You Are Laughing!

Dear Allah!

I am feeling terribly sad at the moment. OK, the word terrible overdoes it, not that sad really, but enough to have forced out a tear.

Yes, yes, alllllllll I want is to get your affectionate attention. I mean my only passing solace is this that I have at least started feeling closer to You again, and not as distant and cast outside as I had thought myself out to be.

I talk too much.

So. How do I make fun of my situation? I mean there's this urge in my heart to petition You, to communicate with you in my human wordy language. to draw Your attention, even though it's already there. And somehow, not to do it such that it is ungrateful.

You are You, You change not, the only one who changes is I with respect to you! I am the only one really learning to dance here, for You are already in Your pre-determined glory!

Well.

So I feel like a mouse, who has been caught stealing stale cheese. And while the cheese was being whisked away, I manage to stuff a bite so big in my mouth that I can't swallow nor would spit. It's too big to let go, and too much to digest. This bit of stolen stale cheese! This desire that is stuck in my throat, that I am not spitting out! You know it's stuck in the mouth of this hapless mouse. You are laughing, for Your benevolence always plans something far more interesting and rewarding than a stale piece of cheese. But I am a mouse with a limited capacity for intelligence, and I think I better hold on to my ill-benefiting loot!

You have turned me out empty like a wallet full of forgotten knick-knacks, but there is a coin still stuck in.

I am astounded at the tenacity of my own desires! How absurd!

So this is my situation currently. Are You laughing? For I am near tears! I believe In You, and I am in tears.

I cannot laugh at this any longer Allah! You have created me and Your knowledge of my being is subtle and all-pervasive. You have known me.

I know You too. It could not be that You give me an improbable stone and I can hammer it into shape. This is an improbable stone. Because it is Desire, and I am not meant to have it.

You alone are privy to the pain that I have felt for my plans. Those perfect, fixed plans. Those ideas, notions, concepts. It all seems so right, but it all goes so wrong. I am not going to blame the whole scheme of things. I am going to accept that what I put my heart after is not what is meant to be achieved this way.

I am going to accept that You have an infinitely better idea for this mouse, dangling as of now from Your fingers by the tail, wailing in misery. Laugh! Humor Yourself! I am a clever enough mouse to smell the abundance I haven't yet seen.

Yes, I am miserable at the thought of giving up, but it's momentary. I want to share something with You. My heart is in considerable sadness, but I am thinking, I should trust You.

After all, for all the other things that I have given up, I have always found that which is far more permanent and indestructible, right in the middle of the chaos of this world. I have found security, depth, and joy.

I am really miserable Allah. I am miserable for my desire. I thank You for the growth You have given me through this trial, but I am thoroughly done with this. My heart tells me that it is time for me to have learned enough.

You know I have decided to dedicate these next few days entirely to myself. (Well, this has not happened quite the way I imagined, but I am content that I am following an emerging plan.) I have decided to let go of both physical materials and the desires of my heart. This could be temporary insanity, but it's something I am going to do to lighten myself enough to be ready for the massive transitions You have set in motion.

And so, I had started giving things up - things that I love, but things that I wanted to give away to enrich the lives of another. Yet there is this thing that remains: my plan for human love.

This is hard for me, and then again, not so completely. I am hapless in or out of love. I have had to speedily transform so many of my relationships - transforming them into something benevolent, something that allowed my growth also.

Yet there is this one that remains.

I am helpless, I am truly tired. I am blessed, and in gratitude. I am floating, and I am not alive.

I will, in short, to hand over to You. To let go. To give up. Utterly. Completely.

I want to empty myself out to You. Fully empty.

Where I am empty, You are Filling - and I will not even ask for this fulfillment. Have with me as You may Your way. I am not frightened of You anymore. I trust You. May be I pretend it is hard for me to give up, but my heart is so full of grief for withholding from You, that I wish, at some level, for this emptiness... for this Surrender.

Take me! Take everything I possess! Turn it to dust, and blow it all away! Free me from my enslavement! Grant me the freedom of complete surrender, of annihilation, of death before I die!

Release me from my desire!

Take my eyes, mouth, hands, feet! Finish the I off, and Be You! In all Your glory!

Amen!

Signs of Life

Prophecy!

It's astounding! Two days ago, I desperately wished to die. Immediately. Yesterday, I was alive & working. Today, I was bouncing. And right now, I want to cry!

You realize what this means? Yes, you, see with your eyes eternally set to see the good in everything!

Ah, yes, exactly!

It means that I am ALIVE! Absolutely child-likely! How long since I felt change so rapidly! Must be late teens? Slipping in to the whole adulthood/ academic-corporate lifestyle had sucked my ability to feel and to be quirky. I am back to being the child whose most dreadful nightmare was washed away the moment a chocolate was produced from a pocket.

You know when I was a little kid, I had a little ritual. I did not, as other children trained by their moms were, into family matter machinations. And we lived in one big "joint family." I did not respond to hurt or praise. I had no concern with other people's business or prattle. I was very secure in the knowledge that I was created to outgrow all this. And I learned what I was taught - which was graceful and fun and aplenty - quietly and diligently.

But I kept a record of general unfairness. I did not like how sometimes some people stepped over their lines, with me or whoever or simply in their behavior. So here was my way to deal with what I did not like: quietly walking into the open courtyard whenever I had had enough of world-watching, every week or so, AND LETTING OUT A MOTHER OF A SCREAM! AAAAAAAAAAAAA! Coming from an otherwise poised child buried behind her books, this was a shock for my uncles who were demanded an explanation by my grandmother promptly. They presented their clarifications while glaring while pretending, "No! Who, me? No no I didn't stare down at her!" while clarifying. Oh well! Those were the days!

My youngest and smartest-with-kids uncle came up with an idea. He decided to buy my soul. We formed an agreement whereby every Tuesday, I'd get a bar of this new chocolate with flavored gel in it if I please did not keep up my ritual. I think we agreed on some form of a more organized screaming, followed by a debrief by my uncle. He usually waited around my venting circus with some object that he could scientifically explain to me. Science distracted me, as chocolate bought my political soul.

...

The Search

So Prophecy,

Everyone searches for what is popularly known as a "soul mate." There are two realities to this Truth:

First Reality: The one we are searching for is none other but our Self.
The quality we intuitively search for - well, how do we even become aware of this quality?
We become aware of it because it exists within us as our own true highest potential.
So it is amusing how many of us go about demanding from the Universe what indeed is what we ought to bring out from within.
With a grown consciousness, we may become aware that what we require of our world is actually what our world requires of us.

So my search for courage has ultimately led me within. It had told me that for seeing courage in the world, I must display it. As I did what I was younger and more intuitive. To have felt this courage re-awakened with is to have experienced a great liberation!


Second Reality: And then, indeed, we may be able to find another like our Self.
It is a matter of this world, isn't it? We look for someone who completes or complements us.
I have been advised that I need a "rational" man in my life.

I do not seek rationality! I seek what the world would define as irrational: to complement a soul like mine, I seek a man of courage.
A man of irreverence for glorified structures and systems; a man who does not just have an opinion, but the courage to manifest his belief. A man who can take death's blow on the chest. That is the sort of man I seek - not a rational, self-protecting shadow of a person.

I seek someone who is no longer deluded by duality. Who does not see poor and rich; evil and good; far and close; separation and unity; love and hate - who, in Rumi's words, I can meet in the field beyond the fields of right and wrong.

My beliefs are ancient in many ways. I believe in some fundamental values that make men, men and women, women and make humans, humans. Courage is for all humans - it manifests differently in men and women, of course.

I am just fascinated with the idea of a man who can lift his arm to weild the metaphorical sword: who can fight, with bravery and with fearlessness, for what he believes in. Who has absolute equanimity under adversity. And who does not desert his ground like a coward.

Above all, I detest cowardice in any person.
Cowardice is different from not showing one's full potential of courage, as having courage is the culmination of a process of maturation.

So when I seek courage, within or without, I seek a maturation, without which courage is not possible.

The Highest Concern
My teacher teaches that courage is the highest human concern - and yet it is not a matter of age.
I believe this, for I understood courage better as a child than as an adult who grew into a world of compromises and where all looked to each other for setting the rules, ignoring the Principles of Being.

I think human societies have been raising children to be cowards for too long - especially men, who grow up with a sense of entitlement. In the face of reality which eventually arrives in all lives then, this weakness begins to reveal itself in the form of a search of happiness, of security, of avoidance of pain, of a permanency.

Such people can never take courageous decisions, can never walk alone.

I walk alone, Prophecy, I have always walked alone. And on my journey, whoever comes to walk with me has to have the courage to walk alone and on their own feet also.
I seek this strength in my close relations, in my friends. And to a greater degree - to an absolutely fascinating-me degree - I seek that also in a man.

Beyond the mystical veil before which we believe there is no soul mate, I believe there is such a thing. If it is indeed intended for us to have a match in this world, I believe that in every moment, there is a soul in the world that completely relates to our own. I seek that soul with belief.
~.~.~.~.~.~.~

So there. I have made an intent. I have blown a wish into the wide chasm of the Universe.
So be it.

The Immortal Comfort of Friends

To whom death does concern:

They that love beyond the world, cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill, what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs. Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent. In this Divine Glass they see Face to Face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

William Penn, More Fruits of Solitude

What may be perceived as death is not death; what may be perceived as life is not life.

The End of Possession

Prophecy, the temptation for you to remain your Older Self is great. Beware!

We are possessed by none other than our Own Selves. How we command ourselves! We desire, we fear, we crave, we want, we don't want, we attempt to avoid. It creates relationships in which we tie one end of the rope to our being, and hand over the other end to another - by our own will.

Thus begins this bizarre dance that we don't wish to dance, but know not how to take ourselves away from. The other, possessed by their own ego, enjoys pulling the ropes in whatever manner that takes their shifting fancy. Since this requires an unusual amount of mis-applied energy, it's up to the other to fall tired and drop the ropes, jerking the self to a stop in mid-bewilderment.

Most minds see liberation in simply shifting these ropes from one holder to an-other, and still anticipate liberation. When this does not happen, the self becomes furious at an-other other... Now you see even writing about this soap opera is tiring.

Prophecy, we cut the ropes at our own end, and even beyond, we learn the art of not creating ropes at all. Going even deeper, we are in a state where there is no question of a rope, for if there is, there is always an urge and its counter-resistance.

How do we reach that state?

I give you the secret, Prophecy, it's many-layered, so watch this closely and learn:

1. First, release your Self from your Self.
2. End your relationship with yourself. If you "love" yourself, there is the potential of the opposite in duality: the possibility of "hating" yourself. So will you one day love yourself, and another day be unforgiving? No; if you wish true liberation. At least with ourselves, we have the wonderful possibility to end relationships. Relationship take two. You are One.
3. Be one with you. Release your Self from your expectations and fears. You will immediately annihilate the ropes that others control you with.
4. And do this strange thing: release the Other from your Self. End all expectation, attachment, and fear! Forgive. Forget. And thus give yourself the chance to be rendered anew.


The Universe is destroyed and created afresh every moment. Only the Perceptive see this. When you die every moment, when you are released from the possession of your Older, Dead Self, then you are at liberty to watch the miracle.

I will next tell you an exercise...
...

Feeling Near Death: Being the Black Hole

And so, having had all those experiences, and knowing what I knew of how people who knew of their coming death behaved, I worked out the truth about my coming death - with a little help from my friends.

There is no truth, except the truth of the situation - and while I presume to know nothing, this much is certain, I am nearing death.

When we near death, and we find out that we are dying - we feel no happiness. Nor even sadness. That at least is my case - and I think for many others. Those who act otherwise put their names in books for not behaving properly in the face of what is to come, sure as... death.

I wrote to my Teacher. I said I have understood my condition finally. I have understood the inescapable nature of my situation. My pain is not going to end - I am. Neither is my joy going to grow - I am.

I am. And I will not be as I am.

Dying is very essential concept if one is to go with the flow of the Universe, Prophecy.

Have you heard of the black holes? Yes I am speaking of the celestial pinheads. Most of the times, we describe the characteristics of black holes. We don't know nor tell what black holes are. Stephen Hawking made a significant attempt in A Brief History of Time. Of all that I remember of his work, I remember the dimensions folding around a black hole.

And that's all the knowledge I need - even if Hawking's theory has been disregarded.

Here is what I think:

A Black Hole is a cosmic metaphysical metaphor of a human who has annihilated in the Essence of Being - and in doing so, has concentrated in their being the force of the Universe - which explains the inexplicably huge force of the black hole.

It is the point of infinity, the point where our personality annihilates.

It is death, and still being alive in a way that Dimensions of Space and Time become meaningless - they are beyond the event horizon.

Nothing is truly known of the black holes except they exist - and they are known by the influence they create on their surroundings. Theories suggest that black holes are formed by stars collapsing within. I do not know where the research on the physical phenomenon will settle - and there is much I have forgotten of what I knew of the science of black holes except the general details... yet I see them clearly as a metaphor of an annihilated Self, that sustains itself with the Universe.

--
[Lengthy side thought has been deleted and put in a separate post. It's for that part of my mind which is shocked that I make such an apparently mental statement as above.]

--
My friend Peter did the favor of putting the truth about my death in words for me. He wrote to me, after the recent event of yet another armed invasion of my family's peace and privacy, that I should consider the possibility that I am dying.

I know since early this year, when I lost much of my years' worth of work and know-how in freak accidents, that I am going to die. One has to see and respect the signs. The death of everything around you - and the death, Prophecy, of feeling and finding meaning in the Mundane, is the clear sign of approaching death.

Given the nature of time - the quanta-ified nature of time - we can make a decision at every second, every quanta-i-fication of time. So one can't say for sure if they are going to die completely - but it's a choice to be made and I will, given the signs, choose the option to die completely.

--
Note: I started writing this note on, well, October 4th 2007. Today is actually Dec 08, '07. I don't remember much of what I was going to say - in fact, I may just be feeling shy of what I was then so sure to say.

This blog post is so disconnected. When I started writing, Prophecy, I was in the exact state which I was describing in the post. I am no longer in that mindset - so I don't know what I was going to say. There are two thoughts: One, that I had neared death when I wrote this post and its predecessor. One.point.two, that death is a metaphor for stopping being as one is - which, then, is followed by being someone else - a fresher Self. (Not a new Self - I'll tell you why on this journal.) Two, that when one is in the state of annihilation, they are like a black hole, or being absorbed into one.


A black hole, according to some explanations, is a space between two Universe spaces. I remember reading as a child - I'll remorsefully add that I had an extraordinary knowledge of time/ space/ gravity as a child-teen - that it was believed that stepping into a black hole would lead to another Universe on the other side. That's because the black hole has a tremendous mass within, which makes one wonder if it's falling in somewhere? Anyhow that's my recollection of readings from a younger age.

To come back to the point - the black hole is the annihilation of matter in Universe. The annihilation of a human in Being's Essence is much he same. These are metaphors for each other, depending on which school of thought one sees it from: the only-literary, or the spiritual.

Feeling Near Death: Memoirs of Moments Before a Death

Edit: I have renamed the blog post.
Feeling Near Death: Memoirs of Moments Before a Timely Death
How would I presume to know what's Time? And what's Timely? I haven't absorbed fully all I have learned.

I've known through stories that people display a strange behavior when they learn they are nearing death: in short, to these prescient people, nothing means anymore, except the meaningful do.

And now it has happened to me.

Since 2004, I have thought - OK, maybe, this one more step to go. Yet another step, but one more. Then it will be over. The pain will be over. And I can be free. Then I can enjoy the everyday. Then I can, actually to begin with, participate in it.

Meanwhile, I have gone through so many experiences and stages.

The experience of non-priority - when all things seem to be on an equal plane, and it's impossible to prioritize one over the other.
The experience of nearness, when everything and everyone is dear to your heart.
The experience of aloofness, when you wake up one day, and suddenly feel you are not connected.
The experience of unanimatedness, when you feel that all people you are seeing are unreal, and you are on the outside.
The experience of animatedness, to such a degree of subtlety, that you can move your fingers, and feel the winds stir with it.
The experience of silence, when you hear the hollow in your heart.
The experience of noise, when you feel whispers in every movement of the wind, in every corner you turn to.

Experiences. After experiences. And experiences.

My solace was that at least, I now feel. Anger, retribution, like, love, dislike, hate, forgiveness, empathy, lust, piety, self-pity, self-revulsion, self-acceptance - I feel. I felt them all, and went though it all. In the expectation that one day, I will be normal again.

Why did I expect that? I don't know why, except that that is what everyone seemed to be aspiring to in general. And so I thought I should give up my dreams and imaginations, and be normal.

And if you heard a sneer there, Prophecy, it's because there is. Yes, Prophecy, when I say "dream," I mean it in that grand way. I mean it when I said I will give up dreaming - I meant clearly to be understood that I value this whole dream thing.

And then what happened, Prophecy, would you want to know?

I stopped dreaming for real. I gave up, Prophecy, I gave up.

Once again.

All this struggle that I have made, in a way all my life - and ever since the tragedies that have come my way since 2000 - tragedies that turned horrible since the fateful days and nights of 2003/4... the terrors of those days and nights when I couldn't understand how will I keep my head up and straight the next day... or whether I would be alive at all... I did think I would die Prophecy, or at least there was nothing to live for.

But Propehcy, meanwhile, something happened.

Meanwhile, Prophecy, over the edge of pain, I discovered Life.

I've heard of some extreme experiences things, but I didn't know one could have them emotionally-mentally. I thought one had to dive from the sky for that kind of thing.

So in the struggle to stay alive, to find what good could there be in the hearts of people, to challenge myself to determine if I am or could be loved, I found.

I found hearts with love and giving. It's almost like discovering an invisible specie. But it's a state of mind, Prophecy, and once you have it... or wait, rather, it's a condition of heart which changes in turn the state of mind... and once you have it, you see.

You see them all around you. The quiet types. The answering "I am here" types. The talking with eyes types. The listening in silence types. The keeping an eye about types. The caring for animals and plants types. The working without complaint and with joy with their heads down type. The non self-aggrandizing types. The silently fulfilling types. The appreciators of small things types.

The types of people who are capable of giving and receiving love. You see them, Prophecy. You see them.

I saw them, and in that condition of heart, and state of mind - I found myself utterly capable of selfless love, and not ashamed to receive love. I decided to turn this power towards the elements, Prophecy, and that's when I learned how words can bring rains, and how when you run your fingers through the currents of air, you make wind stir. I knew I was the Butterfly who could flap her wings and stir the elements.

And this much I felt, Prophecy, and more, moments before I learned I was going to die.


Image: N. Wayne Taylor, The Mandala Series - after a near death experience