refuge from…

some call it an idea. you can call it something else. human experience shows that one can name something, something that is not some individual human being or even a group of them, and it gains a non-material conceptual reality of sorts. Like unicorn. what can be imagined by the mind can be let into the heart. it can speak to the heart even if in a whisper. and what speaks to the heart can move it and what moves the heart can hurt the soul. And the heart can also move the body (like a person getting into his car to drive on dangerous and slipper roads so he can get to an art exhibition displaying paintings of unicorns). And when the body moves, it can become the means of harming and hurting other creatures, not only one’s own soul ( the person, his heart and body moved to action from love of unicorms, crashes into other people and kills himself and others). The idea of a unicorm, something you may call ‘not real’, moves hearts, bodies and manifests as actions (and power) in the world. The unicorm is just an extreme case of a more general truth – ideas move the heart and bodies to action if the heart decides to allow it. In this sense, they are similar to a human being actually speaking to me or writing to me, telling me and convincing and inciting me to do something. If i let their words move my heart, it will move. It can be moved to sadness, joy, anger and so on.

It is therefore not adequate for me as a human being to seek refuge from human beings alone. My heart is moved not by actual words spoken to me, not by individualized human agents but by ideas and ideologies that seem to be no particular person and yet speak to my heart as if it were a person. This reality, ethereal but real (born/created), having real presence in the mind and the heart without the mind’s or heart’s consent (the consent is limited to whether the mind/heart allows it to direct them to move/act or not), is the Quran’s ‘Jinn’ to me. How ideas in the mind move people to oppress others and themselves – i see it in myself and i see it around me. And i cry out with the Quran, ‘ I seek refuge from the whispers of the Jinn’ because, by God, human incitements are less powerful to me for they come tarnished with the limitations and flaws of those humans and their actions and their other ideas. They are easier to reject as likely flawed and also as imposition of another’s will on me. But when a pure (as if made of light/fire) idea occurs to me unattached to a human being, it enchants and moves me more easily than any person can. i seek refuge from the whisperings of the ideas that ask my mind and heart to be moved without waiting to discern and ascertain their truth and falsehood. Ideas and ideologies, which appear with a note saying ‘accept me! don’t try to evaluate me or else you will lose this and that!..you will be lost…let me be your friend and guide..let me empower you to feel and act’ and when I give in, i am a plaything in its hands! And i committ grave injustices without any remorse or awareness. it all seems fair to me. I seek refuge from what the Quran calls the fair-seeming, pure-seeming whispers of the Jinn.’