A most beloved friend and I met a month prior to my writing the passages below in January of 2013. Little did I know of Sufism or the Shahadah and little do I know now. It’s a tad philosophical, in many ways incorrect, stodgy, an only hints toward that divine experience we so love on faith. By I still enjoy these confusions. So, this morning as I prepared to travel west for a retreat in the tradition the great Maulana (Rumi), I stumbled upon this email to that friend which began with a passage by Kabir Helminski; the passage that inspired the remainder of the email. So it’s perhaps not surprising that I will meet Shaikh Kabir this weekend, three years later.
“I am contained, as a guest, in a faithful heart, without qualification or definition or description, so that through the medium of that heart everything, above and below, may win from Me sovereignties and fortune. Without such a mirror neither Earth nor Time could bear the vision of My Beauty.”
– Shaikh Kabir
Living in contrary to a world (Dunya) is to place that world in an immobile place, un-reaching and unreachable place. A loving heart (“Dergah of Love”) shimmers inward from the nexus, along that delicate membrane that is the mirror between Self and World. Porous before impermeable – it is. Such that selfdom is not a place of space and time, but a ubiquitous realm, that when experienced by two or more – conjoins their essences into one. It is as present as a the earths horizon is finite; as the tip of starlight before it simply exhausts itself before ever reaching the eye of consciousness. If we are the source of such light, then nothing ends or fades…we are not at the receiving end of light, but it’s creator.
My God is not a bitter one – He is not fearful of what is taken away or given, for giving and receiving are origins with no beginnings, destinations with no ending. To speak of God in terms that make Him unattainable is to destroy ourselves, to make Him fully achievable is to destroy Him. There is no God, rather God is. The act of being equals “is.” “Is”ness requires an a priori state from which an action of belief implies “existence.” To argue whether there is or isn’t a God gives more credence to “arguing” than what we actually argue about. God is…from there, one may continue the sentence or not…that is not the argument…it is the origin of choice…the only one we are given in this universe that seems to have merit. Bill Clinton – may or may not have been existentially moved to dispel he was lying when he stated, “there is nothing going on between us…?” Is means there was never a was. All things “are” and “are not.” His affair with “that woman” had always been an “is” from the beginning of time, but as a reality to be contended with, to manifest or not. This as much the case as his affair with an elephant or becoming a famous race car driver. He played on the present and past tense implications of “is.” So, “is there a God” is not a question relative to his existence or purpose… Yes, there “is a God” in the Bible, in the Koran… But in our hearts, our minds… “God is.” And “God is not…” Suppositional argumentation always begins, “God can be…so where do we go from here?” I’m making myself dizzy…
The human condition (being fleshly alive, with a soulful capacity) is to experience the fine line between starvation and fulfillment. Within capacity of Soul, there is no ending, no suffering, no entrance from the outside that is not opened from the inside. Yet we are in a world, where monetary systems are inextricably tied to biology, and nourishment an integration function as as relationship captured within a global physical value system. The equation of biology, versus the Soul, exchanges within limited opposites…feast or famine, abode and homelessness, physical joy and pain. The human condition is to exist in an entropic world that is not driven toward active existence but static equilibrium…quite simply everything is born to die. And a little more is dissipated with each change state. Are we in error to equate thermodynamics and human socio-cultural behavior in their proclivity to irreversibly progress toward disorder? Are we victims of entropy, creators, or misguided in our imaginings of “order?” I do not ask if there is order, order “is” or order “is not.” So where we go from there, is to the hearts language – animus lingua.
Love and thermodynamics. The soul is not measurable energy, it does not exchange states – it simply is what we must acknowledge in order to understand the course of humankind…and love.
