Recently I have been thinking about one’s attachment to the world, and what it is proper to enjoy, and when enjoyment leads to excess.

In the Bahá’í Writings, Bahá’u’lláh makes it clear that everything in heaven and earth has been created for us – except the heart. The quote from the Hidden Words is:

O Son of Dust! All that is in heaven and earth I have ordained for thee, except the human heart, which I have made the habitation of My beauty and glory; yet thou didst give My home and dwelling to another than Me; and whenever the manifestation of My holiness sought His own abode, a stranger found He there, and, homeless, hastened unto the sanctuary of the Beloved. Notwithstanding I have concealed thy secret and desired not thy shame.2

Does this mean that it is wrong for us to enjoy the good things of life? Certainly we know that asceticism is not allowed. But sometimes, if we take great pleasure in the material, it causes us a sense of guilt, like we were being forgetful or allowing ourselves to be carried away.

In the sayings of the Buddha, He says we should be like the lotus flower, which dwells in the middle of the pond without getting wet. Or that we should regard this life and its concerns as a wound, which we care for gingerly but without loving it.

This morning I thought of another analogy. Often when I am trying to understand the relationship between the believers and God, it helps to imagine a similar human relationship which serves as a symbol of the spiritual relationship. In this case I thought of two people who were enamored of each other.

The boy, having romantic intentions toward the girl (and believing there to be some reciprocity), buys her a fantastic gift. He goes to great lengths in order to purchase the finest gift he can, so that he can prove his interest to her.

The day comes, and he presents her with the gift. She of course is overwhelmed and flattered. She becomes so involved with the wonders of the gift, however, that she pays greater attention to it than she does to her suitor.

Ultimately the boy realizes that she has become fully absorbed in the gift, and now it is as if he did not exist for her anymore. Their time spent together is strained, because she is longing to return to the gift (perhaps it is a car, or something involving like that).

So the purpose of the gift was to improve the relationship, to draw her closer, and to give her something beautiful as a token of love. But the result of the gift was to drive her further away.

This is how I see our relationship with the good things of this world. God has given us the Gift of Life so that we might enjoy and appreciate it. After all, it was a gift of love: “I loved thy creation, hence I created thee”. The only tragedy is if we turn away from the Giver in order to turn toward the gift, since the gift was only meant to draw us nearer. But if received in the right spirit, I can imagine that it would only bring delight to the Giver for us to enjoy it, since the gift was one of love and not of self-interested motive.

Tonight, only peace.  
The stars  
wheel about  
their constellations...  
the sea  
recounts  
a hushed lullaby...  
the moon  
winks  
at a sleeping earth...  
and a herd of  
silvered clouds  
pass by.

In the entry on detachment, the essential split was between reality and those of our ideas which obscure that reality. We must detach, or cut away, from whatever causes us to become separate from our Goal: thus, detachment leads to reunion, not division.

This thought strikes a cord with something Thoreau wrote. Here, where he says, “I wanted… to put to rout all that was not life”, is what I see as the very essence of detachment:

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner…

Prior to this scheme, I had used the metaphor of reflection to describe this life in comparison to the next: where attributes of the divine are seen as lambent images upon a pool of water. Without the pool, there would be no reflection; without the reflection, there would be no vision. Detachment is not turning away from the pool, but seeing beyond the apparent color of the water – to the discovery that higher values imbue it from elsewhere. This both justifies the role of water in conveying the image, and the independent beauty of the source of that image. There is no conflict between mundane and divine.

Next is knowing the thing revealed to be the true interest, until the water is all but forgotten: present, yet invisible, like a polished mirror contributing nothing to the vision. In terms of the mundane this is impossible, because everything reflects only a part of the view – whatever is seen is always colored by its place of reflection. But the holy texts say that the soul of man is capable of freeing itself from every impediment, until it perfectly reveals that Light. From the mirror of the human heart can appear a perfect manifestation of the Divine.

Mystics, such as the Sufis, have so fallen in love with their Beloved that they wholly forget the mirror in gazing at the beauties within. Their daily task is to polish its surface, the better to reveal its forms. Their pursuit of a perfect mirror, through transforming the heart, is the Straight Path offering access to the Goal. It is the Way. “O My Brother! A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn. Then wilt thou clearly see the meaning of `Neither doth My earth nor My heaven contain Me, but the heart of My faithful servant containeth Me.’6”7

The glimpses that appear within the mirror have a nourishing quality, like food, or the quenching power of water – in the same way that good things are known to be good, and beautiful things, beautiful: The difference between an idea and the underlying reality, or a body and the life that animates it. In this sense, the world is animated by a world soul, giving life to the qualities we call “wondrous” and “good” – without which they would be only words.

It is said “… the revelation of my Best-Beloved hath so permeated my being that He is closer to me than my life-vein”8. He is our life! If light lost its luminance, all color, shapes, and visible objects would cease to be. The possession of eyes would no longer matter. So too, if the world soul departed, we would have no “we” to reflect – a universal death. Steal the image from the reflecting pool, and nothing remains to be seen. The animation of the world, in the perception of its qualities, is a sure evidence that a greater, universal life animates the body of this existence, with which we possess a very intimate relationship.

Something I’ve been thinking about for several years is the phenomenon of idle complaint: Complaining to another when no solution can possibly result. Is it a release valve? A socialized behavior? A personality trait?

As I spend time with all kinds of people, I am struck by the sheer volume of idle complaint in the world. If I give a random person my ear, this is often what they fill it with. Not their hopes, dreams, loves, desires – but what drives them crazy, without hope of its changing. Where does it all come from?

My present idea is that idle complaint represents an attempt to escape a fundamental moral dilemma posed by freedom: That when faced with any event, we have two choices: respond or accept. By responding, we act to change the situation, flee from it, or request change from another; by accepting, we permit the event to transpire, then return our attention to the present. The event becomes part of our past, and we face whatever new events result from it.

However, as clear cut as the situation is – change things, or don’t change them – some events cause a psychological withdrawal from the necessity of choosing. These are things we refuse to accept, but feel powerless to change. Since we neither act nor accept, the event gets “stuck” in our response queue, waiting for us to find a solution. I believe these stuck events cause a mounting sense of anxiety – a feeling we’ve left something undone – which causes us to play out that anxiety with others, to lessen the pain. Hence, idle complaint.

The requirements of freedom are harsh and unforgiving: One acts, or loses the opportunity to act. If one does not act, he must accept; if he does not accept, he must act. Don’t like the way our governments manage the world? Act. Don’t want to act? Accept. There are no other choices – though the field of action is very wide, and filled with creative possibilities.

Idle complaint refuses to accept the fact that life owes us nothing. It does not have to stop, rewind, or undo whatever wrong bothered us. It moves along, permitting us the freedom to act, but passing right on by if we don’t. For a basic edict of freedom is this: If we don’t act, injustice has as much freedom to continue as our freedom to fight against it. Complaining that injustice should have no such freedom is secretly a wish for no freedom at all. Hence the idle complaint, which asks that the world answer for what happens, without our ever having to act, or accept it.

In bringing these issues to light, I mean to clarify the extent of our freedom – and that of others – and of our capacity for action. When you find an issue you care about: Move! Let the others drop. Since no one can fight every battle, it’s OK to accept the atrocities we choose not to fight against (by “accept”, I mean acknowledge their freedom to occur, not that one morally agree with their content). Where there is both acceptance and action, we put our freedom to use. It’s only idle complaint that absorbs huge sums of energy without return. It’s even worse than accepting, though it feels like an active stance. For everything has been allowed its freedom: this, at the root of it, is why we can never expect the world to act differently than it does: we can only choose to accept things, or act to change them.

All knowledge furthers the development of vision. If one study structural engineering and look at a bridge, he will see what others cannot see. As a computer programmer, I look at lines of code and see purpose; physicists visualize whole universes in a few pages of mathematics.

In these terms, I think mysticism is the systematic development of one’s vision of the whole. Rather than enriching detail, it steps outside of the very eyes that see, giving one a glimpse of things from an ever-greater viewpoint.

For example, we see many of the events that make up our lives. We can learn about the content of those events, how they take place, etc. But we rarely see how they fit together. There have been movies – Shortcuts, Playing by Heart, Magnolia – that play on this theme, showing how several lives can interact with each other. Yet none of us see the whole mosaic. As Rumi tells it, we’re all feeling a single elephant in the dark, but each one of us is feeling a different part.

To see what is not there – is how one poet described faith. Is there a grand design that sheds meaning on all the chaotic happenings of life? Since no eye can ever view all the data – and it renews itself with every moment – we can never answer this question. Thus it takes a certain gift of absurdity to credit the idea that there is purpose where none is evident. Such absurdity is as wine for the mystic’s cup…

We begin with the assertion that everything has meaning, like a sea in which we swim. The question is, can one learn to see the water, even though we’ve lived it in for so long? Can one self-administer the “red pill”? The holy books say that the Grand Design aims at the upliftment of mankind: that every atom is ordained for the training of the soul. If so, then the value of events is very different from how I was taught to see things. In anger, there might be love; in war, peace. “No defect canst thou see in the creation of the God of Mercy: Repeat the gaze: Seest thou a single flaw?” (Qur’án)

It is always easy to disregard what the mystic seeks, however, because it is never rational. Whatever proof we offer presuppose the very system of reasoning it seeks to prove. That just won’t do. Our only justification is in changing the quality of life. After all, what is real? Is the way we see things real, or how it affects us that we care about? Is happiness made of atoms, or how we relate to those atoms? If a sunset grows insipid to one person, but always amazing to other: which sees “the real”?

I knew not what amazement was  
Until I made Thy love my cause.  
O how amazing would it be  
If I were not amazed by Thee![^1]

I think every school of thought defines its own normality, in all of which the mystic seems absurd; so too with the mystic, for whom all normality is thus. Mysticism is that vision which ever scorns itself for lack of vision: that keeps whole worlds in store, just when we think we’ve found its end. So if you, too, find yourself looking at the contents of your life – and then the next day as if you’d never seen them before – you might be one of us.

Photography, my recent hobby, has been a source of unexpected joys – made more significant by the fact that I never liked cameras before.

As fun as the camera itself has been, a few other things have been happening lately, all of which I never expected, but that have been nearly as much a boon as the hobby itself:

The first thing I noticed while surfing the web and reading about how cameras work, is that an interest in photography leads you to looking at other people’s photography. I’ve seen more beautiful, beautiful pictures in the past month than in my whole life of web surfing to date.

The second thing photography has changed for me is that now I venture out much more during the daytime. Previously, I was nearly a self-declared vampire. My schedule alone prompted vestigial fangs to start making their protuberance known. Yet today I woke up early, did everything I needed to, then went to Golden Gate Park looking for pictures. And it’s not just that photography gets me out of bed; it also takes me to places I otherwise wouldn’t have gone: to places off the beaten path; to looking at the ground, the sky; to driving to remote corners that have no reason to draw my interest – except the chance of a nice thing to view.

The third major impact it’s had on me is to improve my eye for beauty. I always loved beauty before; loved it. I’m one of those people who can be stopped in his tracks by the grain of an old fencepost. But little did I know how much photography would further train my eye. I see pictures everywhere now. I pay attention to lighting, texture, color contrast, lines of perspective. With or without my camera, I take pictures every day, experiencing those unique moments in time, letting my soul breathe it in a few, full seconds, then exhaling with a deep pleasure that I was able to see such things. Some I’ve even the good fortune to capture; but the essential quest, I’ve learned, has nothing to do with hardware.

All that effort, and often for only one image: a chance coincidence of nature and device: when the beauty I see with my own eyes also rings true in the final image – or sometimes even, improved upon.

So today I count myself lucky to have driven around a few hours, seeing what I saw, feeling what I felt, and then to come home with something like the picture above (larger version forthcoming). I never thought that from a simple box at the store would come so much. I guess it’s a matter of how much a thing helps us to know ourselves, that makes it rich.

Detachment can be a tricky concept. It underlies most spiritual striving, but can have many forms. In the Bahá’í Writings, the original word is “inqitaa", derived from "qat”: to cut. One could easily translate this as “severing one’s self from the world”, as in the statement, “Be thou severed from this world…”.

There is, however, an irony to using this metaphor: Is our ultimate goal unity, or separation?

Perhaps “cutting off” refers to something else, a realization of which would draw us closer, not push us away, from the world in which we live. Otherwise, we’re forced into a dualistic metaphysics containing both “God” and “not God” – with our soul always caught between the two. Yet how can what is “not God” possess sufficient reality to command our attention, compared to “God”? It doesn’t make any sense.

Holding unity as my object, then, I re-evaluate my concept of detachment: one in which “detaching” would bring me closer to my goal, not farther away…

For instance, an example from ordinary life: If I’m in a relationship with someone, and they do something that bothers me, the odds are good they didn’t do it to upset me (what kind of friend would that be?). But as long as I let my take on things upset me, it will isolate my heart from my friend. To be closer, I must give up the expectation of mine that bothered me. That is, by severing a part of “me”, I can be closer to her.

If detachment means severing our soul from what blinds us, rather than insulating ourselves from God’s creation, then it echoes something Bahá’u’lláh wrote:

Know ye that by “the world” is meant your unawareness of Him Who is your Maker, and your absorption in aught else but Him. The “life to come,” on the other hand, signifieth the things that give you a safe approach to God, the All-Glorious, the Incomparable. Whatsoever deterreth you, in this Day, from loving God is nothing but the world. Flee it, that ye may be numbered with the blest. Should a man wish to adorn himself with the ornaments of the earth, to wear its apparels, or partake of the benefits it can bestow, no harm can befall him, if he alloweth nothing whatever to intervene between him and God, for God hath ordained every good thing, whether created in the heavens or in the earth, for such of His servants as truly believe in Him. Eat ye, O people, of the good things which God hath allowed you, and deprive not yourselves from His wondrous bounties. Render thanks and praise unto Him, and be of them that are truly thankful.10

I read this quote as implying that what we call “the world” – the reality outside our window – can be either heaven or hell: If it draw us away, it is “the world”; if it lead us closer, it is “the life to come”. Detachment concerns whatever prevents us from appreciating this latter role – which might mean detaching from be our very idea of detachment!!

And so it dawns on me that the fine and beautiful things I see in life do not take me from God, rather, they are my experience of His attributes in the medium of this life. My idea of detachment had created a schism in my heart: a conflict between loving the beauty I saw, and later thinking it was “not God”. But beauty can only derive its nature from the selfsame Beauty my soul has always desired: there need be no conflict. It is this conflict itself I must detach from, for more than anything else, it numbs my soul to the glories around me.

What if the world we see is like an image reflecting off of still water; when we die, we will step across into the source of that reflection. In which case, there is a value to this mundane world that is directly linked to the spiritual worlds, though it contain no substance of its own. So when we pass on, we will not be leaving things behind in one sense – the reflection being in some ways the same as the thing reflected – we will only be leaving behind the pool that offered us our first glimpse into Beauty.

What we see here are the “the brilliant rays of the divine sun shining from the dawning-point of Essence alike on all created things”, and thus here too we can commune with our Goal. Putting aside the mortal coil will simply free our vision, and liberate that communion from all impediment – if we’re ready to handle it. But there is nothing about this world per se to be scorned; it’s simply a matter of seeing the message in the letter – and falling in love with its Author, not the paper it was written on!

A thought

There are several mystics connected now via a web of blogs: Sina, Noufal, Daniela, Arya (and Chris, though he has no blog yet). Believing as we all do in the mystical, and the powers of faith to affect reality: What if we started a regimen of prayer for the increase of each other’s vision? Whenever people have prayed for me in the past, it has always had an impact. I will start those prayers tonight, and would love to hear about the wonderful coincidences that begin appearing in my friend’s lives…

There are some attributes of character which are commonly regarded as detrimental to “getting along in the world”. Well, if what you want most is that, they probably are. But these unsung virtues have other values, which have been on my mind lately. Each one of them is something I’ve come to value, personally, and which at some point or other people have tried to talk me out of. This is my response.

The first is the virtue of being gullible. Yes, it can get one into trouble. The fear of such trouble is typically what steers people away from this precious attribute. I say precious, because it acts as a hedge against the mind’s tendency to believe in its own models of reality. To be gullible is to be willing to give credence to things outside that model. Combined with sufficient reflection, I think it works to our long-term advantage to believe in something first, and then examine its faults afterward. This is far easier than the opposite: to not believe in something, then try to evaluate its merits. The motivation is lacking.

There is something to belief that either closes or opens the mind to seeing new things (which might or might not be “real”). To be gullible is to see more, through a willingness to see more. And once seen, detachment determines how far we able are to keep what is real, and discard what is not.

The second unsung virtue is enthusiasm. I would tend to think everyone sees this as a virtue, but it’s not so. From the Greek, it means “to be filled with God”, or to let the divine powers overcome us for a while. This state is so directly opposed to self-control, that the more I manifest enthusiasm, the more people tell me to calm down. Yet, from that inner fount issues forth so many ideas, so much energy, so much freedom from the excessive controls that bind our thinking: how could it be anything less than a virtue?

The third is naivete. To be naive is to see things as they appear, rather than what they mean – presumably, because one doesn’t understand that meaning. But there is another kind of naivete, which is knowing what things should mean, but preferring to take them at face value. Yes, we can look at an abandoned house and see a derelict structure waiting for destruction; or we can see it as a place of mystery and past lives, begging to be explored. Children invent entire worlds from the ordinary stuff of life, because they simply don’t care for an adult’s interpretation of what they see. They prefer the magic of their own imagination overlaid on the mundane, to what is considered the “right” way of seeing things. Naivete is about stepping back from the concrete, and letting the colors of a scene play in your mind for a while. It can mean missing the finer points, at times; but it can also mean seeing what no one else can see, because they lack the combination of a child’s eye and an adult’s experience. The richness of that combination is what makes naivete a virtue.

To achieve any of these virtues requires a willingness to give up the image of a mature, respectable adult. Not because mature, respectable adults can’t have these qualities, but because displaying them just doesn’t fit the modern definition of such a person. A mature adult is always calm, cool, collected, rational, never flighty, focused on important things, with play set aside for its time. The virtues I’ve described, however, fit more the image of a child than an adult (it’s partly why people continue to think my age is ten years less than it is). But is this because such virtues should only be found in children, or because society desires such control over our behavior, that it deprecates these things without considering their benefits?

I think, in the end, that wisdom requires a willingness to play the fool. Otherwise, how can we be sure the fool’s actions aren’t playing to a bigger picture? Consider the behavior of the great mystics, and how society regarded them, for a poignant example of this.