A Reflection on Truth, Certainty, and Faith

“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)

My brother, Amir, asked me: “when you were Marxist, you were so sure, how can you be so certain about your religious belief now?”  I try to respond to his question in this reflection.

My initial response is this: I realize that it is not that much important that one passionately follows what rings true to one, it is more important that one is not entrenched in an ego-identity.  Most of us continue doing what we do, because change is difficult.  My role model in this regard is Wittgenstein.  Early Wittgenstein wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in a strict atomistic view and a picture theory of the correspondence of atomic propositions to the world.  Late Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, is a radical critique of atomistic understanding of language.  One might argue, well if in his first work, Wittgenstein was sure that he revealed ultimate truth to the extent that he quit his education in Oxford, how could he dare to write his now famous Philosophical Investigations with the same certainty?  The point is that no faith or certainty should create an ego-identity who evades truth, with the rationale that after all change is difficult.

We are all one way or another immersed in our situation and take our perception and emotions as true.  We open our eyes as thrown into a situation, a culture, a way of life, and a zeitgeist.  If we are lucky, we strive to make sense of our lives and search for the truth.  If you remember, we followed sciences and philosophy from childhood.  We didn’t have a spiritual guidance.  We had to find our way by our own effort and through trial and error.  And we had a deep feeling for justice and political change.  Marxism seemed to be the best choice.  It was called ‘scientific philosophy’, and it quenched our political-spiritual thirst for justice.  I didn’t understand its philosophy fully, but I was sure about its sense of justice.  Dialectical materialism seemed liberating, because it grounded consciousness and ethics in relations of production and material conditions of life.  I didn’t understand that a subtle hedonistic-well-being was the ultimate meaning-goal of life for materialists.  This is the only life, let’s enjoy it, at best, in peace and socialism.  We all know this rationale.  “Let’s enjoy this one life” is the common current now in a secular world—devoid of spirit.  I passionately followed Marxism, because I think now Marxism hijacks the noblest spiritual feelings in human beings, a desire for justice and empathy, and takes them to the spiritual desert of hedonistic socialism: self-actualization and principle of pleasure, including aestheticism.  This is also now a common coinage: self-actualization.  So, at best we have three things coming together: subtle hedonism-aestheticism, self-actualization, and socialism.

Everything changed for me when I was on death row and facing my pending death.  I was two years on death row and my spiritual quest has started since then.  I asked myself: “can you find dialectical materialism a satisfying response to your existential-spiritual thirst now that you are going to die young?”  I didn’t find it satisfactory.  So, after my verdict changed from death sentence to 8 years in prison, I started studying philosophy in prison and then in the US.  During years studying philosophy for the last 25 years, I went through so many changes and made so many mistakes.  At each point, I lived my philosophy passionately and paid the price.  So, the second part of my response to you is that: I can’t help it, I always live my thoughts passionately.  However, given my youth and lack of experience and knowledge, my certainty about Marxism is not comparable to my faith in God now.  Simply because I am now 57 years old (2017) and studied philosophy for decades and had spiritual experiences that completely changed my perspective about life.  I couldn’t elaborate my faith in Marxism deeply then, but I have written and will write thousands of pages to show how faith in God is possible and necessary.  In the following, I will try to answer the philosophical aspect of your question: we constantly make mistakes, scientifically or spiritually, we are always absorbed in our condition of existence and emotions, and even astute rational thinking for a life cannot be a guarantee that one might not be in wrong.  How can we be philosophically and spiritually sure about anything?  What is “truth” after all and how can we believe (holding-as-true) anything?

After so much ups and downs and self-reflection, I could finally create a wedge into my eyes and shift my outlook to see behind and beyond its domination.  I was living in that congealed perception for too long to be able to see the other side.  Ethical-spiritual sickness is like mental sickness.  Severely mentally ill, such as bipolar or schizophrenics can’t realize that they are sick.  For a long time, psychiatrists and ordinary people thought that these patients are in denial.  However, later they realized that the problem of lack of self-observation is indeed part of sickness.  It is now called anosognosia, which means without-disease-knowledge, or not-being-aware-of-disease, which is a neurological disorder.  But I don’t think it is only a neurological disorder.  It seems that more or less all humans are in the state of anosognosia.  It is not difficult to imagine that when one is immersed in a situation or state, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to separate oneself from that state and see oneself clearly as others can see us, or as we can see others, or more importantly as God sees all sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal). 

However, it seems there is something more to this self-blindness.  I try to sketch it as I can envision.  Even if one might be in the state of lethargic ennui and acedia, toxic guilt, lifelessness, depression, lack of motivation, or feeling-thinking life is absurd, still there is something about human beings that they would like to stick to their self-perception, whatever it is, even if it is killing them, rather than admitting that they are in a special sense “blind” and their overwhelming feelings and declarative assertions might be fictitious and delusional through and through.  In a sense, we worship our self-perception and assume it carries an all-embracing truth about reality, and “I” am the center of this truth.  It reminds me of a psychopath who killed his own mother because she criticized his girlfriend.  His sentence was life in prison.  He killed two of his parole officers, who were interviewing him, with a hidden knife.  Then he was condemned to death.  In an interview, I saw him saying: “I proved I am the master of my life.  I forced them to kill me.” 

One might call it our childish narcissism.  But I see it as our essential blindness to our position in the world.  How can I be sure that my certainty now is not another self-deception and indulgence?  Should I adopt skepticism as my major disposition?  As Chomsky once put it, radical skepticism is a theory, in practice we all know what to do and do it.  We might be wrong but we learn through trial and error.  How can I find a measure to keep me alert about self-deception, because after all I can’t live without certain self-interpretation and taking it as true?  It doesn’t matter how many times I examine my views scientifically, at the end, as Kuhn puts it, I form a dogmatic adherence to whatever I came to believe based on experiment and scientific consensus. 

In a sense, history of philosophy is this impassionate self-examination, which in so many points go astray.  However, now, in twenty first century, we have come to some understanding about ‘truth’, whether in analytic or continental traditions, whether through Wittgenstein, Gödel, Quine, or Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, or Heidegger.  It seems so obvious now, after the puzzle is solved, that we can’t prove our axioms, postulates, or presuppositions.  We postulate as truth certain propositions and build up a theorem or theory based on them.  As long as the theory consistently works, which means it is not self-defeating or self-contradictory AND practically gives result, we take it as true.  Pierce, James, Dewy, Rorty call it pragmatic conception of truth.  Truth is what works.  Foucault says knowledge is for cutting, not for understanding.  Thomas Kuhn basically excludes the pursuit of Truth as the major motivation of sciences: the mechanism works from interactions of institutional elements to form experientially and dogmatically what is held-as-true (belief) and gives results.  Nietzsche is sure that our physiology and will-to-power is the measure of truth.  In his Politics of Truth, Foucault writes: “Critique is to question truth on its effects of power and to question power on its discourses of truth.”  In objection, Popper posits truth as a regulatory principle for sciences. 

  

Marx was also so sure that material conditions of life determine consciousness.  He was so sure he could find a scientific description for historical development based on relations of production. Now, we know that science doesn’t work like this.  Even though Marx’s economic analysis is insightful, his philosophical-spiritual view is flawed through and through and, in other reflections, I argued that why it is fundamentally nihilistic.  As well, Popper showed well how Freud and Marx invented a religion rather than a science.  In twenty first century, still we are dealing with mind-body dualism.  The question of consciousness is not resolved.  Despite all the self-complacent declarations of AI and cognitive science industry that we are about to make an artificial consciousness, we don’t know what consciousness is.  Chomsky and Nagel are raising new questions about evolutionary theory and consciousness.  They are accused of new mysterianism. 

So, the first lesson of 21 century is about limitation of knowledge.  In his paper, Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding (https://chomsky.info/201401__/), Chomsky questions the dream of Western Enlightenment that principally we are able to know ‘everything’.  We can’t, because of the inherent limitation of human understanding, the relation between scope and limitation.  Even though Chomsky and Popper and others still follow Socratic spirit that truth has a regulative value and gives us a direction, none of them believe that capital T-Truth is achievable.  In a sense, as long as human knowledge goes, we can’t be one hundred percent sure about our scientific perception of the world.  By definition, science is refutable. 

Now, all these philosophical and scientific discussions happen within the sphere of a special worldview: it is looking at the world like an alien is looking into our anatomy.  It is a reductive microscopic or analytic investigation of how things work based on certain theory or hypothesis.  The measure as always is “if it works”.  So many take our technological advance as the measure of veracity of our scientific views.  But now that we are on the verge of six mass extinction and the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA) voted to formally designate the epoch Anthropocene and presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress on 29 August 2016, we ought to ponder our handy measure of truth as “if it works” and reevaluate it, because it seems depending on our worldview, we can make things work in different ways.  In another word, we ought to evaluate whether our sciences are grounded in a spiritually barren and nihilistic worldview or not.  In a sense, ethical-spiritual truth ought to precede scientific truth[1].  And it doesn't mean rising a new censorship for sciences, but creating a new science.  I believe that to see the world from the point of view of a subject against the world of objects is destructive, regardless of the fact that how creative it has been. 

Heidegger fundamentally changed the direction of questioning and in a genuine and rigorous way criticized the problem of subjectivism and the history of Western philosophy.  Since Descartes, we took our subjectivity as the most certain and the measure of truth.  For a few centuries now, we have been looking at how things happen from an inside (a subject) to an outside (object).  Empiricism has been transfixed on the disjunction-conjunction of our senses and the world.  If we could figure out how our senses, dissimilar to reality, grasp the reality as such, then we could arrive at the truth of perception.  Reading Heidegger’s philosophy feels like awakening from an addiction or dream.  We have been addicted to dismantle all the systems from inside and to see how they work and build up similar structures.  It has been working all along, so why should we doubt it?  We can see how neurons in brain interact and give rise to consciousness.  This seems so self-evident.  Our anatomic physiology and atomic physics take it for granted that we can see the working of a system by analyzing the components that make it tick.  Find how the particles in atom work and you arrest the nexus of reality.   As Max Planck put it: reality is what can be measured. Mathematics is the essence of reality.  And mathematics is a property of self-grounding ego cogito.  The “I” became the self-positing and self-proposing ground of all being.  Kant’s Copernicus Revolution, to posit the subject as the center of knowledge rather than empiricism’s tradition of the relation of dissimilar subject-object, enclosed the whole world into the prison of phenomenal (what appears to us) vs. noumenal (what is in itself).  We were then ensnared in the delusion of autonomous subject.  The history of thinking seems like constant entrapping ourselves into dead ends.  But this is the way we learn.  We are excessive beings and can’t see the big picture.  We are self-blind.  We overdo everything until we knock our heads against the limit and come back to our senses and try to find some equilibrium.  

   

Let’s now briefly reflect on Heidegger’s holistic philosophy.  Heidegger, phenomenologically shows that the subject (an inside) is not standing against the world of objects (outside).  Moreover, not only we are not understanding the world from encountering-additions of objects but also the world (having a world) is the condition of possibility of understanding objects in the world.  If we can let go for a moment of the addiction of seeing truth as correspondence of our statements to the state of world, then the world, the Open, the horizon of possibility of statements and objects come into light.  How can I see an object if it is not in this open space to which I can attend and thus discover the truth or untruth of my statements?  If I am at home and think that the statement ‘there is a world out of my home’ corresponds to the fact that there is a world out there, the condition of possibility of this statement is the openness in which this relationship can interplay.  The traditional way of thinking (Cartesian way), posits the essence of truth in the subjectivity of subject and logical possibility.  So, it seems obvious that it is logically possible that my home can be in a vacuum, and if I open the door it is possible to imagine that there is no world out there.  A moment reflection shows that even analytically the word ‘home’ presupposes the world.  Indeed, being-in-the-world is the ontological condition of possibility of imagination.  Reducing ‘truth’ to subjective logical possibility, disregards the fact that we are not a brain in a vat.  Not only thinking and being come together (i.e., it is fallacious to say, “I think, therefor I am”), but also Being and the Open in which everything is free to act and become is the condition of possibility of propositional truth. We are grounded in the world, and the world is grounded in Being, which in a holistic sense is not rule-governed or rule-described, as it is the condition of possibility and the horizon against which rules can be perceived.  This is a miracle: each single concept is (and implies) an indicator and a directive sign to “language”, “the world”, “Being”, and “freedom” as such.  And the world and Being can’t be grasped through any concept once for all.  This is called ontological difference between Being and the entities we perceive in the world.  Heidegger shows that the condition of possibility of ontological truth resides in the Open: “All working and achieving, all action and calculation, keep within an open region within which beings, with regard to what they are and how they are, can properly take their stand and become capable of beings said.” (On the Essence of Truth, Basic Writings, p.122). 

We understand ‘truth’ as ‘accord’.  True gold is the measure and then we measure different kind of mixtures to that original and authentic gold.  My words accord to who I am or I am a liar and conceal it.  Foucault’s statement that “knowledge is not for understanding, but for cutting” must accord to real function of knowledge in order to be true.  Regardless of the fact that Foucault holds that all values and knowledges are ontologically posited in historical discourses at the disposal of power.  So, in a circular way he defines knowledge as power and disregards the ontological horizon of everything existing, power included.  What is this ontological possibility of everything existing?  It is so simple that it falls on our blind spot.  We are like fishes in water who can’t see the water as the condition of our existence.  It is relatedness and freedom as such.  This freedom and relatedness is not only a property of human beings.  It is the freedom “for what is opened up in an open region” (p.125).  A tree is free to grow and gives fruit.  I am free to move around and graciously eat that fruit to survive.  There is an open region of relatedness between me and that tree.  We are both free to appear in the open, to be.  Then I am free to examine and discover flowers and fruits.  And in this uncoveredness and unconcealment of fruits and leaves and my movement and statements about the fact that “the fruits are not ripe” the essence of truth reveals itself as a domain of relatedness and freedom in terms of letting be.  Being lets beings (including me and the tree) be so that in our relation we can arrive at disclosedness of fruits, leaves, roots, hands, homes, life, death, and our awe of being-in-the-world:

“Here ‘existence’ does not mean existentia in the sense of occurring [an actual object] or being at hand [an instrument].  Nor on the other hand does it mean, in an ‘existentiell’ fashion, man’s moral endeavor on behalf of his ‘self’, based on his psychophysical constitution. Ek-sistence, rooted in truth as freedom, is exposure to the disclosedness of beings as such.  Still uncomprehended, indeed, not even in need of an essential grounding, the ek-sistence of historical man begins at that moment when the first thinker takes a questioning stance with regard to the unconealment of beings by asking: what are beings?” (p.126) 

There is a major difference between freedom-to-be of trees and animals, the gift given to existence, and freedom of human beings to be and to be free: a distinctive relatedness to Being as a whole as such.  The moment I open my eyes the miracle lightens up—as it happened for Helen Keller when she grasped “general concept” in language in her blind, deaf, mute state of being— through which I simultaneously pre-ontologically recognize the Open, Being, the world, the whole, the core of my existence as a longing-belonging for and to the Truth, as the horizon against which I ontologically and thematically recognize myself and objects in the world.

[“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)]

Now, if you ask me how can I be one hundred percent sure about anything, I can say this much: I came to see the pendulum swing of philosophical and scientific discourses in the course of history.  To make it simple, it looks like a swing between Chomsky, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger.  Chomsky focuses on the innate and inherent capacities and Heidegger brings the world into this ek-static (standing-outside) capacity.  Kierkegaard experiences the mystical and religious as deeply personal and subjective [thus, his 'truth is subjectivity'], to which Heidegger is blind.  We can join interesting parts of all of these views; however, by itself none of them gives us absolute methodical-philosophical certainty.  They give us insights, and in the case of Heidegger and Kierkegaard, a spiritual-mystical awareness.  This is all I can say. 

Now if I want to answer your question: how sure can I be of my faith in God now?  By myself, I couldn’t.  You know I was working on writing my dissertation on Nietzsche-Foucault philosophy.  I was far from religions and faith, though postmodern philosophy can have a liberating effect, which usually ends up to nihilism.  The liberating effect of postmodern philosophy and its nihilism were not satisfactory to me.  I didn’t know where to go and what to do.  By myself, I couldn’t form any universal certainty, but aesthetic fashioning myself in some ways that pleased me; Nietzsche-Foucault call it ‘self-creation’, which is a hopeless way to say that we really don’t know what is the point of living, so let’s do whatever it feels okay to us, because there is no answer to the question who is creating who, and what does “creation” mean here?  It is oxymoron to talk about certainty and faith in Foucault’s philosophy. 

It is a fact that Heidegger’s philosophy and his conception of Being has a resonance of Godhead in Meister Eckhart and late Heidegger talks about the Fourfold of the earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities:

“Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities.  In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.  They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence.  They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols.  In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.” (Poetry, Language, thought, p.150)

Heidegger’s philosophy is deeply spiritual and awakens a deep understanding of God, for those who can hear.  However, none of these could create faith in me.  So, am I now one hundred percent sure about religious truth?  This is a long story and I will elaborate the details in my memoir, but to make my point, I can say this much: it happened to me.  This is Kierkegaard's notion that religious truth is subjective and deeply individual and personal.  It is a happening to a soul who longs for divine.  God responds to those who call God hopelessly and sincerely, not for gain or at the time of misery only.  God responded to me; I was startled in fear and trembling in encountering God's signs.  I thought I was losing my mind.  It took twelve years investigation and teaching philosophy and world religions that everything fell into place and made sense to me.  I have seen it, heard it, experienced it, and then based on the given guidance, God helped me to cultivate myself through knowledge and philosophy, and it became my destiny and mission.  Later, I learned that the Quran and Bible call it divine grace or in Farsi we say: عنایت الهی I am a believer now, in the original sense of "belief": to hold dear, desire, care, love.  However, all these are empty claims if my faith is fruitless.  Real faith brings fruits and encourages one to do good and gives a helping hand to others.  I hope I can show my faith, not in words but in action.  

Also, I think scriptures and the Quran by themselves are enough to bring faith in God.  The problem is that I was ignorant of this tradition.  I never read scriptures with understanding.  Teaching World Religions cemented my faith in God.  This is a general problem with all atheists.  They are quick to reject without doing their empathetic investigation.  In another reflection, I wrote about Russell's response to a student's question: "Professor Russell, what would you say to Lord, if after death God asks you: why did you not believe in me?"  Russell responded: I would say, "Lord you didn't give me enough evidence."  I imagined that God would say: "I sent numerous scriptures through thousands of years; but you never read them or put your heart in them."  Now in the age of internet, we can easily read and have access to all variations of scriptures and the Quran.  Most translations and so many analyses of the verses are now available online.  We don't have any more excuses.  However, God is merciful and if a lost soul like me is yearning for the Source desperately, God would guide that person.  God is the most forgiving, the most merciful.

To end this letter, I should say God guided me to explore God’s signs and this disclosure of God’s signs also strengthened my faith, to the extent that one can see God as the poet of existence[2] and everything in the horizon and in ourselves is a poesis of God:

“We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves, until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth. Is it not enough that your Lord witnesses everything?” (41:53)

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[1] http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-religio-philosophicalreflection-on.html

[2] The Poet is there, who no one speaks until He speaks, and no one creates until He creates. 

 .شاعر آنجاست که هیچکس سخن نگوید تا او سخن گوید و هیچکس خلق نکند تا او خلق کند

http://philosophyweeklyreflections.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-universe-as-signposts-of-poet-of.html

A Brief Reflection on Abraham's Rebellion

The surah Marayam (Mary, 19) continues with a passage on Abraham.  The encounter between Abraham and his father is telling.  I couldn’t understand and relate to it before God’s grace set me straight—and I hurt my body/soul in the path of ignorance, as whatever we do, we do to our own body/soul.  Our body registers every single moment, thought, word, and action and creates duality and chasm between our original purity and defilement.  And, I have had to take the reverse path to undo the evil with good, to restore my body and soul:

“Mention too, in the Quran, the story of Abraham. He was a man of truth, a prophet. He said to his father, ‘Father, why do you worship something that can neither hear nor see nor benefit you in any way? Father, knowledge that has not reached you has come to me, so follow me: I will guide you to an even path. Father, do not worship Satan– Satan has rebelled against the Lord of Mercy. Father, I fear that a punishment from the Lord of Mercy may afflict you and that you may become Satan’s companion [in Hell].’ His father answered, ‘Abraham, do you reject my gods? I will stone you if you do not stop this. Keep out of my way!’ Abraham said, ‘Peace be with you: I will beg my Lord to forgive you– He is always gracious to me– but for now I will leave you, and the idols you all pray to, and I will pray to my Lord and trust that my prayer will not be in vain.’ When he left his people and those they served beside God, We granted him Isaac and Jacob and made them both prophets: We granted Our grace to all of them, and gave them a noble reputation.” (19:41-50)

1)       Abraham is the man of truth.  His clear unapologetic reasoning overcomes the shadow of defense mechanisms to see clearly and set his energy free to attend God.  Hence, God gave him the knowledge that had not come to his father.

2)       “I will guide you to an even path.  Father, do not worship Satan.”  I have met people who endorse Satan’s rebelliousness and interpret it as a desire for “freedom from tyranny”, a rebel against “patriarchy”, as a promethean rebel against Greek gods.  So, they drink, do drugs, or take refuge in the principle of pleasure and at most in an uprooted humanism, or worship sciences and arts.  Satanic rebelliousness is childish and [self]destructive, like a teenager who might think he or she rebels against the tyranny of parents to do drugs and sleep around.  Abraham rebels against his father too, but there is a difference between satanic rebel and the divine rebel.  To conceal satanic rebel under the banner of “freedom and autonomy” is Satan’s trick.  And where will this fake freedom, which is the worst enslavement to our low desires, take us?  To nihilism, annihilation, to a canceric disconnection from the source and sustainer, and this delusion of “autonomy” will kill us in body and soul, following the principle of pleasure, and worshipping our aesthetic and reason.  Hence, we will become the companion of Satan in Hell.  Our freedom is to abandon worshipping anything in this world or in ourselves.  Our freedom is to understand lovingly our essential and necessary connection to God, to love-abide God knowingly and with understanding.  And this is the purpose of creation and the respite we have been given until the Day of Judgment.

Where is our absolute freedom?  Look at the strings, you are wired into the biosphere.  You have nothing of your own.  You can’t ground your own existence.  With all your genetic engineering and delusion of absolute autonomy, you can’t escape vulnerability and death.  Die before you die—this has been Sufi Rumi’s advice and all spiritual sages since the time immemorial. 

3)        Abraham rebels against his father too but how and why?  He rebels against Satan and calls his father to the right path.  Abraham said to his father: “Peace be with you” and asked forgiveness from God for him.  And as his father—entrenched in the “identity-mask” which was permeated into his countenance—threatened to kill him, Abraham left his father and his idols.

4)       The path is steep.  One ought to let go, to abandon one’s comfort zone, painfully to take the “identity-mask” off one’s face, by loving God, the Source, through right thoughts, words, and deeds.  Satan took me away from unity of my thoughts, words, and deeds and extricated the integrity of my body and soul into blasphemy and principle of pleasure—the “love” of an atheist and materialist can’t fathom the real meaning of sacrifice.  Only when Abraham left his father and his idols, he was more immersed in his trust in the knowledge that God had given him, and thus he trusted his prayers will not be vain.  And only then God granted him righteous sons: Isaac and Jacob, noble prophets.

5)       Connecting the dots, what this passage tells me now is striking, compared to the time that I was lost.  It tells me “you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”  Only those who believe and abide in truth can release themselves from false “truths”—the power of the first truth, in unraveling the false one, resides in dying before dying.  The truth that shall set us free is the divine grace and power to destroy the spider webs of entrenchment in position, fame, name, honor, wealth, ambition, and pleasure—in one word in “identity” or the delusion of fallacious autonomy, in worshiping false gods and goddesses, and this transient world or body.  The truth teller and the truth doer will heed the Truth, and thus will be heeded and guided by the Truth-God.  And this is just the beginning of walking the steep path to unify my body and soul and to restore the integrity that Satan, through following my low desires and whims, has afflicted upon them.  I ought to move out of my comfort zone, and to walk towards light, and to die before dying, if I hope my prayers won’t be in vain. 
  
The theory of Erving Guffman and "performed self" is somehow realted to the reflection above on Abraham. A rebel against false selves, if not grounded in God, will take take us to Satan. This is a case that we create falsity from partial truths. The Axial Age thinkers (Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, the mystics of Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides) were indifferent to mere "beliefs" (theological or otherwise), or in our modern term "subjectivity". They all recognized a transcendence within which is ineffable and calls for reverent silence. Indeed they declared that the light within shines only or is "how one acts or behaves" or "how one should live", the ethical, wholeheartedness, mindfulness, care--connected to Heaven, Tien, Nirvana, God. And they didn't impose it on other people (read Karen Armstrong's The Great Transformation), whenever their ethics became obligatory it shows the Axial Age has lost its momentum. The self for them was not a thing; it transforms for better or worse through a course of action and dissolving in or taking off mundane and fictitious "masks". Fast forward to our time: Taking off the "mask" is a movement for Heidegger from inauthentic self to an authentic one. Heidegger invented the famous statement that "Existence is the "substance" of human-being (Dasein)", which roughly means the self is not a 'thing' or 'no-thing', whose kernel is ‘care’. Sartre turned this into "Existence precedes the essence." Most of contemporary perspectives that take "meaning" and "the self" to be purely subjective, or the self is merely performative, or Nietzsche’s “life is only justified from an aesthetic point of view” (see the Picture of Dorian Gray below) are variations of modern nihilism, in which anything goes, because it is only "you" who assign meaning to it. They take it as a sign of being “tolerant”. So many are confused whether rape or Hitler can't be justified, because there is no essential self, which to them it means you "create" yourself. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Foucault say the same thing, it is all arbitrary, no meaning, one creates or wills forth one's meaning and "create" oneself (or at the disposal of genes and reductive/mechanical evolutionary biology of Dawkin and Pinker); it is a common current. It is painful to hear that death from drug overdoses are reaching levels similar to the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak: in 2014, we had 125 death per day from drug overdose and mostly white, which cut across rural-urban boundaries (New York Times, Jan. 19th 2016). One may say, this is when we take a self-destructive path with half-truths. And you can see this sense of being lost in new trends in philosophy too:

A Brief Reflection on "When God Decrees Something, God Says Only, ‘Be,’ And It Is"

There are some important points to reflect on in the following passage:

"This [is] a statement of the Truth about which they are in doubt: it would not befit God to have a child. He is far above that: when God decrees something, God says only, ‘Be,’ and it is. ‘God is my Lord and your Lord, so serve Him: that is a straight path.’ But factions have differed among themselves. What suffering will come to those who obscure the truth when a dreadful Day arrives! How sharp of hearing, how sharp of sight they will be when they come to Us, although now they are clearly off course! Warn them [Muhammad] of the Day of Remorse when the matter will be decided, for they are heedless and do not believe. It is We who will inherit the earth and all who are on it: they will all be returned to Us.” (19:35-40)

1) Truth is with God and it IS God, and the fact is that we can't bring metaphysical doubts to certainty by speculations, human guess work, assumptions, and application of reason to the phenomenal world.  We are not equipped to know the truth that is beyond us and we ought not to bring faith in our guess-work about that which has not been revealed to us by God.

2) Having a "child" is a human notion belonging to procreative world of mortals.  If there is no "being" [existence] and "becoming" [change], as we mortals understand, in God, then although it is intuitively intelligible, it would be ineffable for us to understand it fully that "Being" as such comes from God's word or will--and the Quran says Jesus is the Word of God.

3) The relation between God and us is the relation of originator, sustainer, and worship, not father and mother, to essentially dependent creatures, not son or daughter, whose whole survival in body, heart, and soul manifests itself in "love", "worship", and "belonging" to God--and understanding this point is the straight path.

4) the root of factionalism is when we take our own guess-work and inclination as truth.

5) Following our own inclination and politics of identity rather than resorting to God would obscure the truth.

6) I always found the psychological description of encountering the Day of Judgment painfully accurate and real in the Quran: how clear we shall see and hear on that Day, because the whole truth opens up in front of our eyes and heart and our whole attention will be devoted to it.

7) Everything perishes but the Face of God, nothing belongs to us.  Understanding the poverty of our existence and its complete dependence on God is Enlightenment: "It is We who will inherit the earth and all who are on it: they will all be returned to Us.”

A Brief Reflection on What We Can Know/Do and What We Can't in the Surah Night Journey (17)

We can understand God, the ineffable, as we can understand Being, unsurmountable.  Our capacity in understanding God as the source of Being is the inner light granted to us, but it can easily be covered up by arrogance.  When I didn’t believe in God, and studied different philosophies and scientific discourses, I found them all insufficient: it came so obvious to me that Russell, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Goodman, Popper, Kuhn, Heidegger, Foucault,…were all saying that we can’t fathom it, but it never meant to me that reason or sciences and philosophy were vain.  On the contrary, in the spirit of Socrates, we approximate truth but never achieve it: “this never achieving Truth” is the condition of possibility of humanly understanding the “truth”, for us truth is always partial, not complete. 

When I started reading scriptures and especially the Quran, I realized that revelation is an essential part of truth that we can’t achieve on our own.  Our arrogance, our delusion that we CAN achieve the whole truth by our own reason alone, leads us astray.  Nonetheless, we can use our reason, if directed by God’s grace, to the straight path, without getting lost.

When I was disconnected from God’s revelations, I was considering ideologies and sciences for the way out, but these ideologies can never tell us what course of action to take ethically.  Their ethics is always groundless and this is the place that our whims, desires, and arrogance take hold in us.

The Quran, first and foremost, reminds us of God—take no other god: science, any ideology, or any idol as one’s god.  I didn’t understand this point, and so, I easily disconnected from the Quran.  It seemed to me God is too demanding and authoritative to remind us again and again that if we worship any other god but God, we will be punished and suffer.  My arrogance was a hindrance.  I assume the arrogance of Russell and Chomsky, Marx, Sartre, and Foucault, and the like was the major obstacle for them.  The arrogance comes from a deep disbelief that draws a veil on our heart not to connect to revelations.  We needed historical proof, we needed “evidence”—that why if we worship any god-idol-ideology-science but God, we will fall.  In both ontogenetic (my individual) and phylogenetic (our species) senses—if these terms are applicable to our self-understanding—we can potentially see now why, if we are willing and our arrogance again doesn’t draw a veil on our eyes and hearts.  

Without revelations, we can’t find our way about.  We end up in canceric growth, quantification of the world based on utility, and hedonism.  We see ourselves as random events on this planet, who has no ontogenetic spiritual path but to increase itself in phylogenetic sense: survival.  We shall die from inside (our essence) and simultaneously we shall disconnect from outside (the universe and God)—the arrogance will appropriate everything for the self and pleasure.  In almost two centuries we have seen the ramification of secular ideology.

In reading the surah “Night Journey”, I am now in a different mindset.  I hear the message differently.  Revelations don’t tell us the mystery of the scientific working of the world, it is our tasks to look for proximate and ultimate causes---with constant remembrance of and asking guidance from the ineffable God and unsurmountable Being.  What we CAN know for sure is what course of action to take based on spiritual-ethical directions given to us by revelations: 

“Set up no other god beside God, or you will end up disgraced and forsaken.  Your Lord has commanded that you should worship none but God, and that you be kind to your parents. If either or both of them reach old age with you, say no word that shows impatience with them, and do not be harsh with them, but speak to them respectfully and lower your wing in humility towards them in kindness and say, ‘Lord, have mercy on them, just as they cared for me when I was little.’  Your Lord knows best what is in your heart. If you are good, God is most forgiving to those who return to Him.  Give relatives their due, and the needy, and travellers– do not squander your wealth wastefully: those who squander are the brothers of Satan, and Satan is most ungrateful to his Lord– but if, while seeking some bounty that you expect from your Lord, you turn them down, then at least speak some word of comfort to them.  Do not be tight-fisted, nor so open-handed that you end up blamed and overwhelmed with regret.  Your Lord gives abundantly to whoever He will, and sparingly to whoever He will: He knows and observes His servants thoroughly.

Do not kill your children for fear of poverty (a) ––We shall provide for them and for you––killing them is a great sin.  And do not go anywhere near adultery: it is an outrage, and an evil path.  Do not take life, which God has made sacred, except by right: if anyone is killed wrongfully, We have given authority to the defender of his rights, but he should not be excessive in taking life, for he is already aided [by God].  Do not go near the orphan’s property, except with the best [intentions], until he reaches the age of maturity. Honor your pledges: you will be questioned about your pledges.  Give full measure when you measure, and weigh with accurate scales: that is better and fairer in the end.  Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these.   Do not strut arrogantly about the earth: you cannot break it open, nor match the mountains in height.  The evil of all these actions is hateful to your Lord.” (17:22-38)

(a): “When the sun is shrouded in darkness, when the stars are dimmed, when the mountains are set in motion, when pregnant camels are abandoned, when wild beasts are herded together, when the seas boil over, when souls are sorted into classes, when the baby girl buried alive is asked for what sin she was killed, when the records of deeds are spread open, when the sky is stripped away, when Hell is made to blaze and Paradise brought near: then every soul will know what it has brought about.” (81:1-14)