A Brief Reflection on Oblivion

This verse in the following stands out to me and to my personal experience: “but there came after them generations who neglected prayer and were driven by their own desires.”:

“These were the prophets God blessed– from the seed of Adam, of those We carried in the Ark with Noah, from the seed of Abraham and Israel– and those We guided and chose. When the revelations of the Lord of Mercy were recited to them, they fell to their knees and wept, but there came after them generations who neglected prayer and were driven by their own desires. These will come face to face with their evil, but those who repent, who believe, who do righteous deeds, will enter Paradise. They will not be wronged in the least: they will enter the Gardens of Lasting Bliss, promised by the Lord of Mercy to His servants– it is not yet seen but truly His promise will be fulfilled.” (19:58-61)

Only by giving a picture of “before” and “after” awakening, disbelievers will get a sense of what it means to be in oblivion, because they will ask: “oblivion from what?”  It is obvious that if I have forgotten my connection to God, the disconnection sits inside my body and heart, and without heeding and concentration on God in prayer, I will distance myself more and more from the Source. 

Before Awakening

I don’t pray, and what remains?  I wake up to the world and my survival and what else?  It depends on the kind of ideology and worldview I have fashioned for myself.  It can be that I wake up to homeliness, children, conjugal and filial affection, to use my reason to find the best way to sustain my and my family’s health, to eat proper, to exercise or do yoga for its healthy effects [forgetting that yoga means “spiritual yoke”], to participate in the Aristotelian “police”, political life in city- or nation-state, to vote, to be a citizen and to serve my country and praise the founding fathers of my country—it doesn’t matter which country or whose ancestors.  This is the best possible picture of oblivion.  Against which, in his defense in the court before being executed, Socrates said:

“Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this?”

For an atheist, activities of life are all for insuring (insurance), well-being, and protection from accidents and harm in this world, to have homes, cars, vacations, travelling, and pleasures of life, at best in moderation and harmony with nature, nature worshiping, belonging to earth and forgetting the universe, or vice versa. 

As the experience of four loves (filial, conjugal, friendship, agape) is embedded in our nature, even in oblivion, I experience love of family, friends, and strangers, and I feel longing and belonging to….?  When I was a teenager I found it in “socialism”, devoting my life to people, to the destitute or working class, as my mentor and Emeritus philosopher-Marxist says: devoting my life to the species-being.  Or as one asked Chomsky: "If someone were to say 'Life is just a bowl of cherries?'"  He responded: “If that is the way you want to look at life, fine. If you decide your life is maximization of goods, then that is the meaning of life. We can have sympathy for you, but that is what it is. If you decide that your life is friendship, love, mutual aid, mutual support, a community of people who try to increase their own and other people’s happiness and welfare, then that is the meaning of life. But there is no external force that decides.”

 I will talk about variations of the New Age oblivion later. But this is the picture of the life I used to live.  I remember in the graduate school, I was assistant teacher in a course on existentialism along with another senior older graduate student, close to finishing his PhD in philosophy, who was a believer in God.  We asked students to read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and as most students like me were in oblivion, we were deaf to Kierkegaard’s words about love of God.  My friend tried hard to strike a note in them and asked me “do you see how these students look at us with blank eyes?” and I looked at him with blank eyes—“but there came after them generations who neglected prayer and were driven by their own desires.”

After Awakening

Only by giving a contrasting picture, one could communicate with my oblivion.  But even then I couldn’t understand it.  It is like being colorblind, barely a description could bring a color into my sight.  But if I am colorblind and trust a person who can see colors, at least I listen to his or her narration and trust him or her.  And that can be a beginning for stimulating imagination and, in spiritual matters, healing.

So, I wish disbelievers trust me.  It is real and it is there.  The phenomenal world is the tip of iceberg and being congealed in one’s perception of the world and bringing faith in it is not even childish, because children are more imaginative than adults and not ossified as we are.  It is being completely closed off and hard, as Lao Tzu says:

Humans are born soft and supple;

Dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

Dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

Is a disciple of death,

Whoever is soft and yielding

Is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.

Our experience in our everyday life is a truth, not the Truth.  The point of our postmodern time is that “Truth” is dead and Nietzschian perspectivism and relativism has taken over, or variations of nature worship.  And the point of religions is that “Truth” is God of revelations and you can’t figure this out with your senses and reason alone.  Reflection and reason is the necessary, not sufficient condition of Truth.  Then something happened to me.  I moved out of my state of oblivion in “fear and trembling”—as it shattered my absolute trust in phenomenal world.  I entered the chaos of my existence after oblivion, as in Heideggerian sense the worldhood of my world was fractured.  It took years, with God’s grace and guidance, I came back to prayers and let go of confining the meaning of my life to my desires and belonging to the earth and nature.  A light started shining amidst the leaves that superseded phenomenal light and gradually it became the most real through prayers.  Something in my body transformed, amidst struggles of my body to absolve the entrenchment of disbelief and following my desires and whims.  I can discern two things inside my body now: one is this surge of light, metaphorically speaking, that appears the most in my prayers when I am focused on God, and the residue of my body-oblivion-habits that has permeated into my mask.  And I am sure, God willing, gradually I will take this mask off my flesh.  I can’t explain and could never imagine in my oblivion before that there is such a possibility, and if someone described its color to me, like a colorblind person, I would listen without being impressed or touched.  So, I don’t expect too much.  I just hope to create an opening into the wall of your imagination that something else, completely different and divine is possible—one can find the signposts to this bliss in the scriptures.