Paradox!

By Golly!

It is not-doing that requires more struggle than doing.

Doing is obvious to the five senses, and it is expedient. It is witnessed by the other, it is a form of affirmation.

Not-doing is witnessed by the self alone. Only you know what you could do -- well or ill -- that you chose not to do. Not-doing is never manifest, never experienced by the senses, never registered by memory. It is a kind of hollowness that few can cope with.

Yet it is in not-doing that one's self truly grows to its full potential.

The Impermanent

Prophecy! Prophecy!

Wake up! I have a warning for you.

God's justice is about to overtake Hu's Mercy- the attribute of "The Vengeful" is about to become operative.

There will be more deaths in the streets that you can keep score of. This is because humans did not collectively pay heed to the warning.

Seek refuge of the Lord, from the Lord, with the Lord.

The governments of the world are to vanish soon; people will migrate in great numbers. The victimized will reach the throats of the transgressors. This time has arrived.

Pay no attention to those who will not read the signs. Attend, you must, to your own affairs. Set not your hear on the temporary, the impermanent.

The Illusion is about to shatter. Hold on tight to The Rope. Help one another in good deeds, and refuse to indulge the unfair. Speak the truth - speak it loud, clear, and forcefully even if you are the last or only one to hold on to it.

From amongst human will and the Divine, choose to side with your Lord.
There is no other Way.

The Illusion is about to shatter. Look in to your heart, and you will See all past and future.

Give to people, treat them fairly, and learn wisdom from death. Train yourself in the skills of life and the art of war. Do not play with hearts.

This is a warning to you: events are about to unfurl on which you will have no control. But think! There is something you can master - master it!

Command the Universe to Be!

...And it will become.

Through the Looking Glass, Troublesomely

My very troubled Prophecy:

You have put your face once against so close to the glass, you no longer know you are looking out a window... that you are in a room which is enormous, and full of mystery, and in which you experience the magic of being. When you are in the room, that is.

Where are you?

I am no longer amused by your condition - right now, I am downright concerned.

As long as you keep putting your face against this window, you will keep being moved by what's beyond you. You know this is what troubles you; as, indeed, does it trouble any - but some are unconscious of their condition. Then again, why do you speak of others? Do you not have matters to handle of your own, at this moment?

The Other-ness is You-ness, unperceived by you. You begin with you, and you never end.

...Let's come back to the matter at hand.

You are your own project, and your project is you.

Please do not be foolish enough to take upon your shoulders to calculate the moves and matters of others in this world. You will never succeed with the utter madness this will present to your perception. And if you indulge in the affairs of others, no wonder you'll have to keep looking out the alluring window, and miss the magic in the room. Besides, how do you know the meaning of all that you see? Seeing could be blind believing, but it is experiencing that matters - and you only experience your own experience.

Step back.
Step back, and see within the room.
See the Now.
What do you see?

Why are you troubled with the past - which has a way of resurrecting itself that you have not yet gained a control over?
Why are you troubled with the future - which is a product of your fertile imagination with an immense power to create?
Do you see the connection?

Break all these connections - allow yourself the true independence of being - which, my troubled dear me - is the freedom of being you.

You have a right to be in this world, and to experience it - not just the sorrows, but also the joys. Who ordains you to prevent the flow of your being?

Your Ego.

Remember, it's Ego that sustains on all separation, because ego is separation by another name. You will miss on half the Universe if you see just one side to everything. Joy = sorrow. And, forgetful human! you! - don't you see that there is but only a fine gossamer veil that separates you from the Land Beyond Joy & Sorrow?

I liberate you from the compulsion to trouble yourself, Prophecy. Be. Just be. Let love, which is connective, and not ego, which is separative, be you guide. Let even not my words manipulate you, for I am no wiser than what I allow myself to be, which is insufficient.

A heart that loves is also a heart that fears on occasion, Prophecy, because it is a heart that is involved in its own being. (When I am an established meta-physicist, I will work out what that means - but right now it is as roundabout as it is! :])

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To Set You Free

Prophecy - dear, foolish, Prophecy:

Sometimes you need to learn some from your inspired self. Consider what have you been feeling, and now, what have you been thinking, my foolish friend!?

Let what the feelings tell you absorb into the conscious self. Learn from your self, from the book inside you, dear. Everything happens for a reason. You learned what you learned so it could teach you, and give you knowledge for your situations. You are not clueless.

Prophecy, some days in the lives of humans are expansive, some are constrictive. Sometimes it's light, at other times it's dark. Some times are warm, others are cold.

Then there are seasons: The Spring gives birth, the Summer nurtures and flourishes and brings intense energy to Earth, the Autumn makes everything go still - preparing for days of solitude and rest, and the Winter takes down all things green so they can be born again. We live.

This is the nature of life, my dear. Courageous is the one who understood the transformations of life and went along with them - felt joy in them. Remember, you had learned:

"And so are the days (good and not so good), We give to men by turns, that Allâh may test those who believe."
Verse 140, Sura Al-Imran, The Quran

Prophecy, you spoke only days earlier of Love in Being. This is no ordinary knowledge, do appreciate. Love is larger than our human inadequate beings, though love, too, is just an energy in action. There is the deeper, eternal Being - Within, Without, First, Last.

It is not going anywhere, nor is the energy that it produces. But that Being, Prophecy, is ever in transformation - it has a new shape, a new aspect, a new manifestation every moment. Our whooooollllleeee wide Cosmos is rendered anew every moment, Prophecy.

Be a brave woman. Be a true Muslim, whose heart is not afraid of seeing what is seen. Be courageous. Never fear what you see, Prophecy. Never fear what you lose, or what you get. Allah tests when Hu takes, and Allah tests when Hu gives, Prophecy. The truly courageous are distracted by none, Prophecy. The one who truly loved and was loved always knew better than this.

When you turned 25, you wrote here:

I have touched dust and turned it into gold. And I have seen gold turn to dust and fly away... thus learning some of the most enduring lessons about the delicacy of this illusion called life.

You learned this long ago, Prophecy. So why fear the illusion of life, still?

Prophecy, it is small minds who are trapped in the world. Who see nothing beyond the transactions of giving and taking and the calculations of them all. It drives minds to insanity, and it panics the hearts to be so confined.

All humans, each and every human, has a potential in their hearts. Not all are destined to realize it though.

That should not concern you, Prophecy. The state of everyone else is part of the illusion, it is part of the aspects of Being. Do not take these things to heart, Prophecy, even if they occur in what you perceive to be "your life."

Look ahead and up. What are you seeing? The meaning of being human, a true, realized human - that is what you see, at least as of now.

Prophecy, be the human you are meant to be. See not the world and what touches your heart from the little mind's view. See it as it is, and do not fear that the Universe has constricted upon you. Believe in benevolence, and you shall have it. Be-lieve!

Do not fear anything Prophecy. All there is, is the Truth. Feel this truth, and speak it Prophecy. It is the Truth that shall set you free.

Image from here

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Trust me

Prophecy,

Stay put. Hold on.

I'll take you there.

The Girl Who Was The Mother of The Woman

This is a part of a story titled "The Dream, the Angels, the Rain". It's somewhat fussy and academic in style. But then, Prophecy, the writer was not even 15 years of age. The writer, you may guess, was I. Correction. The writer Am I.

QUOTE

"There is something I can't help thinking about the rain: 'I love it!' I praise God in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

'Glory be to God for dappled things-...
He fathers forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.'

But as e.e. cummings put:

'how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being doubt
unimaginable You.'

My heart is dancing a ballet[...]. I do not comprehend why rain is a symbol of [sadness] and grief to people. May be because weathers are inside human beings themselves.

I've become a part of the scene and I do not feel like going away. I wish the clock to stop and the rain to continue; I wish everything to be the same until hell freezes over. But impossible as it is, the only thing I can do is to make every moment count. I know that it is actually my existence in and the complete enjoyment of the eternal NOW which is the principal reason of my sheer joy. There are moments when you are free from every thought of the past and the future and you dwell fully and consciously in the present. As the quotation goes, "Full consciousness brings joy."

To feel the innate joy which is the open secret of the creations of Mother Nature, we have to keep our senses fully aware of what is happening NOW, and not THEN. It makes you feel as though you are in a spell which has no Dimension, no Time, no Space. As e. e. cummings would say:

(now the ears of my ears are awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Thus the joy of nature comes to you and reminds you that are part of Nature."

______

UNQUOTE

I found this story in my old papers yesterday. I remembered that it was once written, but I didn't know that it spoke so well of the power of NOW - which happens to be the subject I am so earnestly studying today as though I never heard of it. Why fool myself into acting that I don't know? That I truly don't know.... but I still lie. Sigh!

Do you now realize, Prophecy, why the Sufi Master was displeased at my feigned naivete?

One must accept the gifts one has, Prophecy. Or it will come back. My gift, Prophecy, has come back. I do not know where I shall go from here - but ever since this little discovery, I know that I have to let flow a river the source of which has always been within me.... never dried, always in the NOW, waiting it's time to gush forth.




--
I end here. And I begin.

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.]

"Talking Like a Tree"

...Before I tell you your story, Prophecy, know that I talk, as I like to put it, "like a tree." Now I tempted to choose a more tangled metaphor, but the instinctive words are the truest... and I mean, a tree.

That is, I make branched conversations. You will need to go back to the trunk, and then to the root again and again in search of coherence.

Bear with this.

Oh - and I just thought of what I wanted to think of - a better metaphor: Talking Like a Map.

17 Years of Memoirs

Last night, I pulled out some papers - some very, very old papers that I never had the courage to throw away - or look into again. I've lived in this house for 17 years. Now it's got refurbished long, long years. And it is time to start the life afresh, to take the what-they-call-it-clutter out.

And this means that time has come for me to make some significant changes - but first, I must face come significant truths.

I saw my true essence in the papers - the creativity, the perceptiveness, the philosophy, the relentless hard work, the influenced madness, the random thoughts connecting them all.... I also found traces of fears and unhappiness - crossed over with an irrational exuberance.

I knew, from a pile of papers that I am still unhappy to touch, that it belonged to the most colorless time of my life, when I had suppressed creativity and thought in the name of systemic education.

It's the pile that I have almost wholly thrown into junk - though there was still a feeling that I could somehow hold onto it, reclaim from it the four years of my life that went into it in the futile hope that things would get better.

What a laugh! How can something that makes our hearts ache so bad ever be better? We know in our hearts when even pain would be better - but not this darkness that falls upon a heart - extinguishing its most powerful quality: FAITH. The will to live, based on the primal belief that tomorrow would indeed be better than today.

Never, Prophecy, never! Never sell your soul to the Devil!

I saw what happened to my life, what course it took. I could see how my decisions influenced the outcomes of my life. And I could see what influenced my decisions.

Well, I better stop speaking in riddles, Prophecy. Time has come that I tell you your story.

My Responsibility

Ultimately, Prophecy, a person's responsibility lies with themselves. That's why our design is such that each of us has their own mind, their stomach, their heart, their limbs.... and that is the accepted norm.

You, Prophecy, are my responsibility in this life. I know that none can give you hope nor take it, nor can create your path nor obstruct it, and none can see your dreams nor destroy them - but only if I work with the Universe to make things happen or to let them go.

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.

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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