"The world scatters us, and the ego compresses us; God gathers us together and dilates us; He appeases us and delivers us."
Frithjof Schuon
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Relationships: The great mystic Meister Eckhardt once said, “They speak of God as if He were a cow!”
The way human relationships have changed is nothing but a reflection of the way we relate to our Creator nowadays. In other words, our horizontal relationships in the created world are always dependent on our vertical relationship with God. Man, Pontifical man, stands at the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical axes of existence. He has a hierarchy within and without, in the microcosm and the macrocosm, respectively. Vertically, man has states of being, each lower state less real than the one above. Each higher state on this inner chain or “ladder” contains all that is in the lower level(s). Each lower level is the effect, and the higher one the cause of this effect. To climb up this great chain, this vertical ladder, (that is the very purpose of the gift of life, after all) traditional man always employed the science of symbols in which he was well versed. This is because all manifestations, both within and without, are in the form of symbols (ayat). But since the profaned (modern) man, the Promethean man, cannot decipher symbols, he remains blind and oblivious to the levels of being (even when he does not violently, naively and ultimately irrationally, rejects all hierarchy). Then there is the horizontal plane, or the “modes” of being. This is the plane on which we relate to the world, to creation, to all manifestations of the Principle. This is the plane of quality, of all we think and do, a plane where everything is equally “real” but only to the extent that the level is real on the vertical axis. This quality, therefore, is totally dependent on our state of being defined by its vertical level. These are just some hints on which the intelligent reader is invited to reflect and by doing so, he/she will be able to see, one hopes, where we stand now in these latter days of the corrupting cycle of time.
In short, because of these axes at the intersection of which he stands, traditional man is both king and slave, both lord and servant, or both Khalifa 'Allah and Abd 'Allah. He has been given the vicegerency of this world but is also required to be in total submission to his Creator. And it is this that is missing in the totally uprooted and profaned modern man who wants to be king but not slave and the most visible outcome of that arrogance---that sheer stupidity--- can be seen, among other manifestations, in the ecological crisis, a total collapse of life as such, that is now not a question of if but when.
Charles le Gai Eaton wrote in his last work before departing from this world: "Islam is pre-eminently the religion of relationship. When the Qur'an denounces 'breaking ties of relationship' as a sin likely to lead us to damnation it indicates quite clearly that establishing and maintaining such ties is a primary duty for God's 'viceroy on earth (khalifa). Here we we are---you and me and the rest of us---little units, pebbles on the beach. It is by our relationship with other people, with the animals and with the natural world, all of which, ultimately, point back towards the Creator of heavens and the earth." (Reflections, 2012, p.118)
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Reason/Intellect:
Reason is like the minor stars, or like the moon, that shine at night.
Intellect is like the sun. Reason is like a lamp that we need as long as we are
in the dark of the night, to help us, to guide us, to show us the way. With the
rise of the sun, which is the intellect, the stars and the moon fade away and
lose their efficacy in the brightness of day. The lamp becomes useless. Only a
fool would insist on using it while the sun shines brightly overhead.
Existence of God: To deny God is to see the wave and deny the
existence of the ocean; to deny God is to see a speck of dust and deny space.
To insist on asking for the “proofs” of the existence of God is to be like that little fish that
asks its mother for the proof of the existence of water.
For more, click: The Post-real world as hell
