"No further Shall You Go!"

What a moment it is when one realizes that at the end of the path, they meet none other than one's own self.

That one's self is vulnerable, open, truly bewildered, and utterly not-in-control. That one is sustained in a fascinating way with a threadbare yet potent connection that grants one all life.

There is no mastery of the affair, and no end to further comprehension. At the end, one is only left in a state of not-knowing. "I know that I truly, really, do not know."

Answers vanish.

Notions dissolve.

There is no mastery of the future. There is no way that the past can be erased such that it is not a living part of one's self. One comes only as far as the Present.

Where one is one. One is whole. One is complete. One is as one is.

One is brought back to the center, to the self, to a state of necessary obligation and acception, for beyond that circumference is a raging fire -- a friend that defines the parameter of one's being.

One is no one.

Thus far one comes, and no further shall one go.

And Allah knows best.

Alhamdolillah!

Illumination

"Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue. If knowledge of mysterious comes after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart."
-Rumi

Via: Hamza Jamali

Assume Silence

Prophecy:

Who said your path is easy? You are chosen, or you choose. In the end, it is the same thing.

Ultimately, all decisions that were made were yours, and yet none of them are ever truly your own.
You are still in the world of duality, Prophecy, and the doing deeper than that will not be easy.

If it were, every fool would enjoy the path. It is not designed to be so.

You know the Art; and what you don't know consciously now, I shall reveal to you at the right time. Do neither ask me, nor press yourself to be adequate. None of it will work. Do no-thing, and you shall remain on the path.

You know your tools, and you understand the challenges of the Path.

For you, now, the challenge and its answer is this: Assume Silence.

Assume complete silence until the real design is revealed to you. Do not attempt to manipulate the Universe with your words or actions. The Universe takes its commands from none but its Creator; do not attempt to out-smart the design, or you will be shown the result of this utter foolishness.

Musharraf's Leap

By the worldly-politicky way, I have learned the art of persisting against adversity from none other than our President Musharraf. Millions of people against him, thousands of fires around him - and only One God on his side. No one can see God, or define the nature of Being... but the presence seen secondarily through events eventually working out in the favor of the person whose side Providence is on. And the key to that is the person-in-question's own strength of belief.

Musharraf the man's actions or their results may have been flawed... or yet not fully realized. But he is free of the worst sin of them all leaders: guilt.

I define guilt as:

"The No Man's Land between knowing that something is wrong, and doing something about it."

That definition came into my head when I was on a tour of Khairpur with AZM, and she and I were walking in a paddy field. We were walking on raised stiles between the fields of God-knows-what crop which was being irrigated. While we were carefully avoiding stepping into the puddles that formed in the fields, at some place, the stile just disappeared under water... and we have to jump to reach the ground just marking the boundary of the field.

It was right at the moment of making that jump that I realized: If don't make that jump, and I also don't want to walk through the wet fields, then I can stay here until the Sun itself decides to evaporate the fields. That, however, would not be my choice then. A farmer could continue to route water into the fields and the SUn can shrug off its shoulders, and carry on towards the West. So either I jump, or I stand here stuck, or I walk through the wet field. If I jump, I can still land a foot in the water - but that is a consequence which is independent of and beyond the action that I take. I only jump, and yes, I can calculate and aim my jump.

It was at that moment that "guilt" became clear to me as that consuming force which stops the world's flow in misery. It's about standing on that stile between the wet field and the dry ground, going neither here nor there.

AZM and I were having a general conversation about spirit right then - and I was speaking of guilt.

Then, I told her this definition that had occurred to me.

The right and the wrong of matters, the consequences of our actions, are truly beyond us. What we can govern is the state of our own faith, conviction, and our ability to take what is the best possible action that delivers us out of a situation that we cannot stay stuck in: good or bad.

If guilt is standing in the no man's land - then what delivers us is, quite literally, a leap of faith.

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I Don't Owe You Anything

Ah! Just in time... he sends his advice:

We owe it to no-one to be miserable... You cannot contribute positively to a situation if the situation defines you.

-SE

Dear Allah, all praise be to You for answering me.

The River and The Source

I read a story recently. Someone decided to trace the source of a river (Nile? Indus?)... and walked up and up... until they ended up standing in a tiny shallow puddle bubbling forth.

The difference between a river and its source is the difference between all knowledge and its origin within.

All my sarcasm aside - I have a strong suspicion that the "knowledge within" concept is not really welcome in the meta-academic world. Why? Because it signifies a source within, from which knowledge comes. That very source, yes Prophecy!, from where I had drawn knowledge as a child - feeling creative and informed without effort. That source is a dangerous idea for most, Prophecy.

First, this means that responsibility of drawing upon that source is within us. Second, it means we don't have to rely upon others... not need to find that chocolate cake in some bakery in an Ivy Tower which we might or might not access in our life time. Third, it is such a simple idea - it seems to run contrary to our notions of "life is difficult, unpleasant, undesirable." I apologize to those healthy-minded person who have no idea what I am talking about - stay where you are; I am speaking of & to the nether world. Not many people are - surprisingly - happy with the idea that they have more power than they lead themselves to believe.

Finally, it means that we exist as entities dependent upon a Whole larger than the sum of its parts - that is not a happy thought for many people - but I'll not name names.

And as Jung would comment, I have been speaking of my own darkness, Prophecy. You see, I made these very assumptions that I now decry - and it's a shame because I knew. I knew and I was able to draw upon my source, before institutional education made me disbelieve in myself.

But everything happens for a reason.

And as a child, I wondered why people couldn't see the good in their illnesses and their accidents and their pains that I could see? The one word answer is: MINDSET. A Mind which is Set - not to be changed, updated, modified, or be taught new tricks.

Grow up and conditioned as I am now, Prophecy, I swear it's hard to tell when and how one fixed a mind set along the way! I am going to discard it.

The pain that I feel by realizing what I was and what I am is necessary. Not to be written away, fooled or shooed off.

It's not loss, remember! Just remember right when you need it, Prophecy, for I am going to tell you your story - remember that nothing is a loss in totality. Nothing takes anything away from us until we give. The game is to be constantly aware. The game is to constantly alter one's game!

I will, then, now, share with you words you yourself wrote 13 years ago.


This is a serial journal entry from A Quest for Beauty; a Lust for Life!

Knowledge vs. Contemporary (Institutional) Education

After meeting the Sufi saint, and on provocations of thoughtful friends, I reflected.

Knowledge, I have learned, is not a chocolate cake you eat. Knowledge is not out there to be taken in - stuffing oneself so badly that eyes begin watering. That is a fairly recent position on education in the history of humankind.

True education is about bringing out what's within. It used to be the theory of education until, I have a private feeling, the notion ran afoul of intellectualisation. Intellectualisation isn't even word - and that's why the whole thing is so... stupid I'll dare say. The Intellectualising mindset is set to find the Big Intellectual Truth in the hope that it would complicate life even further.

Today, education is about stuffing information in, making fair connections within that information so as to create an intricate semantic web, and throw that net on any unsuspecting fool who hasn't read all the tomes and articles that the Intellectual has.

"Within" is now a storehouse of data, interconnected with fearful sounding bridges of technicalities that usually go by the name of "something-ism".* Basically, contemporary education is based on the premise that the more one reads (and memorizes and regurgitates-on-demand) the more... intellectual they are.

Education has become systematic, cut into shapes and patterns, institutionalized. On a side note, Prophecy, I give you a personal advice to retain your sanity:

RUN AS FAR AS YOU MAY IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD INSTITUTION.

That word means exactly what it says: Institution - the regimentation of the Mind into small cubic squares, filled with other people's dogmatic notions - to be transmitted without thought or accommodation of change in time, space, situations.

Then don't wonder, Prophecy, why I consider the most colorless period of my life the time I spent in the Institution of Business Administration. If only I were as adept at understanding the meanings of words back then! By their own admission, they "brought all students to an equal level".... by keeping the thinking ones lying flat on the ground waiting for the unwilling to step up and over.

Ah. Well. I am still bitter, eh? Have to take that out of my mental system.

I will.

* [Tip: A good time to do eye exercise is to roll the eyes when an "-ism" is suggested as the end-all and be-all for humanity and the Universe. Quick & dirty truth: all "-isms" eventually die. Most already have. The person who's pushing an arcane ISM down your throat just finished reading a book on it and just has to bring that up in conversation and writing. Stay put, and the -ismism will come to pass.]

Spicy & Sweety: Revealed

The answer to the Sense-itivity quiz is here. For the sane amongst us - a friendly version is in the diagram. Study it, be happy, sleep well. For the mad, the following:


The epiphany occurred, as it usually does with me, during a conversation. Ahad A. and I were talking about where is knowledge found when I drew up the shapes of Spicy & Sweety and quizzed him. Actually, I gave him the more mathematically correct but less glamorous version: which of the two is Spicy, and the other Mildy?

The answer came after I drew up the shapes. I found a brand new angle on the old quiz: Why would we call Kiki, Kiki? Why not call it Booba?

If you have no idea what I am talking about and think I just delivered the latest in high street insults your way, you will be de-mystified shortly. But I am not talking about curses; I am talking about a famous test on synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia – or the synthesis of senses – is a fascinating subject. You will usually hear of it in eccentric tales of “colors of music” and experience it closer at home when you decide the taste of food just by its smell. Those very smart with audio-visual effects will also know instinctively that synaesthesia also occurs when music is represented by the exotic visualizations of most modern audio players such as Windows Media Player.

Syn+aesthesia. A synergy of aesthetic senses. How, when senses combine, they create a whole larger than the sum of the parts.

I have been researching, experimenting on, and theorizing on a unified theory of senses for some time.

Separately, I came across the Azeemi (Indian Sub-continental Sufi silsila) concept of “wavelength” meanwhile while learning about spirituality and understanding how God’s design works. Yet the Azeemis are only marginally educated in the fields of physics, mathematics, and art – and they have not explained the concept in terms other than purely spiritual/ esoteric.

The Azeemi elders suggest that there is a “wavelength” and a “light” going around in and sustaining the Universe. They suggest that everything has a “wavelength,” but stop just short of explaining it more sophisticatedly.

While I drew those shapes Spicy & Sweety for Ahad, I was drawing a variant of the Kiki & Booba test.

Then suddenly, the dots connected.

Wavelengths. Graphs, that I had just been thinking about. Mathematics.

I remembered asking myself those very days why I could not separate the math of the graph from the shape of it, and the shape of it from reality of a traveling particle? Why oh why is the sharper shape Spicy? Why is the more toned shape Sweety/ Mildy?

Funny how things come together. Synthesis!

Allow me to use the more correct term Mildy to explain the answer.

These shapes in the quiz are two different graphs. We know that the taste of spice is caused by molecules of certain chemicals (Vitamin C, potassium, etc.) when they come in contact with our taste buds.

The more taste buds a person has, the better their sense of taste. A taste bud is like a catching mattress. The larger the mattress, the bigger can be a falling object to catch on the mattress. The more taste buds one has, the more molecules of a chemical they catch. But suppose a limited number of taste buds, says 10,000 on a tongue. Then take a bit of a sauce with 1,000,000 molecules of potassium. That’s 100 molecules per taste bud.

Take a bit of a sauce with 30,000 molecules of potassium. That’s 3 m/tb. It will taste "Mildy” and perhaps even “Sweety” if taken after the first.

If you plot a graph for the first, it’s sharper, like A. If you plot one for the second, it is closer to the baseline, like B. (B gets its curves from continuous tasting, but that’s irrelevant.)

These graphs are also wavelengths in shape!

So. Think about it. Even taste has a “wavelength.” That wavelength has a shape. Somewhere in our minds, we can associate that shape with the taste. Spicy is sharper looking. Sweety or Mildy has gentler, smaller slopes.

As I said earlier, we have been seeing music represented with wavelengths all our lives. For a sense of touch, we can quickly develop a Thorny/ Grainy/ Smoothy test.

Does this mean that our minds have a de-coder where all senses get processed based on the very unfunny shapes of wavelengths? And do these wavelengths lead us to a theory of universal aesthetic?

(And does an overload of waves lead to certain psychologocial disorders?)

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