“…it may well be that you hate a thing the while it is good for you, and it may well be that you love a thing the while it is bad for you: and God knows, whereas you do not know.” Qur’an Al-Baqarah, 2: 216
“Often, in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you (something), just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you….Your wishing to be isolated (from the world) when God has placed you in its midst betrays selfish desire; to wish for the world when God has isolated you from it is evidence of a decline in your spiritual aspiration.”
Ibn Ata Allah as-Iskandari
The choice is ours.
We either see this (COVID-19) pandemic as just another excuse to continue, insouciantly, indulging our lower passions, or as an opportunity to reflect, to tear ourselves away from the noxious distractions of this world, and to elevate ourselves. We either see it as just another ailment that our hubristic culture of science and technology will eventually overcome, or a warning sign that things have already gone too far----far beyond any reductionist, disjointed techno-fixes. We either succumb, once again, to the pernicious, omnipresent cult or system of indoctrination (which, in its systematic and institutionalized form, is called modern “education”) that confuses purely quantitative data and information with knowledge, or heed the warnings of the sages, who clearly define, delineate and distinguish wisdom from knowledge, knowledge from information and information from data (T.S. Eliot).
The choice is ours.
Quarantined, we either TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Twatter, NetFlix and YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram ourselves and sink further down to the lower depths of our being, or see this pandemic as a blessing in disguise, and take stock of our life. It is a choice between seeing what is difficult, what is inconvenient and uncomfortable, what is adverse and painful as “fuel to be burnt for our journey” as the Japanese farmer-poet Miyazawa Kenji has said, or seeing it as nothing else but all that: inconvenience, difficulty, pain and adversity. For sure, the pain and discomfort are there and real, but suffering is/should be optional. Otherwise, what is the meaning of Faith?
The quarantine, the shelter in place and the isolation can be seen as a godsend for inner revivification, for the renewal of our authentic self that gets forgotten and lost in the turmoil of this world, or they can be viewed as sprinkled sand into the bearings of the amply lubricated and finely tuned machine, the beloved narcissistic-consumerist lifestyle that keeps us exclusively attached, leech-like, to the mundane and the trivial. Since it is more than obvious that the inevitable outcome of this lifestyle is our already toxic levels of anxiety, fear and insecurity, the latter view will only further aggravate our inner turmoil.
We can continue to be floating weeds on the putrefied waters-----the de-centered, disoriented beings of matter-worshiping, anti-spiritual modernity that insists that "man lives by bread alone"----- or we can re-examine, re-member, re-connect and revive our-selves. Just like in normal times, even more so now in the midst of this pandemic: “To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine” (Zygmunt Bauman).
The choice is ours, indeed.
The choice is ours.
We either see this (COVID-19) pandemic as just another excuse to continue, insouciantly, indulging our lower passions, or as an opportunity to reflect, to tear ourselves away from the noxious distractions of this world, and to elevate ourselves. We either see it as just another ailment that our hubristic culture of science and technology will eventually overcome, or a warning sign that things have already gone too far----far beyond any reductionist, disjointed techno-fixes. We either succumb, once again, to the pernicious, omnipresent cult or system of indoctrination (which, in its systematic and institutionalized form, is called modern “education”) that confuses purely quantitative data and information with knowledge, or heed the warnings of the sages, who clearly define, delineate and distinguish wisdom from knowledge, knowledge from information and information from data (T.S. Eliot).
The choice is ours.
Quarantined, we either TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Twatter, NetFlix and YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram ourselves and sink further down to the lower depths of our being, or see this pandemic as a blessing in disguise, and take stock of our life. It is a choice between seeing what is difficult, what is inconvenient and uncomfortable, what is adverse and painful as “fuel to be burnt for our journey” as the Japanese farmer-poet Miyazawa Kenji has said, or seeing it as nothing else but all that: inconvenience, difficulty, pain and adversity. For sure, the pain and discomfort are there and real, but suffering is/should be optional. Otherwise, what is the meaning of Faith?
The quarantine, the shelter in place and the isolation can be seen as a godsend for inner revivification, for the renewal of our authentic self that gets forgotten and lost in the turmoil of this world, or they can be viewed as sprinkled sand into the bearings of the amply lubricated and finely tuned machine, the beloved narcissistic-consumerist lifestyle that keeps us exclusively attached, leech-like, to the mundane and the trivial. Since it is more than obvious that the inevitable outcome of this lifestyle is our already toxic levels of anxiety, fear and insecurity, the latter view will only further aggravate our inner turmoil.
We can continue to be floating weeds on the putrefied waters-----the de-centered, disoriented beings of matter-worshiping, anti-spiritual modernity that insists that "man lives by bread alone"----- or we can re-examine, re-member, re-connect and revive our-selves. Just like in normal times, even more so now in the midst of this pandemic: “To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine” (Zygmunt Bauman).
The choice is ours, indeed.
The Collapse
For more, please click: Short, Short: On belief
