Although I have discussed some of what I say here in my first blog “Before Revelation I”, I just read a quote from Camut and felt the urge to share it here. I find it expressing an important truth about the human being, that resonates with what I read in the Quran.
“Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery. In itself weariness has something sickening about it. Here, I must conclude that it is good. For everything begins with consciousness and nothing is worth anything except through it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
The consciousness that Camut speaks about is a beginning. It is the point at which real choices become possible and available because one has become weary of mechanically repeating, like a machine, what one has learned from others or what one has been habituated with. Living a machine-like life is smooth and easy UNTIL it is not. This is the moment where human consciousness is awakened, by the maker [I would say but Camut may not agree because he may say the human being just ‘naturally’, on its own and from pure luck or chance, becomes conscious.]. In this awakening is a realization that one exists and one does not know what the meaning of one’s existence really is. One feels lost, sick, abandoned, alone, anxious, in the dark. One wants to know what is going on other than just a mechanical world at work mechanically. One finds the need to see beyond the apparent. From here, there is either a perpetual self-destruction and self-annihilation or there is a search for answers from whatever or whoever is responsible for existence and consciousness. It is this consciousness, searching and alone and orphaned, to which revelation speaks. It does not speak to those still living a mechanical life, a life of repetition and habit, whether religious or otherwise.
When I read the Quran say in 93:6 “Has He not found thee an orphan, and given thee shelter?” and in 93:4 “And did He not find thee lost, and guided thee?” and in the next verse “And found thee in want, and given thee sufficiency?” I understand that the message of my maker is for those in need, in want of meaning, those lost and who become conscious of and weary of their situation in the world. Given that I am an orphan, someone without the means to secure what I find myself in need of, my maker says that I shall not be pushed away or left without help. He asks me to re-think what I have been taking for granted and see that they are favors and gifts of a sustainer, a host, a caring Lord who is demonstrating His will to me in the way that He is treating me. I find myself orphan when I do not find the One treating me to His gifts and just consume things mechanically, which leave me weary and tired. The ‘high’ of eating after hunger, the ‘high’ of loving someone and consummating that love is followed by disappointment and flattening out of the joy and excitement which leaves me weary and empty. What is the meaning of the high and the low? I do not know and I can’t seem to find out on my own. As a remedy for this weariness I turn to revelation and revelation seems to confirm that the guidance it offers is precisely for such persons, driven to its doors weary and lost. Come to revelation weary and lost then. Do not expect to find remedy in it if you are too proud or too unaware to realize how sick you are.
The Quran as Revelation 