top of page
Search
  • ghayasosseiran77
  • Jan 3, 2024
  • 2 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

Sometimes I’ll attempt to determine my internal state, my intentions, beliefs, sense of self-worth with mirrors. Through external means, the eyes of others, or even through the imagined representation of some other but absent person. Maybe even a group of collaborators to assess what in God’s name is so wrong with me. When I don’t trust myself, the quality of my heart, the sincerity of my values, the honesty of my self-awareness and accountability. I do so as an appeal to ‘objectivity', I suppose. If I can’t trust my self-image to be consistent with how I show up in the world, I might appeal to another’s judgement, even to my own self-criticisms through the imagined judgement of another. How objective is that really? People you love usually have a pretty good experience of your identity over time, a consistent and up to date representation of who you are. And yet, they're not living your internal life, they don't follow you into your dreams or to your job. How objective is this outsourcing of awareness? If you’re having trouble with a physics problem, are you going to ask the professor whose been familiarizing themselves with this problem for 20 years? Or will you appeal to the majoritarian opinion of the hundreds of students who take their class? What about another physics professor who specialized in a different region of physics?


Bad example okay, but you know what I mean tho? In my 23 years of life, no one has as consistent, familiar and as wide an access to my inner life as I do. While it’s important to consider how you show up in the world, how your loved ones know you, as well as maintaining consistency between our inner workings and our actions, it's also important to trust yourself about yourself. This trust is usually earned with ourselves by sufficiently practicing self-accountability and acceptance, making room for our fuck-ups so that we can more readily identify them and tend to them. Trusting yourself about yourself, investigating yourself and your memory banks, holding yourself accountable to your duties is far more gracious than doing all these things from the reflection of someone else’s eyes, or our imagined version of their eyes. Far more authentic and autonomous too.


This world is dirty. All the pearls and jewels will never distract from the fact that all life rises from the dirty, every lotus has to crawl out the mud, every tree blooms from the soil. Dirt is our real, based and sober truth, all our shit stank! We’re all dirty. That’s freedom. 

 
 
 
  • ghayasosseiran77
  • Jan 3, 2024
  • 3 min read

Updated: Jan 9, 2024

Don’t wait until something is gone before you appreciate its presence. When you’re sick, or in pain, nothing means more to you than your health and relief. When you’re healthy we take the incredible work that our body does for us for granted. When I suffer, I pray to God for relief. When I’m relieved, my neglect of God only deludes me from the reality that God encompasses every moment and place. There’s also this tendency to obscure our need for God when we’re used to discouraging our necessity of anyone or anything other than ourselves. That somehow, our radical dependence, emergence from and perpetual return to God, takes away from the self-sufficiency and independence this Dunya taught us to value. It’s difficult to surrender to the tessellating unity of creation the indivisible co-dependency that multiplicity holds with singularity. When we’re terribly afraid that we’ll be hurt again, that things won't go our way, that we’ll somehow be punished for our vulnerable surrender to God. 


Dependency of any kind is such a fragile state unless it’s mediated by Allah. Financial dependency is brutal, so is the dependency that hearts have on one another. I guess that’s okay when we’re kids dependent on the love and support of our families, but adulthood scraps that. Unnecessarily in my opinion, I don’t think we ever escape our dependency on the love and support of our people. Noticing that all of the rizq is from Allah helps with detachment, independence, but also by letting us remain dependent on our networks of care, mediated by Allah to whom all Love belongs to and comes from. Dependence on Allah’s love or rizq, except as that love and rizq figures between our relationships. If two friends know all their love and their money came from Allah then their dependency on one another is in fact a dependence on the mediation of a higher power both friends adhere to, in principle and action.


Firstly, our dependency on God is different from a dependency on any corporeal person or material object. You might think it brave to strip your essence from the realizable world, stand alone in a void to survive on nothing but sheer will. But it's even braver to realize that we can’t do any of it alone. We can’t face the grandeur of this universe alone, learn its secrets alone, live pleasantly and happily alone. We can either fight our desperate and at times problematic need to belong, to need others and be needed in return, or we can reconcile it with the fear of living at the mercy of creation by living at the mercy of Allah. When we abandon our need for belonging and support to multiplicity, to the transitive properties of a physically present or absent community of loved ones, to objects of power we can hold until they eventually hold us, we’ll find ourselves manufacturing a network of sustenance that is both temporary and unfulfilling. A network of sustenance that is already existent in a more natural, immanent, and dare I say eternal way. Surrendering to the world as-it-is requires we walk through the gates of our hearts as we are. We’re not always going to enjoy the outcome, the circumstances or our response to them, and while ‘I’ am a living testimony of my existence, I trust in the unfolding of my life, I trust in the order that my peace and trials hold in the grand scheme of things. The peace we find after dissonance, the tendency of chaos towards relief and harmony. I and by extension, creation, am never disadvantaged by God, fortune is myopic when we defer to the comfort we get from living in a system governed by Allah, one with a tendency towards equilibrium and balance. 


PS: Just because the universe tends to unfold as it should, this doesn't exempt us from our roles as actors on its stages, as forces of good or idleness.



 
 
 
  • ghayasosseiran77
  • Jan 3, 2024
  • 4 min read

Updated: Jan 4, 2024

Summer 2022

There’s a world of productive spirits that’s a little overwhelming, hard to leave behind, one that rewards courage with care. I didn’t realize how hard it was to surrender to the universe, to trust it, when you’ve had to fear the places you call Love. It’s a bizarre world, but as real as anything my heart has had the honor of seeing. I went to Nomad with Reemo, the river home hanging on the clouds, where the skies took flame and danced with the Shaman. It was a wonderful sight, the Shaman from the outskirts of Brazil sang Icaros yesterday night. He poured his soul into every strum, every syllable, he and his instrument were both expressions of the same spirit. You really felt that his words were resonating with so much weight, to the point where I spent most of the night crying, drawn out of my shell, bringing me out of my hiding place and into this wonderful world. I’ve been holding onto alot, knowing my path, myself, but not believing it, keeping myself from the experience in an unsafe defensive strategy of intellectualizing what can never be explained or understood, only felt. Pessimistically holding off from what I know to be true, holding myself away from the uncertainty of worlds way bigger than I could ever be, hiding from the shadow of my ’s gun. Hiding behind the promise of illusory and fantastical love.


The Shaman moved out of his body, deep into the moment He and the world of spirit around him were communing in. The flames danced with his voice, with the outpoor of will, feeling, ernest and natural expression. It’s one thing to know of the world of spirit, to see the colors flowing around the singing Man, to see his aura expand and contract, to see when there is no longer a distinction between the spirit of man and the bright spirits of the nature he cloaks himself in, it’s another thing entirely to live it. I wonder if you could cloak yourself with the spirit of the stars. Ahh this stoic man I knew nothing of, the man with the many blurring faces, the man with the child in his heart. It’s as though he carried with him a history of a people, stories that decorate and give meaning to the halls of his heart. A home, for the Man lost in the desert. This surrender to his immaterial spirit to the flow of his life force through his craft, his communion with the energy of the life warming fire, the wind and the tales they string together, the moon and the times they speak of, the all-colorful Sun, breathing all of us in. It didn’t feel like surrender at all, it felt like his most true and practiced nature. The reality he’s named home.


This place is filled with butterflies, it gives me lots of comfort. The rocks here, the fire pits, the walls, the water, even the pets that live here, they share a story, a sense of equilibrius self-sustenance. The trees take care of one another, the lamps remember the kind candles that give it life, it’s like time twisted in on itself here, the love that strings it together collapsed in on itself and now fills the space with all sorts of moments from the past, the still present and the future, or maybe  I’m just intellectualizing what can’t be put into words. The Shaman wore this 8 eyed and two feathered helmet, it was so cool I thought he could look into my soul. I wonder if it’s a two way door, you can only meet a soul as deeply as you stand in yours. In a way we all saw each other, felt each other, and most wonderfully, allowed each other to be. There is this propounding sense that the space feels itself as sacred, everything I touch I want to put back to place, everything I take I give in return, whatever I clumsily bump into I apologise to, the cats rest in Love here, so much so that they’ve become ambassadors of compassion and gentleness.


It’s not enough to have knowledge or awareness of the living force, not merely enough if you don’t let yourself experience it, surrender to its transitive unity. God is living, but God is Greater, God is dead and God is ever Greater. Reemo also taught me about spiritual maturity, accepting the loneliness of spiritual solitude, but learning to keep yourself company, you and your kind and gentle heart. Learning about ourselves, returning to the childlike wonder of an unfolding day, of a day that we never want to see end, that’s an incredible thing. Not only making space for ourselves and everything we could possible want ourselves to have the freedom to explore, but also accepting ourselves irrespective of how we show up in the world, validating the things we do for the reasons we do it. You wanna stay home? Bet! You wanna cry? Do it. You’re gonna puke? Go for it!! You wanna be an unabridged, fully extending, self-assured, self-directed, wonder-filled, goofy, unapologetically loving, fearless and self un-absorbed you?? Then for the Love of God, do it!!!

 
 
 
bottom of page