A Way Out of the Fragile Straitjacket of My Body by Reflecting on the Scroll of Skies

“On that Day, We shall roll up the skies as a writer rolls up [his] scrolls. We shall reproduce creation just as We produced it the first time: this is Our binding promise. We shall certainly do all these things.” (21:104)

These verses from the surah The Prophets (21) and this expression “as a writer rolls up scrolls…” have occupied my mind for a while.  When I remembered it again and again in different occasions, I noticed I have been feeling a kind of awe and awareness about something I had never thought before, and a sense of clarity was dawning upon me.  I can’t put my finger on it, so I go with the flow of my thoughts and write this reflection to make it clear to myself. 

Yesterday, I visited my ailing friend and mentor in philosophy who is now struggling with old age and a kind of sickness that somehow freezes him to the extent that he can’t coordinate his legs and walk easily.  I had to remind him to lift his right and left legs.  He jokingly told me “like in military”.  I took for granted the coordination of the members of my body.  Observing his struggle to take a few steps with exhausting concentration reminded me how fragile we are.  He was a good caring teacher.  When I was tying his shoes, I reminded him that when I was broken in spirit he sat close to me and like a father gave me hope and energy, read my sloppy papers in the only way that loving teachers do, not breaking me for my mistakes but showing me how good I could write and highlighted the nice parts and encouraged me to write about Fanon in addition to Sartre, Heidegger, and Foucault for my MA, but all gently, lovingly, inconspicuously.  It is heartbreaking to see him in this situation, entrapped into his body.  However, while ambling very slowly on the streets, we remembered that how lucky he was and what a wonderful life he had, a lifelong teaching carrier, a good wife, daughter, and friends, and a decent life.  With his usual optimistic smile, he agreed.     

Now I remember the movie “Awakenings” which touched me so deeply.  It is about catatonic patients who could momentarily “wake up” from catatonia by the drug L-Dopa.  But it didn’t last and they fell back into their catatonia after a while.

Encephalitis Lethargica: Awakenings Oliver Sacks with text

Encephalitis Lethargica or Sleepy Sickness crisscrossed the world starting around 1917 leaving almost 5 million dead in its wake. In 1927, it essentially disappeared. 

Sometimes, I felt spiritually blind or trapped in my body like in the movie Awakenings.  Similar to the dreams in which one finds oneself in a straitjacket and can’t move.  I noticed and remember it now closely: it was a state-of-being-and-mind, not an ideological, but spiritual loss.  It doesn’t matter whether we are rich or poor, despite the fact that most of us can see and use our reasons, we are blind to the universe and can't see the spiritual path without revelations and guidance.  I constantly remember and feel that I am blind for my limitedness and ignorance of the unseen and the mystery of universe and God, and without God's mercy and guidance, I will fall.

I remember the homeless old woman who years ago begged me and my friend and his family to take her to their home for Christmas, as she cried, "I have no future".  It hurt to hear that.  I remember when I was 16 years old and working in a building as a laborer, just for a change, and I asked the old janitor sitting by the fire to give me an advice summing up his life experience.  His answer broke my young heart: if you don’t flatter, you won’t succeed in life.  I was looking at his wrinkled face beside the woodfire.  I remember he was almost close to death and what a pity to think like this: defeated, seeing oneself as a loser, and identifying life—in the advice of lifetime—as financial gain and loss.  I was young and worried “what if I die like this old man in pity for my life and in yearning for the money and good life that I couldn’t make for lack of flattery?!”

Now I am old and, God willing, I will finish my philosophical reflection on my life before dying.  And I have a lot to say.  But its kernel would be these: one can die in agony and loss, faithless and in the prison of one’s desires, like that old woman who begged us to take her home or like that old man broken in desire for success, or like a man or woman gaining a fortune and keeping face in the face of death and trying to die in a fallacious proud.  I learned most people want to look courageous and value their life-experiences and belief-system at the time of death, no matter how misguided and lost they are at the time of death.  Psychologically, it seems we can’t hold ourselves together and will fall apart if we face the truth of our life: greedy, or in lust, constantly fashioning oneself in different idolatrous belief-systems, following a false religion, image, or living in disbelief and cynicism, to be the slave of one’s desires or to follow fictitious dreams. 

It doesn’t matter how much money or wealth we have, or how poor we are—anyone who has lived in terms of loss and gain in this material world, identifying one’s success or failure with worldly measures is at loss.  Whoever follows one’s desires for merely bodily pleasures, the arts, or sciences, or socio-economico- political dreams, as the only guidepost, even if it is Marx, Chomsky, Hayek, Friedman, or Foucault, he or she is a loser.  Only those who cultivate their soul and receive Socrates and religions in their purest message, which is a call for cultivating spiritual growth and virtues in connection to God will die in a genuine content, the rest are shallow desires, identifying with one’s whims and pleasures or with a sense of community and scientific or political success. 

In my philosophical memoir, I will document that it is possible to experience God and the divine mystery, and with the grace of God, to transform spiritually to a different plane of existence, as all authentic religious and spiritual people experienced and were transformed by that experience and left their stories for us from the time immemorial.  Those who don’t heed this message and don’t step in the path of cultivation of the self and self-discovery will die in a sense of loss and misery, seeing oneself either as a bubble, insignificant, and finding consolation in their “fact” that they will not be remembered in 100 years, or in the transient pleasures of wealth, honor, name, and in their “fact” that they will leave an immortal fame or  “legacy” for thousand years in this world.  No matter how brave they face their death, they are losers.  How pitiful and stupid human being can be!

As well, I will show that the destiny resides in the process.  Of course, we choose our priorities to achieve a goal but the goal doesn’t justify the means.  I can’t step over others, my family and strangers, to arrive at Mystery.  The mystery is the nearest, the style is the substance, the form makes the content tangible.  What I do to an ant, a worm, a chicken, a tree, my wife, son or daughter, to my father and mother, to my sojourners in my own country or to people in the world determine my destination.  The Way is the Destination.  I can’t kill people indiscriminately in the name of patriotism, nationalism, capitalism, or communism and for any other “ism” and say I am seeking liberation.  I can’t hate others and see evil all around me and kill people indiscriminately in the name of God and step over others and rush to salvation.  Whatever I do at this very moment to this very ant shapes my destiny.  And my good thoughts, words, and deeds can repel my past evil deeds.

As well, if I worship and identify myself with this moment, to lose myself to this ant, this worm, this tree, my wife or husband, son or daughter, to my father and mother, to my sojourners, to my country or to people of the world, or in one word to the nearest, I am lost.  I ought to constantly remember the unseen to the point of becoming one with the remembrance so that in losing myself in the moment and my everyday tasks, I drop the mask and become completely absorbed in God.  Hence, internalized at the unconscious level, I never forget that this transient world is not self-sufficient and it happens because of that horizon, that referential totality, the universe, and God.  The superimposition of these two, the seemingly the nearest (particular) and the seemingly the farthest (universal) is the spirit that holds us closest to God.  Prayer is for this remembrance and closeness.  Seeing the Way as the Destiny and seeing the Destiny in every moment of the Way doesn’t reduce one to the other; Destiny and the Way orbit around each other and God.

And I remembered all the above while asking myself why these verses touch me so deeply:

“On that Day, We shall roll up the skies as a writer rolls up [his] scrolls. We shall reproduce creation just as We produced it the first time: this is Our binding promise. We shall certainly do all these things.” (21:104)

“We shall roll up the skies as a writer rolls up scrolls”…the Day of Judgment is not just about the end of the earth as we know it, it is about the whole universe.  The whole universe is the scroll of God.  In it a truth is written and we are the vessel of this Truth. That Truth comes to obliterate falsehood.  And the Day of Judgement reveals what and who we have become in our lives, through our deeds and the remembrance or forgetfulness of God, in indulging in pleasures and honors or seeing the unseen and God as the nearest.

“We wrote in the Psalms, as We did in [earlier] Scripture: ‘My righteous servants will inherit the earth.’  There truly is a message in this for the servants of God!  It was only as a mercy that We sent you [Prophet] to all people.  Say, ‘What is revealed to me is that your God is one God– will you submit to Him?’  But if they turn away, say, ‘I have proclaimed the message fairly to you all. I do not know whether the judgement you are promised is near or far, but He knows what you reveal and conceal.  I do not know: this [time] may well be a test for you, and enjoyment for a while.’  He said, ‘My Lord, pass the true judgement.’ And, ‘Our Lord is the Lord of Mercy. We seek His assistance against what you [disbelievers] say.’” (21:105-112)

The Quran reveals to us that this universe has a story to say and the way we partake in it defines our destiny.  This universe is transient.  It is not the only way to be and it won't last forever.  The universe will be rolled up and a new creation will happen.  In my short life, I ought to seek and see the author and the source in this scroll, whose seed and signs are already within my longing and agony and in these very worlds.  In tapping in that source and removing the fogs of nihilism, hedonism, nominalism, contingency, absurdity, and despair, I will realize that, with the grace of God, I am eternal and God will recreate me and the whole creation just as God created me and the whole universe for the first time.  Then the Truth will be in the open and heartfeltly I will understand why my love of my family, people, animal, trees, and the earth are essentially a shadow of the love of God.  Only those who realized this relation and in the process of their lives remembered and internalized God as the nearest can experience the joy of being close to God in the world to come.  In the Day of Judgment, we will truly experience God as Love, either in its loss or attainment.

A Brief Reflection on Egalitarianism and Deceptive Leveling Off through Reading the Surah The Prophets in the Quran

"People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God's eyes, the most honored of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.” (49:13)

This empty rhetoric of equality of everything with everything is the language of Satan to be equal to God or when God asked it to  bow down to Adam, it refrained, not because Satan respects democratic and egalitarian values but because it sees itself higher than all God’s creatures and wants to be even equal to God, so disobeys God.  We are fascinated with the egalitarian values and rebellion, but we confound human equality with leveling off virtue and vice, good and evil, the how, with whom, and for what cause of rebellion?  When I could disabuse myself from this empty pretension of reductive and atomistic equality between all beings and even with God, I wondered how and why was I entangled in this trap in the first place?  It is obvious now to me that I and anything else in the universe suffers from poverty of existence and only God and prayers to God can sustain and help us.

“Have they chosen any gods from the earth who can give life to the dead?  If there had been in the heavens or earth any gods but Him, both heavens and earth would be in ruins: God, Lord of the Throne, is far above the things they say: He cannot be called to account for anything He does, whereas they will be called to account.” (21:21-23)

Earth worship and the reification of gods and goddesses or animal forces and totems, admitting there are some wild forces in nature, none of them guide and save us.  None of them is the One who created us, the earth, and the whole universe.  Just think about it: since a few thousand years ago, before we understand that the earth is not flat but a sphere suspended in the universe, God sent us God’s prophets and messages to beware us that we shouldn’t worship the “nearest”—the earth and the moon, the sun and the sky, the humans or animals, or the universe.  Is this not strange?  If this inspiration was just human conjecture and an arbitrary belief system, how could we form such an idea?  Given our historical limitedness, we couldn’t imagine the limits of the earth and the sky and celestial bodies within it.  Our historical-natural inclination was to worship idols and what is the nearest, or our ancestors.  It is God’s constant message and reminder to transcend our perspective towards the Truth.  Our minds had to go through real transformations to let go of the most tangible and ponder the invisible God, the seemingly the farthest.  The reaction to this “unverifiable” God, asking for phenomenal evidence, is denial of God’s existence, or falling back to worshiping the nearest, shamanism and earth worship.  Nonetheless, longing for God, strikes the deepest note within our very soul through the consistent messages of scriptures--a phenomenal evidence.  However, we are inclined to reject hierarchies categorically and leveling off everything to atoms.  As always, our excess can't discern false and through hierarchies and the fact that methodologically reductionism has a limited explanatory power.  So, we want to become God or to bring God down to our level.  But God says:

“If there had been in the heavens or earth any gods but Him, both heavens and earth would be in ruins: God, Lord of the Throne, is far above the things they say: He cannot be called to account for anything He does, whereas they will be called to account.”   If there were other gods and goddesses instead of God, the heavens or earth would be in ruins, because 1) they don’t exist and even if they exist, they lack knowledge, power, and goodness to sustain the universe.  As well: 2) there is no proof or consistent scripture from these false gods.  The sort of things that are ascribed to those gods and goddesses are usually self-destructive and ends up to following one’s whims and desires:

“Have they chosen to worship other gods instead of Him? Say, ‘Bring your proof. This is the Scripture for those who are with me and the Scripture for those who went before me.’ But most of them do not recognize the truth, so they pay no heed. We never sent any messenger before you [Muhammad] without revealing to him: ‘There is no god but Me, so serve Me.’ And they say, ‘The Lord of Mercy has taken offspring for Himself.’ [The Meccan polytheists claimed the angels were God’s daughters.] May He be exalted! No! They are only His honored servants: they do not speak before He speaks and they act by His command. He knows what is before them and what is behind them, and they cannot intercede without His permission ––indeed they themselves stand in awe of Him. If any of them were to claim, ‘I am a god beside Him,’ We would reward them with Hell: this is how We reward evildoers.” (21:24-29)

We ought to reflect on the ontological difference between God and everything else that is created by God.  The verses above make it clear that to say “there is no god but God” means the created is fundamentally different from creator.  We have the problem of all or nothing thinking.  For example, we might say, “well, if it is fundamentally different, then we share nothing with God.”  How do we get to this conclusion?  If I paint a picture on a canvas, the picture is fundamentally different from me, but still it shares something with me, with my hand, thoughts, and aesthetic sense.  Imagine I make a robot.  A robot can never be equal to me or you, unless it is a biological cloning, as it won’t have a world and soul like me, and hence it won’t have the capacity— and it is dangerous to give it power— to rule the world.  However, the robot and all my creations, including this very written text, share something with me and my world.  If the created (jinns, angels, or humans, or other forces) declare equality with the creator and share godliness with God, then the ontological difference between God and what is created by God will be obliterated and that which has no knowledge or goodness as God, will ruin the heavens and earth.  This fundamental difference indicates nothing has organic relation to God, i.e., God begot no one nor was God begotten.  Again, it is like our artifacts and robots want to share power with us.  Not that anything is wrong with “sharing”—these egalitarian terms are deceptive and conceal rather than reveal—the fact is that robots and our artifacts, even animals, don’t have the discretion to preserve life on this planet.  The analogy between God and human beings is however fallacious through and through, because one might argue human beings are also potentially capable of destroying life on this planet as the present age of Anthropocene shows it.  So, it seems animals are somehow sometimes better than humans.  But this again disregards the fact that humans also carry the spirit of God and are God’s viceregent on this planet and they are also the ones who with God’s mercy and grace will overcome the destructive greed of the powerful and at the end the earth belongs to the faithful and those who care and do good.

One of the barriers that hindered me from connecting to the Quran was this fictitious egalitarian and seemingly democratic sentiment; it looks like we want everything to be equal to everything.  To the extent that it is equality between human beings, regardless of race, gender, class, but in their taqwa (God-consciousness), the Quran clearly states:

"People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognize one another. In God's eyes, the most honored of you are the ones most mindful of Him: God is all knowing, all aware.” (49:13)

Animals also are to be revered and respected in the Quran:

“All the creatures that crawl on the earth and those that fly with their wings are communities like yourselves. We have missed nothing out of the Record— in the end they will be gathered to their Lord.” (6:38)

This is a reason in killing animals, the divine ritual is to bring the name of God.  But are animals equal to us?  Can they take care of your business and the world?  This “egalitarian” veneer in the age of Anthropocene cruelty and animal factories just hides another fact: everything is equal means I want “I” or “my tribe or group” to be in power.

This empty rhetoric of equality of everything with everything is the language of Satan to be equal to God or when God asked it to  bow down to Adam, it refrained, not because Satan respects democratic and egalitarian values but because it sees itself higher than all God’s creatures and wants to be even equal to God, so disobeys God.  We are fascinated with the egalitarian values and rebellion, but we confound human equality with leveling off virtue and vice, good and evil, the how, with whom, and for what cause of rebellion? When I could disabuse myself from this empty pretension of reductive and atomistic equality between all beings and even with God, I wondered how and why I was entangled in this trap in the first place?  It is obvious now to me that I and anything else in the universe suffers from poverty of existence and only God and prayers to God can sustain and help us.

For this very reason, in the next verses in the surah The Prophets, God reminds us of the creation of the universe and all living beings from water—to the surprise of evolutionary theorists:

“Are the disbelievers not aware that the heavens and the earth used to be joined together and that We ripped them apart, that We made every living thing from water? Will they not believe?  And We put firm mountains on the earth, lest it should sway under them, and set broad paths on it, so that they might follow the right direction, and We made the sky a well-secured canopy– yet from its wonders they turn away.  It is He who created night and day, the sun and the moon, each floating in its orbit.  We have not granted everlasting life to any other human being before you either [Muhammad]– if you die, will [the disbelievers] live forever?  Every soul is certain to taste death: We test you all through the bad and the good, and to Us you will all return. When the disbelievers see you, they laugh at you: ‘Is this the one who talks about your gods?’ They reject any talk of the Lord of Mercy.” (21:30-36)