The Hearth Within
Introduction
We are all born, and we soon shall pass. It could be today, tomorrow, or decades from now from ashes to ashes. I once perceived the infinite cycle of being as a meaningless passing; why should I continue “living”? We are born into a capitalist society that values consumption above all else; the self is a means for an end. If we are reluctant to end our lives, we might as well enjoy the pleasures we have and be “happy,” and I sought to find that in dopamine. I pursued the route of being an egoist, seeking only to consume and believing that I am by default special. However, I also found an emptiness that kept getting deeper, like a never-ending well; I could never satiate my cravings for more. If I cannot end life or consume, I am left with the mundane. How do I start seeing the weight of vastness surrounding me?
Before we move forward, I use my narrative as a tool to introduce the concepts I think are important to finding fulfillment and content. I, the conceptualized ego, am not important holistically; I am an infinite being with the sensory to experience living. Like an astronomer discovering the stars, the astronomer can only witness the vastness but not influence it, and so am I.
Listening to the Call
After graduating as a civil engineer from a prestigious university, I vividly remember the moment I had noticed the delusion I had built over the years. As with all people, we seek to find security and well-being for our future, which means establishing a stable career. I loved the theory and literature on the mathematics behind solving complex soil mechanics problems, but that love did not manifest when working as a civil engineer. I had worked day after day, loathing life and wondering when the despair would end. My spirit, mind, and body were depleting. When I initially began feeling the resistance from continuing the same path, it seemed impossible to change my mind since my father had invested in my education, and my family had strong expectations of me to support them financially. I had reached an ultimatum. Either I continue to live an unfulfilled life wasting away years, or I defy my family’s expectations and live deliberately. This was the call to change, and it took me five years to listen.
When I took the pivot in my career to become a software engineer, although I was proud of my deliberate action, I had lost the support of my loved ones. The flexibility and the ever-changing nature of the field would equip me to create things I wanted to see in the world. I had found it satisfying and a joy to learn to code, and simultaneously I was thankfully united with a friend from childhood, Omar. My prospects for success in my career path were limited in the Middle East, and subsequently, my anxieties and depression were projecting to a new level. Without the support of my family, Omar was there to show me a new way to see the world’s experience through a new lens. This was another call, but for stillness.
Mere desire to transcend one’s ignorance is not enough; a journey out of ignorance towards truth must necessarily involve purification from worldly limitations. The path has laws that one must obey, and with the call, a being will be available ready to guide our ignorance. Through the teacher’s lens, we can see. (Angha)
Pilgrimage to Shore
On Friday nights, when the temperature was slightly cooler, and the city was tumultuous with parties, we would spend our time in stillness on Kite beach in Dubai. There, Omar and I would sit down together and talk about our experiences as young engineers trying to find purpose. He would teach me lessons he learned in his journey and beauty in life when I could not. It was the concept of separating the being from the ego, and to do that, one ought to define and understand what both mean. In the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, he separates the two entities by questions and answers defining each. One of the most distinctive properties of the ego is that it can determine the future and the past.
On the other hand, the ego seeks to control time and space, which is a delusion, pushing our minds to act like the donkey chasing after the carrot. The ego holds our well-being hostage to secure an objective that we want to achieve that we lose ourselves in the process so desperately (Tolle). We also discovered another to discover the being, but more divinely, Anthony Paul Moo-Young, i.e., Moojibaba, speaks of the effortless self, the self that requires nothing beyond what it already has. He uses the hums that his teacher, Papaji, had trained him to indulge in to nudge out the ego’s delusion. Its elemental influence is from the Buddhist religion that sees desire as the ultimate form of suffering (Moo-Young).
We would first meditate on the sand by the waving shore by finding stillness. Omar would start performing a hum, and I would echo it back. As we continued this sequence, my mind would stop racing, my heart rate would drop, my breathing slowed down, and I would start to listen to the sound of the waves by the shore close by. I could always hear the waves, but I was not truly listening until we found stillness. After we started listening to the waves; it got louder and louder; we would get dizzy, almost as if we were tranced. Only then would we start the pilgrimage to the water; I remember feeling every grain of sand with every step. We would float with only our noses surfacing from the water when we entered the water. We would release the tension from every muscle in our bodies, all this while we were knowledgeable of the clenching fear of the unknown dark medium beneath us. We could not tell how far we drifted from shore or how long we were in the water. Our thoughts became like clouds passing through the vast sky of our beings. We were no longer the slaves to thoughts or sought to chase after the distractions when we were in the water; we were paying attention to the infinite.
Prayer and Islam
During the pandemic, I experienced the peak of my depression, and at that time, I could not find the shore I had been trying to seek to relieve my racing mind. I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder amid the lockdown in my hometown, Dubai. I was trapped, yearning to quench my thirst for water, the thirst for surrender. I was appointed to phycologists and psychiatrists to help “fix” me. After months of mental interrogation, they pointed out that my surrender was not being practiced, and they urged me to seek a higher power to speak to. In other words, peace is not external but within my infinite being. Again, I felt the ultimatum simmer, and I heard the call, but for something even deeper. I needed to sacrifice a bigger piece of the ego with every call. The teacher here was my phycologist, Peter, an empathetic Christian from Buffalo, New York that understood the horrors of loneliness and the emptiness that comes with it.
Growing up, the only religion I ever practiced was Islam, but with time the connection to that higher power, Allah, drifted as I got distracted by worldly illusions. In Islam, which means surrender in Arabic, ablution is compulsory before any prayer, of which there are five every day. Once I began my ablution for my first prayer in a very long time, it felt like the time I was in the water with Omar on those cool and quiet Friday nights. Then during the prayer, I would feel the composure and stillness while reciting the prayer with absolute surrender to Allah in every step afterward. I see it as a dance that I must perform the ensure that my ego is at bay — the bow and then the prostration in particular. My worries and anxieties felt channeled through and out to the ground like how electricity from lightning strikes a grounding pole. I no longer held onto the physical world when I was in prayer.
During my time in Dubai, I have been blessed to meet a warm group of friends from Pakistan. One of my friends, Mubashir, once held a Qawwali event in his home, and when I attended, it felt like a surreal drunkness. What kind of love is this to Allah? This certainly was not the normal movement of prayer that I knew, but it was different, more vocal, and fervorous. I was curious, and I fell in love with the practice of singing about god without uttering his name and drawing him without an image.
Throughout my fall semester in university, I began a quest to dig a little deeper and played around with what Allah loves to describe himself. What Allah loves, therefore I must love. I noticed the words he describes himself as like الله (Allah — God), الجبار (Al Jabber — The Almighty), الرحمان (Al Rahman — The Merciful), العظيم (Al Atheem — The Magnificent), and الوكيل (Al Wakeel — The Entrusted). There were also five fruits he mentions in the Quran: Olives, Pomegranates, Dates, Grapes, and Figs. I then dissected each word and fruit in two symmetrically to the horizontal center of the center half of the paper piece. There can only be meaning by only physically moving the first paper on the other, the drunken chaos of the passing art piece just as life, while the fruit gets eaten by my five loved friends ones.
Now I am at the shore at last. I can enter the water in demand. My cravings for distractions are negated when between the prayer timings. I am consistently within a state of contentment, neither happy nor sad, as though life were a mirage.
Joy in the Mundane
Between my prayers, I recite praises to constantly remind myself of the vastness of Allah’s influence and how little mine is. The prayer serves to keep me wet and maintain it; I must constantly remind myself about the surrender by uttering مَا شَاءَ الله (Mash ‘Allah — What Allah has willed) or سبحان الله (Subhan Allah — Glory be to Allah) when I heard the sound of the hawks that fly over me, the smell of plantation after the storm, or when I see the sunrise in the misty mornings. Paying attention to the history and beauty in the “mundane” no longer makes things around us as objects but as subjects of our reality. We no longer subconsciously believe that we own the fates of anyone or anything.
This became even more pronounced when I met Hannah, a person I have learned to love dearly. I believe she sees the beauty of life more than I and most do. As we spent time together and as I narrated physical environments, she taught me to pay attention to the sounds I hear but do not listen to, objects I touch but do not feel, and the voice I utter but do not speak.
When I confided in her that I was not finding the intimacy I once had in my prayers, I had been praying five times a day for over a year, and I had found it mundane and an inconvenience. She measured the situation and asked me to pray in front of her. She noticed the rush I had during the prayer. She told me to recite the Quran aloud, change the Surah recitation, and learn the meanings of each word I uttered during those prayers. She explained that I ought to imagine eating the same dish every day; you will dislike it if not revolt against it. Like the saying “a rolling stone carries no moss,” so was the case here; the fleeting nature of keeping things the same will fester the process. It is either we move forward or frustratingly roll backward. Hannah does not identify herself as Muslim, but she knew how to be one more than I did. I consider her to be my wise teacher to walk me on the path of finding true liberation in seeing the unseen.
Conclusion
I ended where I started, just like the Shepard in The Alchemist or Eisik the Rabbi in The Calling. The Shepard crossed lands searching for gold that he saw in his dream at the pyramids only to find it where he began (Coelho). Eisik found the gold he was called to search for by the great sprawl of a bridge only to find it in his stove at home (Cousineau). In both stories, the parables emphasize that we can see the home’s hearth through the pious journey that the promised gold lies. It is within us — The effortless self. The call need not only come to us through our dreams. It can be through the surreal experience of our daily lives — we need to pay a little more attention to the “mundane.” The little voice speaks to you when feeling something from within that we usually brush away when it challenges our value and reality.
Needing to remove ignorance is a process that requires patience and commitment. We ought to abide by a strict process to slowly strip away our ego by surrendering. Surrendering to god’s will that comes in our way, the water that we all quench. We ought to keep our senses open and deliberately become intimate with the details of our surroundings. Accept the magnetic fields that attract us to teachers, and these teachers come in different forms. The teachers may not conform to your beliefs, but the commonalities that you both hold will build a bond beyond words. Entities that hold lenses allow you to see the path we will take to become drunk with the intimacy of god’s grace within us. Just as Khidr was to Moses, my wisdom teachers were Omar, Peter, Mubashir, and Hannah.
Finally, maintaining that relationship with a higher power comes with its challenges. However, finding the variation and curiosity can allow us to swim liberally in our essence because, without them, we will indeed drown in ignorance, for we must move, breathe, and most importantly, remain wet.
Works Cited
- Angha, Dr. Nahid. The Journey: Seyr Va Soluk. International Association of Sufism Publications, 1991.
- Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. HarperTorch Publishers, 1988.
- Cousineau, Phil. The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Conari Press, 2000.
- Moo-Young, Anthony Paul. An Invitation to Freedom. New Harbinger Publications, 2018.
- Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now. New World Library, 2004.
