The Kingdom of Heaven, The Fall of Man

There are two models by which the Kingdom of Heaven has been perceived and, more to the point, enacted, on the earth: authoritarian and collectivist. What is difficult, at this space in time, is to recognize that both of these enactions were considered utopian at the outset. Time has taken the sheen off the authoritarian model (in the West, though how many millions had to die for that illusion to fade) but the collectivist model still maintains its allure, an allure that Marx was himself captivated by, and without which, Marxism, as a movement, would have few converts.

Marx himself was a latecomer to the game—one discernable in the various monastic enclaves to some extent or the other— but fully flowering in the Anabaptist movement, a movement which still maintains the longest sustaining utopian communities. Even with the schisms within the Anabaptist movement over the years, those splinter groups still found and sustain successful communal groups for substantially longer periods than anyone else on record. The founding philosophy of those groups is shared communal resources and practiced generosity within that group. This is the very basis for Marxism, and others that preceded it of a more religious vein, but the success of the Anabaptists lies in having not just shared resources, but a shared nature. Anyone who does not lean in that particular direction either leaves on their own or is asked to leave by the group itself. By this “free-acceptance, free-association,” the Anabaptists reveal that they understand full well that human nature is not constant and in this they create insular, but workable communities because of that. There are absolutely no pretensions towards universalism to be found in the Anabaptist doctrines nor in their practices.

This is the problem with utopianism: once the notion of universality enters the frame, the “Kingdom of Heaven” has long since fled the utopia, primarily because no one ever asks: “A utopia for whom?” Not everyone has the same idea of Utopia. In fact, most people do not. The question, once universalism manifests itself, is what to do with those who do not share one’s vision of “paradise.” For the 16th Century Anabaptists, this was a fairly simple solution: ask them to leave. If there were more of them than there were of the Anabaptists, then they would move somewhere else. But universality can accept no distinction in its foundations or it is not universal at all. There is only one way for a universal movement, then, to consider and address the world: those who keep the faith, and those who do not, those who are, by definition, aberrant. Had this come to the fore earlier, this perhaps would have posed too insolvable a problem as to make the enaction of the collectivist model demonstrably impossible. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

The introduction of the study of statistics enters history at this point, and, certainly, and its benefits are hard to argue. The problem, however, with statistics is the mindset it creates, that being generally accurate is to be thoroughly accurate. This is not the case. Statistics can predict, with alarming accuracy, the occupations and fates of the general subject, but it cannot predict that absolutely. It can foresee that a certain percentage of the population will obtain a college degree, but it cannot predict their names, their faces, before or after the fact. What statistics does is create a simulacrum of numerical subjects with which to mathematically compile and experiment upon, and it does this very well. So long as the line between man and his analogue is maintained, this was hardly a problem.

The world, however, had other plans.

________

The Era of Enlightenment began as a throwing off the shackles of the monarchy and the Church, both of whom had long illegitimately influenced—where they had not outright intimidated—human development. But, once the tentacles of both institutions were sought out, they were found to be everywhere, and once they had been severed, found to have run like a flaw through everything. Quite suddenly, the West found itself without any foundation, nor restraint, to the world they found themselves in. And that world now was, quite literally, raw material.

They cut too thoroughly and too deep. If the very value of human life was gauged by those two institutions, then they would have to themselves and all over again measure and enumerate these most basic things as they began to rebuild. How fortuitous, then, that science had made such progress in the interim, and it uncorrupted by Kings and Priests either one, for none ever made so exacting an array of tools as science to be brought to this very task.

Statistics as a science was quite the boon for progressivism, and in particular in a state where holy writ had been abrogated. Stripped of a soul (that which science cannot prove does not exist, not to mention that the existence of a soul might unpleasantly point to God, perish the thought) Man is nothing but upright and walking chemicals. He is material to be experimented on. The terms of the experiment were statistically articulated and for all intents and purposes correct statistically, as a statistical model can express the weaknesses in a society, and can also calculate and model the movements necessary to improve on those weaknesses. Hence the model can suggest where social rearrangement and removal would be most propitious, and that accurately, as simple numbers on paper.

Were Mankind merely numerical this would prove unproblematic. Such is not the case. Social rearrangement entails forced relocation, without any approval from anyone other than their Benefactors. It includes reeducation among social abberants, not simply in how to acclimatize themselves to their new lifestyles but into the proper mindset entirely. If an aberrant is incapable of recognizing Utopia when he sees it, perhaps he might come to see it once he has been reeducated. And if not, as statistical models show, the stubborn aberrant becomes waste material and should be ejected from the experiment. Permanently.

Socialism presented itself as a scientific program. Its varying iterations suggested that if the program were followed to the letter, like all scientific programs, the end would justify the means. The problem is not that none of its iterations succeeded, but that once the “scientific” systematic method was applied, only another systematic program could succeed the previous failure. That is to say, once the programmatic approach is engaged upon, one cannot stop until a program succeeds. And these programs must be systematically total. To suggest a partial program to redress the failed complete program is to suggest the absurd. One iteration must be as comprehensive as the other or it is judged incomplete and unnecessary. And this has been going on in Europe and Asia for a long, long time now. Program after program. Rearrangement and disappearance, one after another. The roles change from one group to next, year after year, down the generations.

This also integrated a systemization of thought, a mindset so deeply rooted in the populace that it became impossible for them to address anything without those systems. The question of whether the government (or anyone, for that matter) should even be involved in addressing these problems, systematically or not, was anamethea. It became every bit the blind faith they had stubbornly derided and destroyed in the Faithful, but it was a faith in a manifestly broken machine, a machine which had never so much as worked at all.

It is nearly impossible for anyone in this situation to maintain any faith in anything, with one colossal failure after another, and the ensuing readjustment, when the only means of redressing it is yet another program, another turn at the roulette wheel.

________

Compared to this America presented a considerable problem. It offered no program. Capitalism is what people do naturally. No one has to indoctrinate anyone into capitalism. It is the default of any mode of exchange, even criminal. Couple that with democracy and freedom of speech, both seemingly as natural—one only really needs to instruct the citizens how not to impinge upon other people’s freedoms, not to pursue their own—and the evident lack of any program was remarkably noticeable.

The problem with America’s lack of a program was that it was manifestly imperfect. It widened rather than redressed social inequities. It did not manage anything socially, so that Man’s natural social behavior—ugly as it happens to be on occasion—was not directed in a positive way. To this, America had no plan. Because the Enlightened understand that most people need to be managed, the lack of a plan was alarming. The realization that their plans had failed, over and over again, had never manifested itself, primarily because they were so entrenched in plans—conceiving them, implementing them, adjusting them constantly as the experiment went wildly awry—that the moment to stop and assess had never presented itself either.

No matter how seemingly perfect the plan, no matter how expediently enacted, every plan failed while America, without so much as a program, continued, one age after another, one paradigm shift after another, to not only maintain but thrive. The question seemed never to occur to them as to why, why so many minds and so many plans could not create for a moment the success of the United States.

What immediately becomes noticeable is not the plan but those made subject to them, over and over again. Through one experimental iteration after another—experiments first of all to improve the populace—they have ground that populace down to Subjects only. As any initiative on their parts could run afoul of whatever new program emerges, they refuse initiative. As any individual responsibility is contrary to their masters plans, now or in the future, they refuse that as well. They are like mice in a maze; they may perform but only when prodded to do so and otherwise they sit inert, awaiting the next prodding to come. Not only are they incapable of initiative, they are incapable of repairing the damage in any social program whatsoever; they are not even capable technicians to the machine they exist in. Every generation is poorer the more improvements enacted upon them.

Compared to this what America created, not only through the freedom but also a sense of responsibility, was Individuals. The Individual is not acted upon, he is the actor. It is only through this that the flaws in any machine, business or social, can be addressed, from without, and it is an eternal irony that the Individual, the absolute enemy of Systemization, is still the only one who can maintain the machine of the System. But the US had, because the Individual is so loathe to being acted upon, a peerage of Individuals, all of whom could argue the means of addressing any problem and weigh the means to repair it—or even if such a repair might be too stringent, whether it was anyone’s business to address it at all— before working said repair upon it. Common sense was the linga franca among them as common sense was the best means of persuading the peerage. They are engineers of the moment, addressing problems of the moment, but they are, to their great benefit, not sequestered in any one place, but everywhere— not only existent at the federal or state or even local level of government, but in the business community, churches and schools— moving forward when the others among the peerage have failed to address the emergent problems or been unsuccessful in doing so. If each group singularly moves forward with plans of their own, the most successful plan will in the end rule the day. Success is evident in what works. With this emphasis on the peerage, what emerges is the America was built to be an imperfect machine. Constancy was abhorrent to the founders, who had witnessed with their own eyes the shifting current of change and realized there was never a machine complete enough to adjust, infinitely, to it.

This is where the chasm between these two approaches is most pronounced. The social engineers of the Enlightenment were attempting to create a perpetual motion machine, which, granted, never worked at all, but even if it had worked, would have concreted them in a static system while all around them the rest of the world continued to change. And no means of adjusting it once it had begun. The Kingdom of Heaven was doomed to failure, and with it emerged the Fall of Man; He is no longer a Man but a Subject, denied even His Soul to succor Him. When the pressure becomes unbearable, He may lash out in mob violence, but as a rule He simply submits. It is hardly surprising the alcohol addiction in former Soviet Union; how better to keep the pain away? How better to submit than to foil the tongue from speaking or the mind from loosing its cage? How much better a world of fog and alcoholic vagueries than to stop and realize just how much like cattle the bootheel of the Enlightenment has made of oneself for to whom would one make their case; in the Kingdom of Heaven, even their God is denied them.

Whose Lord This Is

I have lived in Texas all my life, all over the state, though primarily in rural or suburban areas. I was raised a charismatic Baptist; there weren’t any holy rollers but, short of that, it was awfully close sometimes. I was always pretty faithful, a good kid; helped out at church a lot, was in the choir. I got baptized when I was about 13, and while I can’t honestly say for sure that was when it began, I can say that I don’t recall it occurring before then either, but I would find myself in the presence of God. You know, just out doing things. Maybe two or three times a month. The primary problem that I had at the time was that His presence really didn’t resemble what I had been taught to expect, nor were the implications that seemed to arise by the “character” of what I perceived as God.

It was like fire, really, not hot but like some sort of unseeable and relentless brilliancy, and my reaction to it, on a physical and spiritual level, was an overwhelming and almost maddening desire, and that desire seemed to be reflected back— though in an even more overpowering essential form; it was nearly unbearable— from the Presence: a Love as opposed to the treacly “love of God” one finds espoused to on crochet in kitchens all across the US. I had grown up under the impression that God loved us basically like a father loves his autistic son or a master loves his dog; this was nothing like that. It wasn’t like anything I was familiar with. It put me, also, at a loss as to what to do about it.

It, I’m sure, begs (at least) a couple of questions. How did I know it was God? I mean, it could have been a delusion, right? The mental institutions are full of people who “see” God. I could say that—and trust me, this is something I have myself looked into— in the cases of “divine” delusions, more often than not, that delusion is telling them to do something. This wasn’t telling me to do anything. It was just… manifesting… itself. The alternate (and honest) answer to that question, though, is easy: I did not and do not know save for my faith that it is so. What other possible answer could I have? Don’t think that simply because I know this is God now that there were not times in my life where I didn’t think it could have been something else, anything else. Quite the contrary, and no more reason did I need than the next question this raises: what did I do to deserve this? Honestly, I cannot for the life of me think of anything that I might (or could) have done to have brought this upon me. It’s so difficult to express just how— astoundingly powerful (the fact that I sat here for three minutes trying to come up with something and that is the best I could do certainly points to the problem of expression)— this was; I cannot really imagine what I could have possibly done to justify it. I cannot imagine how I could have ever deserved this. But. There we are.

But because this was so much in variance with the depictions of God in, well, just nearly any religion you can name, I didn’t know what to do. It alienated me from the religions around me and so I went looking around to see if maybe I could come to some sort of grips with how I needed to address this. I read what I could find about nearly every religion or spiritual group I could find. This was, for me, not really such a trial— I have always wanted to know. Not just what something is, but down in the root of everything what those things mean. I was getting a world class tour of the landscape. But, except maybe a little piece of something here or there, I wasn’t making much progress as far addressing the particular nature of this Presence.

It was somewhere around 1993, I think: I was living in Tyler, and I had heard there was going to be an exhibit of Jain religious sculpture at the Kimball Art Museum in Ft. Worth. At the time, I didn’t have a car, since I was living and working in the city. I decided I’d take an extra day off from work and take the bus to Ft. Worth.

I remember on the ride to Dallas, feeling sort of rarified. I don’t really know what to call it other than that. It was like being high on something except my mind and my eyes were astoundingly sharp, like my self would have drifted away if it wasn’t for the iron talon of the mind. That was all, though, that I seem to recall unusual before I got to the main terminal in downtown Dallas where I was going to have to wait a couple of hours before connecting to Ft. Worth.

Now I have been laid over there on more than one occasion and I have also been in that part of town on other business. I knew that the best way to kill an hour or two in that part of downtown (for me) was to go to the little park behind the Federal Building, said park situated right across the street from the beautiful old Adolphus Hotel (one of the few old buildings left in downtown Dallas.) It was usually virtually empty except at noon. I knew every step up Commerce Street to the park: the big vents on the side of Federal Building that made the seams in the black marble weep in the summertime, the vending shops small and sepulchral beneath the lee of the east wall of the building; greencopper gargoyle heads leering from above the balconies of the Adolphus across the street. I left the bus station and stepped across the street to the big parking lot there and what I saw simply left me awestruck. I kept walking as I went along, crossed the lot and into the rising buildings there on Commerce. Like I said, I had been here before.

We don’t simply process sensory information. We take that information and we induce substance into the perceptual world that is not real. How much we bend that information by simple association: you like this building; you don’t like that one; this one reminds you of another building from a long time ago. Figures and objects stand out from one another or fade back into near oblivion by our association alone. We cannot trust the veracity of anything we perceive because it is laden with association that makes us blind to some things and see too well the others. This was something that was made very, very apparent to me because I found myself walking in a world without association, even though I knew the way. I kept walking to where I was walking to, but every building, every past association, every abstract association was stripped utterly bare from me.

I think it was about then that I noticed the shadows thrown from the buildings. It was about two in the afternoon, long enough past noon in the summer for those shadows to have deepened and lengthened at angles beside the structures that cast them. What I saw was them pale and almost nonexistent, nothing more than a vague frame where the solid shadow would be. What I also saw was something else, something like a shadow that emerged cast from another angle and from building after building, and longer, more intense than the other framed shadows were. I wandered out at some point, out to the parking lot again, following the shadows and the “shadows” both cast at oblique angles of each other from parking meter after parking meter, and then I turned around and I saw the buildings again and I realized they were somehow without substance.

It’s hard to explain. They almost looked like figures come and gone in a multiple exposure photograph, layered upon one another translucent. Some of those buildings appeared more solid than the others, the older those buildings were, but the translucency was a matter of degree only. Only the Trinity River valley the city sits in seemed solid, and I had some strange idea that if I looked hard enough, even its substance could be called into question. It was then that I recognized that what rendered the strange shadows and the buildings (the world?) translucent and without substance was an intense white cast of light that I could see, come from some source I could not, and I remember hearing in my mind something (as if I had known this all along) that I could not look at the source of that light or it would destroy me: everything that was or is or will be was existent, at this very moment, in that light. Creation was constant and instantaneous, generative and caustic at the same time, and it existed solely in that light.

Since I had gotten off the bus, really, that rarefied sensation and that glittering mental clarity had just intensified every second this was going on. Everything that had happened was so… astounding… and yet it never seemed alien to me; it seemed entirely natural. Like seeing the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls: it is breathtaking, maybe even awe-inspiring, but it never seems unnatural. This was the same thing. At the time, I suppose the thing that most struck me about the light was how utterly… mechanical… it seemed to be. It existed in and of itself. Its form was its function. That was all that it was.

Now about this time, I felt the presence of God again. I remember that, unlike most of the times I have experienced this, this time the character had changed somewhat. He appeared to be rather bemused at my reaction to what I had seen.

A friend of mine and I were discussing something peculiar that happened to him during his devotional, and I told him this story to make a point. I think God is more than willing to give us what we want, what we think we want. I mean, like I said: I’ve always wanted to know, always wanted to understand what things meant at the root of everything. Here God was showing me what I wanted to know: this was, after you had reduced everything that could possibly be reduced, the root of everything: an appliance. I could almost hear His voice in my head: “Is this not what you wanted? You can go on now. You can go away satisfied…” I think that would have been exactly what I could have done, right then, gone away satisfied, and yet the very nature of Him, manifest as He was to me and in such a direct relation to this awesome… thing…. made it impossible for me to ever be satisfied with anything save Himself. That was the entire point. You can have whatever you want, or God can have what He wants, which is everything, and if you find that a difficult decision to make, then He already has His answer.

______

I don’t remember getting on the bus. A vague recollection of the airconditioned cabin and the smear of cars passed in the streets, one seamless line of them. Being stuck in traffic. It was later than usual when I got to Ft. Worth and I wandered out of the station filled with this sort of amiable idiocy, like someone had hit me on the head with a hammer. No doubt, Someone had. Downtown Ft. Worth was virtually empty in those days after people got off work and I recall seeing cars parked up the street from the Flatiron Building all of them with quarter-sized rustspots covering the hoods, the doors. I thought, with an agreeable confusion: “Where am I now? Beirut?” The spots did look like holes from machinegun fire. Somewhere in my head I could hear—very distant— “Hail storm” and I did recall that there had been a bad hail storm some days before but this seemed so unconnected to me at that moment that if I had suddenly found myself in Beirut or on the moon for that matter, it would have been the same to me as the reality of walking through the streets of Ft. Worth at dusk.

I walked for hours. I remember I was supposed to be looking for a motel to stay at, but I didn’t seem to be making much progress in that area. I was just walking. The world looked improbable. And all the while in my head over and over again like a nursery rhyme, some other, just as shocked (if not unmanned) voice was singing:

There has to be an invisible sun
It gives its heat to everyone…

At some point I remember thinking to myself that I really should sit down. I had walked for miles before this came to me and, once I did, I could see the point. It had been in the high nineties that day, and still humid enough the bricks on the street rippled and steamed when the dusk came on. I was carrying a heavy backpack for my stay, and I had traveled in this long and aimless path uphill from the River. When I stopped, I was sopping wet with sweat. I sat down on the low stone wall next to the Kimball Art Museum and looked down Camp Bowie in the dark, sloped gradual to downtown around the Trinity and it glowed from within like holothurians in the deep. I thought I was going to start weeping.

God knows what I looked like to my friend when he came and got me after I finally remembered to call him. He never said, but I don’t think he looked at me the same way after that.

I don’t think I ever quite understood the word “sanctified” until that moment. I had been sanctified. I passed the weekend in a state of quiet, like a monk in a cloister. No matter where I was. In the crowd looking at the redundant, repetitious ascension of man carved in the Jain sculpture or at a movie theater or absolutely by myself in the room my friend let me stay in that weekend, I was utterly silent inside. My mind hung above my self completely still, like a curious animal trying to discern just what it was looking at. I had been sanctified. But I also knew that there was, as there always is, a price that would have to be paid for this. Up to that point, though, I can’t really say I might have been willing to pay it. Now I was left looking for what it was.

______

I imagine this sounds sort of strange that, after all of this, I still was not any closer to knowing what I needed to do. I suppose that was the most maddening part of the whole affair, that no matter how much changed— and I had, most assuredly, changed after that encounter— there is was still no way made known to me.

I guess it was not more than a year after this that I went to the book store. I had been reading about the ancient Greeks and I kept running across references to the Persians. It occurred to me that I didn’t know a thing in the world about them. I decided that the next time I was at the book store, I would see if I couldn’t find something. I didn’t find anything in the history section, but I did find a book of poems by Jelaluddin Rumi, who was referred to on the dust jacket as “Persia’s most revered poet;” even though Rumi himself was not from Persia, as I later found out, and there was absolutely nothing about the Persians nor their culture to be found anywhere in it, I thought I’d take it on home anyway, for some reason, and give it a shot.

My first thought I had after reading a poem or two was: “Oh! These are the guys.” The Sufis at some point had taken a liking to Arabic ghazals (love poetry) and had (as is their wont) turned them into poetry that reflected instead their deep (and overwhelming) spiritual love for God (and, inadvertently— or maybe advertently— prompted the Romantic movement in Middle Ages Europe when troubadours from Andalusia spread out into Christian lands singing that very poetry . Chivalry, apparently, also stems from Sufi influence, coming from the adab, a code of manners the Sufis practiced at the time); the Sufis are the Lovers of God. What Rumi was describing was the same burning Love, the same grasping desire, the same intoxication that I felt from and towards God.

I don’t think I could have been more surprised. I had nearly given up on the idea of ever finding anyone else who experienced the same manifestation of the Divine that I did, and here is this group of obscure Islamic (more often than not) heretics who perceived God the same way. I didn’t know how to take this: was it a slam-dunk or a big foul out? I mean, to my largely still rational and no doubt deeply Scottish nature, this was a cult. It really didn’t matter that they had been in business since before Islam began, nor that being considered heretics to Islam was, to me, a meaningless measurement: this still stank of a cult. Still, the more I read of Rumi’s poetry and parables from the Mathnawi (including one utterly hilarious and utterly filthy story about a woman who catches her servant having sex with a donkey,) the more I saw that I found myself more in agreement with him than I did anyone else I had run across. I decided to take the middle road: let’s see what I can learn from these guys and integrate it into my beliefs if they fit.

Thus began my education in the distinction between those who study Sufism (as I was now doing) and those who practice it. There is a wealth of Sufi literature, covering centuries. Most of it has not been translated, but there is still enough to start an expedition into What It All Means. Throughout my study of it, I kept coming upon seriously important things, but it was so often buried in traditional Islamic and in some cases, Zoroastriac (Mazdaism) terminology that I found myself both alarmed and perplexed. I wasn’t a Muslim. I certainly wasn’t a Zoroastrian. I found myself stepping away from what I was reading because this was going somewhere, it seemed to me, I did not want to go. I also knew that I understood so little of both of these traditions that even if I was to go any further, I would have to study both enough to get what it was they were talking about. And so often I came up wondering “Just what does this have to do with God?” I mean, I am more than willing to work off the assumption that I just don’t understand things well enough, but that was still dismaying how little this seemed to have to do with Him.

“You do realize that this is all metaphorical, don’t you?” Sheikh Kashani asked me when I happened to bring up some obscure question regarding some concept or another I had run across during my reading. The answer to his question, when he asked me, was Yes, but it took me some time to realize that. I’m not even sure when I did come to that conclusion. The problem that Sufis throughout history have come up on (and I think I have illustrated it as best I can in how poorly language is suited to the task) is that they were trying to describe the Indescribable. These experiences and presences they find themselves among are essential and so multifaceted that there is simply no way to describe them without resorting to metaphor (and the fact that the terminology, then as now, had become so degraded certainly didn’t help matters much. God, for them, would best be described as the Greek theós, the root of the Latin dios— Fr. dieu— and from whence comes “theology,” but theós has a predicative function and refers to something that happens “….is God.”) Because of this, they used the raw imagery of traditional Islam because they lived in a world of traditional Islam (and, no doubt, to keep from being considered heretics, which they ended being branded anyway.) There is a Zoroastrian current to the language because Persia at that time still used Zoroastrian imagery, and because it was so much more articulated a system of Presences that it was useful. Ultimately, they were heretics to everyone but God.

Sometime in 1998 I decided that, as far “integrating” things into my beliefs, I was still not addressing a fundamental question, which was: what should I do? I decided I would look into maybe finding an order to join (the closest comparison to a Sufi order in the West is a monastic order, though one of the central points in the practice of Sufism is that one must be “in the world,” since it is easy to be, as they say, “a holy man on a mountain” and because of this, while some of those orders offer some place that initiates can stay to recruit themselves, removing oneself from the world— monasticism— is frowned upon, to say the least.) Sufism is not monolithic, and one order can vary greatly on both their practices and their orthodoxy towards Islam. That, certainly, made the task difficult, but also I was aware that, while not having attained quite the cult-popularity of Buddhism, Sufism had gained enough recognition to attract goony Americans (hippies) and that there was good chance that virtually every order I could find that was “lax” on the orthodoxy question was a festering pit of New Ageism. So, I decided that I would just go down a list and use as a yardstick that any order I looked at would not a) practice the sema (most famously, the Dance of the Whirling Dervishes,) b) practice the vocal zikr (which is a word or phrase given to the initiate privately to repeat in their meditation, also privately. At gatherings, there is also the vocal zikr which is a phrase uttered aloud—usually la illaha il Allah— and, sometimes very elaborately, during public meditation,) c) advocate wearing anything to distinguish themselves from the rest of the populace in public nor at gatherings. I figured that weeding out those aspects of the practice would leave me with an order that had nothing in the world to offer the hippies.

The fact that I actually came across an order that fit that particular bill, having gone through a fair amount of orders and having looked at still more after the fact, is an act of God in itself. I found the Nimatullahi Order, which had split from the original Order over the question of the universality of Sufism as a practice (a point on which nearly all orders agree, “universality” still supposedly only applies so long as you are a Muslim.)

I won’t go into too much more detail in this, other than to say that eventually I called one of the meetinghouses (khaniqahi) and talked to someone there. I was awfully impressed with them. The entire time I was talking to them on the phone, I remember thinking there was something unusual about them, and then I realized that they were absolutely sincere. No doubt this says a great deal about the world we live in, hm? This was one of the base characteristics I found in Sufis, their complete sincerity, which could become a little maddening (to me and for themselves, I would imagine) when I would ask what I thought an innocent question simply out of curiosity, not understanding that there are things they are not supposed to talk about (not because it’s some sort of secret, but that they don’t want people doing something stupid) and the Sufi I asked would find themselves between the rock of their not wanting anyone to get hurt and the hard place of their sincerity and virtual inability to lie. It made for some interesting conversations.

The problem I had with the Nimatullahi Order was they only had meetinghouses here and there and nowhere near me, and that, if I was going to be initiated, I would either have to do so in Washington DC or happen to catch Sheikh Kashani at one of the closer khaniqahi. As luck (sure, luck) would have it, at some point my aunt— just out of the clear blue sky— asked me if I wanted to go to DC with her when she went to take her Appraisal Exam. I made arrangements to be initiated and then off I went.

Now, the funny thing about all this is that while I had talked (though never seen) three or four people from the Order, one of whom was Sheikh Kashani himself, I was still not convinced that when I got there I would not find the khaniqah was nothing but a Den of Slack, nothing but burned out freaks and New Agers. So it was with more than a little trepidation that I went to meet them before the day of my initiation. I could not have been more wrong. They were exactly who they said they were. I was deeply humbled and deeply honored to be among them. All of them were very intelligent, very well spoken, very committed to their path. I have never felt so at home anywhere, amongst these people I had never so much as met before. I went to get initiated, but I was not prepared at that point to do so, and now that is impossible— neither circumstance having anything the world to do with them and everything to do with me. I have no regrets about any of it.

The sheikh did teach me how to begin the path of purification, and since everything else in the practice of Sufism is built off of that very simple action, I was able for three years to come a very long way. The first task in Sufism is to clear a place for the manifested God; to purify yourself, because like a current of electricity run through a wire, if those electrons hit an impurity in the composition of the wire they can go out of control. Such is the problem with our impurity relative to unity with the manifested God. You are to become an empty place for Him to reside. The simply overwhelming encounters one has with Him in this process are unrelatable in words, and they are transformative in every encounter. I cannot believe how much I have lost in them: my fear, so many of my desires. I can only testify to what I know, and like I have said over and over again: I know my Lord.

There at the Creation

IN WHAT MUST BE THE MOST USEFUL OF CREATION MYTHS we are witness to a spanless, clockless void where the sovereign darkness lies riven with hues, mandelbrot tentacles, arabesque folds, everything coalesces at one line, sinuous and unending. It becomes two lines parallel. The eye follows that path and now focuses upon it, perceives the contour within the span of those lines. Scales do emerge once the eye can properly see: glittering, sharp edge, reflecting and refracting all the wild chaotic patterns about. A thin chimeric mail clothing the girth of this form in the darkness. Look up or look back, either way: this form does entwine with another its alterimage, over and over again, on into eternity— two great and resplendent snakes bound to one another in an infinite helix through the ageless void. Split at one end they embrace: her holding him close with one alabaster arm around him, her broad wings spread to the ends of the infinite, and himself a god of a thousand faces— bull, medusa, lion, more— with his own wings cast back to frame the limitless dark. They look only into the other’s eyes.

Time-Without-Age and his bride, Ananke.

The definition of the universe and the nature of it bound to one another.

The void about, it proceeds to shimmer like lightningcharged mist, separates from itself light from dark and it is this light that Time-Without-Age coils about, drawing it into itself, into a luminous sphere that collapses upon itself growing more translucent. Malleable. Finally solid but incandescent yet. He coils tighter still upon the sphere, loops more and more of himself about it until a line emerges bisecting the sphere, until it opens and opens to light more brilliant than anything the universe has as yet conceived. So bright neither one of them truly sees what emerges. Only Nyx— the Night— with her dark changeling eyes catches a glimpse of that which steps from the sphere:

Phanes Protogonos. Appearance. Final Beauty.

He steps out of the light but for a moment and then he shatters himself before that light fades, a constant reflection of this light scattering, falling, descending into time and into form.

This is what beauty is. This is what is perfect.

____

BEAUTY IS APPEARANCE. It refracts through the eye and into the mind. It reflects from the mind through the eye and onto everything the witness sees. Nothing can be seen but in comparison to it. Nothing escapes our thoughts but in some way is affected by it: a thousand thousand shards of brilliance reflecting upon everything as they fall.

Beauty is. It is its own history and its own witness. It stands before us asking nothing and giving all, perfect as a sphere is perfect and without fault. Beauty terrifies us because it is. It illuminates the finite nature of our existence. There will always be another man after us, as there was always another man before us, but Beauty stood before them all and saw them fall to time and nature and still it stands, wings outstretched so all might see, indifferent in its perfection to the audience that gathers before it.

Perfection itself is infinite, and so it is only fitting Time-Without-Age gave birth to Appearance and by proxy gave us Beauty. The law of the universe— Ananke— is blind necessity. However, within the definition of the universe, at once balanced against and intertwined with blind necessity, there is only Beauty, timeless and seamless. Just as drawn against but never extricated from blind necessity, we labor out our only lasting gifts: our art, our reflection of beauty. We pound it out of metal. We carve it into stone. We pass it down to one another, a neverending helix. A story told by men long since dead. A song played by instruments gone to disrepair and finally dust. Mud huts or skyscrapers, plows or planes: these are merely necessity. Art endures because that which gave birth to it endures: Time-Without-Age.

Yet there are those who believe that there must always be a purpose for things. Everything must fulfill some agenda somewhere, as if they have seen in their dreams the construction of the universe, the foundation of it, and as such every brick and cog must be defined and in its proper place or the architecture of things must be untrue and coming undone. They look upon Beauty, and lacking a definable purpose for it, they suspect everything about it. Something sinister in its affect. Something troubling in its form. The freedom to simply be, to exist without judgment— this mocks them. These are the children of the Law, and seeing Art, seeing offerings made to Beauty, it undermines their authority, casts doubt upon the constitution of Ananke, their own mother.

But there is in most men a natural instinct to be free, independent of the consideration of others. It is this very thing that Art celebrates. Therefore, those children of the Law must find some exception, some small case in Art that all find dangerous to illustrate and pillory, and in doing so give credence to their own fears while justifying their subsequent actions: to legislate Art, to bring it under control.

Too much tending will kill a flower and with so many shadows thrown upon Art, it dies as well. And civilization as a living thing then dies itself because civilization is based as all things are upon the reflection of those two serpents embracing: one the law of balance and one the living image of That Which Is. When Art dies and Beauty is overlooked in an overtipping of the scales, all that is left is the Law, and the Law is not alive; it is merely a cause, not a thing unto itself. Law is nothing but words and circumstance without blood, without appearance, without form, and, casting no illumination, everything before it dies.

But Beauty does not die any more than Appearance is a perishable thing. The lack of it kills, throws life into a shadow play with no meaning at all. In the end, from the ghosthaunted halls of ruins is Beauty found again, appreciated once more. The sacrifices come upon the heels of this discovery almost as a matter of form. There are always men who would marry it. Always women who would take it into their beds and hearths. And this incessant ritual begins the dawn of a new age and a new civilization. This is the history of mankind. It is not trading that builds civilization. Trading can be done in the lowliest crossroads. It is not protection that inspires civilization. A hole in the ground is a safer place from robbers than a city street. It is upon this statue that the city is founded, this altar to a god without a name, without need of a name. A god that simply is.

A god within a statue like the Athena Palladium, arms spread out so wide and a crooked smile asking you as you pass it by: Would you die for this thing, this Beauty?

You would die without it.

Ananke

IT HAD BEEN A BAD summer that year. Nine months already without any rain to speak of and now the lakeshore stood naked and primordial as some postdiluvian plain, an uncertain wasteland revealed in the receding Deluge. The leaves dead on the branches like a premature autumn. There were buzzards them by the score in those bent and sunblasted limbs, more circling in the skies on spread black wings, fluttering funeral cloaks chased by their broad shadows on the earth below: an audience of them. But we live our lives before an audience unseen of some kind or another, often without ever acknowledging their presence and certainly not letting their attentive eyes influence our decisions in any way. The audience of the carrion birds is always there, truly, whether we see them or not.

I was amazed at how silent it was. No wind off the lake surface, no cars passing by. Which was fine: the way it should be. There is a secret whispered in intimacy, something implied but never named: it is the pale and distinct face of betrayal. Betrayal is the flip side to the coin of the intimate. In the clearing there was only two of us, the animal and I, and the instrument of betrayal— the maul— in my hand unnamed and unnoticed, dangling against my side.

We all wear masks from time to time— the Greeks were right, as always, there— because of our need to order ourselves out of the speeding chaos of life, a way to frame an incident into something measurable and nameable. The mask defines. By defining the role of he who wears that mask, it condones the actions the wearer commits. How could it be any other way? A man defined by a certain nature cannot be expected to do otherwise.

I had my mask to wear there in that dry and bitter field. I wish I could say the same for the calf that lay before me. That it was a sacrifice, that it was prey. No. The calf was simply lame in a drought when there was no feed to be wasted and no water to be spared. And now it had lifted its trembling head up as I arrived, me in my mask, and I wondered if, seeing that I had not come to bring the calf its bottle, if it recognized the mask, if it was old enough to name the grim and tight expression on my face. I doubt it. I know people nearly a century old who do not know that mask when they see it, but I know it because I have worn the mask before, never comfortable with it in any way but resigned to it nonetheless. It is Necessity. Ananke. And no man wears it willingly no more than any man bears it willingly when he sees it come for him.

____

I WONDER WHAT RAPTURE early men must have felt seeing horses wild on the floodplains, running like cascading waves against the forest edge as the trees ticked by. Like fire down the wind. Perhaps one of them had become so enamored of that kinetic grace that he had taken to chasing them down the tall grasses, exploding through briars and blooms both to catch one, maybe become one of them simply by joining the fleeing herd. How, eyes whited and teeth bared, all mane and tail, they had run into the forest. Perhaps one of their number had fallen on a treacherous treeroot and this was how the man found it: leg broken, wasted, no wild spirit at all. Maybe he just stood there in the silence of the forest, impressed by the intimacy of this moment, between this beast and himself, before he drew his spear and slew the animal where it lay.

Early man’s first use for horses was eating, not transportation. Sometimes they would run them into an autumn forest and set it afire.

Intimacy and betrayal.

Apparently one day that intimacy was broached again, but this time the man left the weapon behind him, unmentioned among them. Then there was something new that had never trodden the earth before: the rider and the steed. But the weapon was there all the time, the other side of that coin was there all the time. They simply agreed to overlook it until the day came when a certain mask would be taken down again. Men perhaps did not even need a name for that mask then; they knew what it was all along. It was poets who needed to name it. Name it perhaps so that they might distance themselves from it. If such a thing is possible.

____

MY GRANDFATHER HAD a few cattle that he kept, one of which he was willing to let us have butchered on one condition: that I maul it myself. I was thirteen and a city boy and what I knew about slaughtering animals could have filled the inside of a matchbook if you wrote in fairly large print. I was not much on the idea and my mother was dead set against it, but my father— well, my father understood one thing and that was that my grandfather was a pointless man to argue with. My grandfather and my father and I all went into town with this heifer in the trailer rattling behind us. My first and probably best memory of the slaughterhouse was the thick and waxy smell in the air, something I attributed to the butcher paper, but that wasn’t it by a long shot.

They put the animal in a narrow cage with its head hanging out. Overhead there was a heavy steel beam with chains strung on it, some that had hooks bolted into the links and these dangled to the floor behind the cage. I had seen that before, though I couldn’t remember where. A man came and he locked these large metal hooks around the cow’s hind legs and then he spat into the metal grating on the floor and nodded his head. No one had spoken the entire time on the killing floor. No jokes. Nothing. My grandfather handed me the maul and the weight of it nearly pulled me over. “Do it once and do it right,” is what he told me. And they stepped back out of the way.

It makes a rather undramatic sound, mauling something to death. Maybe that’s the worst of it, how unspectacular it all is. But it’s a sound you will remember all your life. There was perhaps a second between the moment I heard that sound and the animal quit convulsing of utter silence and then with quick efficiency, the floor manager released the gate to the cage and hoisted the animal up into the air with the most ungodly racket as the chains passed through the pulley. He slit its throat and bled it into the floor.

Frisson is the word. Looking at that animal dangling in the air, limp now but still warm, its blood raining down into the grating below: I was struck with a sudden and electric frisson. I knew now what that waxy smell was. It was the smell of the dead. And I knew where I had seen that hoist before: it was in the back room of the funeral home my father had worked at. And I knew something else as well and it was this: the killing had all been too simple, too quick and easy for me to assume that I was anything but mortal myself. Mortality, for me, had been defined in that moment, and not as a word or a concept but as something undeniable and paperthin that at any instant could find itself cut short by Necessity.

My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder and nodded to me. Intimacy. Betrayal. My grandfather had betrayed me to something capricious and impossible to argue against. Ananke. Out of necessity he had betrayed me to it.

____

GETTING HER HOSE OFF had been an adventure, but with that finished there had only been the two of us there naked in the pale winter light, on that bed with its jumbled sheets and weak springs. Just the two of us there. Her disheveled hair half in her face. Her magnificent eyes on me, but there was nothing clever in them now, only apprehension, and somewhere in the back of her mind she must have told herself over and over again that she could trust me. Yes. She could trust me.

God, how nervous she was and so helpless to her fear and to that ravenous need in her that she had fought in all our tight, rash encounters before, but this time there was not going to be any staving it off with her fingers in some dark room later, no. This time was for real.

“What if my father finds out?” is what she asked me. I almost laughed.

One would have thought the two of us of conflicting interest, her father and I, but we were the same man, the same hand. The same mask upon our faces. Iphigenia with her pale breast borne naked to the knife when Agamemnon her father had called for a sacrifice. Before, her father had been her consort and her initiator, father with his pale mask of Necessity, but this time he would not hold the blade himself. She would have look elsewhere. To another man. Another conspirator. In the end the same man with the same aims. What if my father finds out? He already knows.

She told me she loved me. And I told her I loved her, and that I wouldn’t hurt her.

Which I did anyway.

Intimacy. Betrayal.

Like that proud horse broken, the wild spirit I had seen in her was gone. Like that animal in the cage, she was helpless and submissive to her own desire. I held her hand when I broke her. Kissed her as I entered her. Betrayed her even as I took pleasure in the warmth of her. Rider and ridden: something that had never trodden the earth before. She bled onto the bedclothes and she cried into my neck. Cried even when she came. She wrapped herself around me and kissed me and told me she loved me while I could feel the warm drops of her blood on my thigh, on my own member as if I were anointed in it. Which I was.

____

THE FOREST SUCCUMBS to fire. The flames are drawn as if by the inward breath of some great titan back through the black and standing cruciforms of the burning trees and the watchers step lightly through the cooling cinders into a landscape ash-hot and unreal. They group in a loose circle around the Horse Grove where the still smoldering ruins of some score of horses lie black in the quivering heat of the earth. There is then only silence. Even the songbirds have fled to the river.

How many of these childlike men drop their burning brands to the ground as if ashamed of them. A caprice, and surely it had never occurred to them that the fires they had set to herald the wild run of the horses would come to this. They look from one to the other to affix the blame somewhere, but there is not a one of them that does not reek of that killing smoke.

There is one among them who steps forward and his jaw is so tightly set, his eyes lost of any levity. He draws out his primitive knife and kneels beside the closest of the charcoal animals and cuts into its flesh. He begins to eat. To devour the animals as if to relieve the trace of this act from the earth as surely as the fire erased the grove itself. The others they balk for a moment but in the end they all join this solemn banquet though none of them will speak of it. Not for long years to come, and then only by allusion, any word but the truth.

In the evening the first man to eat sits before the anticlined wall of the tribal cavern and he grinds down charcoal from the forest fire and ochre as well and these he places into his mouth and grinds them even more, mixing them with his saliva. He leans his mouth close to cavern surface, the nameless rock, and begins to blow out colors dark upon that wall. After a few hours the horses begin to appear again, run wild upon the stone.

Silence, the mother of Art. The silence of the initiated.

____

MY UNCLE HAD TOLD me I could take his .22 rifle out to put down the calf, but I had done that before and it was more unpredictable than anything else. Even a month old calf has a thick skull. I took down a sledge and walked through the brittle haymow to the little place we had fenced off to feed the animal out. It might have worked out, bottlefeeding it until it was strong enough to get up on its own, but the calf had fallen out into the full summer sunlight and hadn’t been able to get up. The afternoon sun had all but killed it and now there was nothing left for it but Necessity, nothing left but the maul.

Poets gave Necessity a name to distance themselves from it, but they gave it another name, under certain circumstances, and this word is mercy. Mercy does not imply a distance but an excuse. Mercy is what you call Necessity when it is not you personally that has to pull the plug, or swing the hammer.

All about the trees were fringed with buzzards. Some had even landed on the grass to stand witness like dark mourners, but carrion birds do not mourn any more than they pray. Still, there was the silence, and the calm clear lake past the reeds before me. It looked like a sheet of glass. It looked like the world had stopped entirely.

The calf struggled its head up and looked at me. And I told it not to worry. I told it that I wouldn’t hurt it.

It hardly made a sound when the maul struck, but the buzzards exploded into the air and the noise of them taking flight was huge, overpowering. Their shadows were everywhere.

I do not speak of what I did to anyone.

The initiated aren’t just those who know how to shake off guilt but those who more than others have reason to be guilty. The complicity between initiates has to do with a shared knowledge, but likewise with a crime. However much we try, we can never quite sever the bond that links the initiated with the gang of criminals.

—The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso

... and of the CBI

from The Burma Road, Donovan Webster

During one battlefield cleanup along the Tiddum Road, ever since Japanese chose to fake death and one by one ambushed a detachment of Gurkhas collecting corpses for burial, the Gurkhas started to take their own precautionary steps. Pulling out their long and razor-sharp knives, called kurkis, which hung on their belts, the Gurkhas ensured all subsequent enemy troops were dead by slashing their throats before grabbing up a supposed casualty. When a passing British officer saw a Gurkha about to cut the throat of a still-living Japanese soldier who—until that moment—had feigned death, the officer stopped the killing with an off-the cuff order: “You mustn’t do that, Jim,” he said.

Hearing the command the Gurkha turned to the officer somewhat disappointedly, held his blade, and—with a pained expression draped across his face—responded, “But, sahib, we can’t bury him alive?”

The apotheosis of the war in the South Pacific

Charles Crary gets a friendly fire wound and a free ticket home:

We reached the portable hospital, but I had to wait. I was given plasma. I vaguely remember my arm taped to a board so I wouldn't disturb the IV. The mosquitoes saw my arm as a "free lunch" counter. It was black with them. Because of the shock and heavy sedation I just lay there and watched them. During this time my clothing was removed and burned. It had been worn unwashed for about three months. Eventually I went into surgery... I woke and discovered my leg in a cast that let my toes peek out and came two-thirds the way up my thigh. I felt really great. I'm sure that much of my feeling was euphoria that I was out of immediate danger of being shot at. On the second day a crew of twelve porters was assigned to take me to the airstrip at Wau.

On the way we chattered and joked in pidgin. But around 9:30 am I began to feel sick. It started with a knot in the pit of my stomach, but gradually grew into a pain that restricted my breathing. It wasn't too long before I began to think I was going to die. My crew began to run with me. We arrived at a way station that had a doctor. He diagnosed my problem as secondary shock and overmedication of morphine. Relieved, all I wanted to do was sleep. Sometime during the night I was awakened by a sharp pain in one of my toes. It felt as though it were being cut with a knife. I couldn't move the leg because of the cast and weakness. I called out and finally someone came. They found a huge jungle rat trying to eat my toes!

Benny Hinn Gets An Ice Cream

or Constant Prayer

Some years ago, I caught Benny Hinn on the TV. I don’t know why I stopped there when I was flipping around the channels, but I did stop, and Benny was talking about the Flood and what God commanded to Noah—using the same words that He did Adam—“to replenish the earth.” This was the first I had heard of this, so I sat there listening. Hinn was talking about, in Isaiah, where it mentions God turning the world on its side because those who populated it had angered Him, and Hinn, understandably, made the assumption that this must have happened before Adam, since there was no record of it in the interim. At which point, Hinn said: “And do you know who those people were, who were cast into darkness? DEMONS!”

At which point my engagement in Hinn’s story sort of faded.

I did stop to think, though, what it would be like, to be in Benny Hinn’s head. “Hmm. I think I’ll stop on the way home from work at Baskin-Robbin’s. I really like their chocolate—DEMONS! DEMONS TEMPTING ME WITH DELICIOUS ICE CREAM!!”

Hinn makes a demon of everything. And fights with them. It is, in fact, common to fight with demons, turning our temptations into them, struggling around. One does not get very far that way. It is, in fact, very close to idolatry. By making our temptations something to be wrestled with we turn away from God. Simply that. Most temptations come and go. There is nothing really wrong with them, per se. They just are. They come, they go. If one simply lets them come and go, and with that much of an attachment to them, then they press with considerably less weight than any other way. But blowing them out of proportion, it is no wonder we find ourselves so hard pressed to overcome them; we give them their strength.

The late Suleyman Loras, dede of the Mevlevi Order, said once: “There is no reason a relationship with God should be some trying task.” And he was right. There is no reason. The only obstacles in the way are of our own making, the only gauntlet is the one we erect between ourselves and the goal. I trusted God and I trusted my spirit and between the two of them, I felt the one could find its way back to the other if I just let it do so. I found that the more I allowed my spirit control, the easier things went, and the stronger it got. It was a process. Everything is a process. And it is a process that begins with prayer. Being prayerful.

One of the things I came to the hard way was understanding just what prayer was. It wasn’t an act or moment or spoken thing, but the nature of the moment. Various people all across the religious spectrum have, at one time or another, exhorted us, as Paul does, to “Pray unceasingly,” something that, when we hear it, we know is right, even if the concept strikes us as untenable. “Pray at such and such a time and so many times a day” is always a more laudable model, from our perspective, since we can be sure to do so and then go on with our lives without having impinged too greatly on them. Praying “unceasingly,” from our generally narrow and selfish point of view, would be an act that would devour our lives. And practiced as most people practice prayer, speaking and gesticulating a certain set of words and motions, that is true. It is entirely unworkable in that way. Which left me with something of a problem, since this was exactly what the Nimatullahi Order was expecting me to do.

One of the things that I found so interesting, when I began to look into the nature of Sufism and to practice it, was how much it seemed to me to resemble the act of creation (and in particular, the inspirational nature of it) that I had been practicing for a number of years prior to all of this. At that time, I didn’t realize that these things resembled one another because they were the same, but the model of what I did understand about the one was awfully helpful in understanding the other. What I found was that to create, it was best to empty myself in that moment, when I set down to work.

Keep in mind, I had no way of realizing why this worked; it just did work and that was good enough for me. But what I was doing, in those years of practice, practice both writing and impelling that inspiration (and here I would like to interject that that practice was a constant, difficult work. Fulfilling, in its way, but very very difficult. People always seem to want some sort of shortcut, which is impossible. Practicing writing or practicing Sufism, both were enormously demanding,) was becoming a good instrument. By that, I guess a good comparison would be when you are just playing the guitar, freely, and the compulsion of a tune comes on and you follow it along, but suddenly, the note you want to play next is one you don’t know how to perform; knowing how to play every note, every intonation, and that automatically, makes you a good instrument. It allows the inspiration to work its way through you and through the guitar, allowing that inspiration to play you. This was how I approached writing, even though there were added layers of work involved that could not (at least not by me) be handled the same way; as much of the work as I could perform in that way, the better everything seemed to be and the farther along I progressed. All art can be handled in this way—there are particular logistical problems to each discipline, and how each artist handles those problems—but, at the core of it, it is all the same. For me, however, this was art, though, not Everything Else. And how, at the time, it connected with prayer, was still a long way distant.

I clung to that common definition of prayer for a long time. I was engaging in other things at that point, and they seemed to have great and immediate benefits, which, compared to prayer (as I defined it at the time,) prayer was looking to be a bad investment. I took a long look at it, especially the question of its function and utility. It was in that that I realized that everything I was doing was prayer.

Everything has its ground, its aspect, and, as I was moving along, the more I began to realize that the important part of those things is that nature, that aspect, because those are the Names of those things through which we impel their appearance. Prayer is a sacred moment, and the sacred has an aspect: this is what we are called to do, in prayer, to impel the sacred and in that moment, on our knees, surrender to it. The words and the gestures are part of an act to begin that process, but those words and motions have no meaning but what we impart to them ourselves, towards the sacred. Because of this, they can be utilized or dispensed with entirely. To be “prayerful” is to be in that state of surrender, before the sacred. One can induce that surrender, through a “moment of prayer,” but from there, one can maintain that surrender, all through the day. Stopping, throughout the day, to pray again is very helpful to support that state of surrender but not absolutely necessary. Practice makes it possible to maintain it, unceasingly.

What that surrender is is the same as “being a good instrument,” an empty place in which the sacred can manifest itself within you, but only through that surrender. The method and means are very much the same as the “inspirational approach” to creating, and it is easy to see, at that point, how one can approach everything one does, in their entire life, in that way. Praying unceasingly.