The Cheerful Nihilist

From the dark I go to the dappled: from the dappled I go to the dark.

~ Chandogya Upanishad, VIII, xiii, tr. R. C. Zaehner.

Snow Leopard Revisited

40 years on.

Emptiness

The Feeling Of Eternity

Kirklar.

In The Shade Of The Tree

Meetings With Mountains

MEETINGS WITH MOUNTAINS from Peter Sanders on Vimeo.

Life Under Empire: The Mystical Turn

In an Imperial Age, when citizenship is but a fiction (republics have citizens, empires have subjects), the possibilities of effective political action through democratic processes are all but foreclosed.

In such circumstances, the illusory nature of life in this world becomes palpable.

The mystical turn is an unmasking of those illusions and a politics of the Great Refusal. Aldous Huxley meets Herbert Marcuse in Norman O. Brown.



Let us remember St. Paul, who boasted of his Roman "citizenship" only to pay for his loyalty with his head.

"Speak To Us Smooth Things..."

Go now, write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, so that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever. For they are a rebellious people, faithless children, children who will not hear the instruction of the Lord; who say to the seers, "Do not see"; and to the prophets, "Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions, leave the way, turn aside from the path, let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel."

Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel: Because you reject this word, and put your trust in oppression and deceit, and rely on them; therefore this iniquity shall become for you like a break in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose crash comes suddenly, in an instant; its breaking like that of a potter's vessel that is smashed so ruthlessly that among its fragments not a sherd is found for taking fire from the hearth, or dipping water out of the cistern.

~ Isaiah 30: 8-14.

Mysticism

A mystic is a cheerful nihilist, irresistibly drawn to an ever-present absence: the numen in the heart of the phenomenal world.

Nothing

You have seen the world and all you saw was nothing.
All you have said and heard, that too is nothing:
Running from pole to pole, there was nothing.
And when you lurked at home, there was also nothing.

~ Omar Khayyam, tr. Avery and Heath-Stubbs, # 102.

Waitin' On A Sunny Day

Touchstones

To be united with God means not to exist.

~ Mawlana Sa'd al-Din Kashghari

Sartre

The Romantic Modernism of Wittgenstein and Heidegger was inherited by Rorty and Sartre. There is latent Existentialism in the best of us.

Itlaq Yolu

There can be no such thing as a "philosophy of mysticism" insofar as the philosopher's animating question is: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the mystic's inquisitive response is: "Why do you imagine that there is something rather than nothing?"

Nothing Is Gained

Nothing is gained until you follow the path of one in utter poverty;
Nothing is gained unless tears of blood wash your cheek;
Why enflame desire? Nothing is possible until you abandon selfhood
Freely, like the pure whose hearts are consumed away.

~ Omar Khayyam, tr. Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs

With A Wise Silence...

With a wise silence we do honor to the inexpressible.

~ Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, (589B).

An Empty Black Box

The mystical heart of Islam.

It is the mystical heart which is the pilgrim's destination. The events and accidents occurring along the way give each individual's pilgrimage its distinctive color and hue, but they ought not to be conflated with the pilgrim's destination. They may impede her progress or facilitate it; they affect her velocity and raise her hopes or disappoint them. But the destination remains the same.

Mood and attunement wax and wane with velocity and distance. The horizon recedes. Even so, in rare moments, we can encounter that to which we have attuned ourselves: the foretaste of the end which has been present with us from the very beginning.

We, all of us, are the evolving characters of our individual pilgrimages to our unscripted ends. Unscripted, that is, so far as we know...

Song Of The Heartland

O my Khan!
Under blue skies
beneath spreading trees
beside swift rivers
surrounded by strong horses
sitting on carpets of felt
our ancestors drank tea.

A Letter Of Counsel To A Dervish

It is said that Khwaja 'Abd al-Khaliq (4th deputy of Khwaja Yusuf al-Hamadani, d. 1140 CE) wrote the following letter to his dervish (and 3rd deputy), Khwaja Awliya' Kabir:

You should thoroughly imbue yourself with knowledge, self-discipline and piety. Make a profound study of the Islamic classics. Learn jurisprudence and the Prophetic traditions. Steer clear of ignorant zealots. Always perform your ritual prayer in congregation, but do not act as prayer-leader or muezzin.

Do not seek fame, for in fame lies calamity.

Do not get involved in other people's affairs. Do not frequent the company of kings and princes.

Do not build a dervish convent or live in one. Do not engage too often in sacred music and dance, for over-indulgence in this is fatal to the life of the heart.

But do not reject the sacred dance, for many are attached to it.

Speak little, eat little, and sleep little. Avoid the crowd and preserve your solitude. Do not converse with young people, women, the rich, or the worldly. Eat lawful food and avoid suspect provisions. Postpone marriage as long as you can, for its worldly demands will be detrimental to your religious life.

Do not laugh excessively, for undue hilarity deadens the heart.

Treat everyone kindly and look down on no one. Do not embellish your outward appearance, for ornament is a mark of inward poverty. Do not get into quarrels. Ask favors of none and do not let yourself become a burden to others.

Place no trust in this world and do not rely on worldly people. Let your heart be filled with melancholy and disillusion; let your body suffer and your eyes weep. Let your conduct be upright and your prayers sincere. Wear old clothes and choose a poor man as your companion. Let your home be a house of worship and let the Exalted Truth be your most intimate friend.

[H. L. Shushud, Masters of Wisdom of Central Asia, 30-31].





H. L. Shushud

Redeeming The Time

Communists must always go into the whys and wherefores of anything, use their own heads and carefully think over whether or not it corresponds to reality and is really well founded; on no account should they follow blindly and encourage slavishness.

~ Mao Tsetung.

A book I have returned to frequently since I first read it in the 1980s is Grey Eminence, Aldous Huxley's biography of the 17th century French Capuchin monk, Father Joseph, who served as a close advisor to Cardinal Richelieu during the Thirty Years War.

The book was first recommended to me by a friend who cherished hopes that I might convert to Roman Catholicism. After several conversations with me on the subject, he became convinced that my interests in mysticism might lead me astray into some sort of heresy. He offered Huxley's book as a cautionary tale about mysticism--which it undoubtedly is--and hoped that, by reading it, I would see the wisdom of submitting my "spiritual" impulses to the guidance of the Magisterium of the Roman church.

While such a conclusion is not necessarily unwarranted, it was not Huxley's, nor would it be mine. Moreover, the part of Huxley's book that would make the deepest impression upon me concerned the nature of mystical experience and its relation to politics in the 20th century.

For me, the key chapter of the book is X. Politics and Religion. There Huxley argues that the need for military efficiency and the need for industrial efficiency in a modern state combine to make totalitarianism inevitable. He then observes that totalitarianism is not conducive to mysticism and "theocentric" religion--for such modes of religiosity refuse to accord human beings final authority over life and death, over thinking and feeling. Instead, they look outside the world for such authorization--even in the political realm.

Huxley's remarks about the modern state anticipated Dwight D. Eisenhower's tardy warnings about the military-industrial-complex. In this respect, I found him to be prescient. I was less sanguine, however, about his observations on totalitarianism. I could see how a totalitarian government would have little tolerance for a "spirituality" (or any kind of religiosity) that failed to acknowledge its hegemony, but I was not yet ready to acknowledge the degree to which the United States had become a totalitarian state.

In the early 1990s, Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent both challenged and disturbed my thinking about the nature of American political culture. I was willing to concede the powerful role of the media in shaping public opinion, but I was not yet ready to concede that the power of the media was "total."



I'm still not ready to make that particular concession. But lately I have begun to question whether "totalitarianism" actually requires total governmental control. Perhaps what is necessary for a modern state to be classified as "totalitarian" is a high degree of ideological agreement among certain key institutions (both public and private) that work in concert to produce a political power dynamic that cannot be effectively resisted through democratic processes. In other words, my understanding of totalitarianism has indeed become Chomskian over the years.

In the 21st century, the military-industrial-complex's control over the business of government is reinforced not only by the media, but also by the dominant religious institutions in the United States (collectively, the Christian church). The latter no longer produces figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Sloan Coffin--men of the cloth whose Christian commitments led them to actively oppose laws and government policies that they felt contradicted the gospel. Instead, Christianity (in its North American expressions) is dominated by an apocalyptic End Times eschatology that regards the United States as God's instrument on earth and its imperialist policies as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. These Christians have entered into a cynical alliance with Pro-Israel Zionist Jews (the cynicism, by the way, is mutual) and together they have created a united front against religiously inspired political dissent.

The fabled polis of Aristotle no longer exists in the United States (if it ever did). "Politics" under such conditions are farcical, mere spectacle.



In 1976, Martin Heidegger told an interviewer: "Only a god can save us."

In the first century of the Common Era, an anonymous author of the Pauline school wrote to Christians in Ephesus: "See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil" (Eph. 5:15-16, KJV).

As subjects of the American Empire, ruled by the military-industrial-media-ecclesiastical-complex, we can no longer legitimately consider ourselves to be the citizens of a democratic republic.

"In such a world," wrote Huxley, "there seems little prospect that any political reform, however well intentioned, will produce the results expected of it" (GE, 311).

In our present circumstances, the only way to "redeem the time" is to wait and watch, bearing witness to the tragedy that some have called "the project for the New American century" as it unfolds. In addition, I suggest we all pray that Hamlet's "divinity that shapes our ends" is as just as the ancient Near Eastern prophetic tradition--a tradition to which the 21st century Christian church is only too oblivious--would have us believe.

Julia Ohrmann & Mehdi Aminian

Asif Ali Khan In Brussels