All my problems seem so solid, only solutions flow. I seem solid, although quantum physics tells me that all matter is made up of mainly empty space. The forces of attraction and repulsion seem solid, as matter is pressed against me or as I press upon some matter’s place.
Existential matters seem heavy as though they weigh unkind upon my mind.
Financial matters seem like actual things that knot together and insist upon a form, upon formal meetings with a choreographed manner of processing what’s due where, to whom, when and what for, in a matter of due diligence, contracted service, work, payment and statements as receipts.
All breath flows, in and out. My blood flows across expansion and contraction, my food digests within a peristalsis of squeeze and release. Everything that is living flows, conversation flows, air, water and electricity flows, love flows.
It doesn’t seem to me, at times that my life is flowing, that it is within necessary boundaries, pressured and purposeful, pumping it’s energy toward a goal; that it’s much fun.
God calls me to return to Love’s flow, in the here and now. Who is the miser of my misery? Not He who makes all, but the he or she who would try make small the beauty of Her face.
I’ve written and written blog entries, social media posts and tweets. It seems a …. long drawn out debt …. man of words, a merely sent invoice for my time’s blood, seeping from a gash of an amateur’s concern for a professional game never really played. It seems that my past life has been nothing but a secret, leaked.
So for now farewell, my android’s metaphoric pen must cap: my leaky way become more light, more robust if I’m to survive, escape and pay down my debt to those who would prefer to see me dead, like them.
Only solutions flow.
“Say Allah then leave them to plunge in vain discourse and trifling” ….
(No just estimate of Allah do they make when they say: “Nothing doth Allah send down to man (by way of revelation)” Say: “Who then sent down the Book which Moses brought? – a light and guidance to man: But ye make it into (separate) sheets for show, while ye conceal much (of its contents): therein were ye taught that which ye knew not – neither ye nor your fathers.” Say: “(Allah) (sent it down)”: Then leave them to plunge in vain discourse and trifling. – Al Qur’an 6:91 (Y. Ali) )
It is said on The Way that “Man proposes and God disposes”.
For me as ‘Abd al-Mu’min this is the living reality of my experience. There is a hadith that says that God fits into the heart of the believing servant.
So, as life poses problems for me, there is a constant flow of possible proposals for me to manifest as a consequence of engaging with life.
These arising proposals are at every level and aspect of my being without exception and with a total unconditional regard. These proposals encompass my physical/mental/spiritual presence and are led only by my certainty of union and conscious contact with God as the experiential fact of my life.
This fact of my conscious contact with God is unassailable but is testable from moment to moment in terms of my inner experience and my manifestation of mental activity and physical action. This fact is embodied in Step 11 of a 12 Step Programme.
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
Thankfully God disposes of His presence in my heart and the extreme limits of my awareness are held in a function of peace and relative possibility so as to make my service possible and bearable, not only for me but also for those to whom I am brought into contact.
This post then contextualises the years of writing that is patently embracing of a message of messianic proportions, but without having to join the queues of disintegrated messianic function that presents itself for treatment in the psychiatric offices of the global health care systems on a daily basis.
My exterior function is integrated in that prayer of Muhammad (pbuh), “O God, I seek refuge in You, from You.”
I am open to any rôle that is possible for me to manifest for God in His/Her/Its creation. I do not crave any particular rôle however, even though the reality of my presence connects the highest with the lowest as may be generally understood by Mankind.
There is not much more for me to say about me personally or explicitly that can expose any further the implicit message that my writings have conveyed over these past few years. The reader can take what suits them and leave what does not, without worry that there is anything to be missed that may be somehow needed.
Events in this physical world on Earth are not what they immediately appear to be, especially at this time of juncture between eras. My posts and communications will attempt to convey the strength and hope that is the antidote to my personal experience, the reality of the protection granted to me by my being who I am.
For you to be able to come to believe in your own Higher Power is the only reason for my writing.
Thus although my writing and talking exposes myself to a scrutiny that is utterly unnecessary for my certainty of and service toward One Love in action that is Life Itself, yet as a catalyst it may be utterly necessary for you to have read or heard it, if your belief in yourself is to become reconnected with what you know of yourself.
Always makes me laugh out loud when I see that analogy, rich and layered about the Universal Spanner …. I of course see myself delivering its efficacy to nuts in the Middle East, in Ukraine, Korea …. The Vatican, Davos, Lambeth Palace, Westminster Palace, The Whitehouse, Europe …. anywhere where the nuts have lost the thread and can’t seem to do what nuts are designed to do on the eternal lightning bolts of creativity, to turn, turn and keep on turning …. not slam their misunderstood bolts across their makeshift locks that are welded with fear upon the closed doors of their armour plated hearts.
My wife, on the other hand …. who knows me so very well …. listens to my grand designs, and smiles …. and with her own inimitable version, seeming more as a wrench to me, asks “but, can you see it in yourself?”
All over the World, religious folks are poring over the ancient texts, trying to emulate the lives of Saints who lived in different times. Many have given up on finding contemporary portals of Spiritual efficacy, overwhelmed by the collapse and infighting of the only global religious vehicles seemingly available to them.
Even the many millions of participants currently working upon themselves within their particular 12 Step Fellowship are perhaps not fully aware of the magnificent global spiritual achievement that they have collectively achieved and are upholding.
Both inside the anonymity of their 12 Step Programmes and outside within the principled application their daily spiritual victory, a message of good news is extended to everyone by these Fellowship members both past and present, within the undeniable success of their global spiritual endeavour.
The many millions of people who are currently in a 12 Step lifestyle are urged to seek ways to pray and meditate. The more deeply world events impact upon the exoteric religious vehicles, the harder it becomes for particular people to truly tune into the Transmission Mast of Indivisible Love that is the wellspring of our existence.
People personalise their Inner Craft, through Step Eleven of the 12 Steps, that powers them upon their further personal journey.
These further personal journeys can then correlate within established collectives to be a catalyst to further and deepen their transformation.
“The last shall be first and the first last.” Matthew 20:16
“Nothing else but ideas will change the world, but they can only do so at their own pace, when they become assimilated and people begin to think differently. That is where objective compassion comes in, that we should set ourselves to live in such a way that corresponds to what is best for the world, and that we should be in effect guinea pigs or demonstration animals to say that it is possible to live in this way, it is possible to be really happy in this way of living and make these kinds of sacrifice. It is no easy thing – however much we may say ‘Yes, yes’ to all this – when it actually comes to giving up having more of something which one has the power to get. It is then the test comes of our objective compassion. … but what is really important is that by having that attitude firmly in ourselves, we become contagious because just as diseases spread by contact, so also does a new point of view spread by contact. We need an epidemic, but that epidemic must be of a new attitude, picked up from people who have it. One has to look objectively. To be distressed over the state of the world, and remain distressed, however distressed one may be, is simply one’s own subjective state. It may even be satisfying to us to feel that we are sensitive and able to be distressed and the rest of it. The real thing is to have this objective compassion, to say, ‘I must do something myself’, that however small in its material consequences, can be very very large in its spiritual consequences.”(Compiled from tapes, Intimations – talks with J.G. Bennett at Beshara (Aldsworth: Beshara Publications, 1975) 16-17.)
Words so often tumble from pretend to contend, so it seems that the square that is called a ring might give a clue to the necessary process involved in doing the impossible – often called ‘squaring the circle’.
The ego and the One can wrestle if they are placed in a safe container to do that work.
Religions (Theist and atheist derivatives), and to some extent the political structures whose roots used to serve them, are designed to provide the narrative material and the square boundaries for the “ring” to appear for an individual evolutionary wrestling match. Recent events in the Christian traditions, in Israel, in the Middle East and elsewhere across the global religious theatre, render this religio-political design as failing, as less than practical for contemporary folk to feel safe within an existential inner wrestling rite of passgage with an invisible Creator: a rite of passage to the very purpose of their having been physically born, of becoming a Human, being.
“Idris, the Biblical Enoch, he who ‘disappeared because God had taken him’ (Gen. 5:24), is mentioned only twice in the Qur’an, and quite briefly. In contrast to that of Adam, his voyage is upward: ‘We raised him up to a high place’, … (Q. 19:57). Ibn ‘Arabi, … also speaks of him at some length in Chapters 14 and 15 of the Futuhat, … he is referred to emblematically as … ‘he who heals wounds’. This reference to a therapeutic role is connected to a long tradition, … which identifies Idris-Enoch with Hermes … and ascribes to him all cosmological knowledge.* Carried off into the celestial spheres, he is taught the mystery of their revolutions, of the links between what is above and what is below, and of how, step by step, divine commandments come down through the great chain of beings. He resides in the middle heaven, where the sun also is, the ‘heart’ of the Cosmos, and he possesses the knowledge of time and of its rhythms that order the cadenced flow of history.
* Islamic tradition ascribes the construction of the pyramids to Idris/Hermes. Foretold of the imminence of the great flood, he is to have represented there the arts and the sciences, as well as the instruments of both.” ( Michel Chodkiewicz, “The Endless Voyage,” The Journey of the Heart Specially for the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society (1996): 77.)
It is not about alcohol, the symbol of the misuse of a spiritual drink and the collapse of an inner meaning may be endlessly debated, what the collective sacrifice of abstinence in AA over eighty years is really about is the undeniable unlocking of the Universal Spanner that is capable of loosening any kind of nut.
Note that the Step doesn’t say to ‘establish’ conscious contact with God, to theorise about the possibility, to ask permission from someone licensed by Government, prophecy or importance. It states that if by the time a person reaches Step 11 and they have changed their behaviour in a clear and categoric manner, hitherto thought impossible, then that power to change is wrought by conscious contact with God.
In the wrestling ring of intellectual disassembly, the concept of such a simple proof of God would be an almost irresistible challenge to any latter day “Big Daddy heavyweight” of post modern academic qualification across any number of disciplines.
However, there is a successful line of spiritual transmission that now spans across a global presence of scores of differing 12 Step Fellowships, that count their practical claims to efficacy, across eight decades of proven fact, in the lives of millions of men and women from 140 countries, all of whom have either lived and died anonymously in conscious contact with God, or are still living anonymously in conscious contact with God, in the world but not of the world.
Historically, members of anonymous 12 Step Fellowships were urged to stay under cover for their health and as a part of their being bridged back to normal living, their Groups sometimes almost as hidden as any ancient Sufi tekke. Current global events are showing that normal living itself may be under threat. The 12 Step phenomenon seems to have become a surviving beachhead of the very sanity that it used to try to return folk to.
“In as much as collectivities are mere accumulations of individuals, their problems are also accumulations of individual problems … Such problems are never solved by legislation or tricks. They are only solved by a general change of attitude. And the change does not begin with propaganda and mass meetings, or with violence. It begins with a change in individuals. It will continue as a transformation of their personal likes and dislikes, of their outlook on life and of their values, and only the accumulation of such individual changes will produce a collective solution.” (C. G. Jung, Psychology & Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1938) 95.)
There seems now to be no excuse for any political, economic, religious, quasi-patriotic, historic or idealistic log jam to persist that is causing misery, degradation and oppression.
But the answer is in the hands of individuals, clearly the politicians and the Central Bankers that they have become embroiled with can’t deliver a new vision. When a sufficient critical mass of individuals return to the Sunlight of the Holy Spirit, the global darkness will give way to a new dawn for all, even if the then political class try to claim it as their initiative.
“An awareness of his true situation and a determination to turn towards God are, however, useless without the grace of God to aid and protect him; ‘… and but for God’s bounty and mercy …’, ‘God guides to His light whom He pleases’. Thus the aspirant must become empty of himself and receptive to the inflow of divine grace. This grace may come to him directly as inspiration and flashes of insight, or indirectly through the scriptures and rites which, as vehicles of grace, serve the seeker as guides and supports. For, in addition to the task of combating his own spiritual blindness and insensibility, the aspirant must wage war against a host of external forces and tendencies which resist and fight the Spirit. The Prophet once said, ‘We are returning from the lesser war (jihad) to the greater war.'” (Translated by R.W.J. Austin, Sufis of Andalusia (Oxford: Beshara Publications, 1971) 53.)
The truth of the global problem and of that problem’s 12 Step resolution, has arrived as the appointment of the 12 Step Programme’s rendezvous with destiny on this World Health Day 2014. Falsehood will shatter. It’s simply a matter of time. Just how deep the global crisis has to become before sanity prevails is now in the hands of individual response. The preparation work is completed successfully. The outcome is not in question, but because the nature of arriving at that outcome is to be lived, it is up to you to do the work and then pass on your message.
“Our Fellowship has been permitted to achieve – though still in miniature – the ‘one world’ dream of philosophers. Ours is a world in which we can hotly differ, yet never think of schism or conflict as a solution. For as long as we remain sure that our ‘one world’ of A.A.’s is God’s gift, rather than any virtue earned or created by ourselves; and for so long as our ‘one world’ continues to be ever more inclusive of those in need: and for so long as we speak and try to perfect the language of love – for just so long may we count upon making whatever rendezvous with destiny that God would have us make.”(Approved by the General Service Conference, The AA Service Handbook on Public Information (York: A.A. General Service Office. York. UK, 1992) 21.)
the HU man healing 