You know of course that I was not going to say what this all-fired thing is right here and now, but heck I've changed my mind.
But first - all the jokes that only good (and not to mention also rich!) Muslims will understand.
This text is an authentic hadith, brother! And it is graded hassan - which means good, strong, sound.
Also means 'handsome,' by the way, which is why so many Arab kids are named 'Hassan.'
How can you not know it??
Vaguely, very vaguely - a clue for you. No, no. Not 'The Travels of Marco Polo...' |
What? You do not know it?!
Astaghfirullah!
Now when you get it, you have to read it properly.
Start at the beginning, and follow the thing properly all the way through; it is not long at all.
Each page, why each line, is a fruit from Heaven.
Unless you read this and see the whole thing, you will not be able to follow along when we start the journey into another world, another place entirely from here.
You will otherwise get lost in the maze of this world.
And be side-tracked.
Who can compose such a writing as this?
For who can compose even just one verse like unto it, whether they be Jinn or Man...
So can you, by the way, guess what the text is?
It is written in the form of a play.
I suppose, well not 'I suppose,' it is essentially true - that only those who are able to observe those things of the past, maybe of their own personal past, that are not let's say, ideal, not the way they would choose to act and react: they are the ones who can accommodate 'a heavenly realm.'
Others simply cannot.
Where the wealthy go... |
We are, as humans - as Plato considered - half way between the mortal and the divine. What keeps people back in the enclosure of mortality is that they cannot see.
It is completely easy to see rich things, to see a wealthy lifestyle, to admire nice things and to desire them. These are material things.
But so too are the inner emotions and understandings also material things - they are true and they are real, if unseen by the fundamental optical vision of the human eyes.
One cannot enter into the realms of heaven without an intimate knowledge and understanding of moral right and wrong - and this can only come from experience in the dynamic mortal realm of existence.
Which is why some religious thinkers posit some intermediate place, a place not Hellish at all, but not yet truly Heaven as such either... This is where the souls of the deceased innocent children go, in this hypothesis.
The religious concept (and which is also a primary psychological one described by Jung and also Freud in his own way) of 'forgiveness' is highly complex when examined closely. One cannot simply just choose to abandon the ways that do harm, and then by the same token too, say that one has 'forgiven' others who do wrong to you.
The shawl of the traveler... |
And this is because we all have bio-chemical and neuro-chemical processes going on that demand that we feel in certain ways!
We did not and do not intend to install such processes inside of us; they are already there.
We can no more choose to not feel them than fly to the moon on a magical camel.
The essential problem also involves the human ego - what it really is.
Is it intrinsically my own consciousness of self?
But what if I had a different composition of those bio-chemical process structures...? Would 'I' then still nonetheless be 'me, myself?'
The logical thing is that neither can I expect to be free of wrong-doing myself, nor am I able to pretend that I have 'forgiven' any others, when I know those others have not changed in their own internal construction; especially of the bio-chemistry and neural responses of which they were made up as a particular identifiable 'self.'
In the human world I have choice, but I do not have supreme power.
There is a great and a totally commonplace mistake that most if not all Christians mistake in this matter, when they talk about 'forgiveness.'
They misread what the words in the sacred scriptures are.
They read it as 'forgive others that you may be forgiven.'
It doesn't say that.
It says, 'Forgive the transgressions of others.' Not forgive what people are. People who are evil cannot be forgiven; they are evil. God hates evil, and He hates the evil (people, diabolic, diabolic beings).
You can forgive what a person does, but not what a person is.
And because people are not finished beings, they must be left behind if they cannot change - you have to also leave behind the things of this world, in order to see and to be with the things of the next world.
The text is 'Hassan' by James Elroy Flecker.
The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and how he came to make the Golden Journey to Samarkand...
The power of the forgiveness of sins is a power endowed by the application of logic.
Logic comes from Truth and God is Truth.
You, if you possess logic, have the power to forgive yourself, what you have done. You are though, a person that understands the difference between Good and Evil - this, what you are, does not need to be forgiven. If you possess logic, you possess a power of God. Thus you indeed are somewhere between the mortal, and the divine; in part.
Next, you must go to the next stage...
Jews, generally speaking, do not have a concept of 'sins.' Each year they 'sweep the mischief they have done under a carpet' (Yom Kippur) so that they can just go ahead and do it all again next year, because at the end of the year, they have Yom Kippur again.
Muslims do have some sort of concept of bad deeds and evil acts, but these are presented (in the religion, not in their own families) in the Koranic context that says that Allah decides who does what, where and when. So it's a bit fatalistic.
Star Trek is the only ideology that maintains a discourse along the lines that beings, typically human and/or humanoid beings, can change and become something better than they had been.
Vulcans all abandoned emotions because they saw these as the sources of evil.
The humans of Star Trek apparently, somehow viewed virtually free energy as the condition for a post-scarcity economy and thus, it was that scarcity was the source of Evil in societies; to the humans, of the Star Trek Universe.
And yet text-book Abrahamic Faiths do not think that scarcity is the source of Evil: in fact quite the opposite, if anything.
After all, it was a tree that was there, in the Garden, and from its fruit came a desire whose fulfillment held evil consequences for people.
Frankly, seeing the World, you would have to say that this tree was very very abundant indeed, its fruit not scarce at all.
The lust for money is the root of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But lust itself is not wrong.
Humans who are 'of the right stuff,' lust for the heavens and for a better life and a better world.