Notes: I

have you left enough stories of you to be retold, over and over again?

and the mercy of your Lord will shatter your sense of self, of how from utter strength to weakness He compels you, and of how from raging humiliation He brings you forth, delivered and rescued. קָר֣וֹב יְ֭הֹוָה לְנִשְׁבְּרֵי־לֵ֑ב וְאֶת־דַּכְּאֵי־ר֥וּחַ יוֹשִֽׁיעַ.

sometimes there is an anxiety to worship your Lord at all times, to feel disturbed in the moments where the mind wanders away from the realization that He exists; it is important to nurture this anxiety but to keep it internal, not as a source of chaos for others.

proper morality is a mesh, not a wall. it has shape, substance, strength, but it allows stretch, elasticity, a proper way to buffer tension. running into it won’t destroy one. rather, at its best, it softens the blow.

sometimes the same moral objective may very well be achieved through a veneer that doesn’t look so.

everything must be done with a degree of madness, nonchalance brings death.

God can create a rainbow just for you. He can orchestrate the clouds to provide shade just for you. الم يعلم بأن الله يرى.

do you not feel the wall of divinity? have you not exerted yourself, having faith in your “agency,” in your self-perceived capacity of enacting a re-arrangement of the world through your work, and wound up bound, unable to be efficacious? that is the wall of divinity, constraining you and then expanding you. make peace with it, for if the Lord wanted, you would be in a different state than you are.

using “muslimness” as a mark of spiritual superiority, of distinctiveness. over other muslims and ones who are not is a mark of immature metaphysics. metaphysical racialization has both spiritual and political ramifications, usually not beneficial.

if you could fully grasp where people come from, what constitutes their being, you would realize that judgement as a social concept would mean very little.

take your share of joy whenever you can, even if it may be very small.

romantic attachment to loss, subaltern characteristic, can be powerful, but often misused.

loss is meant to be a future oriented state, temperament, akin to a person rolling down a hill, downwards but forwards.

you know the people you love through the voice of their footsteps.

a mechanical attitude towards “self-improvement” makes a person worse in their being. improving the self in a modern sense is alienating. it is better to learn how to “live” than to improve the self.

deaths emancipate the spirit from the drudgery of socialization, imbues in it not a simple hatred for it, but rather a radical acceptance, a love, of the brokenness of society, culture, and time.

the isthmus, can see colors that other cannot, or so we have heard; it may be a station or a state, all this can be inferred. the one at this station may see those color at all times; the state can be just be ephemeral gift from God, for the man to experience the divine in the material. however, once the man loses that state, he may experience severe bouts of melancholy, for to have experience the divine and then be shrouded by the metallic darkness of the world, by the incapacity of perception, is infernal.

speak to people in the in-betweenness of time and death, they might be able to put in a good word for you.

honoring tradition, the past, is done best by a radical futurity, not by being haunted by loss. the two extremes of finding in the past material for soapy romanticism or attempts to revive cold logic are both just that, extremes. complaints of the modern world being too mechanical or too emotional are self-perpetuating caricatures. just live, it’s not complicated, God will announce Himself intuitively, and with that, the perfect synthesis, the proper blend, of love and reason will dominate.

there is little that is “traditional” about “tradition.” most understanding of it comes from perception, which by its nature is not static, it jumps from point to point in time and space.

spiritualizing of the spirit, the rūḥ, can be a sickness. make it real, make it material. to do so is not a crude materialism, it is the acceptance of the fact that perception/s splinter so much as to become useless. hence, the geist needs mass to be real, otherwise it becomes abstract reflections and refractions of the mind. time exists and it doesn’t exist, but to make it not exist, one has to annihilate himself into it, right through the empirical facts of life, being and non-being then are the same.

nothing about the past and present is irreconcilable or incommensurable; that is the glory of God. the assumption and then the knowledge of His existence necessitates this. yes, eschatological time is generally considered as degenerative, but from a Higher vantage point, it is is value-neutral. the locally divine, meaning the God-given ability of man, is able to produce perfect alchemies of existence, of love and beauty, at all times, even a second before what is perceived as the cataclysm.

you are born on the day where you realize you exist, as something real in time, as something that is material, capable of movement.

the first time a man says “back in my day,” he surprises even himself. after that, it becomes a self-indulgent balm for the psyche.

having mercy on one’s self is infinitely harder than God’s willingness to be merciful.

the cracks in your self are worthy of God’s love.

at the height of suffering, when all days recycled without much joy, there was always a very brief moment of light, extinguished shortly after by the overwhelming reality.

the highest pleasure is perhaps merely sitting by a cliff, letting the sea breeze touch your face, what else could surpass that? to be whole in mind, body, and soul and witness a perfectly crafted tapestry, what a shame for the many who are restricted from even that.

often the pain of others for your own is more devastating for the self.

hope is not a feeling, it is an orientation, that despite suffering, there are always modes of moving forward.

remember God at all moments and take care of people, there is nothing else that matters.

a desire to delve into logic, in supposed opposition to love, to compensate for some sense of perceived loss, be it individual or civilizational, will not result in the positive outcomes one hopes for. to delve into love to find refuge from the reality of the now will neither. only merging the substructures of logic and love will do.

only God can adjudicate moral superiority of one man over another. yes, there are signs and symbols, but they are not the definitive ḥukm. to deliver such a verdict towards the end of gratifying the self is dangerous.

a space that cannot accommodate the unorthodox is destructive.

the past cannot be recreated, all movement is forward. if you could recreate the past, time would cease to exist. if you are recreating the past, what would those in the future do when looking at you?

hoppípolla.

God may induce such a darkness onto the believer’s perception to only make the light clearer.

miracles unveiling themselves at glacial pace make themselves imperceptible to man. indeed, خلق الانسان من عجل ساريكم اياتي فلا تستعجلون.

what miracles are you looking for? is there more a miracle than being in heaven, seeing the face of your Lord?

God may induce a hundred deaths before physical demise, and the purpose may remain perplexing.

there is no other viable course of action than to submit in the measured arrangement of your life in face of unchangeable circumstances.

tragedy is the best revealer of the level of attachment one has to the material existence.

settled urban life induces strange attachments because civilization erases the spontaneity so constitutive of nature.

don’t worry about the “caliphate.” check up on your neighbour, clean your street, pet the cat, all this is not “apolitical.”

under appreciation of purpose is a disease, obviously. yet, an over fixation on purpose too is a disease. in the latter state of being, one forgets to live, overlooks that the highest form of life can be feeling the joy of walking on your two feet, to be able to smell, to see. a proper cognition of these abilities frees man from said over fixation. the same level of work towards a purpose can exerted without unnecessarily exerting one’s spirit.

the sick man is rendered invisible first to himself and then to the outside world. he stops existing.

do you not wonder why the child that falls of the tall monkey bar often comes away scratch less? do you not think something eases the fall of the sinless?

rather than humbling yourself to the reality of your own existence, you squander your time bartering with God to rid you of your misfortunes.

a man of God may be a brute, but he cannot be a villain.

wounds are theophanies. the scars your Lord inflicts on the body, mind, or soul, are marks of domination, of asserting ownership over his servants.

new cars are analogous to smart phones. they are means of alienating man from the built environment he is treading upon, and rather than one operating a vehicle, it is the case now that the vehicle aims to operate itself, making the user increasingly superfluous, inducing a sort of distracted state so reminiscent of the information era.

being blessed and feeling blessed do not always coincide, the latter can often be a delusion.

why are you in love with a grief that exerts itself viciously to escape? even in your being, you know you are able to declaw your spirit from the pleasure that this grief induces, yet you don’t. to find this joy in grief, it must then be elemental. in that case, is it really grief anymore? it is just you.

care is all we have.

pain is real, but for the believer it ends. that is greatest of realizations. it ends. it cannot go on forever, it burns out, even if takes a hundred years.

grief exists in both thought, as in cognitively, and in the soul, more diffused without location. in the aftermath of tragedy, grief takes root on both these levels. it makes a difference if the traumatic episode was a singular event in time or recurring one. in any case, to move forward requires a broad array of techniques, from excision to nurturing.

phenomenological experience is unstable, viciously changing its perceptive angles. Such a basis of experience can, by its nature, not provide steady bearings for the soul. this is evidenced by basic empirical proof: even if nothing goes “wrong,” subjectively determined, a person may complain of feeling forlorn. psychoanalysts may seek to attribute such a state to some hidden factor that is imperceptible to the patient. Nonetheless, the person afflicted may still say nothing is causing them grief, the eternal existential problem. If something goes “wrong,” based on more commonly agreed upon metrics like sickness or death, at the very least there is clear cause. In either case, the soul recognizes a persistent unmooring, a material sense of impermanence, and without a proper psycho-spiritual orientation, ان الانسان لفي خسر.

better people than you have suffered utterly more than you, let the sense of shock go.

all of life comes down to perception, we are born with perceptive biases from the start to the end, and everything else is a creation of that. the sea, the anger, the coveting, the road, the wall, divinity; it is all perception.

probability becomes a hundred when it happens to you.

even good doctors and good science can belong to a tyrannical dogmatic cult.

low trust societies exhibit certain symptoms: intense staring, aiming to estimate danger, animalistic.

the believer in expansion often aims to pray five times a day. the one in suffering prays all day, often without prostration.

we are also organisms of this Earth, we are inscribed in its dna. there is no distinction between man and nature, just as there is no separating your blood from your bones.

leaving your affairs to your Lord is not complacence, it is the material acceptance of the limitations that are constitutive of yourself.

we imagine all sorts of differences with others upon whom immense suffering has been imposed. moral difference, cultural difference, familial distance, political difference, existential difference, and so on. it is just fate, donning the garb of life.

never comment on the quality of food; imagine the scenario where you could not even get food down your throat.

the prosperity of modernity is structured around particular axes of geography and the built environment. most of it has been produced, obviously, through a dominating relationship to land. it’s always hard to analyze how geography operates as a historical fulcrum.

amongst the worst traits of man, particularly modern man, is the annoyance he exhibits when his life veers even slightly from the track he imagined it to be traversing.

good and evil cannot occupy a vessel at the same time without explosive alchemies, there is no admixture that does not exude a viscous mess. if there is indeed this adulteration, that is corruption, good becomes tainted, by being covetous mainly, evil becomes tempered by guilt and repentance.

it is habitual to love your own tribe, your own people, first, to prioritize their ends and aspirations. there is good in that, especially if your people have rightful ends, ones either demanding justice or producing beauty. still, if it can be helped, one has to transcend the love for the tribe, and habituate himself to love what are the ideal averaged ends for all of society.

medicine should be taught in monasteries.

“wrestle” with God while knowing there is no wrestling with God, لا يسأل عما يفعل وهم يسألون.

in the gulf lie the true enemies of faith, goodness, and the truth, consumed by gold, a false sense of religion, buried by prosperity, a trial of the highest order, at least the nomad with punctures in his shirt, wandering the streets of the Punjab, is not bewildered or deluded by the jewels of the world. all wealth must be depersonalized, to have it and hold one’s hand at the bare minimum is the right struggle of the soul. ἀκούσατε, ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί. οὐχ ὁ θεὸς ἐξελέξατο τοὺς πτωχοὺς τῷ κόσμῳ πλουσίους ἐν πίστει καὶ κληρονόμους τῆς βασιλείας ἧς ἐπηγγείλατο τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν αὐτόν.

undignified poverty breeds barbarity, especially in its patriarchal iterations, wherein men oppress women and women oppress other women, as on show in most of the the so-called post-colonial third world. whereas, a lack of material resources in a societal setting that is able to organize relations in a more refined fashion is still fairly bearable, even something a primal good, potentially even better than hyper-financialized capitalistic societies that come with a whole set of associated spiritual, societal, and economic issues.

love the cripple, he may be freer than you.

help others even if you are the cripple.

death lurks in every corner.

exerting oneself to determine the “religious,” for example the “islamic,” is frequently a low level academic activity. often done to produce analysis where none is emerging intuitively from the self. time would be better spent on refining the heart, mind, and the soul so as to enable one to ask better questions in the first place.

his loss blotted out the sun. lately, the brightest of days looked like days of the eclipse.

what is more real? pain or joy?

opression looms large in the pure land. what spark can remedy centuries of rot.

true tragedy is an epistemic event, meaning it alters the architecture of one’s beliefs on the level of the soul. most vulnerable to this is one’s own self-perception. after severe material loss, the man asks the question “who even am I?” tragedy then is not the event, not a focal point in time and space, it is what remains behind, or rather what remains ahead.

all intellect fails as fate strikes.

the nation-state is not some exogenous franksteinish entity. it is just lackadaisical to think that it is one thing, one general structure that only oppresses, that it is merely an arrangement of oppressive power. certainly, it is an arrangement of power generally, but it is not always a foregone conclusion that it should be sauronish entity.

tissue is created to mature perfectly as man is born. later, as wounds injure him, he matures through scar tissue, but not perfectly. that, in some ways, is the story of man. he is born through divine programs, connected to the space he comes from in the world that was before. once on this earth, there is no perfection. what is broken must be mend, through tears, scars, sutures, welds. there is always a mark left in the lesion, which sometimes cannot be seen by the naked eyes, but the imperfection remains. but, but! God has no limits to what is possible. if later, the scar heals without trace of the wound, it would mean eternal divinity has entered a new stage in human history.

who can dignify the sullied sick man, with wounds all across his body, soul, and mind, who no longer has space in society or even in his own personhood? al-laṭīf.

it is a pity that the eyes only open after death. the highest of mystical tasks has always been to see here and now what one is ordinarily only able to see after death.

a good intellect can still lack introspection, a clear understanding of the progression of their life, a grasp on the passing of time.