When i reflect and if it is truth that i find, i am like the fallen who has stood up… i am either fallen or standing. i move from an understanding of being fallen and wounded to being healed and joyous. this is my experience as a human being who goes to his maker with his wounds and seek an understanding of them, the truth about them..who seeks revelation of its meaning..and if i find a truthful meaning, nothing more is left to find in that moment…if it was incomplete, it would not be a meaning that answers my needs and i would thus not affirm it as truth.
in my view, those who speak of stages of spiritual development – they have made up a story that are prisoners of it now. they must journey…nothing can be a satisfactory end because the journey must continue. this forcing of the moment of truth to a chronological or temporal future is itself a loss that such person chooses for themselves.
In my world, loss is already ubiquitous and inescapable. i already live in this lower realm of passing beauty, lower on account of its limited and transient glimpses of beauty. my only “reading” of them is that they are passing and departing beauties. and my only condition, without an encounter with some “revelation” about a different meaning that they may have, is that of loss and darkness.
In darkness i am found by my maker and it is from this darkness that he must bring me to light…..if i get light, i am in light. when i forget, then i am in darkness again. there is no question of “progress” or “spiritual growth” here…there is the absence of truth and meaning and the presence of truth and meaning..when i am reflective that is..
when I am not reflective, it is neither dark nor light for there is no soul involved..just bodily sensations but no human consciousness of existence…in this state, there are things but not meanings (or their lack or inadeqacy) that i am interacting with..
i find that when i am reminded by my maker about a truth i can recognize/remember, i am in light. at any moment, i am either in light or in darkness. when i look at the past as a continuous whole, i imagine there is some journey that is something more than the ups and the downs..this is just my imagination..all movements from 0 to 1 and 1 to 0 are movements between truth and falsehood..again and again…but there isn’t some long gradual journey from 0 to a 100 so that i may say that i am at, e.g., 27 now, as if i have traversed some 26 degrees of truth towards some final truth that i imagine exists because if my 26 degrees were degrees of the truth then i did already get the truth, which is the opposite of the falsehood i was suffering from, but if my 26 degrees are not of that truth, then how do i even know that there is some truth that i am moving towards at all!
if degrees of truth is m awareness of the truth, it is either this much or that much, i understand that. but in that case, there is no saying that there is any linear or cumulative or gradual growth (or retardation) in that awareness..if my witness of truth is, even once, a witnessing of truth, then each awareness is awareness of that truth and each unawareness (if i mean it) is total absence of it…i am either aware that there is someone in the house..or i forget there is someone in the house…i dont understand what it means for me to say that i am 27% aware that someone is in the house..i’d rather say i am only 27% sure that there is somewhere in the house..in which case i should say i dont yet know the truth that satisfies me and i am searching for truth rather than saying that i know truth is 100 and i am just at 27 or something like that…
this “gradual spiritual growth” story is as unconvincing for me as it is common…it is not how i experience the world and how i interact with meaning or truth..
there is no journey for me other than coming, again and again, to my maker to be my teacher and guide in what need for answer or meaning he gives to me..i come in a state of loss and misguidance and, if it is my maker who is telling a truth to me, i expect to leave, to the extent i would remember, with guidance and abundance.
i bring my troubles and disagreements and disputes (between my expectations and the meanings i find on my own in the world) to my maker and to a message-bearer (messenger) from him to me. i listen to the claim. i hear the message carried by message-bearers. if it makes sense, it makes sense. if it doesn’t, it doesnt. if it does and i forget, there is no sense for me again and i’ll have to return..
my path is a message from my maker to me, a message i can confirm to be meaningful in a way that satisfies my heart (i.e. true) not any other path…it is the only “path” (a path between me and my maker, God) in which i found the safety of my heart, mind and soul. there aren’t any stations and states. the states for me are two: loss (no satisfactory meaning) or gain (Satisfactory meaning).
The Quran as Revelation 