Since he was first introduced to me by one of my fellow bloggers, I have felt a special affinity with this Lebanese wiriter and poet of spirituality. I bought all the books by him in Hong Kong that I could lay my hands on. Whenever I have time, I would turn a few pages of one of his books. There is a feature in his books which renders him particularly attractive as a book which one can read at random: unlike me, he writes with extreme economy. His passages seldom exceed 6 pages at the most. More often, he writes in couplets or epigrams. Not only that, he writes with a poet's sensitivity and imagination. And he writes with great beauty. There has never been a single time when I read him without being surprised at how insightful he is in his reflections upon various aspects of life which I regard as important to me.
Over the Christmas vacation, I read parts of his "The Eye of the Prophet". As he already writes so concisely, it is impossible for me to do summaries, as I do with the works of other writers which I have from time to time introduced in this blog. So I shall let the poet speak for himself on the various subjects I read about.
Faith
Is faith not the sense of the heart just as sight is the sense of the eye?
God has created several doors which open onto truth. He opens them to all those who knock onthem with the hand of faith.
Good and Evil
Remember that a single just man causes the demon more trouble than a thousand blind believers.
Prayer
A word of compassion addressed to a criminal or a prostitute is more noble than the long and meaningless prayer that we repeat each day in the temples.
Religion
..the varying pathways of religion represent the different fingers of the single loving hand of the Supreme Being. And this hand is stretched out towards us with ardor and offers us all the fulfillment of the Spirit.
The Priest
A priest is often a traitor who uses Scriptures as a threat to spirit away your money, a hypocrite who carries a crozier and uses it like a sword to open your veins, a wolf in sheep's clothing, a glutton who has more respect for the table than for the altar, a creature hungry for gold who follows the dinar to the most distant countries. He is a strange being, with the beak of an eagle , the claws of tiger, the teeth of hyena and the skin of a viper. Take the bible from him, rend his vestments, pull out his beard, and do as you wish with him. Then place a dinar in his hand, and he will thank you with a smile.
God
The drop of dew curled up in the heart of the lily is no different from you when you deliver your soul into the heart of God.
Without doubt we are closer to God each time we try to divide him and find he is indivisible.
Most religions speak of God in the masculine; in my eyes, he is as much a mother as a father.
And we can be united to God the Father through the mind, but the Mother-Goddess can only be reached through the heart, through love.
Jesus of Nazareth
Jesus did not come from the heart of the Circle of Lights to destroy our dwellings and build convents and monasteries over their ruins, nor to persuade men to become priests and pastros. But he came to breathe into the air of this earth a spirit as powerful as it was new, with the strength to undermine the foundations of all the monarchies erected over the bones of mankind.
He came here to demolish the majestic palaces constructed over the tombs of the weak and to destroy the statues erected over the corpses of the poor.
Jesus did not come to teach men how to build huge cathedrals and opulent temples close to humble cottages and cold, dark, homes. But he came to make the heart of man into a temple, his soul into an altar and his spirit into a priest.
Oh Jesus, to your honor and glory they built those churches and those cathedrals, adorned them with silk and melted down the golden calf over their cupolas. They filled the sky with the smoke of candles and incense, while leaving your faithful worshippers without bread. They intoned hymns of praise, while remaining deaf to the cries and tears of widows and orphans.
O living Jesus, if only you could return to chase the merchants of Faith out of your sacred temple! For they made it into a dark cavern where the vipers of hypocrisy and trickery crawl in their thousands.
Time
Tomorrow is conceived in the womb of yesterday.
Perfection
Man will be on the path to perfection when he becomes a universe without bounds and a sea without shores...He will have to embody the child crying in its mother's arms, the father concerned about his family, the young man wavering between desires and sigh, the old man struggling against the past with the future, the devout man in his hermitage, the criminal in his jail, the scholar among his endless writings, the ignorant man stumbling against the shadows of the night and in the darkness of his days, the priestess surrounded with her blossoming faith and her thorny solitude, the prostitute caught between the fangs of weakness and the claws of need, the deprived man between fatality and honesty, the rich man between passion and reason, the poet between the mistiness of his nights and the clear light of his dawns. If man can live out all these things, he will grasp perfection and will become one of the shadows of God.
Death
The beginning of life is not in matter, and its end is not in the tomb. For the years that pass are only a moment in the eternal life, while the world and matter and everything that composes it is only a dream in the sight of that awakening which you mistakenly call the terror of death.
Eternity
Humanity is a river of light which runs from the valleys of Creation down to the ocean of Eternity.
Between the peoples of eternity and the peoples of the earth there is constant communication. And we must obey the wll of this invisible power. Often the individual performs an act believing it takes place with his consent and on his orders, while in fact he has been precisely guided and inspired in order to accomplish it. And a great number of men have achieved fame by abandoning themselves to the will of the spirit in proud submission, without objecting and without resisting its demands, as the violin abandons itself totally to the will of the good musician.
Between the world of the spirit and the world of matter there is a pathway that we tread as though we were half asleep. It supports our steps but we are not conscious of its strength. And when we wake, we shall discover that we are carrying in our own hands the seeds we must carefully sow in the good soil of our daily life so that they will produce our good actions and our finest words. If there were not this pathway between our lives and the lives of those who have left us, there would never have been among us any prophet, poet or genius.
They only return to Eternity who have sought it on earth.
Truth
Truth is like the stars: it shows only in the darkness of the night.
Truth is like the beautiful things in this world: it reveals its attractiveness only to those who have first felt the influence of falsehood.
A truth which needs to be proved is a half-truth.
回覆刪除[版主回覆12/27/2010 19:18:00]Thank you for sharing this very valuable background information as well as additional aphorisms from this insightful spiritual writer.
I like this. A truly religious man censuring religion with conviction and most of all, with courage.
回覆刪除[版主回覆12/27/2010 19:16:00]You are a wise man. I'm proud to have you as a friend. But according to the priests, we may both have to burn in Hell!
Send me no priest. Fire is supposed to be the energy that fuels life and therefore sacred. Why must fire be used as a punitive tool in Hell, and the only means of penalty? Why are people not punished by surfeiting them with excessive food, wine, money and sex?
回覆刪除[版主回覆12/27/2010 20:25:00]It is said the fire in hell will burn but not destroy. If so, the kind of body to be burned cannot be the same as our earthly body. As to what kind of body it may be, no one has any answer. The only answer there can be is negative. We can only say what it is not but not what it may be.
According to biblical scholars, the word "hell" in the Aramaic version of the bible merely refers to a low place outside Jerusalem where the Jews used to burn their rubbish, a place of dirt and trash where the fire was kept ever burning. It was only later, with the influence of Platonic thought (which regards all material things as imperfect copies of the eternal form which belong to the world of spirit) that hell became a place where the human soul (which in the original Aramaic simply means "breath" analogous to the word "inspire" "respire") was considered to be suffering eternally. But to St Thomas of Aquinas, to be separated from God is already punishment enough: that is hell!
To me, however, hell and heaven are merely psychological conditions. When we are full of anger, hatred, revenge, jealousy, greed, lust, violence of any sort ie. when we are dominated by excessively negative emotions, we shall then be living in hell and when we are filled with love, sympathy, empathy, justice, harmony and moderation and other positive emotions, our mental state will be that of peace, serenity and tranquity and a quiet joy, that will be a state of heaven. There is no need at all for us to wait till after we die to experience hell. We die to "good" ((which is a corruption of the word "God") every time we are consumed by negative emotions and when we are in such a state, we shall then be "burning" in the "fires" of hell.
Heaven and hell are mere metaphors which stupid and unimaginative priests take literally! So your questions are pseudo-questions which need not be answered because they are the wrong kind of questions to ask.
Talking about hell, I have heard the following story:
回覆刪除Bill Gates dies and is met at the pearly gates by St. Peter. St. Peter says, "Well, you've done a lot of bad things in your life, but you've done some good things too, so I'm going to let you take a look at both heaven and hell, and pick which one you want to go to."
Bill thinks this is fair, and takes a look around heaven. He sees a lot of people in white gowns playing harps and floating around, but it looks rather boring. He looks down at hell, and sees people laughing, drinking, smoking and partying down.
"I'll go to hell," Bill says, and instantly he is whisked away into hell, where he is immersed in a vat of boiling oil as flames and smoke fill the air.
"What happened to all that fun I saw people having?" Bill asks, shocked.
St. Peter looks down and says, "Oh, you must have seen the demo version."