision: for He alone is unfathomable, all aware”, is of paramount significance, and it alone is sufficient to make a person who thinks, realize that his thoughts and actions must be exercised knowing that “the All aware” is uninterupptedly informed. It is not for us to try to perceive how and by what senses Allah accomplishes it.

The purpose of Man’s “creation” is to worship Allah. As soon as the word “creation” is used, it implies that there is a purpose, as is for everything that is “created”, and the grammatical expression “I have not created…except” implies that there can be no other reason whatsoever. Yet, what most of us perceive to be reasons for Man’s creation are not synonymous with this unchangeable reason. We may say it and know that reason, yet that is hypocrisy, as it is not evident in what we end up doing. There is no significance of Allah’s desires in the lives of many of us, and more often than not, our desires stand in blatant contradiction to Allah’s desires. This is due to either ignorance about Allah’s desires or knowingly disregarding them. Either way, the blame lies on Man. It should be simple to only read the above verse that lays down Man’s purpose of existence, and understand it. Yet, the distractions in the world around us make us “know” this verse, but not “realize” what it implies. Realization is required to wake up the ignorant mind, and it is only now that such a distance has been born between us and the words of Allah; understanding “just by reading” His words for the first time and religiously portraying them in our lives is unfounded nowadays. And our desires continue to contradict Allah’s. In fact, the “first time” that the words of Allah are read with an honest attempt by many of us, is as late as spending most of our lives. According to Professor Ahmed Rafiq, most of us strive to satisfy our bosses at work when we are in the prime of our youth, taking extra precautions not to displease them and regard their commands with vehement obsession. And when we have spent most our lives, and the candle starts to flicker with  life drawing near its close, we hold a prayer mat in one hand and rosary in the other and try to seek out the approval of our True Boss. How would that make Him feel? Would he care for us any more than we cared about Him? How often would He pay heed to us if that is how we remembered Him? “Nay, but Man doth transgress all bounds, In that he looketh upon himself as self-sufficient.” (Qur’an 96:6-7)

Trust in Allah emanates from “realization” of the truth, from “realization” of the true purpose of Man’s existence. When a person “begins” to place his desires behind those of Allah’s, he has in effect started his spiritual journey towards Allah. Trust in Allah spells out to Man that any act or thought desired by Allah can only be of advantage to Man himself, for He is not in need of Man, but Man is in need of him. The realization of this truth is what relieves a person from anguish if his yearnings are not materialized. In fact, his whole journey towards his own desires becomes an action done in psychological and spiritual tranquility, and since he has made certain that his desires do not contradict Allah’s and same time fulfilling Allah’s desires first, his whole journey (in pursuit of his own desires) becomes an act of worship. In essence, then, Allah holds his hand and guides him to his desires. But here again, trust in Allah is of vital significance, since any delay in the fulfillment of his wishes or a negation of their completion should only be seen with contentment and a calm disposition. This trust shall spell out to him an incredibly essential conception: “Man can only make choices, the decisions lie in the hands of God.”

Flickering Dawn

[as always:

One or two errors, yes, deliberate though
Grammar only restricts creativity's flow]

Standing upon the pillar of asunder
Of billowing clouds and twit-twat thunder
Corrodes the feeble and sulks them in defeat
The tears mingling rain at their mudded feet

Of winds that bring cries and hopes afresh
Of crowds of ants that democratically enmesh
Of people that flutter and birds that walk
And blind that see the deaf who talk

Phoenix, ashes, blackness, some coal
Was brought by fire, some angel stole
As God looks away, and lets Providence slip
Like a bloom of a flower, from a withering nip.

On the Existence of Man in Two Worlds

The existence of Man can be understood as being fluid. It is unbound by time and space, and it flows freely into the metaphysical space. A belief in the conception of such a space is faith, and discovering it is gnostic success. On account of being surrounded by an abundance of the physical, it is tedious to identify the metaphysical. The dearth of knowledge about the metaphysical makes us ignorant and unintelligent, even if we are intelligent in the physical space or world. The identification of the physical, and the laws which govern it, are obvious to quite a few, and even if the commoner has not seen the atom, the commoner believes it by virtue of a trust in the knowers of the physical world: the scientists and so forth. Those who have correctly identified the metaphysical and the laws which govern it, are the prophets, and their knowledge is undeniably superior, for the metaphysical is everlasting. Understandably, for a commoner to identify the atom after years of study and speculation is relatively easier then identifying the existence of reality via gnosis and knowledge of the metaphysical. Hence, physical space is only an illusion of the metaphysical (the real) [Inayat Ali]. The physical space can be vaguely analogous to viewing the world from satellite pictures, whereas in reality, there is a lot more going on, in a very fluid way, unlike the stagnant portrait picturized by the satellite. Here, it would be appropriate to draw an analogy between the satellite, and the human mind, for both are limited, and an escape from the ‘orbit’ is mandatory to uncover the Truth. It is also mandatory to uncover the metaphysical, or at the very least have faith in its existence, in order for one’s self to escape from the physical space, once the latter collapses on Man. Otherwise, one would be confused and a poor fit in the metaphysical- the state which is real and eternal.

        

Epitaphic

what starts to flicker
            shall soon begin to fade
a dwindling will to live:
            a sombre, minimalist serenade


the wind that gives life
            persuades death to pervade:
the horror of an ending,
            and the beauty of being afraid.
           

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W. B. Yeats"

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Just One Sentence (A Mini-stream of Consciousness)

Often curving through the misery of the world we see a hope in smoke billowing out of a rest house and we decide to stop, knowing not who will welcome the presence of an entity from the cold snowy blizzard and that who would be brave enough to console you and subjugate your sorrows with the flick of a matchstick that burns brighter than a thousand suns of joy to evacuate the cold blizzard from your slowly colding heart, and yet the heart gets warmed as your future seems full of promise once more and life has seen you again through the foggy sunset, just in time.



(One or two errors, yes, deliberate though
Grammar only restricts creativity's flow.)

Poem Language

Still await a time, an optimistic I
When poetry will be the language new,
Speech vague, yet clear like a cloudless sky,
Words quivering on lips like evanescent dew.


(The time will never come, I bow my head and cry,
Weary vocabulary shall keep permeating our air
With reason but no rhyme, wings to show but not to fly,
Useless mumbo jumbo; words escaping without flair.)

Joy in Madness. The

I sat on an apple to eat a star, when I saw how my thoughts were dripping out of a leaking, torn sky. I smiled, and my dreams showed on my teeth like diamonds polished with an oyster's spit. Wings grew from my ears, and I dived into the ocean of my future memories. Music played out of a dumb man's lips, and it painted a golden arch that only the blind could see. There were flavors on my skin, and textures rubbed into my eyes. I saw the bottle of joy, uncapped and leaking profusely.

And then, a hand came and grasped me from my back, and dragged me back to boring sanity.

“I became insane, with long
intervals of horrible sanity.”
- Edgar Allan Poe

Loneliness and I

Sometimes I envy the lonely, because they have become accustomed to loneliness, and their yearning for company has withered away as a desire of the distant past. I on the other hand, am a social animal like most of us, and when loneliness befalls me, sporadically, I am left with hours of emotionlessness and with periods of diminished joyfulness. I am not accustomed to loneliness, so in those few moments lasting days when I sometimes have to bear loneliness, time seems cruel and life seems empty. Truly, "boredom's not a burden anyone should bear" (Tool).

I need angels, and I need dust
A union: pure flesh with a soul to trust

What Makes Your Heart, Beat?

Often, we reject what we cannot define. Anything that fits not into the four corners of common Man's thought cube, is naturally, viewed with skepticism and an uncalled for scorn. People need things they can understand, because they are afraid to think beyond what they know they can understand. We have been brought up by our societies that way; the wretched, materialistic, animal-instinct infused society where Man is cattle, and its mind is pushed to yearn for wealth and individual glory. We have forgotten how to watch the Sun set on a beach, or how to write a letter with a fountain pen that travels all over the world (in every meaning of the word) till it reaches its destination, and you can smell the seven seas in its writing. We have forgotten our goals. We have forgotten that there are other ways too that lead to happiness; ways simpler and ways more beautiful. Because at the end of a long, tiring, weary day, isn't that what we all seek? The undefineable? The abstract? Things like happiness, satisfaction, love?- but we seek these abstractions through things as solid as a brick. We seek joy through wealth, because we have forgotten the joy that the sunset gave us, the joy that holding a letter in one's hand gave us. Can anyone remind us how we loved all these things? Because we have drifted too far into a vortex that may be good for our body, but is poison for our soul. And the person who has felt true happiness, knows that it is a feeling not of the body and not derive-able from materialism, but it is a feeling of the soul, reproducible only from what "feeds the soul". And once you've been there, everything else seems so distant and so useless, and you never ever want to return to "here". Can someone take us there, again?

"Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)"

"Questioner: How do you know God? Abu Asa'id al-Kharraz: By the fact that He is the coincidentia oppositorum. Corbin's commentary: . . . the entire universe of worlds is at once He and not-He (huwa la huwa). The God manifested in forms is at once Himself and other than Himself, for since He is manifested, He is the limited which has no limit, the visible which cannot be seen. This manifestation is neither perceptible nor verifiable by the sensory faculties; discursive reason rejects it. It is perceptible only by the Active Imagination (Hadrat al-Khayal...) at times when it dominates man's sense perceptions, in dreams or better still in the waking state (in the state characteristic of the gnostic when he departs from the consciousness of sensuous things). In short, a mystic perception (dhawq) is required. To perceive all forms as epiphanic forms (mazahir), that is, to perceive through the figures which they manifest and which are the eternal hexeities, that they are other than the Creator and nevertheless that they are He, is precisely to effect the encounter, the coincidence, between God's descent toward the creature and the creature's ascent toward the Creator. The "place" of this encounter is not outside the Creator-Creature totality, but is the area within it which corresponds specifically to the Active Imagination, in the manner of a bridge joining the two banks of a river. The crossing itself is essentially a hermeneutics of symbols, a method of understanding which transmutes sensory data and rational concepts into symbols (mazahir) by making them effect this crossing."

- from the works of Ibn e Arabi (1165 - 1240)

To perceive God, one has to forego his five senses. These senses have been
given to perceive the world around us,
but God is above this world, not in a
sense of height, but in a perceptual
sense. In order to identify the higher
... stimulus that is God, one has to let go of the five
'primitive' senses that are only useful to
perceive the stimuli of this world. There
are planes other than this world:
existence of places which can only be
reached if one is able to dissociate himself from
the five senses WHICH ONLY SERVE TO
DISTRACT MAN by putting his focus on
this world, and Man is unable to reach
the ground reachable solely by spiritual
ascension (gnosis/'kashf'). Hence, 'Evil is
whatever distracts' - Franz Kafka. Man lives life as an animal, pursuing the basest of the desires in this world, whereas a whole sea of the Truth inside him remains unexplored.

Materialism and the Worlds

I have a world inside me. There is a world outside me. Will the exposure of my world to the world outside, adulterate it? I open slowly, watching for snipers as i walk, holding my white night gown up from the muddy grounds of the enlightened land. My soul is alive, and the world is dead. The world is materialism but my soul is not materialistic. I want to shield myself from the materialism that the world's population is after. I want to be able stand at the top of a hill and see at everyone else, in their meandering pursuits of the things that will die. I can only reach the top of the hill if my soul is alive and has not died in pursuit of the dead world. I want my soul to live. To be able to appreciate the sound of nature and the touch of a falling leaf. I don't want to identify myself with the dead world. I want to be the people; i want to be the life; i want to be the soul that broke apart from God's Existence. I want to go in the direction of living; into the direction of the truth, and away from what seems to be reality but is not. Life is not a closed barrel. It is a vast, endless ocean that laps on the shore of truth, and that is what helps to keep it alive...

Questions that hold answers many

Who can give a clear, objective, non-judgemental and an unbiased assessment of what the human kind is doing?- an opinion, an assessment, that is unaffected by his own past personal experiences or by his vested interests. There is no higher authority than Man except God, and no lower authority, in terms of mental capabilities, can be given the privilege to assess Man. So, can the circumstances in which Man is, be the result of how God feels about Man's actions? Can turmoil and turbulence be a way of God's expression of anger and dissatisfaction? Can prosperity of Man be a measure of God's joy and satisfaction? Can the situations that befall a man, be the result of what God feels about him? - and thus, do our previous actions affect the future situations we are in BY MAKING God feel satisfied or discontent with our previous actions? If I do evil, will I be punished with evil situations befalling me in the future? And how far into the future?- in this world, or the next?

Mute Cry

Watching a child crying in the far, so far that you can see him cry, but cannot hear it. Or you are inside a car with music playing in the background. A morbid and terrifying moment to see a mute cry.

(Footnote: For example, the mute cry in the movie, The Shining)

Dreams; the mystery of their essence

What is reality? How much can we rely on our senses? What if our awakened moments of reality are just a dream, and we sleep to enter reality? What if we have mis-identified reality and dreams? And maybe the doorway between the two gets opened on occasions other than our sleep. We dream of people. People dream of us. Two persons, miles apart, can dream the same dream and meet each other in their dreams, and upon waking can tell each other how they met in the dream - shared dreaming. Often, the reality of dreams scares us and therefore we choose not to explore into the secrets of their reality.

Doors open without keys

I’d like to see doors open without keys. The display of sharpened tools on an obtuse table does not impress what I dearly hold inside- still half undiscovered, half in the process. Yet there is a smirk on the blinded tool-wishers that recollect around the table in a second and a constantly repeating cycle of watching, holding, turning around to tell the ones who are too small to see, and then returning to the table. Hold the little ones to the table for your own sake, and throw the tools away. In limitless time of absence from distractions, you and they might see the sky, consciously or by following an escaped ray. If you have the purity to hold the little one, the ray will find in it the mercy to escape from There and shine on you, dying in the process and never entering There, yet the ray knows you will live forever and it itself not will. You will live forever, and nothing else will, not even your body. So who are you fooling by wishing for the tools? Anyone else than yourself? If yes, come and whisper into my ear, and I will see your voice vibrate as you start to tell the lie. Embrace the Extraordinary, not the tools that will vanish; if you taste even a drop of the Extraordinary, you will know how you had enslaved yourself in desire for objects that are not worth your attention. You will live forever, and once you have embraced that truth, it will change everything. Everything will become Extraordinary; in fact, the Extraordinary will become your everything, and the ordinary will just dim in its unfettered Brilliance.

In the words of Da Vinci

"Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind."

Just revving up

Just discovered that when you try to write after an immodereately long hiatus, words seem to adumbrate into the deepest crevices of your mind....a writer's block - the five dollar word for the uncanny phenomenon....but when you try to haul them out of their clandestine abode you end up createing a semblance, an illusion of expression that depicts nothing but nothing. And what's a better muse than nothing!