The Untold [a poem]

The Untold


There are conversations 
that cannot be had 
the way we have
ordinary conversation: 
by turning to face someone 
and uttering a few words.

There are conversations 
that are made 
by catching the eyes of another 
and beholding them with our eyes. 
Letting the windows of one soul 
open into those of another.

There are conversations 
that are finer and subtler 
that those made by ways of seeing. 
These are conversations
of feelings that move whichever way they choose 
in the chambers of our hearts. 

There is, though, a conversation 
that is finer and subtler than these all. 
It is the conversation that is not. 
It cannot be had with any other 
or even our Self. 
It is just what it is. 

It is a conversation that we are having 
whichever way we turn or not
wherever side we look or not 
whether we are awake or not 
whether we know we are
having this conversation, or not.

It is the conversation of which 
we are the alphabet. 
It takes place with us 
and despite us. 
Within us and
without us. 

....
December 29, 2008
by: RA
aka The Prophecy 

This rather rambling and perhaps yet unfinished poem was written two months ago. I began composing about one thing, and ended up with this. Well! 

To Not to Stress

Think of a pleasant warm shower that gives one relaxation. Think back to how its warmth is powered.

The water is warmed by a boiler, at the heart of which sits a tiny furnace, at the core of which is FIRE. Powerful, raw fire. This is what fire is: an energy that exudes power.

Should one decide to tear down a shower, expose the pipes, trace them to the boiler, piece it apart, reach to its core, and put their hands on the fire - THEY. WILL. BURN.

That does not imply that the fire is "harmful" or the boiler is "bad." They are what they are. The issue is that they are engaged by an external entity at the level to which the boiler ought not to have been engaged.

Our fire is meant to power us - no more, no less. How it's used in the world out there is based upon our intention, it's not the "fault" of the nature of the fire. We stand between our energy and the world, and that's where the transaction with the outer world takes place.

Don't be tempted to blame the fire within; it powers you. Don't prevent your fire from being channeled either - it creates pleasure, relaxation, and joy by transforming the energy of water into a warm shower.

You are you.

Transform a situation in which you are being pieced apart. And know that this tearing or this transformation is a process that takes only ONE: you.

This occurred to me during a meditation last night. 'The question that came into my mind was: how does stress 'peel us down to the animal level?' Why do we feel rage? Must the animal within be reigned in, or must it be liberated?"

This question arose in a conversation earlier.

The answer has helped me understand the stress situation I had been examining in my self (and my dear Karachi world) for the past couple of weeks - a situation that inevitably leads to moments where the whole world seems hostile and we react in a snap.

Meeting Amatullah Armstrong - a woman who answers her call

I met Amatullah Armstrong yesterday at the quietly peaceful home of my Reiki teacher, Firdaus. Finally. I meet the woman whose story, in some subliminal way, gave me the courage to undertake my own journey to South Africa on a quest for learning. A month ago, when I first met Firdaus, she somehow broached the subject of her friend Amatullah's visit to her place a day earlier. "Amatullah is your friend!?," I yelled in delight. I made Firdaus promise me that when Amatullah was back from her tour to Lahore, I would be invited to meet her.

Amatullah came into my life some two years ago when I bought her book Sufi Terminology (Al-Qamus Al-Sufi). The author's biography caught my attention: apparently this woman, an art teacher, had left her homeland, Australia, and started traveling the world on her personal quest.

She cycled 5000 kilometers from Paris to Tunisia, where an encounter with Islam awaited her. She welcomed Islam into her life in the Algerian Sahara Desert. Later, Amatullah - her name literally means "the (female) slave of Allah" - joined the famous African Sufi tradition, Shadhiliya. Amatullah married and settled in Africa, and went back to Australia to get a Master's Degree; her thesis was the first on Tassawuf (aka Sufism) in Australia. Later, intrigued by a dream that called her to Pakistan, Amatullah left all behind in Africa, and came to Paksitan to start a new life.

In short, she became a perfect inspiration for me.

I was trapped in an ordinary life that was at once falling apart around me, and yet enslaving me in a most dreadful way, when I found Amatullah's story. So. A women travels the world on a daring quest for Truth. Seemed like my kind of destiny, except I wasn't living it. Trapped by dogma, fear, and a great sense of loss and anxiety, I wasn't getting anywhere in my life. I am not even sure if it was my life at all, or some randomly scripted drama filling up a void that I had left.

Reading her biography reminded me of a future I had seen in my memories: of myself taking a journey - I didn't know when, to where, and exactly-worldly why.

Then a man entered my life the next year, in 2007, and I accepted him as my teacher as much as he accepted to help me learn and grow. This year, I was waiting for the fulfillment of a prophecy about "a journey [I] would take to a foreign land which would change [my] life forever." I usually do not set much stock by these kinds of things - prophecies and predictions, for I think the human themselves is a Prophecy. However, this one rang true with me. So while I was meandering through a few usual choices of immigrating? traveling for pleasure? traveling for learning? - I realized I had been most quietly invited to the journey I was destined to take. The invite had almost slipped under my attention that was so focused on my own expectations.

Yet finally, lucidity came. I left for Africa. I went to love, live, learn. That sojourn in a foreign land marked a point where the life before it completely died and I came alive in a life after that point.

When Firdaus called me on Friday and said, "Come! Amatullah is coming to my home!," I could not resist the invite despite being dreadfully sick. Indeed, in Amatullah's company, I forgot the terrible ache that was rendering my body unable to stay happy. Amatullah is that ray of light from this world of no-mind, no-care that we are fortunate to catch a glimpse of. She is famously seen in her photographs as this Sufi doll, all bedecked in dervish green clothes. When I met her yesterday, she was hip in her kurti and carpenters with a chic fuchsia ethnic scarf, looking ready to jump on the next adventure. In the course of the conversation, it was revealed she is finally going to move on from Pakistan.

Amatullah has always followed her heart. She trusted Allah before she became "officially" Muslim, she was never afraid to live on the world during her fantastic voyages. We have made a random plan to go somewhere else together. I think I may now have a truly eccentric travel partner - one I prayed for a few days ago!

How charming.

Absolute Justice: After thoughts

1. When One comes across the Other - each must remember that if the world is just, then One to Other is Other, and Other to Other is One.

I.e. I am "me" to me, but "you" to someone else. Both have a right to choose a strategy and to assume that their way is better.

Then, of course, is absolute truth - i.e. which way is really better? Given that One and the Other are both smaller than the larger truth, each can see it. The one more familiar with the truth is tasked with the responsibility of enlightening their self, and then the other. Having reached the point of decision, the one who knows the truth also has the responsibility to protect the truth.

In that entire process lies the area of Mercy.

2. Absolute Justice would destroy the world. Which is why, our legal systems are always bound by the doctrine of the necessity of continuation of existence. There is no absolute, neutral, odorless, colorless, and tasteless justice out there - as some try to seek it. It does not exist in human design. Seeking it is self-destructive.

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You will be lost if you haven't read:

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 3: Justice Destroys

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 3: Justice Destroys

And at that day, waiting for my colleague, I saw in my mind's eye how the next worlds are being created on the simple principle of Love & Mercy.

We are going from one moment to another on the basis of trust, hope, faith, love, giving, and forgiving others. We would stop driving to our offices - I realized - if the human mind did not understand the principle of having hope - in reaching the office at all. We would stop running the business of life as the store would not let customers touch merchandise - because buyers hadn't paid! Isn't it unjust, I thought, that people buy first, pay later? And there are at least seconds between these part of the transaction?

Why would farmers plant seeds? Why would parents raise children? Why would we employ workforce? Why would we give our hands in marriage? Why do teachers teach? Why do people start journeys? Why would we start a conversation?

Why would we start all transactions essentially by giving or offering ourselves or our possessions - and standing the chance of being cheated or taken away from? Why, when such consequences do happen - we forgive and move on?

That day, I understood the very meaning of the metaphysical phrase "establishment of the Day of Justice" and why, should that day exist, every thing and being would essentially have to be destroyed. I understood the Arabic roots of the word "Qiyamah" - known as "Qiyamat" in Urdu. Essentially, "qiyamah" is "qiyam" - a static state, establishment, equilibrium, full stop.

For as long as Love & Mercy lives, there can or must never be absolute justice, nor absolute destruction.

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Complete conversation:

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 1: Conversation with a Lawyer
Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 2: Why I'd Rather Not be Treated Justly

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 2: Why I'd Rather Not be Treated Justly

Waiting for someone who was late, one day, I felt annoyed and thought of ways such behavior must be punished. It seemed to me, feeling languid at that moment, that punishment was the solution to such problems.

My conscience then quietly reminded me that at times, I am late also. My problem-loving mind suddenly got active at this. It tried to create a mathematical visual where everyone was going to settle scores.

BOOM! BANG! CRASH! - I saw.

Without the need of precision, I realized that it would mean I would somehow perish for all my faults, so far unaccounted or simply forgive by others. This would also be the fate of most of others, and so - I realized that establishment of absolute justice would lead to instantaneous destruction of Existence.

Between action and reaction, there is choice. Between One's first contact with the Other, there is time & space, and adjustment - there is flow of information, and creation of a connection. This little "work-in-progress" area is either directed by the principle of mercy, or the principle of "attack." Love, or hate.

I use this term "attack" to mean a wide variety of active behaviors including hostility, lack of empathy and understanding, desire to modify the Other, intolerance, feeling superiority, etc.

Say we are urban explorers who enter a tribal region. We don't like the way they treat their women. What do we do between the period of our first contact - and until the time they see the light, given that we have light at all in the first place?

Do we understand their position,observe their cultural evolution, and understand their aspirations? And help them towards the light - a process which will take time, effort, and much sacrifice from us?

Or do we impose our values on them in an instant - declaring their ways illegal and barbaric - and try to get them to change either by being obedient to us, or be captives to us?

Or do we decide to finish them there and then - as living being or as a cultural phenomena?

The first is the way of Love, and or mercy. It is dynamic. And it creates the next world.

The second is the way of Attack, Ruthlessness, Un-Compassion. It is dynamic. And it destroys the next world.

The third is the way of Absolute Justice - which is not the absolute prerogative of any human over the other. It is static. It destroys our world instantaneously as neither One nor the Other would remain.

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You may also want to read:

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 1: Conversation with a Lawyer

Absolute Justice... and a Little Mercy - 1: Conversation with a Lawyer

On a flight towards the North once, I got to sit along a woman lawyer.

They say that on this planet, seven persons look, and behave like one another. I.e. each person has six doppelgänger(s). This lady seemed as broody and thoughtful as a certain teacher of mine - with facial features, hairstyle, and age to match.

So we struck up a conversation - something I rarely attempts with strangers - with my heart feeling certain sense of familiarity, of having always known her. It was no surprise to me, then, that just my certain teacher would, she delved into a thoughtful exchange. Even her life story was told in a reflective narration. She wondered at every moment how she got to be where she got to be, and what was she doing... not in an edgy, questioning way which elicits the kind of face expression from me that alarms people... but in a way that one who listened to her only would hear in her words.

She told me she was a lawyer.

And somehow (wasn't it predictable!) we started talking about life. Her company stirred in me the kind of thoughtfulness that I always feel in the company of people who are... awake.

I shared with her what I believed was an insight:

This World is Balanced on Justice, But Operated on Mercy.

In Urdu, my words were:

Ye Duniya Insaaf Par Qayem Hai, Aur Reham Par Chalti Hai.

She turned her head away from me, and down, and reflected. I wondered what this lawyer would think. She turned her face back to me after a few moments, smiling that strange, pained smile of my teacher, and said, "True."

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Of conversations, an imaginary contentment

Yawer shared these lines – likely a translation of Faiz’s poetry, he wasn’t sure – dug up from the trenches of his computer. We were speaking of loneliness and the weather and privacy and the pretensions of being okay when we are not right before.


The afterglow traps you in its skin.
Hours later, you are still stepping in and out
Of conversations, an imaginary contentment.
I walk around the house, restoring solitude
From room to room, only to find your smile
Wrapped around my hand, opening doors.

. . . . .

On a silent pond,
A peel of exile sky
Caught a skin of distant cloud
And felt its still heart stir
For the silver babble of raindrops


Exile sky…. Sounds like Faiz. Beautiful lines anyhow. In the first piece, I like the imagery of stepping in and out of conversations; the normal tip-tap sounds of an ordinary day passing by in the mind of the poet.

Power Vs. Justice

Letter to R., a Jewish friend, written in spring of 2002. Or whenever the Taliban fell the statues of Buddha. It's a small essay about power, and its many manifestations.


Hello Dear R.,

Yes, you are right. Hard as it may be for most of us, the fact is that power--or the (often wanton) WANT of power--makes the world go the way it does. Those who have authority, as individuals or as nations or cultures, want to wield their power on others.

What amazes me most is the funny tendency of the powerful to believe that what they do is not only good for them, but for others--particularly their 'victims'--too. I think when one is in authority, they assume a god-like position, and believe that all their actions are justified. And since they have the power, they also have the right to use it whatever way they may. The rest of the people then are weaklings and fools who know nothing of how matters are run.

This is true of elders who think they know 'best' how to treat the young right. And it is similarly true of ethnocentric cultures that believe that theirs is the only right way of life.

Well, this is one of the many facets of power. Yet another aspect of power is to use it as a weapon to spread into the world one's own kind. I am sure there are more sophisticated ways of putting it, but I can take only the naïve approach: I think that humans feel congested, and that just as is amongst the various species of the world, there is a conflict amongst the various races and cultures around the globe. They all want SPACE, which they perceive is limited. This space may either be the physical geography, or it may be ideological, etc. But there is some kind of a limited space that the various sections of the human race want to capture. So they kill others in order to spread more of their own kind. It may also be linked to a wish to dominate. Perhaps the most evident manifestations are the Christians' and Muslims' preoccupation with a larger population, or the American culture's attempt to 'reach and influence a larger audience'.

And then, there is WANT of power, stemming originally from an acute sense of insecurity. Coupled with authority over something, this can be a dangerous thing. This is what the Talibans and Afghans are doing. They do not have real power and strength (strength being the most positive form of power, in my opinion), so they turn on what they have a control on, and use their authority. I am referring to, of course, the demolition of the Buddha statues.

So… somewhere in all these frames of power and power-related struggles, we can put the Israel-Palestine picture. Two nations, both insecure for one or another reason, are fighting for space and survival. And yes, of course, for an identity (religious)… but that may really be just secondary.

Let me tell you what I honestly think of this situation. I am not aware of the precise historical developments that preceded this conflict, but I do not think it may be too relevant anymore because the situation is too embroiled. In a fight that has involved too many punches and kicks, no one party can stand up and say, “I have been hurt more than the other person is!” And in a world where fairness and justice only are found in books of law, no one goes for rational, righteous arguments. They tilt instead on the already heavier side. (If Pakistan were a bigger, more ‘powerful’ country, TIME would not dare to feature Srinagar as an Indian city in spite of the UN resolutions!)

Back to the Arab-Israel conflict: I only see this as a human situation, where humans are being killed, hurt, and deprived of their rights. I feel that the Arab suffering is too great, and should not be played down. But on the other hand, I also realize that Jews have suffered too much through exile and isolation. And that, every human has a right to a (decent, free) life. (I just don’t support this thing called Zionism, and that’s about it.) I know that my faith explicitly warns the Muslims about making friends with Jews and Christians, for it says that we will never, by nature, be the same as Jews and Christians are (Another interesting topic in itself.). Yet it is the same faith that orders us to respect and accommodate all faiths, provided they do not infringe upon us. It is just like your father telling you to watch yourself with snobs at school for fear that you will emulate them. But for you to translate this into an animosity with the ‘rich boys’ would be foolishness.

So, I think that if we see the equation in its simplest terms — human versus human — it will make understanding and sympathy much easier. Calling upon history may not let the situation rest, just as in the case of India and Pakistan. Of course history cannot totally be ignored, but if we humans are to find any peace in this chaos, we will have to look towards a common future for the mankind. Ah, well, one can at least dream!

I have gone a complete circle and came back to the same thing: nothing will happen until people are too busy fighting for more space, more power. Sometimes I take the cynic’s passive view, and attribute every wrong to those who are in power, and are bringing misery to common humans like myself — just because they are untouched by this misery and suffering themselves. Just like Saddam, and like Pakistan’s rich rulers. Or perhaps, the fault lies in us common people, that we have let ourselves be thoughtless puppets.

Well, in the end, it is justice and fairness that stand to lose. I can but dream that things would one day be otherwise!

And this is what I think of this issue of power versus justice.

Regards,
-Rémmie!