An Exercise in the Study of The Design

Prophecy:

These days are giving you interesting chances. There is sometimes no power at night - which is such a blessing in an urban life! The chance to feel completely helpless and at the mercy of the forces that be - just like in the times when Humans were close to nature. Take this as a blessing. It is your chance to feel the heat your body passes to the Earth, the calm that the green grass provides to your feet, and the possibility to sit in the glittering serenity of the moonlight.

It is an excellent opportunity to observe the Universe, Prophecy!

Lie on the grass on a dark night.
Intend to study the design as it is.
Focus your attention on the sky above.
Watch the stillness of the constellations.
Watch the stars, the Moon, and any planet you may or may not see.
See.
Feel the Stillness of Being.
Allow the feeling to enter you.
Now, the Mind does have a job to do, so use it as a servant: it tells you, that at the very moment of your observation, deep in the stillness that appears to you, great changes are happening. Nebulae are pregnant with stars, keeping massive energy formations within. Stars are breaking; planets are spinning; bodies are colliding and fires are erupting. Black holes are gobbling up their unsuspecting neighbors with intense negative energy. Suns are shining just like that, and Life on planets is basking in the glory of a benign energy. The Universe is pulsating... Off-on. Off-on. Off-on. It's in an ecstasy, energized through duality. Duality was created only to split the existence into a yin and a yang, and to create the dance.
The Universe is rendered anew every moment! As you watch the skies, do you realize how many entities just died or were born within the moments of your observation? It is not something that reason or intelligent knowledge can comprehend. It is something that you just know by way of Love, that energy that connects us all.

Now I tell you something you may not have thought of: The Universe is looking at you, too.
It watches how you, another creation, just lies idly on the grass. It is very close to you, too. It begins where your physical nose ends. Are you comfortable realizing you are nose-to-nose with the Universe? Ha ha! I know you enjoy nervousness. But I digress. The Universe watches you in awe, too. It wonders, because your words change its design, so it hangs upon your words... wondering what move you, its partner, will make in the dance that you two are engaged in? Will you figure out what move is makes, and will you follow? It keeps its ears on your heart beats, it contemplates you. When you are being, you are being sensed too. Enjoy this!

Get up. Use this contemplation whenever your mind begins to possess you.

...

Love in the Time of Bird Flu

There is a positive co-relation between the world around me marching off on it's way to Hell, and me simply experiencing a tremendous sense of love and clam at that very mad instance.

Let me begin with a more impersonal anecdote: Just a week before the biggest likely disaster to happen, i.e. the Pakistani Elections, I burst into frustrated tears at what I felt then was a positive moment of impending doom. I seriously thought Pakistan was dead.

Come next morning, though, and I was ready to be happily dead or alive - but cast my vote! Devil of Distraction be damned! I am going to love this bl**dy country of mine and do what I can!

Pakistan can decide to go to hell, but I am in love with the risk of being alive, with the risk of participating in my own microscopic way in the task of building this back.

There ought to be a reason my spirit animal is the planner/ constructor Beaver. That, though, is another story better told in some place life Africa, where ears are trained to animal mystery.

...
Here, again, after what seemed to be the whole Universe visibly conspiring for me, is another time of mad chaos.

What's been going on in the past 3 weeks is an astounding (apparent) reversal of fate... My poking the Universe's order is like an attempt to slap one's image in the mirror: futile, bizarre, and with some truly imaginative lessons in the aftermath.

When, with difficulty, I have finally managed to step back a moment ago and watch-watch all this, I am amazed.

After a full two weeks of insanity, here is the conclusion I reach - behold!:

"Everything Happens For a Reason."

I am like a palace under construction that is opening its eyes, becoming gradually conscious... and is astounded and awed at once to observe at what's going on: The massive work at hand, the design, the beauty, the gestalt of the whole process of construction overwhelms my awakening consciousness. Here I see a beautiful window, and I am captured by the beauty of what I am looking like and at. There I see a loose pile of bricks, and am horrified at what seems to be a disorderly incompletion.

My being swerves between a love and fear of myself - and by extension, for the Architect. I have moments of absolute certainty about my beauty, and instances of utter doubts of the project.

The benevolence of the Universe that was so clearly visible to me had suddenly hidden, leaving my heart with an inexplicable feeling of contraction. I was wondering what happened? What wrong have I done - for, thanks to my culture, I indulge in the self blame-game more often than I'd like?

Then occurred to me a new analogy, a word: Nebulous.

Come, sit, I will tell you its story.

It came by when I was explaining to someone their state, and it just became crystal clear to me that my own state is no different. I am nebulous. A vast cloud where elements spin, collide, and stars form or fail to be. Such is the ongoing madness inside. Sometimes the things are creating, and sometimes they are destroying - but most often they are completely random.

It is all a Design, and nothing is at fault except our perception unable to hold the Entirety.

I don't think the Benevolence, the Universe's Grand Conspiracy which I so clearly saw until about three weeks ago has gone away. I think I was actually being indulged at that time, being allowed to see the Blue Print of my own creation. Being allowed to read The Code. It's there, only I see no more.

It's not a misery that I see no longer the Beauty. It is a privilege that I saw the plan before I was put in the midst of this chaotic construction, and as ever, my task is to remember the origin. Look at this word again!

Re-member:
Re: Again
Member: Part
Remember: Join the parts again.

Become Whole again.
Return to the Original One!

I don't have a clue as to what grand palace I will form into... what stars will form within the nebula that I am; what futile experiences with design will the Designer carry out just for the fun of testing things out. What do I know? May be I am created just to be smashed to bits? Oh, wait, actually The Event eventually will happen.

I only know that I am condemned to love.

Come heaven - which I have no wish to enter - or come hell - which I have no wish to avoid - I love being created! I love being the work of the Creator! I love being put through the uncertainty of my essential being! I love - I love - and yes, despite this cruel architecture, this complex chemical reaction - I love the act of Being.

I am so madly uncertain, and afraid. But continue to love I do in the most uncertain of times. Fearing the process is foolish of me, eh, because didn't I just say I *have* seen the Architect's Design?

The point of love is: to aid us into the vast Unknown! The point of that is The Point.

.

The Design of the Universe - 2

Prophecy,

I was going to speak of the design of the Universe but someone came by. I was interrupted, and had more moments to reflect, and now I think it is not something to be written about here in concrete detail, as I originally planned.

I begin with this:

"Your remedy is within you, but you do not sense it. Your sickness is from you, but you do not perceive it. You presume you are a small entity, but within you is enfolded the entire Universe. You are indeed the Evident Book, by whose alphabet the Hidden becomes Manifest. Therefore you have no need to look beyond yourself. What you seek is within you, if only you reflect."

- Imam Ali Ibne Abu Talib, May Allah be pleased with him

And to conclude what I said of the stars - there is no wonder that stars' paths concur with us. At the same time, I always believed in humans creating their own destiny or influencing it greatly - enough to over-ride the stars.

In the light of all this (apparently contradictory) knowledge, Prophecy, I have reached the simple conclusion about our existence:

We have been looking at it outside-in. It's not the stars that affect human destiny. It is the humans who move the stars - and that is how whoever realized that they could create or destroy something, and took action to do so, indeed did. Single men and women have moved the world - leading it to lofty achievements or dreadful despair. Single-minded single souls. It was possible because of the secret of the Universe.

You see, Prophecy? The humans create the stars and black-holes and the matter and elements of the Universe. It's inside-out.

This is why, in response to the wish of a person, the Universe re-arranges itself and re-aligns its resources. This much, many creative persons and spiritual-minded people now agree upon. The popular theorem of the Law of Attraction alludes to this "secret." But why does the Law of Attraction work that way? They couldn't say.

Whoever believed in either genesis or the Big Bang or any similar mythology of the beginning sees that it all began from a singularity, and expanded. How, then, do we still picture the oddity of something coming from up above? As if the Universe existed as large as it is, and we are in it somehow.

Have we not seen the plant growing? What comes first? The tip of the leaf, or the seed - then the stem, then the unrolled leaf rolling out and the flowers blossoming from a bud? To imagine a single pollen to be contained in the periphery of leaves is not the truth of existence. It is the perception of existence to one who has not seen a plant grow.

+++

I leave you to reflect upon these images:

The Design of the Universe - 1

Note: This knowledge is blogged for my own remembrance. It is not for the Beginners, but for those on the middle of the way.


Prophecy,

I am going to share with you the pithy result of my years of pondering the question: What is the Universe? Or the Multiverse, as it surely is, but for the sake of simplicity....

Why do stars seem to affect the lives of humans? How do all things co-relate and why? How come so many elements of being are in a dance with humans - above all, I have wondered about Fate.

Once again, I turn to stars which have fascinated the humankind for so long. For the simple reason, perhaps, of them being "above us" - though how have we come to determine that the South Pole is at the "bottom" of the world, and the North Pole is the "top" of the world is a matter of pure arbitration. It should logically be that the stars seen from the Southern End of the Earth must be "below" the people on North if North indeed is the right side up.

So, Prophecy, the human race must learn to embrace duality - the yin and the yang - and understand that the stars are around us. Neither above, nor below.

Perception, however, in relation to the human body of which the head is the de facto right side up, determines that the stars are above our head, and therefore above us. The stars have guided the humans on our travels and navigations. They have, as astrologers have determined over the ages, also shown curious concurrence with the patterns of human life.

Now if concurrence occurs at all, it means two things to our perceptions: the stars affect us; or there exist cycles (of economic activity, of stars' and comets' orbits, of climate change, of life change) that have co-relations with one another. I.e. If I come home only on Sundays - and my neighbor's wife fights with her husband having been impressed by my car, and demanding her husband to furnish one likewise - there will be a pattern of co-relation 1/ by my affect upon her moods; 2/ by the simple fact that I and the neighbors come across each other every Sunday only.

If the neighbors undertake an unrelated activity such as going on a picnic on Sundays, we will still find that every Sunday, I come home, and neighbors go away.


Now what's the co-relation of the Universe to us?

How come there are so many similarities between the Universe's macrocosm and our microcosm and what does it signify? It signifies more than the assumption that we all burst open as part of a giant blob, and have similar patterns/codes inside our organisms (which, if someone agrees to it, is still an astounding belief).

What has concerned me, dear Prophecy, is the expansion of the Universe. The Universe is expanding - at an accelerating speed. Something is going on. We are boggled by the size of the Universe and the point of ever figuring it all out. And why?

Meanwhile the human society has declared several times that it has neared the end of its evolution. How did they reach this conclusion is beyond me. As long as people are hungry, and some of us can still obtain gourmet food - how on Earth could we even reach the mathematical conclusion that it's either a state of equilibrium or perfection or destruction? The human society will never end as long as there is room for either possibility or further hopelessness.

But the human society is in admitted deep trouble - so will we ever embark upon journeys to explore the depths of the Universe?

What shall we do with our fascination with this giant project then? Will we perish before ever setting foot forth? And how far shall we go anyway?

... But I hadn't give up on the Universe, Prophecy. I have alway had a feeling that there is a point here to be seen, and something to be understood, and something I can find out in my own lifetime, without the need to leave it to the eternity of later generations.

So Prophecy, last week some time, I found out what the Universe is.

Where is it "coming from," why and how is it expanding, and why the microcosms within the Universe draw such a true parallel to human micro/macrocosms. And why do stars seem to affect human lives.

Destiny and Choice

Back to our favorite topic: destiny.

Have you read Victor Frankl's truism: "between stimulus and response lies the freedom to choose"? It just hit me this morning - the clear distinction between destiny and choice:

• Stimulus is destiny.
• Response is choice.

I then thought, "what about when we respond to the stimulus in a manner that allows us victory over its adversity, its challenge?"

I realized that victory takes us to another level with larger and more forceful stimuli acting upon and challenging us. Consider the example of business. A small firm grows to a medium-sized one. It succeeds in growing, but it also meets larger challenges. From local challenge, it graduates on to national, and then global challenge.

This is true for personal life too. Childhood is tough, there is so much to learn and there is so little freedom (or so we think!). But every subsequent phase in life is tougher than the last.

What about when we have beaten every challenge? When we are the most gifted, most successful, the top ranking? This poses a strange challenge. Suddenly, we have conquered the external stimuli. Suddenly, there is no stimulus. Nothing to fight for or against.

Why, then, live?

I rested my cup of tea, and focused on this thought: what about the gifted? What about the winners? What about someone like, say, Bill Gates whose book I just leafed through last night? What about when you are on the highest rung? What do you do to live?

...And then the dots connected. Ever heard Iqbal's couplet about Khudi (self-respect, self-actualization)? "Actualize and take thyself to such a summit that God will ask thee before thy destiny is formed, 'What doth thee wish for?'"

[Microsoft tag line: Where do you want to go today?]

You create your own stimulus when you have conquered the standard ones. This is a freedom that comes with responsibility to oneself, to one's gifts. And it is a great test. Though a few get this choice in more flagrant ways (being the world's richest man, etc.), many of us have more choice than we think. Whether we choose to exercise this freedom or not may be the strongest test of our spirit and character.

Note: Pulled this unpublished piece from amongst the drafts on December 08, 2007.