Mountain Of Light

Faqir

But look: stock-still against the churchyard wall,
a man who seems to have no strength at all
is leaning; in his great, dark eyes are fed
the fires of grief, like candles for the dead.
Rustic his clothing, of a coarse grey thread;
he claws his wild hair with a wandering hand
and stares, quite lost, toward the mountain's rand
as if with pinions quietly outspread
his soul readies for that other land.

~ Rilke, Visions of Christ, Polikoff, 30.

Black Agate

Holy Family

The Expander

We should not be ashamed of recognizing truth and assimilating it from whatever source it may reach us, even though it might come from earlier generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks truth there is nothing of more value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him.

~ Abu Yusuf al-Kindi, d. 870.

Al-Kindi was 'abd al-Basit. He was a servant of the Expander, dedicating his life to capaciousness.

Late Ottoman Gentleman

The religious call us atheist
Yet the atheist blames us too
We are not from them or the others
Yet we are both from them and the others.

~ Kenan Rifai

(Tr. Mehmet Demirci)

More Rilke

“The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense.”

~ Rilke

Letters To A Young Poet

R. M. Rilke

The Open Mind

Walter Lippmann.

Beauty

Shams and Mevlana



Gulshan-i Raz



Hafez and the cup of Jamshid



Majnun among the beasts



Silence

Ramazan Zikr

There Is No God

But al-Haqq.

Ramazan 2018

Without Contraries Is No Progression

When I consider the people who vilify (whether in their words or actions) the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), I have to wonder why they find this man, fifteen centuries in the grave, so threatening.

It strikes me that these people have been seized with a mania. They labor under the influence of a mental disease.

I have no way of curing them and so I feel that I have little choice but to distance myself from them in whatever way I can.

The more they hate the Prophet--and it's not the Prophet they hate but some image of him that they have formed in their minds--the more I feel compelled to love and revere him, or an alternative image of him made available in Islamic tradition.

Every thesis deserves an antithesis. Every poison an antidote. Every act of desecration, an act of consecration.

Let us, as Norman O. Brown advised, begin to "get 'Blake and Tradition' right." Let us start with the Prophet Muhammad.

On The Sufi Trail

Srinagar.

Songbirds

John Cage's 4'33"

Three Things I Believe

1. Baseball is the reason that America was invented.



2. Gospel music is the reason that Christianity was invented.



3. Tasawwuf is the reason that Islam was invented.

Psalm 130 - Scottish Metrical Psalms

From Language-Game To Thought-World

Language acquisition is the doorway to a thought-world. Once inside, you can begin to understand how meaning-making is embedded in a particular culture. Meanings are not free-floating concepts but embodied thoughts subject to emotional investment. Words carry affects. Thinking is intimately inter-related to feeling. The central nervous system reacts to environmental stimuli mediated by the human body. We are not brains in vats but sensate organisms. We language our bodily impressions. The "mind-body problem" exists only for those who represent the relation of mind to body inadequately. Culture is a key component of human habitation and language is a key to culture.

Ortega y Gasset

Think.

The Walls Came Down

Tom Clay - What The World Needs Now

In Pre-Reagan America, this version reached #8 in Billboard's Top 100 and was awarded a gold disc (over 1 million copies sold).