The Supreme Existential Importance of Islam; It's Personal and Cosmic Significance

When it comes to Islam , it is the only thing that I've ever been like this with (as I wasn't with Christianity for instance, nor Thelema, nor Buddhism or other things I explored along the way in my journey), is that even reading on basic things like Salaah can make me tear up because of how much heart and truth there is in it.

Reading a Jewish or Christian prayer for instance, just doesn't bring me any kind of feeling compared to it. Islamic prayer is a heavily powerful thing.

Unlike the other two Abrahamic religions (Judaism and Christianity) I feel a strong feeling of "this means something", that when I read the Qur'an, when I recite in Salaah, when I read about Prophet Muhammad (A.S.), the Ahl al-Bayt, the Companions (Sahaba), I feel this immense awe and love, as well as an immensely piercing confrontation of day-to-day consensus reality. 

Islam is conceived as so dangerous and confronting for a reason and it's not terrorism or "barbaric" punishments, it is it's ontological nature as a religion beyond all the other religions and the transformative power it has. 

Islam liberates the individual to God, it isn't "liberal" it is Haqq (Truth/Reality), it brings the Worshiper to direct awareness of him/herself and to God. It is a sword that separates the wheat from the chaff, it is itself a spiritual quality control in a sense. 

It is universal and archetypal, it is by it's very nature anti-tribal and cross-continental. It is immensely powerful by it's words alone.

No religion has what Islam has. 

Other religions have good and true aspects but nothing as unified-ly profoundly principle as what Islam has.

With Islam unlike Judaism and Christianity there is this sense also of spiritual determination, integrity, etc. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, there is not a sense of self-hatred and embarrassment to being deeply spiritual/religious/pious. Jews and Christians in their root mentalities feel they need to apologize (even extreme fundamentalist Evangelical Christians!). Whereas in Islam, if you truly accept and believe it, then you defacto cannot hold such a view. Islam is something one is humbly unashamed about, even in light of social stigma in the west. It is something so hard to articulate. 

Far more than Christianity (even though that Jesus calls it out in various places), Islam (and God in the Qur'an) strongly criticizes hypocrisy. We are to cleanse/purify ourselves of our hypocrisy and truly embrace the truth and justice we are called to and what we profess to believe. This means that being at odds with the world around us, being Nomads in a sense (as I mentioned once) is part of the deal. 

Anyway with the experience of Islam, it's messages, it's practices, it just overwhelmingly brings me joy when I embrace it. When I got through tough times I need to not let go of that spark, I need to keep letting it grow. 

I see all the Islamphobia, hatred, controversy towards Islam in the media and internet as a cosmic thing. Islam won the hearts of the hostile Meccan Pagans and spread all throughout the middle east within several decades of Prophet Muhammad's (A.S.) death, and in the 20th/21st century is the same thing happening again. The general westerner is too stupid to realize how this works. Islam is so much more criticized in intensely hostile ways and extremely unfairly for a reason, and it is not something that leaves any scar on the legacy of Islam in the long-run in the future.

The willingness to depict Islam as "desert tribal religion stuck in the 7th century" just shows hoq little thread left the propaganda against Islam has. The overuse of distortion and misinterpretation of Islamic history and Islamic teachings also show this too.

Secular-atheistic-modernity is the bridge between a Catholic-dominated west and an Islam-dominated future. Not globalism and not authoritarianism but you get my drift. 

It's only a matter of time that the west's propaganda falls against itself in epic ways and the majority west embraces Islam. 

Everything that modernity created and developed with science will be dealt with in a similar way to which Muslims dealt with science in the middle ages. We will surpass western science and unveil more mysteries of the universe. 

This is obviously one reason that fanatical Christians often want to frame Muhammad as an "antichrist" and Islam as an "antichrist religion", because Islam will very much succeed Christianity in numbers eventually. 

Unlike Christianity, Islam has had a much richer track record and has a larger legacy to adjust to. Christianity doesn't have any of these benefits, no other religion does. 

Even though Christianity was an international religion it hasn't had any of the room for benefit that Islam has, nor has it gone through as many phases as Islam. Islam has had phases, whereas Christianity has undergone schisms and internal controversies.

The only major internal controversy in Islam is the Sunni-Shia split but aside from that it is a diverse religion which accommodates it's diversity while upholding orthodoxy, something Christianity was completely incapable of doing.

Anyway, I just love Islam so much.

The Unquestioned Worship of Technology; And The Wrath Of God

Throughout the Qur'an is the frequented phrase "walk throughout the land and see what became of those people's destroyed before you". There is also the notion of natural and supernatural destruction throughout history.

In modernity we have the notion that just because we've built some impressive technology, that we are somehow superior to those in the past or even "God-like". There is definitely a Faustian and Promethean notion to all of this.

Now we, in "modernity", come to take it for granted and accept that technology has now made us useless and that technology itself is our future, rather than ourselves.

As basically all the Postmodernist philosophers have noted, we are living in an age of disassociation. We collectively have no idea what we are anymore and our collective "brain" is guided by big tech corporations. Our place in society has been inverted to serve them, rather than each other.

Anyway, from here we find the whole Dystopian idea so consistent in modern scifi.

However as I mentioned the Qur'an, the referenced notions in the Qur'an, as well as the Quranic and Biblical lessons found in the Flood of Noah and in the Tower of Babel are so freaking universal I think. Both these stories, related to different time periods before Prophet Abraham (A.S.) are signs and warnings against this kind if Faustian/Promethean spirit which is so much at the heart of 'modern' people's minds these days.

It doesn't matter how sophisticated, how strange the technology we create is in the future, we will never be "gods". At some point the internet will cease to be because of some kind of natural disaster. We see floods and hurricanes all the time. Matter of fact we're in the middle of a plague at the moment.

These messages, are not pleasant but they are beautiful in how much they speak to the heart of our existence which modernity seeks to separate from us.

God's wrath and judgement is on everything we do, personally and as a collective planet. Our games and illusions we create for ourselves are only means of distraction, when we uphold these ideals that are contrary to our Fitrah, we are merely waiting for our own self-created demise. The rise of Nihilism (whether self-acknowledged militant nihilism or veiled through assumption) is a further testament. Within this idolatry of technology is a new form of self-hatred and existential self-sabotage.

Between my love for avant garde art and Islam

So I've been studying Marina Abramovic lately and I find her incredibly interesting in different ways but at the same time I can't digest lots of her work at once. I am skeptical of certain celebrity endorsement of her but it seems more like a lot of pop stars want to make her like a kind of Serbian female Warhol, which she's not.

Anyway, some other artists I love include the filmmaker Stan Brakhage (who's work you may find is like a precursor to elements of Kubrick and Lynch, except he's way more abstract and more direct within avant garde tradition).

I also love the playwrite and director Richard Foreman, whom I discovered through John Zorn. Foreman I see relating to many elements of the intense, primal spiritual art that I have mentioned in relation to Iannis Xenakis, Aleister Crowley, Stravinsky's Le Sacre, Antonin Artaud, Austin Spare, Jani Christou etc. 

I think in relating to that 'primalness', that 'true' art is an awakening experience that awakens the subject experiencing it to the reality of existence. Not in a pretentious pseudo-gnostic sense but in a truly primal, unfiltered manner. That there is something lurking behind the daily experience of reality and both what produced it (birth) and where it ends up (the graveyard). 

Sure the Macabre has one relevance but I'm not speaking of basic gothic horror stuff or even Lovecraftian horror, because it is a lot more extreme than either and yet not as dressed-up either, it is completely unfiltered and completely self-aware. 

Out of this comes an archetypally transcendent impulse rooted in the ground of one's being, the impulse towards God/Allah/YHWH/Brahman (not speaking religion-specific in this sense), the thing that both 'causes' but which also frees us from this initial realization, the thing which is both the peace and the suprapeace, a pure kind of transcendent pleasure (Paradise in Islamic terms). 

I do think that I see Islam relating deeply to this, as with the Prophet prior to the significantly great Prophet Muhammad, such as Prophet Abraham and Prophet Moses. 

On some level it is like the apes in Kubrick's 2001, they pick up the bone and smash it, they discover tools, they discover the intellect ('Aql), they also understand the greater calling of humanity.

But the rest of humanity needs the basic safety, so they rest on the animal instead of the intellect and therefore (in conjunction with modernity) must therefore deny God and remove metaphysics from their collective societal worldview. 

So every throughout history in the Abrahamic scheme, a great Prophet is chosen, who stands up against the apes and calls them to the intellect ('Aql). 

The apes, in reaction, choose a parody of the intellect (materialist-empiricism) as a further assertion away from the primal truth. 

(I'm just using analogies from Kubrick's 2001 here).

The age-old, absurd, crisis about "Eternal Hell", of the theologians and philosophers

 It does greatly amuse me that many people get stuck in moral outrage and angst about the idea of "eternal hell" and then trap themselves in speculative struggle with an idea relating to a metaphysical reality which they have intellectually abstracted in a manner that has nothing to do with the subject to begin with.

It is treated by Christian and some Muslim theologians as one of the ultimate "problems" of faith. This really shows the utter idiocy of what we Abrahamics let perpetuate under the skin. Letting poor understandings and a lack of direct experiential engagement in our traditions, send us down an Aristotelian dead-end.

I find the whole question Idiotic, when they never ask WHAT IS HELL?

These idiots who spend their time in crisis, both believers and theologians/philosophers are that dense in the head that they don't even come to correlate that both Paradise and Hell are, in some manner, theophanies of God itself. The idea of "the return" to God, the center of our beliefs and the very things which we come from and return to. Completely ignored.

One path results in divine ecstacy and the other results in the purification and refining of the soul the hard way. 

Both are encounters with Ultimate Reality, al-Haqq, (God/Allah) at it's highest direct intensity.

There is no room for speculative headscratching. No room for any moral discontent when the questioner is making up their own sophistry and trying to attack at an imaginary problem that is simply not there in the Abrahamic religions' conception of hereafter.

To think that so many believers, theologians and philosophers can't grasp the WHAT of the situation makes me wonder. To fall for it shows that they don't really know the details of their beliefs and spiritual problems they are trying to solve and that they are merely responding to prior intellectual tradition rather than actually engaging the Revelations themselves.

This all is also supported by how the Bible itself calls God "a consuming fire". 

The significance and potency of Islam is so strong that it spawned the entire Western Civilization which furiously tries to copy everything it achieved and make similar pronouncements but with an inverted morality

Islam and the Holy Grail

 Something really significant that people don't often consider with Muhammad, is that; given how the Arab pagans used to bury their female infants alive because they viewed daughters as curses. How significant is it that Muhammad's only progeny surviving past childhood was Lady Fatimah. And how through Fatimah (who married Imam Ali obvs) that Muhammad's successorship was advanced. 

Also, though you may know (I think I've mentioned it before) but Surah Kawthar is a promise God gave to Muhammad before the birth of Fatimah. The word Kawthar means "abundance" but it also, in Hadith, is metaphysically referred to as "the fountain in Paradise". From there it is obvious where Cup/Chalice symbolism in Qur'anic verses about Paradise factor into this.

The layers of symbols associated with Fatimah is profound. The whole "holy grail" myth in the middle ages comes out of Shi'ite tradition, relating to Fatimah and Ali, but as it was appropriated into the Parzival story (which Crowley and other occultists of his day very much loved) where Christianized to be about Jesus rather than Muhammad.

However of course the "holy grail" is also connected to Alchemy/Hermeticism as well, with the concept of Magnum Opus or "the Great Work".

One further interesting connection there is between Fatimah's Sophic aspect and the Babalon of Thelema, to which Crowley attributes the Grail symbology in texts like Liber Cheth and Liber 418.

This is all part of a grand mystery nonetheless. It is really upsetting that so many western esotericists/occultists want to exclude and bastardize Islam from this conversation when it undoubtedly contains all the missing pieces. The answers of western occultism are to be found where the biggoted minds of so many westerns don’t want to look: Islam, but not just that but Shia Islam (the seed where Sufism sprouted too).

Christianity's forgotten mystery

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. 

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.” 

And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

(John 20:20-23)

......Only to be later revived and reinterpreted by both Pentecostals and Mormons.