Memoir-izing: My Life's Story, After Intent

This yet unpublished blog was written on the morning of Thursday April 10, 2008.
I did not publish because I felt there was a promise in this I was not going to keep.
Three months later, however, this is exactly how my life has played out after a series of fortunate incidents.

----
April 10, 2008


I am supposed to be preparing my notes for a business meeting, but the call comes again: loud, clear, inevitable.

And so I am back to doing what I am meant to do: watching my life, and writing about it. I don't know why, I don't know what for - I only know how. That's my only power, that's my soul's liberation.

I am astounded but not surprised at the utter destruction the whole illusion of my existence has undergone within a few days right in front of my eyes, right in my hands. Perhaps it was the putting my hands on the illusion that destroyed it, but then so be it. Now.

Then every moment now is a blessing in itself. Those who learned this secret sailed through the illusion. So where's the blessing, now? The blessing is that everything around me has stripped down, such that the inevitability of my path has become startlingly clear. Where was I running off to? Even if I physically or emotionally removed myself from my circumstances, the story would have stayed in my heart, and I would have felt that strange, unnamed gap between where I would be and where I ought to be. That unnamed, buzzing, persistent feeling some identify and label as existential angst.

I'd rather choose death, than angst at being. Which is to say, I'd rather choose that the unreality dies, than to be bound to it. This is hell. I am not dying in hell. Not me.

I am living, by the blessing of death of time, my dream. What a strange dream it is! How fascinating, how rich!

Notice words as you speak, Prophecy: you say, "I am living my dream." It is indeed still a dream you are living. A dream you have created to fascinate yourself. You said to your dream, "Be!" And it became. Such is the method of creation.

I have made a few decisions that actually were inevitably made for me... however that works.

• I place my trust in the clear truth that Allah is Merciful, Beneficent. That Allah is Beautiful, and Hu loves beauty. That this Multiverse is created on the principle of being, and there is no non-being, which is why I am alive. That my life is beyond ritual and force - it is to live Beauty.
• I liberate myself from the whole illusion of being by submitting to Allah.
• I embrace the Uncertainty that comes from living moment to moment. I see the joy in not knowing where shall I be next, or whether I shall be at all or not. I recognize that any sorrow arising from this decision is actually the other face of joy.
• I love.
• I let go of control of my Self.
• I heal and be healed.
• I get out of the way of my own writing. It's happening, I am writing memoirs and essays, and I am not going to stop myself from this.
• I choose Love over the Deep Blue Sea. That, to me, is a literary reference: Love is my country, and the Deep Blue Sea is every place else. I don't owe anything, anything. But I love. Love shows me the way, and I love Pakistan. Not out of a sense of compulsion, not out of a sense of sacrifice or enforced martyrdom. Out of free choice, out of joy, out of pure love. I choose to live here, transforming myself and my country at once. Her life is my life, and that is how I relate to my physical being. I love Pakistan; I choose Pakistan.
• I bring out the best in others by reminding them of their dream, and helping them see the place in this world that their soul wants to reach; thereby gaining Connection. I decide to share open knowledge, but force none by way of my expectation or attachment.
  
• I have decided to have conversations, and show by inspiration and experience to all who I am meant to show the beauty of this design.
• I pursue the unraveling of mysteries that amuse me.
• I engage with the abundance of Nature - in-joying the forms of life and consciousness spread about me... the animals and the plants and all other species.
  
• I learn from whichever source I can, wherever I can, whenever I can.
• I travel God's Earth far and wide in search of knowledge and to answer my questions; and to bring the knowledge home.
• I allow my Self to be freed from others' manipulations, expectations, and baggage even if it means I have to let them go, they have to see me go, or either of us have to die or live more fully.
• I trust that in its beauty, the Design hurts no one. It provides adequately and beautifully for us all. And that which I destroy for myself lives on in its own life. I am neither the master nor the servant of creation.
• I choose nothing, and I give up!
• I am thankful when I am given to; and I am patient when I am taken from. For I understand in the depth of my being, that everything is as it is. It is the perception that matters.
  

And so, "Be!"

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.