An Arab Spring? February 2, 2012

Springs are characterized by blossoming. The Arab spring is no honorable exception. Nations stand still, in anticipation of what the blossoms may bring forth. We stand still, in fear of what the spring fields will look like. Will the fields embrace all existing colors? Or will they be spread out in all shades of intolerance? Will roses, lilies, irises, and carnations bloom into full flower, or will our eyes be stabbed by the thorny brown-grey of mutated colorless flowers. Will our deserts explode into multi colors, or will they be barren except for a single color, a single slogan, a single creed, a single oppressive and color-phobic rule.

Will the flowers bend and dance with the gentle spring breeze? Or will their thorns deem them to heavy to sway and too proud to accept a dance offer from a playful breeze? Will their thorns point in accusation? Will their thorns puncture people’s hope of a better tomorrow? Will the newcomers be brothers to their brothers, but not to their sisters?

Those with naïve optimistic apprehension might be disappointed by the birth of another tyrant out of the Arab womb, maybe this time around, a tyrant with a license; a non human license, a license from God all mighty to rule and reform.  A god appointed “righteous” group, placed on earth to carry out a divine doctrine to fix that which is broken. First fix the political system, then fix those who are “broken”; those who need fixing.

In such case, will we be able to uproot a double elected representation; once democratically by the people and once divinely elected by the word of God?

Will they protect our money but steal our freedoms? Will they free Palestine but occupy our minds? Will they feed us bread but starve us from literature? Will they free our political prisoners and replace them with our free-thinkers? will they unite us amongst ourselves but isolate us from the rest of the world?

Are the Arab revolutions hiding thorns beneath a spring-cloak?

Listen Little Man! July 31, 2011

Excerpts and Illustations from Listen Little Man!

Written in 1945 by psychoanalyst and Freud Colleague Wilhelm Reich. While reading it, I felt it was extremely relevant to what is happening in the world today. I felt as though this man was speaking directly at me, at people I know or knew , at teachers and preachers i’ve met, heard and believed so blindly. His words are especially aimed at politicians, at identities and illusions we hold as “truths”.  Listen Little Man! is the most brutally honest talk anyone has ever had with me ! This “we need to talk” book (which, from what I read was not supposed to be published) is an invitation for each and every one of us to turn the mirror around and see what we look like behind all those masks we wear , to look at ourselves hard and long and finally see WHERE humanity’s misery stems from.

“Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.” -Wilhelm Reich

LISTEN LITTLE MAN!

I am going to tell you how you are, Little Man, for I honestly believe in your great future. There is no doubt, it belongs to you. So, first of all, have a look at yourself see yourself as you really are.

Listen to what none of your Fuhrers and representatives dare to tell you:

You are a‘Little Common Man’. Understand the double meaning of these words: ‘little: and ‘common’. Don’t run. Have the courage to look at yourself!

This is why I am afraid of you Little Man, deadly afraid. For on you depends the fate of humanity I am afraid of you because there is nothing you flee as much from as yourself. You are sick, very sick, Little Man. It is not your fault. But it is your responsibility to rid yourself of this sickness. You would have long since shaken off your oppressors had you not tolerated oppression and often actively supported it. No police force in the world would be powerful enough to suppress you if you had only a mite of self-respect in practical everyday living.

No, you did not ask yourself whether your thinking was erroneous. Instead, you asked yourself what your neighbor was going to say about it, or whether your honesty might cost you money. This, Little Man, and nothing else, is what you asked yourself.

You do not believe that your friend could something great. Secretly, you despise yourself, even when – or particularly when  you make the greatest display of your dignity; and since you despise yourself you cannot respect him who is your friend.

You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Since you have never learned to create happiness, or enjoy and protect it, you do not know the courage of the upright individual. You want to know Little Man, how you are? You listen on the radio to the announcements of laxatives, dental creams and deodorants. But you fail to hear the music of propaganda. You fail to perceive the bottomless stupidity and the disgustingly bad taste of these things, which are designed to catch your ear.

True enough, you want to have ‘geniuses’ and you are willing to pay them homage. But you want a good genius, one with moderation and decorum, one without folly, in brief, a seemly, measured and adjusted genius, not an unruly, untamed genius which breaks down all your barriers and limitations You want a limited, wing-clipped and dressed-up genius whom without blushing, you can triumphantly parade through the streets of your towns.

That’s the way you are, Little Man. You are good at scooping up and ladling in, but you cannot create. And that’s why you are what you are, all your life in a boring office or at the designing board or in the marital straitjacket or a teacher who hates children. You have no development and no chance for a new thought, because you have always only taken, only ladled in what somebody else has presented to you on a silver platter.

You long for love, you love your work and make a living from it, and your work lives on my knowledge and that of others. Love, work and knowledge know no fatherlands, no customs barriers, and no uniforms. They are international and comprise all humanity. But you want to be a little patriot, because you are afraid of genuine love, afraid of your responsibility for your own work, afraid of knowledge. This is why you can only exploit the love, work and knowledge of others but can never create yourself. This is why you steal your happiness like a thief in the night; this is why you cannot see happiness in others without getting green with envy.

Now as to your freedom giddiness. Nobody, Little Man, has ever asked you why you have not been able to get freedom for yourself, or why, if you did, you immediately surrendered it to some new master.

‘Listen to that! He dares to doubt the revolutionary upsurge of the proletarians of the world, he dares to doubt democracy! Down with the counter revolutionary! Down!’

Your yelling ‘Viva!’ and ‘Down!’ is not one step closer to your goal, Little Man. You have been believing that your freedom is secured when you ‘put people against the wall’. For once, put yourself in front of a mirror.

If you, Little Woman, by mere chance, without any special qualifications, have become a teacher, simply because you did not have children of your own, you do untold damage. Your job is to handle and educate children. In education, if one takes it seriously, this means correctly to manage the children’s sexuality. In order to handle the children’s sexuality, one must, oneself have experienced what love it. But you are fat, awkward and unattractive. That alone is enough to make you hate every charming, alive body with deep and bitter hatred. What I am blaming you for is not that you are fat and unattractive; not that you have never enjoyed love; not that you do not understand love in the children. What I am blaming you for is that you make a virtue out of your unattractiveness and your incapacity for love, and that, with your bitter hatred, you strangle the love in the children, if you happen to work in a ‘progressive school’. This is a crime, ugly Little Woman. The harmfulness of your existence consists in your alienating the affection of healthy children from their healthy fathers; in our considering the healthy love of a child a pathological symptom. It consists in your being barrel-shaped, your going around like a barrel, your thinking like a barrel, your educating like a barrel; in your not modestly retiring to a small corner of life, but, instead, trying to impose upon this life your barrel shape, your falseness, and your bitter hatred hidden behind your false smile.

You built your house on sand and you did all this because you are incapable of feeling life in yourself, because you kill love in your child even before it is born; because you cannot tolerate any alive expression, any free, natural movement, because you cannot tolerate it, you get scared and ask: ‘What is Mr.Jones, and what is Judge Smith going to say?’

You are cowardly in your thinking, Little Man because real thinking is accompanied by bodily feelings, and you are afraid of your body. Many great men have told you: ‘Go back to your origin – listen to your inner voice -follow your true feelings -cherish love.’ But you were deaf to what they said, for you had lost your ear for such words. They were lost in vast deserts, and the lonely criers perish in your dreadful desert emptiness, Little Man.

Through the centuries, you will follow the braggarts and will be deaf and blind when LIFE, YOUR LIFE, calls to you. For you are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it, in the belief of doing it for the sake of ‘socialism’, or ‘the state’, or ‘national honor’, or ‘the glory of God’. There is one thing you don’t know nor want to know: That you yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day; that you do not understand your children, that you break their spines before they have had a chance really to develop them; that you steal love; that you are avaricious and crazy for power; that you keep a dog in order also to be a ‘master’

‘Grab him! Examine him!’ Does he have a license to practice medicine? Proclaim a Royal decree that he cannot practice without the consent of the king of our free country! He does experiments about my pleasure functions! Jail him! Throw him out of the country!’

‘He is a megalomaniac! He’s gone crazy, absolutely crazy!’ I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image, then I am tempted to come close to you again, in order to prevent your crime. But I also know that you have taken care to protect yourself well by your institution of a Department of Education.

You always think in too short terms, Little Man just from breakfast to lunch. You must learn to think back in terms of centuries and forward in terms of thousands of years. You have to learn to think in the terms of living life, in terms of your development from the first plasmatic flake to the animal man, which walks erect but cannot yet think straight. You have no memory even for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and so you keep repeating the same stupidities you said 2000 years ago. More than that, you cling to your stupidities, such as your ‘race’ ‘class’ ‘nation’ religious compulsion and suppression of love as a louse clings to a fur. You do not dare see how deeply you stick in the morass of your misery. Every once in a while, you stick your head out of the morass to yell, Heil! the croaking of a frog in a marsh is closer to life.

Little Man; one has seen behind your facade of retchedness and pitiableness. One wants you to determine the course of the world, with your work and your achievements does not want you to replace one tyrant by a worse one. One begins to demand of you ever more strictly that you submit to the rules of life just as you ask it of others; that you improve yourself as you criticize others. One recognizes better and better your gossiping disposition, your greed, your freedom from responsibility, in brief, your general disease which smells up this beautiful world. I know you don’t like to hear this that you prefer to yell, Heill, you bearer of the future of the proletariat. We have found the key to your secret of thousands of years. You are brutal behind your mask of sociality and friendliness.

Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; low more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence (you have it in you, Little Man, buried deeply in a corner of your existence); when your thinking will be in harmony, and no longer at variance, with your feelings; when you will be able to comprehend your gifts in time and to recognize your ageing in time; when you will live the thoughts of great men instead of the misdeeds of great warriors;

when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license; when you will recognize errors in thinking in time, and not too late,as today; when you will feel elevation in hearing truths, and feel horror of formalities; when your adolescent daughter’s happiness in love will delight instead of enrage you; when you will only shake your head at the times when one punished little children for touching their love organs; when human faces on the street will express freedom, animation and joy and no longer sadness and misery; when people no longer will walk on this earth with retracted and rigid pelvises and deadened sexual organs.

You are great, Little Man, when you sing the good old folk songs, or when you dance to the tune of an accordion, for the folk songs are warm and soothing, and are the same all over the world.

~The Forty Rules of Love~ July 21, 2011

1.How we see God is a direct reflection of how we see ourselves. If God brings to
mind mostly fear and blame, it means there is too much fear and blame welled
inside us. If we see God as full of love and compassion, so are we.

2. The Path to the Truth is a labor of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart
your primary guide! Not your mind. Meet, challenge, and ultimately prevail over
your nafs (false ego) with your heart. Knowing your ego will lead you to
the knowledge of God.

3.You can study God through everything and everyone in the Universe, because God is
not confined in a mosque, synagogue, or church. But if you still in need of
knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for
Him: in the heart of a true lover.

4.Each and every reader comprehends the Holy Qur’an on a different level of
tandem with the depth of his understanding. There are four levels of insight.
The first level is outer meaning and it is one that the majority of the people
are content with. Next is the inner level. Third is the inner of the inner. And
the forth is so deep it cannot be put into words and is therefore bound to
remain indescribable.

5.Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people
in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks
everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, ‘Beware too much
ecstasy,’ whereas love says, ‘Oh take the plunge!’ Intellect does not easily
break down, whereas love can effortlessly reduce itself to rubble. But
treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures.

6.Most of the problems of the world stems from linguistic mistakes and simple
misunderstandings. Don’t ever take words at face value. When you step into the one
of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into
words can only be grasped through silence.

7.Loneliness and solitude are two different things. When you are lonely, it is
easy to delude yourself into believing that you are on the right path. Solitude
is better for us, for it means being alone without feeling lonely. But
eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror.
Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the
presence of God within you.

8.Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem,
do not enter the neighbourhood of despair. Even when all doors remained closed,
God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful! It is easy to be thankful
when all is well. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but
also for all that he has been denied.

9.Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust
the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the
thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means
to be shortsighted as to not able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never
runs out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon
to become full.

10. East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your
destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within. If you travel
within, you’ll travel the whole world and beyond.

11. The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be
opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born,
hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to be
strong, Love can only be perfected in pain.

12.The quest of Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for
Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you
start to change within and without.

13.There are more fake gurus and false teachers in this world than the number of
stars in the visible universe. Don’t confuse power driven, self centered people
with true mentors. A genuine spiritual master will not divert you attention to
himself or herself and will not expect absolute obedience or utter admiration
from you, but instead will help you to appreciate and admire your inner self.
True mentors are as transparent as glass. They let the Light of God pass
through them.

14.Try not to resist the changes that comes your way. Instead let life live through
you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do yo know
that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?

15. God is busy with the completion of your work, both outwardly and inwardly. He
is fully occupied with you. Every human being is a work in progress that is
slowly but inexorably moving toward perfection. We are each an unfinished work
of art both waiting and striving to be completed. God deals with each of us
separately because humanity is a fine art of skilled penmanship where every
single dot is equally important for the entire picture.

16. It’s easy to love a perfect God, unblemished and infallible that He is. What is
far more difficult is to love fellow human beings with all their imperfactions
and defects. Remember, one can only know what one is capable is of loving.
There is no wisdom without love. Unless we learn to love God’s creation, we can
neither truly love nor truly know God.

17.Real filth is the one inside. The rest simply washes off. There is only one
type of dirt that cannot be cleansed with pure waters, and that is the stain of
hatred and bigotry contaminating the soul. You can purify your body through
abstinence and fasting, but only love will purify our heart.

18.The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you. everything that
you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the
people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees.
Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside yourself either. The devil is not an
extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within.
If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your
dark and bright sides, you will arrive as a supreme form of consciousness. When
a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God.

19. If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way
you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely,
there is no way you can be loved. Once you acheive that stage, however, be
thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It’s a sign that you
will soon be showered in roses.

20. Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step.
That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take
that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do
not go with the flow. Be the flow.

21. We were all created in His image, and yet we were each created different and
unique. No two people are alike. No two hearts beat to the same rhythm. If God
had wanted everyone to be the same, He would have made it so. Therefore,
disrespecting differences and imposing your thoughts on others is tantamount to
disrespecting God’s holy scheme.

22. When a true lover of God goes into a tavern, the tavern becomes his chamber of
prayer, but when a wine bibber goes into the same chamber, it becomes his
tavern. In everything we do, it is our hearts that makes the difference, not
our outer appearences. Sufis do not judge other people on how they look or who
they are. When a Sufi stares at someone, he keeps both eyes closed and instead
opens a third eye – the eye that sees inner realm.

23. Life is a temporary loan, and this world is nothing but a sketchy imitation of
Reality. Only children would mistake a toy for the real thing. And yet human
beings either become infatuated with the toy or disrespectfully break it and
throw it aside. In this life stay away from all kinds of extremities, for they
will destroy balance.

24. The human being has a unique place among God’s creation. “I breathed into
him of My Spirit,” God says. Each and every one of us without exception is
designed to be God’s delegate on earth. Ask yourself, just how often do you
behave like a delegate, if you ever do so? Remember, it falls upon each of us
to discover the divine spirit inside and live by it.

25. Hell is here and now. So is heaven. quit worrying about hell or dreaming about
heaven, as they are both present inside this very moment. Every time we fall in
love, we ascend to heaven. every time we hate, or fight someone, we tumble
straight into the fires of hell.

26.The universe is one being. Everything and everyone is interconnected through
invisible web of stories. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all in a
silent conversation. Do no harm. Practice compassion. And do not gossip behind
anyone’s back – not even a seemingly innocent remark! The words that come out
of our mouth do not vanish but are perpetually stored in infinite space, and
they will come back to us in due time. One man’s pain will hurt us all. One
man’s joy will make everyone happy.

27. The world is like a snowy mountain that echoes your voice. Whatever you speak,
good or evil, will somehow come back to you. Therefore, if there is someone who
harbors ill thoughts about you, saying similarly bad things about him will only
make matters worse. You will be locked in a vicious circle of malevolent
energy. Instead for forty days and nights say and think nice thing about that
person. Everything will be different at the end of forty days, because you will
be different inside.

28. The past in an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not
move through time as if it were a single line, proceeding from the past to the
future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity
does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. If you want to experience
eternal illumination, put the past and the future out of your mind and remain
within the present moment.

29. Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been predetermined. Therefore, to leave
everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe
is a sign of sheer ignorance. The music of the universe is all-pervading and it
is composed on forty different levels. Your destiny is the level where you will
play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is
entirely in your hands.

30. The true Sufi is such that even when he is unjustly accused, attacked, and
condemned from all sides, he patiently endures, uttering not a single bad word
about any of his critics. A Sufi never apportions blame. How can there be
opponents or rivals or even “others” when there is no
“self” in the first place? How can there be anyone to blame when
there is only One?

31. If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your
faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as feather. Through an
illness, accident, loss, or fright, one way or another, we are all forced with
incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental, and more
compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lesson and manage to
become milder, while others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only
way to get closer to the Truth is to expand your heart so that it will
encompass all humanity and still have room for more Love.

32. Nothing should stand between yourself and God. Not imams, priests, rabbis, or
any other custodians of moral or religious leadership. Not spiritual masters,
not even your faith. Believe in your values and your rules, but never lord them
over others. If you keep breaking other people’s hearts, whatever religious
duty you perform is no good. Stay away from all sorts of idolatry, for they
will blur your vision. Let God and only God be your guide. Learn the
Truth, my friend, but be careful not to make a fetish out of your truths.

33. While everyone in this world strives to get somewhere and becomes someone, only
to leave all behind after death, you aim for the supreme stage of nothingness.
Live this life as light and empty as the number zero. We are no different from
a pot. It is not the decorations outside but the emptiness inside that holds us
straight. Just like that, it is not what we aspire to achieve but the
consciousness of nothingness that keeps us going.

34. Submission does not mean being weak or passive. It leads to neither fatalism
nor capitulation. Just the opposite. True power resides in submission – a power
that comes from within. Those who submit to the divine essence of life will
live in unperturbed tranquility ad peace even when the whole wide world goes
through turbulence after turbulence.

35. In this world, it is not similarities or regularities that take us a step
forward, but blunt opposites. And all the opposites in the universe are present
within each and everyone if us. Therefore the believer needs to meet the
unbeliever residing within. And the nonbeliever shoud get to know the silent
faithful in him. Until the day one reaches the stage of the perfect human
being, faith is a gradual process and one that necessitates its seeming
opposite: disbelief.

36.This world is erected upon the principle of reciprocity. Neither a drop of kindness
nor a speck of evil will remain unreciprocated. Fear not the plots, deceptions,
or tricks of other people. If somebody is setting a trap, remember, so is God.
He is the biggest plotter. Not even a leaf stirs outside God’s knowledge. Simply
and fully believe in that. whatever God does, he does beautifully.

37. God is a meticulous clockmaker. So precise is His order that everything on
earth happens in its own time. Neither a minute late nor a minute early. And
for everyone without exception, the clock works accurately. For each there is a
time to love and a time to die.

38. It is never too late to ask yourself, “Am I ready to change the life I am
living? Am I ready to change within?” Even if a single day in your life is
the same as the day before, it surely is a pity. At every moment and with
each new breath, one should be renewed and renewed again. There is only one way
to be born into a new life: to die before death.

39. While the parts change, the whole always remains the same. For every thief who
departs this world, a new one is born. And every decent person who passes away
is replaced by a new one. In this way not only does nothing remain the same but
nothing ever really changes.

40. A life without love is of no account.
Don’t ask yourself what kind of love you should seek, spiritual or material,
divine or mundane, Eastern or Western…Divisions only lead to more divisions.
Love has no labels, no definitions. It is what it is, pure and simple. Love is
the water of life. And a lover is a soul of fire. The universe turns
differently when fire loves water.

From the Book “The Forty Rule of Love” by Elif Shafak- Hoping she does not sue me for posting the rules on my blog.

Dead Word Walking March 30, 2011

I’ve been wondering lately about how words dry up and wither and I came to the conclusion that overuse is the ultimate word-killer and blood sucking vampire. This is how:

Imagine a relationship situation, where a couple exchanges the notorious “I love you” statement hundreds of times during the relationship. What happens? It dries up. It becomes redundant to the point of death. Unable to convey the meaning of the word “love” anymore, it becomes “standard procedure” instead.

Imagine a political situation, where leaders from all around the world express the need for “democracy” over and over and over again. What happens? As with love, the meaning dries up until democracy becomes a dead walking corpse, devoid of any essence (especially when war machines like George Bush keep uttering it). Another example from the world of politics is “reform” or “isla7” in Arabic. Now that’s a REAL corpse especially in the Arab world, also declared dead as a result of overuse, misuse and abuse.

Imagine that instead of reform we say “make better” or “clean”. Because really, even the word reform is just a fancy way of saying “fix” or maybe if we’re too attached to the prefix re-, maybe we can just say “recreate” instead of “reform”.

Instead of democracy and democratic, we can say “rule of the people” or “peopleatic”. Think of the distance created between the word democracy and our understanding of what it really means. We don’t speak Latin or ancient Greek anymore, so how would we understand that “demo” means people and democracy = rule of the people?

This makes me think; maybe it’s time to become a little creative and invent new words to replace our decaying corpses, so that we can pump a new word with the freshness of meaning and new energy; so that maybe, just maybe the REAL message or meaning behind the word can be conveyed or comprehended.

Words are like people; we grow old, our health deteriorates and ultimately we end up in the grave. It’s time to face the fact that some words have simply died and that we cannot raise the dead.

Also, it just occurred to me that the words that we like to murder most, are the very words that carry the meaning of our most cherished values.

R.I.P: DEMOCRACY, REFORM AND LOVE.