Read and become ignorant

 

Read and become ignorant!

"Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire culture, our science and our philosophy, our literature and our art."
(W.M. Urban, "The Intelligible World", 1929, p. 172)

"It is better to have a well-made head than a well-filled head."
(Montaigne )
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The great art historian, metaphysician and perennialist hakeem, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, once wrote, "...it is far better not to know HOW to read than not to know WHAT to read." This may surprise many people and may even sound absurd to many others. But there is wisdom in it, pertinent wisdom for our times.

There was a time when literacy, mainly the ability to read, meant awareness, knowledge, culture and cultivation. To be literate was to have access to information and to become knowledgeable, even wise. Books were prized possessions because they were so rare, expensive and difficult to get hold of. The technology of book and printing, after the invention of the moveable Guttenberg printing press in the fifteenth century, made literacy the sole criterion of success, of fame and fortune, of culture and civilization. Reading and writing became essential, so much so that to be illiterate was automatically equated with being ignorant. That was the context then, long time ago.
We live in a totally different age now. There is no lack of information or of books now. Books are easily available and information, every kind of information, is just a click away. Google, Wikipedia, OpenAI and ChatGPT, social media...all at our service to fetch us within seconds whatever we want to find and know. In fact, we are now drowning in the oceans of information. We have terms like "information glut" and "information overload", choking on it all, as if drinking from a big hose; we are simply overwhelmed by the tsunami of information. So, it is not about literacy anymore, or the mere ability to read.

What the Coomaraswamy sutra means is that literacy is now a kind of burden, or a tool that puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders and conscience. The issue is not "how to read", or not that only, anymore; it is essentially about "what to read". Ignorance now means the lack or the dulling of that discriminatory faculty that can sift through all that "information" with which we are bombarded 24/7, 365 days all year round. We are not faced with the problem of "lack of information" anymore, but with too much of it and most of it is useless and obviously harmful. Not everything is worth reading, but how do we decide? Therein lies the problem and its solution, too. In fact, just saying "information" in an innocent or naive and neutral manner is not helpful anymore; most, if not all, information is now suspect, either as misinformation or as disinformation. Among other things, the critical mind now needs to be able "only (to) connect" as the writer E.M. Forster once said. Everything is fragmented and compartmentalized, especially knowledge in the institutions of learning where specialized disciplines have gained depth in knowing the minutest details of things but have lost breadth and connection with other disciplines or fields of enquiry. It is not an exaggeration to say that a well educated person today lacks the crucial and critical ability to "connect the dots" that are spread all across disciplines and fields of enquiry; practitioners across discipline can't communicate with one another at all and all of them resemble tribes of experts with specialized, even esoteric, vocabularies and discourses and often busy in protecting the boundaries of their fields, something called "gate keeping" inside the academia.

A serious implication of the sutra above, therefore, is that ignorance now, in its compound form (jehl e murrakkab in Urdu), is more likely to be the result of literacy or of reading without discrimination, or without knowing WHAT to read and not the result of illiteracy. In other words, whereas in the past, it was illiteracy that was often equated with ignorance (often wrongly though even then but for different sets of reasons), it is literacy that now leads to compound ignorance.

"Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
("The Rock", T.S. Eliot)

(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)

Our childhood and toys, or children then and now

 

Our childhood and our toys, or children then and now

Potali or kencha (marbles), pittu garam (tennis ball and a pile of flat stones), pahari (the grid tag), paisa guchi (played with coins), patta baazi (with old cigarette packets piled one on top of the other), gulli danda, bearing gaadi (home made carts using old ball-bearings and wooden fruit crates) and so on. These were our toys and games then.

When we were kids, toys were not usually bought, but often home made by kids themselves, with whatever material that was then available: discarded shoe boxes, old bicycle and car tires, used ball-bearings we used to collect from the auto-garages on Wafa Road, discarded cigarette packets, wooden sticks for gulli danda and slingshots (ghulail), pieces of leather and cords for home-made catapults (called palkhamo in Faarsi), old metal clothesline wires for "seem gaadi" (the hand held metal guides with a U-shaped head used to roll and steer the used tires) and so on.

Our imagination and creativity then were of a totally different kind and at a different level, involving raw, unsullied imagination and both authentic intellectual and manual effort geared towards making the best possible use of our wits and of the limited available resources for the final products that we carried around in our heads and not on our iPads. There were no iPads, tablets, HDTVs, Playstations and Nintendos. The young eyes then were not trained on navigating the virtual worlds on different kinds and sizes of screens but, scavenger-like, on spotting potentially usable materials to actualize the fuzzy and funny ideas in that thing we carried on our shoulders, our heads. There were no "how to" Youtube and TikTok videos, but there were people, real community people in the form of friends, neighbors, relatives and elders who would help, guide and show us how to make and fix things. Yes, things always got fixed then and not thrown away. Everybody had a skill, especially manual skill, then.

For us kids, toys often meant making our own, and not an expensive visit to the mall or getting gadgets online from Amazon. Time, a lot of it, was spent not on choosing the make, color, design and model, but on finding materials and then putting all of them together in creative ways. It was the entire process, that process of actually creating something from almost nothing, often from discarded materials, that was the most satisfying of all whether it was assembling a three-wheeler cart with old, greasy ball bearings, or constructing a slingshot with pieces of carefully scrapped and neatly wedged sticks and rubber strips cut from used and discarded bicycle tubes, or coating kite strings with finely ground glass and liquid raisin glue (seeraish) to prepare "manja" during the kite-flying season in the brutally dry and cold winter months of January and February. The cold, too, was extreme then, in the Quetta of 1970s.

Just like everything else, the toys were also a reflection of the ethos of the time, of old Quettawaali: simplicity, frugality, humility and modesty, contentment with the essentials of life and a detached attitude towards what was ostentatious, trivial or secondary.

(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)

Corruptio, optimi, pessima!

 

Corruptio Optimi Pessima!

There is an old Persian/Farsi proverb that says, "The fish starts rotting from the head down".

"The corruption of the best is the worst" is the meaning of this Latin saying. This means that those with the highest authority, status and, therefore, power, have to carry the heaviest burden of responsibilities and duties both towards the self and towards the other in the world. Neglect, slack or failure on their part wrecks not only them and their kith and kin, but entire communities, nations, societies and even the world.

When the ruler, the king, steals an egg, then the ruled subject thinks he has a duty to steal ten! When religious leaders sell God and faith for worldly gains, then the common man of faith considers every conceivable sin as a pathway to his salvation. When the upholders of law and order and the dispensers of justice practice tyranny and injustice, then the victims think and feel totally justified in disregarding and breaking the rules and the laws of the land. When teachers become the very symbol of ignorance and irresponsibility, when those whose vocation requires them to cure the sick and care for them, when they sell diseases and death because it helps them line their pockets, then society is doomed. When those whose very job is to protect and provide security indulge in corruption and create insecurity and fear, then hope for establishing a sane and humane society becomes a distant dream.

In a society where the fish has already started rotting from the head down, nepotism, sycophancy and mediocrity are the core "virtues" of all, from top to bottom. It is then a society where the reign of "The Shudra" is well established. To borrow the imagery from the Upanishad (old Hindu scriptures) , when the charioteer (Intellect) becomes corrupt and fails to control the reins (mind) as they should be, the horses (the senses/nafs/ego) then start galloping at full speed towards the abyss which means the destruction of all. Of these inverted "virtues", nepotism needs special mention since this was the one evil that saw the downfall of Catholicism and the rise of reform Protestantism in the West. After all, nepotism has its root in the word "nephew": when you disregard merit, talent and justice and start favoring your own, wantonly inbreeding and corrupting institutions with the worst elements in society, then the end is nigh.

History, the past and nostalgia

 

History, the past and the charge of "nostalgia"

Some of my modern and "progressive" readers (and friends, too) have often charged me with being too "nostalgic", or nostalgically romantic about the past and have even accused me of being not enough "realistic", not adequately "progressive" and/or "Tarraqee pasand". I totally agree with them and fully accept that charge.
I have written many times that I do not see the past as a graveyard of superstitions, a mortuary of obscurantisms, a scrapyard full of irrational, unreasonable and junk ideas, values and virtues, or a vast, barren landscape completely devoid of truth, goodness and beauty.
I do not see the journey from the past to our present (which itself will become past as soon as I post this!) as "growing up" only, but essentially as growing old and decrepit: not Progress (with capital "P"), or not only as Progress, but also, and importantly so, as decline and degeneration. History, modern "scientific" historiography, for me is not about coming out of darkness of old cultures, customs and traditions and seeing the illuminating light of modernity, but essentially a cunning of time, a trickery of those who write and preach History and Progress; I see it as a totally ideological and even fraudulent project of knowledge production and consumption about the past that merely displaces our "simplistic outlook" and does not abolish it only to replace it with something better and sophisticated as it always loudly claims. What modern, reductionist historiography does is that it irresponsibly dirties the past wholesale, it violently murders all the other ways of understanding the past---myths, stories, collective memories, epic poems etc.---and sells its own ideological narratives, its own "myths", in the name of reason and science, or wrapped in scientism.

If we are told that there are "pathologies of irrationality", let it be known to all those ideologues of "History and Progress" that there are also much worse "pathologies of rationality"; after all, the twentieth century, a genocidal century of mass murders, pogroms, ethnic-cleansings and holocausts in which more than 100 million were butchered by the secular-modern men of reason, science, culture, civilization, history, progress, was a period of time that was called "the century of terror" by no-less a modern ideologue than the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm himself. Who would know better than Hobsbawm that there was a direct link between "scientific history" as taught at Sorbonne, Oxford and other modern citadels of knowledge production and the killing fields of Cambodia; that the road to the Siberian Gulags was paved with ideas of History and Progress propounded by the leading lights of Hegelian-Marxian worldview, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin et.al; that the thousands of dead bodies floating down the Yangtze River in mid-twentieth century China were of those unfortunate "savage" a-/anti-historicals who resisted those Hegelian-Marxian notions of materialist and scientific history.

I would rather listen to my great grandmother's tales, poems and myths about our own past than to Hegel, Marx, Santayana inspired Eurocentric nonsense!

Modern history and history writing, because it is secular in nature through and through and, therefore, excludes by default "sacred history" and depreciates the cyclical nature of time and other modes of understanding the past that are part and parcel of all the traditional civilizations of humanity, it obscures the eternal in time; reductionist and ideological to the core, it also forces us to throw the baby with the dirty bath water, as if our own time is the final and absolute arbiter and model of perfection, goodness and beauty! Its cunning is thus: it throws its net on the past and what it catches in that net, it presents to us as the total and final story, the whole past, the entire narrative of time past! What it can't catch in its badly crafted net does not exist at all! This is its reductionism.

I stand totally opposed to the modern evolutionary understanding of our nature, of our time and society, and of reality itself; I stand on the side of the great, perennial spiritual traditions of humankind, all of which tell us that time degenerates and things, the essential things and values in life, decay and do not get better. True, there are "bursts" of "progress" what these traditions invariably call "renewal" or "tajdeed" and other similar expressions (because God has promised it!) but overall, there is decline and degeneration: entropy, in other words. I am in full agreement with what a contemporary Muslim sage has said about these two perspectives---the evolutionary/progressive and that of decline and degeneration (the religious)---what he calls secular Modernity and "Tradition" (the religious traditions of humankind): "Modernity is essentially evil and only accidentally good; Tradition is essentially good and only accidentally evil." (Seyyed Hossen Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred).

Silence and Chatter

 

Silence and Chatter

"Who knows, does not say."         Tao te Ching

"Nothing in creation is so like God as silence."      Meister Eckhardt

"So it's not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying. What we're plagued by these days isn't any blocking of communication, but pointless statements. "
(Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations, 1972-1990)
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The most profound conversations are carried out in silence. Language, since it is a form, eventually comes to a dead end. "Language cannot contain reality...we know more than words can tell" says Ali Lakhani. While we must speak and converse, a form, in the final analysis, cannot do justice to the deepest, the highest essences, as sages of both East and West have reminded us. It can't do justice especially because languages in our modern world have lost their symbolic quality, something we see nowadays around us. When thought patterns and worldviews become depleted of their symbolic, mythical and metaphysical contents, then languages also get affected; with the loss of the sacred and the science of metaphysics through which we have access to the sacred---the loss of verticality---languages also begin to lose their symbolic and anagogical richness and end up expressing the flat, one dimensional inner cosmos of the speakers or users of those languages. So much is said these days, but all so weightless, so lacking in profundity, so utterly superficial and meaningless. The continuous, colorless, vapid chatter and especially the speed with which it is carried out by many people, the young in particular, is outright ugly, lacking all the old charm and beauty.

A Jain tale. The Man in the Well.
(Samaradityakatha, 2.55-80).

A famous parable taken from the Story of Samaraditya (Samaradityakatha), a lengthy tale in mixed prose and verse written in Prakrit by Haribhadra, who lived in the seventh century. The story tells of the adventures of its hero in nine rebirths, and is intended to show the effects of karma. This story is supposedly told by a Jain monk to a prince in order to persuade him of the evils of the world.
__________________________________________________

A certain man, much oppressed by the woes of poverty,

Left his own home, and set out for another country.
He passed through land, with its villages, cities and harbors,
And after a few days he lost his way.
And he came to a forest, thick with trees ... and full of wild beasts. There, while he was stumbling over the rugged paths, ... a prey to thirst and hunger, he saw a mad elephant, fiercely trumpeting, charging him with upraised trunk. At the same time there appeared before him a most evil demoness, holding a sharp sword, dreadful in face and form, and laughing with loud and shrill laughter. Seeing them he trembled in all his limbs with deathly fear, and looked in all directions. There, to the east of him, he saw a great banyan tree ...
And he ran quickly, and reached the mighty tree.
But his spirits fell, for it was so high that even the birds could not fly over it,
And he could not climb its high unscalable trunk ...
All his limbs trembled with terrible fear,
Until, looking round, he saw nearby an old well covered with grass.
Afraid of death, craving to live if only a moment longer,
He flung himself into the well at the foot of the banyan tree.
A clump of reeds grew from its deep wall, and to this he clung,
While below him he saw terrible snakes, enraged at the sound of his falling;
And at the very bottom, known from the hiss of its breath, was a black and mighty python,
With mouth agape, its body thick as the trunk of a heavenly elephant, with terrible red eyes.
He thought, "My life will only last as long as these reeds hold fast,"
And he raised his head; and there, on the clump of reeds, he saw two large mice,
One white, one black, their sharp teeth ever gnawing at the roots of the reed-clump.

Then up came the wild elephant, and, enraged the more at not catching him,
Charged time and again at the trunk of the banyan tree.
At the shock of his charge a honeycomb on a large branch
Which hung over the old well, shook loose and fell.
The man's whole body was stung by a swarm of angry bees,
But, just by chance, a drop of honey fell on his head,
Rolled down his brow, and somehow reached his lips,
And gave him a moment's sweetness. He longed for other drops,
And he thought nothing of the python, the snakes, the elephant, the mice, the well, or the bees,
In his excited craving for yet more drops of honey.
This parable is powerful to clear the minds of those on the way to freedom.
---------
Now hear its sure interpretation.
The man is the soul, his wandering in the forest the four types of existence.
The wild elephant is death, the demoness old age.
The banyan tree is salvation, where there is no fear of death, the elephant,
But which no sensual man can climb.
The well is human life, the snakes are passions,
Which so overcomes a man that he does not know what he should do.
The tuft of reed is man's allotted span, during which the soul exists embodied;
The mice which steadily gnaw it are the dark and bright fortnights.
The stinging bees are manifold diseases,
Which torment a man until he has not a moment's joy.
The awful python is hell, seizing the man bemused by sensual pleasure,
Fallen in which the soul suffers pains by the thousand.
The drops of honey are trivial pleasures, terrible at the last.
How can a wise man want them, in the midst of such peril and hardship?
(Dervaish Ali, Quetta Walla)

On Pets

"If dogs could talk, it would take a lot of fun out of owning one."

Andy Rooney

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I have always been puzzled by this idea of pets! Really, I just fail to understand the whole concept. Now, before I say anything further, let me declare that I have nothing against animals. I am against cruelty to animals and also protest indiscriminate and irresponsible animal testing. A nature lover, an "environmentalist" for life with two postgrad degrees and loads of publications, academic and journalistic on the subject, I have even had a short stint volunteering with the RSPCA when I was studying abroad. I don't hate animals or anything, to be clear. Although I don't hate them, I don't really love forcibly domesticated animals---pets--either. I do love them in the wild, for sure. Nothing is as awe inspiring as an eagle in flight, or nothing is more inspiring than a sprinting big cat, especially the cheetah: oh, the sheer beauty and grace of the elegant form in motion! So, it's not the hatred of animals; it's just that I find this thoroughly modern idea of "pets" very odd, even bizarre!

When I was studying and working in the UK, I used to do my grocery at a local supermarket, a Tesco. Often, at the cash register, I would be behind an old lady who had a small dog, an ugly and sad looking pug. This woman, who was not as ugly as that little, fat creature, would shop for both herself and her pet. Her items: a loaf of sliced bread, a pack of sliced cheese and some cucumbers. Her dog's food: two shiny, big packets and an assortment of small boxes and fancy bars of dog food. After a few weeks, I figured out that she was paying at least double for the food for that dirty-looking pug than for the food she bought for herself. Or perhaps it was even more than that. I often wondered then and would ask myself, "Would I do such a thing for an animal? Would I invest so much, especially emotionally, in a four-legged creature than in a two-legged one?" And, so on. I always felt sorry for both of them, the not-so-ugly lonely looking old lady and the visibly obese, lazy-looking, ugly pug.

 
Recently, I had an argument with an old female acquaintance, a "spinster", as we would call such persons when I was learning the English language for the first time (one has to re-learn the English language every few years now!). A dedicated progressive, a head-to-toe modern, an evolutionist to the last bone and muscle in her body---you know, the culturally unmoored and deracinated type that has to borrow the very conceptual categories in order to understand her own self, history, culture, religion and civilization---one of her cats had either died in an accident or had disappeared somewhere, so I was trying to comfort her and in the middle of my comforting, I said something similar to what I am saying here, about the modern concept of pets. She didn't like it, and, in turn, started lecturing me on the benefits of owning pets and why modern pet owners are superior, more "civilized" beings because they "care", "love" and are "sensitive", and thereafter she went into a full-scale, full-blown virtue signaling mode as is the custom on social media these days. So predictable. Obviously, I responded, however humbly I could, and then I got "cancelled"!

 
In the modern west, where she lives now and she has imbibed wholesale---hook, line and sinker---the worst aspects of the secular post(modern)culture there, something that unthinking and psychologically swamped 'desi' people with many kinds of inferiority complexes often do (non-Westerners from this part of the world who have made the modern west their home because of whatever reasons), "people are so kind to animals that they actually take better care of their pets than of themselves" she informed me (oh yeah, I thought of the old lady with the horrible pug). "Pets are so terribly important that were it not for pets, people would not even say hello to one another while walking their dogs or playing with their pets outside...they would not make friends with neighbors, with other people". And loads of similar undigested fluff. I thought of sharing these "insights" with my savage psychoanalyst friend Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki and to get his take on them, his "reverse anthropological" reading of the cat lady's arguments. He never fails to oblige, so he quickly wrote back:

"The often lonely and anomie-stricken moderns with their shrunken souls like and love pets because the poor creatures---the forcibly domesticated animals---don't talk back! That is one of the most important reasons for keeping pets. This strange, even pathological, concept has not much to do with the poor animals who are basically the passive victims in the relationship; the problem is with the reductionist, pathological idea and reality of the modern self, the owners of these pets. Let me elaborate.
The sad fact that people are now either totally incapable to connect in any meaningful way with others, with their neighbors, relatives and strangers is because community has died, community has been murdered by the obscene consumerist, hedonistic individualism in the modern world. That is why pets are now needed by human beings to actually say "hello" to one another. And that is not something to be proud of, but is actually a lamentable, pitiable situation. Someone like Sartre's prognosis that "the other is hell" has become true. Everybody, especially the young---the millennials, the iGen/GenZ and God knows what follows them---seem now terribly afraid to "invest" in human relationships because of this very fear; cute, little animals and even virtual toys are their safest bet: light, burdenless, convenient, disposable--"the bearable lightness of being" alone with a toy, to give a spin to Milan Kundera's famous postmodern notion. Observe how an image of an injured or dead pet sends traumatic shock waves in them, but the mutilated body of a child in Gaza or elsewhere registers nothing of that sort. There is something terribly wrong there: misplaced empathy, lack of empathy. I am not saying that there should be empathy for one and not for the other situation, but am surprised at the tragic anomaly, the disproportion. It's sickening, really.

 
"As the traditional family structure comes under more brutal assault by the forces of secular-modernity, in particular by the "trans-" or what the comedian Dave Chappelle once called "the alphabet people", and with all the hype surrounding transhumanism and AI, traditional notions of human relationships will further degrade and pets, real toys, virtual toys and other similar paraphernalia will quickly become alternatives to fill the vacuum. To a certain degree, this has already happened."

Continues the wise Sardar: "Just like you [yours truly, that is], I also grew up in a house with a big, wide backyard where we kept all sorts of animals, from cows and buffaloes to chicks and ducklings. We had cats, goats, sheep, dogs, pheasants, parrots, doves, canaries, and even fish and much more. But we had no "pets" in the modern sense of that concept. The animals had functions to serve; they were often sources of milk, eggs, ghee, butter, cheese and even meat at times. And sometimes they did not serve any of those functions at all. We played with them, we loved them and took care of them, but they were certainly not "pets", definitely not extensions of our one-dimensional self/ego. For example, we had no need at all for these animals to become mediators or intercessors for our relationships with our neighbors, relatives or even strangers. No, there was no such concept and, in fact, that would be considered very odd, if not contemptible. There was always a strong community and human relationships, whatever they were in essence and however they were formed and nurtured, they were not animal-centered or "pet-centered". There were a million other reasons for people to interact with others, to say hello to one another, to ask after each other's health and to make friends. The "other" was not "hell" then; the other was an essential part of the healthy self and without the other---the neighbor, the relative, the stranger---the truncated and reduced self was considered to be hell, was hellish! The animals did not talk back then, too, but the owners understood them and catered to their needs better then. How could they not? The religion and religious culture required them to be mindful of their needs. The Prophet of Islam (pbuh) loved cats and his treatment of animals is the ideal model for all Muslims, his sunnah; the very first and original animal clinics and shelters were, after all, established by Muslims in the Middle Ages, all of whom were enlightened beings without this modern concept of the "pet"! The concept of "hima" in Islam makes it a farz (obligatory, duty) for a Muslim to be kind and merciful towards all of God's non-human creation too, smaller and weaker animals in particular. That many Muslims around the world don't do any such thing, and who have often forgotten all these noble principles of their faith, is another sad and tragic story, indeed. But did people then hate their animals? Not at all. People took care of them, but since they were not "pets", the animals did not sleep with them in their beds, did not sit with them on their carpets and sofas nor ate with them at their dinner tables. The point is, one does not have to subscribe to this modern notion of the "pet" in order to be kind to animals, to love them and care for them. In fact, as a reverse anthropologist, I would go as far as to say that one must shun this whole modern idea of the "pet" altogether so that one can truly love God's animal creation. That would be a healthy thing to do, because then it would mean, among other things, that the "self" has been healed back into a wholesome and integral state. Wallahu Alam."

On Happiness

 

On Happiness: some random thoughts

"Perfect happiness is the absence of happiness."      Chuang Tzu

"Destroy a man's illusions and you destroy his happiness."

                                                                         Hubert van Zeller

"The path to happiness lies through the remembering of death."                                                                                  Abdal Hakim Murad

Gautama Siddhartha Buddha, sometimes called the "antinomian" Hindu sage prince of the Shakya clan, had many argumentative and even pesky disciples who never tired of picking Buddha's brain on everything under the sun. The grand sage and prophet of Buddhism answered many, but about some he always remained silent, or hesitant. For example, on the very important issue of the nature of God, Buddha is said to have remained silent or to have discoursed elliptically or symbolically.

In the modern world, particularly in the modern West, where traditional Christianity lost its pull and foot hold in post-Renaissance Europe (although some like the great Mahatma Gandhi have said that "Christianity was a good religion before it went to Europe") many disoriented and discontented people often feel attracted to some aspect, interpretation or sect of this great world religion, especially to Zen Buddhism. Although there are many reasons for that, one that often stands out is that some Western orientalists--- polemists who are usually metaphysically illiterate and who are often the same ones who question and doubt the authenticity of Sufism/Islamic esoterism and think of it as nothing but a bad copy or crude plagiarism of Hindu spirituality or of some other preceding religion--- these ideologues find Buddhism attractive because they think that it is more an "atheistic" social philosophy than a proper, authentically revealed religion like other world religions such as Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Now, this is of course nonsense since Buddhism is an authentic religion but one which is different in its discourse and in its use of conceptual and spiritual categories, and especially different from the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Some Muslims, most recently Hamza Yusuf (2013), have actually written that the Buddha is one of the 124,000 prophets mentioned in the Holy Quran, the prophet named Dhu al-Kifl (a contraction of "Kapila/Kapilavastu", the birthplace of Buddha). To state this point metaphysically, as Seyyed Hossein Nasr and other scholars and sages have done, "God has spoken many times to different peoples and in different tongues..."


But I have digressed from the topic. Inshallah (God willing), some other day I will post on these crucial issues in a more detailed manner. For now, it suffices to say that Buddhism is not "atheistic" as it is presented to be by some people, but it is non-theistic. And there is a world of difference between those two words---atheistic and non-theistic. Or, it is not "God-centric", God as understood in other major religions. What is God in these religions is sometimes called Supreme Reality, or Supreme Consciousness in Buddhism. The Buddhist worldview with its main idea of "dukkha" emphasizes an approach that is geared towards "knowing the very nature of things" ---things as they really are----and is, therefore, not given to defining everything conceptually and conventionally, because every definition is ultimately "a form". And with forms---important and unavoidable as they are--- as every informed Muslim and Jew in particular should know, there is always the possibility, or danger, of "shirk" or "idol worship", of confusing the symbol (ayat) with Reality, of confusing the finger that points to the moon with the moon itself: danger of polytheism. Because the Buddha was often silent or not clear on this issue of the nature of God (as clarity is ordinarily understood), and because Buddhism is an apophatic theology or worldview (negative theology or the metaphysics of tanzih/utter transcendence), does not mean that Buddhism is just another variety of atheism and the Buddha merely an older, browner version or incarnation of Voltaire, Marx or Jean Paul-Sartre!

So, one of the Buddha's rather pesky disciples often asked Buddha this question: "O Great Sage of the Shakya: What is happiness, and, more importantly, what is the way to happiness?" After trying to answer this disciple in ways that he was known for, The Enlightened One finally said this to that disciple: " There is no way to happiness; happiness IS the way."

                                    

Chris Jami in his excellent book Killosophy says, "The most fragile, unhappy people destine themselves to live lives of constantly reminding themselves to be happy." The truly happy people are those who don't run after happiness, who don't obsess about it and who have never consciously tried to define it since defining something always means limiting it, reducing it. Defining means giving some form to something. We can, and we often do that, but sooner or later we realize our folly, or at least the wise among us do. Like that other abstraction we call "love", any attempt at defining happiness will always remain partial, even futile. The moment the fish starts thinking about or starts analyzing the water in which it exists, was born into and will die therein, its miseries begin. In a sense, this obsession to "know it all" is a very modern attitude geared towards control and prediction. It is a mindset which tries to demarcate, to define, to categorize or build cages around things since reductionist modernity is nothing if it is not about control. The kind of control that essentially leads to domination and violence, hence unhappiness or wretchedness. The consequences of this obsession with control and domination can be clearly seen in the form of the ecological crisis that stares us in the face.

A truly contented (happy) person is one whose heart is not dead. Life takes every one of us on a unique journey, but what is shared by all those who are on this journey is the mixed experience of both happiness and misery. Since man, according to all pre-modern and traditional perspectives has a hierarchy of realities within him, these experiences are also felt at different levels within man. There is the reality of the Spirit (ar-Ruh), that of the psyche (nafs) and then that of the body (jism) at the lower end of the hierarchy. We experience happiness and sorrow at all these levels. The body and the psyche are in the realm of flux or transience and only the Spirit is the changeless, the uncreated in man. The happiness of the jism and nafs, while real on their own levels, are ephemeral or transitory, here one day and gone the next. According to Islamic philosophers from Farabi, Ghazzali, Suharwardi and all the way to Ibn al Arabi and Mullah Sadra, all have stressed the hierarchy or the gradation of being (wujud) and because of this the different levels of happiness experienced at each level of these realities, from sensual to intellectual and spiritual. And because of this, Islam shares with Buddhism and Hinduism the saying "die before you die" (or "die to the self so that you live in the Self", the fana and baqa). This 'dying before dying' resulting in the attainment of permanent happiness that is not fleeting and not the cause of pain and suffering requires detachment from the world, requires us to die to the world while we are still alive. Or, "to be IN the world but not OF the world" as the famous Sufi saying informs us. The more detached from the world we are, the more we die to the world, the more intense our self consciousness becomes and the more acutely we become aware of true reality of things and that true knowledge of "things as they are" is what gives us lasting happiness.

As in Buddhism, so in Islam, the attachment to transient happiness is actually blamed or held responsible for man's dukkha or suffering in this world. But whereas in the former this is over-emphasized and which is understandable because, as I already mentioned, Buddhism is an apophatic weltanschauung (worldview), or it has a negative theology, such is not the case in Islam where happiness in this world is also valid, its attainment actually encouraged but clearly differentiated from the happiness that man can experience at other, higher levels of being (works such as the "Tehsil e Sa'ada" by Al Farabi and other words by such sages like Al Ghazzali and many Sufis, including those by Sheikh al Akbar Ibn al Arabi all say so ). Worldly happiness must be attained, but real happiness is one which has permanence and does not come to an end with the demise of man's body and psyche at death. For example, it is reflected in the smile of the dying man who attained it while he was still alive. Since the heart is the seat of the Spirit, that smile confirms that the dying person's heart remains alive while they depart from this world. Al- Ghazali has identified this highest form of happiness, this permanent happiness with "knowledge of God".

The Sufis, especially Ibn al Arabi, say, "the truly happy person is one with whom God is pleased". This is the highest form of happiness---spiritual happiness--- where a person, a wayfarer is contented, or who is experiencing "ridhwan" because his Lord is "raadhi" with him. The Muslim belief is that no matter what we have achieved, what positions we have attained and what we have gathered and possessed in worldly terms, we cannot really be happy if Allah is not pleased with us. True happiness will always elude us, will always be out of reach for those of us who forget this. And that is why, one of the best prayers we can gift the pious amongst us with is to say that "may God be pleased with him or her". A famous hadith says, "God loveth those who are content" and, conversely, only those who have the love, fear and knowledge of God are truly content. The Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari has said: "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." God's loved ones are always aware of this apparently paradoxical hikma and are, therefore, content either way. We are again reminded that this is also because of the knowledge of God by yet another Sufi master, Sheikh Ahmed al Alawi: "He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God and he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God."

The philosopher sage Seyyed Hossein Nasr tells us that, "a person who is content and with whom God is content, has no fear, fears nothing in this world". People who have been blessed with this (essentially spiritual) contentment transcend fear because "they are God's friends". Nasr further says that faith or iman is a gift of joy from God to us, and that faith and happiness are inseparable. Faith requires "sacrifice and self discipline but results in joy and happiness for the person of faith, who knows that in performing these rites one is doing God’s Will...and thereby experiencing the grace or barakah that issues from the performance of the sacred rites" and that "On the human plane love is often combined with pain and sorrow, but the love of God is inseparable from joy and happiness, even when there is longing and separation." God is the source of all goodness and beauty that is around us and within us, "how can a soul that attains through the love of God, through the attachment to the source of all beauty not be in a state of joy and happiness?" he asks. This happiness that comes through faith is the antidote to all the fears, the doubts and the trepidations we experience in this world, if only man has sincere faith, has tawwakul, he tells us. He continues: "The Islamic saying tawakkaltu ‘alā’Llāh (“I place my confidence in God”), repeated so often in daily life, encourages one to take refuge in the bosom of the Divine in a state of contentment, a state that overcomes and transcends all that causes sorrow and unhappiness in human life in this world." (2014, p. 81)

Man is born with a spiritual yearning that remains with him while he still breathes. It is so because his very substance, his very essence, has kneaded into it the perfume of the Truth, Goodness and Beauty of his Creator. He is, after all, imago Dei (image/form of his Creator). A yearning for return to that origin which is also our end. While we experience the transient happiness of our psyche and body, attaining this permanent happiness that is not followed by sorrow and suffering remains a challenge: "The difficulty lies in attaining permanent happiness in a world that some have characterized as a vale of tears. In Islam, as in other authentic religions, that permanent state of happiness is attained by gaining not the freedom of the passionate self to receive whatever it desires, but freedom from desire and from the passionate self." (Nasr 2014)

Let me end this post which is for the most part an explication of, or commentary on, Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 2014 lecture on the "Islamic Perspective on Happiness" given at Emory University, USA, with his beautiful concluding insights. Says he,

"To attain permanent happiness, we must therefore remember who we really are, where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going. We must detach ourselves from fleeting pleasures and joys and seek permanent joy by attaching ourselves to the spiritual world, which is our original home and the only place where we shall attain permanent happiness. We must die before we die; die to the world here and now in order to gain eternal felicity in the life of the spirit and the intellect understood in its traditional sense....Only through leading a spiritual life do we gain that peace that “passeth all understanding” and attain that abiding happiness for which we were brought into this world and which is our birthright by virtue of our primordial nature ( fitṛah), yet which we have forgotten and have to recall. To be truly happy, we must rediscover who we really are. In this process of rediscovery, even sadness can be a major step towards the attainment of happiness, if this sadness is nostalgia for our original abode in its proximity to the Divine." (Nasr 2014, p. 90)

The World on Fire

 
The World on Fire

“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”    Confucius

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."    Reinhold Niebuhr

“One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words.”   Goethe

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There is an old saying of the sages and saints that “too much bitterness leads to hell.”

There is a lot in this world that can and do frustrate us, irritate us and make us angry. Every day, we experience and come face to face with acts and events, with people and groups of people that enrage us without fail. To be angry most, if not all, of the time is actually the condition of the average person in these latter days of modernity. And to be angry in the virtual world is as if it is a requirement nowadays, a default setting of being present on the social media platforms: “I am angry, therefore I exist” to twist the dominant Cartesian logic of the times. In the hellish dungeons of the social media in particular everything and everyone gets blocked, canceled, enraged and, therefore, weaponized so easily these days. Aggression is now available and experienced in every form and template: gender-sexual, ethno-racial, ontic-epistemic, work-related, age-related and at both macro and micro levels of existence. Rage is all around us, in abundant supply.

Anger is of course a legitimate human emotion and it cannot be denied. There is even sacred rage, anger that is completely justified, just as there is the concept of a “just war” in many world religions or civilizations inspired by these world religions. But in an increasingly and thoroughly secular and God-less world when anger turns into bitterness, then the harm that is done to the agent of rage far exceeds that done to the object of rage: bitterness destroys the angry person more effectively than the object or target of rage. That madman of Europe, the “illuminated psychopath” Friedrich Nietzsche, once rightly said that, “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” The abysses of our times, many as they are and everywhere as they are, not only gaze back into you but actually and quickly pull you in, if you are not on guard.

And what should one do to be on one’s guard in these dark times? Well, here’s another piece of wisdom from the past, and this one is from a Taoist (Chinese) sage which says that, “When the world is on fire, the sage tends to his garden.” This should not be seen as apathy, or as indifference towards the world and its problems, but understood as it has always been understood throughout history and across civilizations: as the profound wisdom that engagement with the world, especially by those of us who have not engaged, or who have failed to engage fully and sincerely with our own inner selves, with our own inner moral, intellectual and spiritual universes, does not always lead to the betterment of the world around us and often does more damage to both the worlds within and without. “Before we embark on the mission to rid the world of thorns and nails which are scattered all over the place, we need to put on our shoes” as an old African proverb informs us.

But in fact, on a much higher (or deeper) level, metaphysically speaking that is, the wisdom can be understood in the sense of our relationship with God and with His creation: vertically and horizontally. I have written about this earlier in another post. Whereas vertically we are required to be passive, we are now active; whereas horizontally we are required to be active, we are now passive. This may seem odd to the average reader, but it is exactly in our passivity viz-z-viz God that we can avoid our anger from turning into bitterness which can lead us straight into hell. And also, it is this vertical passivity which, because it informs and guides whatever activity we carry out in the world, makes our horizontal existence effective and meaningful, both for us and for everything and everyone around us. Think of the vertical providing the context, the needed proportion or balance (meezan) for the horizontal without which an activity (or activism in general) can quickly turn destructive.

                                 

We must, therefore, take heed and remember that quietude/quietism and careful and thoughtful disengagement with what goes on around us in the world where everything is now politicized and vulgarized (meaning disengagement in the true Taoist sense of Wu Wei, or “non-action” or “effortless action”) is sometimes more important than being active or actively engaged with the world. This detachment which is the result of compassion and acceptance of the inexplicable "Mystery" in the higher, transcendent scheme of things must not be confused with the modern indifference or unconcern about which Tennessee Williams once said that "Happiness is insensitivity". While the original Greek apatheia meant detachment from ego, or the lack or absence of base passions ( and therefore, attachment to virtues), the modern "apathy" means the exact opposite: enslavement to ego and detachment from, or forgetfulness of, what is above the ego. 

Once again, to quote the Trappist monk Thomas Merton: "Let us not forget the redemptive power of the hermit, the monk, the recluse, the bodhisattva, the nun, the sannyasi who out of pity for the universe, out of loyalty to mankind, and without a spirit of bitterness or resentment, withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness, or of poverty, or of obscurity, not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the whole world." The great metaphysician Isa Nur al Din (Frithjof Schuon) has similarly said, ‘The world need hermits as much as preachers. In Islam, it is said that the equilibrium of the world depends largely on the existence—sometimes hidden—of the saints, or also on the Invocation of God’s Name. If man is not holy, nonetheless, the Name is holy, and man is made holy by the invocation.’ (F. Schuon, in a letter to a Hans Kury, 1951).

Never underestimate this redemptive power of silence and disengagement.

Short, Short: A Sufi tale

 The Tale of the Sands: A Sufi Tale



One of the teaching devices for which the Sufis are famous is the Sufi tale. This one, “The Tale of the Sands,” relates to their doctrine of fana, the transcending, in God, of the finite self. 

A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.

It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: “The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.”

The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand, and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.

“By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across.
You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination.”

“But how could this happen?”

“By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.”

This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality.

And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?

“The wind,” said the sand, “performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.”

“How can I know that this is true?” “It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years. And it certainly is not the same as a stream.”

“But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?”

“You cannot in either case remain so,” the whisper said. “Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.”

When it heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, it remembered a state in which it—or some part of it?—had been held in the arms of a wind. It also remembered—or did it?—that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do. And the stream raised its vapor into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many, miles away. And because it had its doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in its mind the details of the experience. It reflected, “Yes, now I have learned my true identity.”

The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: “We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.”

And that is why it is said that the way in which the stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.

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Source: Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, Harper Collins: HarperCollins, 1991.

Original source: Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), pp: 23–24.