Our Story is Ancient - man and the ego

Kiara Cemetery

41. You will burn, o’ Ego
I am here, o’ Ego,
In spite of you!
How well you disguise
Yourself to be my Heart!
How cunningly do you
Entwine your desire
With my Heart’s desire!
How weary you have
Made me to be!
But it is your mission,
And you are made blind
To my Lord and my Master
In the pursuit thereof!

But my Heart is not blind,
My Heart is not deaf,
So please do entwine
Your vine of thorns
Around my Heart,
But beware!
For there is a flame
Burning therein,
It is white and luminous
And surely, you will burn.

Oh, Ego!
You will never understand me,
As I will never fully comprehend myself,
Such knowledge being hidden
From me for my sake,
And hidden from you
For your sake.

......................................

I am informed by well situated sources that the human ego is an appalling creature - despicable, envious, ambitious, prideful, greedy, cunning, manipulative and chameleon-like in its ability to change colours to suit the cloth we are wearing at any given time - The ego can manifest itself as the priest, the clergyman, the carpentar, the student, the father, the judge, the gambler, the politician, the mother, the poet etc. The list goes on and on. There is no guise that you can put on that the human ego cannot mimic.

Compared to the human ego, the chameleon is a complete amateur at changing its looks

The ego's manifest powers are fitting when it faces its natural quarry - us. Silly, stupid and often careless, we rarely consider ourselves spiritual creatures, what more heavenly beings. But we are. Each of us connected to an ancient story originating from the time of Adam and Eve in heaven, and many infinities further back then that to the creation of the Light of the Beloved. Our story is ancient.

I am stringing this long, long parable because the only clear victory we can achieve over the ego is through the patience, sincerity and honesty contained in the humble cup of servanthood that is offered to every man, woman and child. I myself sometimes accept and sometimes reject this cup. I do this because I am stupid and often egoistic. You don't have to be like me. Indeed, you are better than me.

That is what gives me hope every day that I am alive. Don't you know that, sunshine?

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

Getting Ready to be Unready - Man, Woman and Love

6. Unready and Ready

I am ready, o' Love,

To be unready

And face you,

In whatever guise

That you choose

To wear.

We cannot choose the timing for love. We cannot say that in my 42nd year, after decades of bachelorhood, I am determined to fall in love and get married. As I had written earlier, my oldest friend is about to be wed at a ripe age of 41, just short of his 42nd birthday. Nothing was more surprising than this because he appeared determined to spend the rest of his life in blissful singleton. Do not be fooled into thinking that he is leading a quiet solitary life. For like most of my friends, he is a charmer and an excellent company. Being a diplomat he has friends all over the place. So it was not as if he is searching for companionship.

If he has one personal weakness, if you would call it that, it is his distaste for uncertainty. Time and again he has shared into my ears his unmitigated dislike for volatility and unpredictability. He is fond of clarity and likes to call a spade a spade, and a shovel a shovel.

Well, love has given him a shovel and love is telling him to start digging. To bury his old habits and pick up new ones, to be open to change, and most importantly, to uncertainty. For if there is one adjective fitting for  women, it is uncertainty and unpredictability. For you see, women have figured out that what men need is uncertainty and occasional surprises in our lives. A good scare is healthy and keeps us on our toes, you see. Men should have figured this out by now...

Let me be clear., my love. I am not in the mood. Go away.

So if you are about to fall in love, then prepare to be unready. And in the face of arbitrary whims and feminine guile, our duty is only to listen, to obey and to always (and I mean ALWAYS) say, "Yes, dear..."

Have a lovely Wednesday, sunshine.

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

At the Vocabulary Junction in the Forest of Our Wild Imagination

Forest river, near Janda Baik village, Pahang.

8. Ah, a Woman

Fragile and soft,

Yielding

But ever so

Commanding.

Heche's Abridged Complaint

I was sitting with Heche one day where she was complaining about not having enough self-confidence. I commiserated with her like any gentleman would, until her conversation winded down to "You know... I felt...umm. I felt like... umm...I was like errr..." I interrupted her vocabulary stalemate and commented tartly, "Yes, yes, I know. But do YOU know how lucky you are? If your mastery of the English language is better, can you imagine the sort of despairing prose you can be verbalizing right now? Don't you agree that sometimes it is GOOD not to be able to find the right words...?"

She threw a tissue box at me.

In the Forest of Our Wild Imagination

But really, when you think about it, isn't it good sometimes to be not so imaginative? I myself have a rather vivid imagination, and although I enjoy it, I will confide something with you here - My imagination has led me to some pretty dark places that I wish I have never ever known...

But I guess this is part of life - We don't always end up where we want to end up. And perhaps that is why our attachments to God and good conscience are like bread crumbs we leave behind. So even if we get lost in the Forest of our Wild Imagination, we can still find our way back out...

Alhamdulillah, I see the Sun again!

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

Marriage is Surplus to My Requirements - the King said...

I received this wedding invite a couple of days back. The invitation is from my oldest buddy who has been an active participant of the story, 'Taufiq, His Life' for more than 24 years.

It all began more than a year ago, when I started noticing that this friend has been spending an awful lot of time with a girl. "Is there anything going on with you two?" I tactfully asked. My friend answered in the negative. It's totally platonic he said. Then he went on the attack and said, "The problem with you is that you cannot even entertain the idea of being close friends with a woman without getting romantically entangled."

Six months down the road, again I inquired, "Are YOU sure there is nothing going on?" To which my friend said, "Bro, I am happy. You know me... Marriage is surplus to my requirements." Oh. Okay.

In early December he called me and Heche, "Let's meet up, I have some important news." So we had lunch at our favourite roast duck joint in Bangsar. "Since you guys have been awfully meddlesome about my relationships, I have gotta tell you that me and Pea (for that is the girl's nickname) are getting serious." 

Two weeks after that, King (for that is my friend's nickname) confided that they are unofficially engaged and will have the engagement ceremony in February, which proceeded well according to his postmortem. The wedding is now set for next month. Very fast? I blame it all on King's pent-up tension and pressure of 41 years of bachelorhood.

The cards are designed and printed in Jakarta, Indonesia. Way cheaper there, it seems.

I love weddings. Have a lovely day, sunshine.

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

You Cannot Close the Door I Want to Keep Open - an apologia

You Cannot Close the Door

You cannot own me,

I am not yours to possess,

You cannot say that I am yours alone,

You cannot tell people that you are better than them

And you cannot tell people that

You deserve me more than them,

You cannot monopolize me and my history,

You cannot sway me from my destiny,

You cannot decide who is for me and who isn’t.

You cannot close the door I want to keep open…

Really??

It would be the easiest thing for me to write (and I did - Click Here) that God is for everyone, but the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad (pbuh) is only for us Muslims. But the moment the sentiments were put into writing, I had a strange sensation. A doubt in fact, an awkward question that keeps popping up in between the syllables of my soul, asking, “REALLY?”

Something from the Scriptures

For me, God has made it patently clear (in my hindsight...). His Beloved Muhammad was sent to us. To all of us grandchildren of Adam and Eve, in whatever colour or creed we are clothed in. And it includes terrestrials, extraterrestrials, Mankind, animals, sentient and non-sentients, and even Djinn, whoever they are and however they may exist in any form, shape or energy. So He said in the Quran -

(Sahih International translation)

And We have not sent you, [O Muhammad], except as a mercy to the worlds.

(Pickthall translation)

We sent thee not save as a mercy for the peoples.

(Yusuf Ali translation)

We sent thee not, but as a Mercy for all creatures.

An Apologia

So the thing is, even if you do not accept Muhammad (pbuh) as a Messenger of God and the Seal of the Prophets, you are always entitled to His Mercy. After all, are you not a part of my world, my life and my own humanity? I think this is what my Prophet has been trying to knock into this stubborn head for the longest time. My bad for giving the wrong impression in my earlier posting.

Please forgive my lapse of judgment, sunshine...

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

The Spiritual Hobo and The Spiritual Bourgeois - How to write Songs and Prose

A songwriter is driven by his feelings. I know of one famous songwriter with a large portfolio of beautiful songs before his conversion to Islam. The songs were sincere, melancholy and yearning, with a certain edginess in his music which attracted me.

After he converted to Islam, well... the songs are still rather good. But I could sense the feeling of contentment and satisfaction in the music - A 'I-am-home-already' sorta sentiment which permeates through the music and lyrics. And that is good for him personally, but for me it has lost that 'I-am-lost-I-need-to-find-my-way-back' drama and tension which rippled to the surface of his older songs.

I was talking to my brother about it, and I (cruelly, I think) commented that this musical phase as being the songwriter's 'spiritual bourgeois' phase - That middle-class suburban reality of self-satisfaction you achieve when you think that you have "made it". There is not much edginess or grit in this sort of music. The 'Blues' mood of separation, solitude, rejection, yearning and desire just fell away from the songs.

I hope that at a metaphorical level, we shall always be like hobos riding on a freight train of God. Not knowing where we might end up, living life a day at a time, a loaf of bread and an apple a day, utterly in the Mercy of the Lord who made us all. Because frankly, there is really no other way to write beautiful prose or songs.

The Love is in the searching and yearning. So may our search and yearning never end.

Have a lovely day, sunshine.

wa min Allah at-taufiq

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way

Take your time. You have all your life to discover yourself.

This is just eye-candy. No relevance whatsoever with this post.
Mika was only 5 years old when he caught chickenpox. 

16. Divine Mind-Altering Substance

Food taste better

Prayer feels sweeter

Since I have come to meet

A Naqshbandi Mureed.

Ya Saidi, if we could bottle and sell it

We would be rich, rich, rich!

So wrote an apprentice of a Sufi Order long ago. I was pretty darn happy back then with what I have found.

Now I still feel pretty darn good. But the taste of life and love has altered. I guess it comes with age, for 8 years have passed since this prose was written. The taste is still sweet, but it is more subtle, delicate with many, many layers and nuances.

Of course this means that even if we bottle this experience we shan't be able to sell it in the consumer market. Alas, I won't get rich this way. Not when people want instant gratification, overnight change and spontaneous ecstasy of a spiritual form. Oh, the passion and the wonder are all still there, but the beauty of spirituality is that it turns even the mundane into a beautiful and transcendental experience. Like having your first cup of tea late in the morning while trying to blog something nice. But turning the mundane into something beautiful requires time. Time and effort. Which is the antipathy of our consumer society.

So if you want to drink religion and spirituality, take your time. You have all your life to discover yourself, sunshine. How can you know what you need to know in the context of an infinity of happiness with God when we are still constrained by time? Don't rush.

Pax Taufiqa

Hate has no place in Islam

Love will show the Way