All the best,
Zahir Davdani,
UK/Iran.

The Profanity of a Profane World

The modern era in which we find ourselves is unlike any other era in the history of the world. From the very beginning of human history, the greatest and most intelligent men of every epoch have given credence to the existence of worlds and beings beyond this physical realm and have posited an Absolute Being who is at once the Origin and Destination of all things. It is only now – in the last few centuries – that man has found not only “reason” to doubt the things that his forefathers saw to be certain and sacred but has also discovered the “courage” to break from tradition and, by standing on his own two feet, has had the audacity to deny the very existence of anything sacred. The roots of this newfound “enlightenment” of man can be traced to his predilection to rebel against his Creator, individually speaking, and to the effects of the Fall of man, on the level of society and civilization. A thorough examination of these roots reveals the fact that modern “reason” is nothing other than the obfuscation of metaphysical insight and vision or, at best, the vestiges of the sacred Intellect deposited in man; and the much touted “courage” is really foolhardiness and merely the masked rebelliousness of Promethean man.
To understand the rebellious nature of fallen man, it is important to first understand his “created” nature and the fact that he is not the cause of his own existence. Man exists, but then so do dogs. What separates man from other creatures is his ability to reflect on and intellectualize his “own” existence. Upon doing so, he discovers that in himself and by himself he is nothing, and that his existence is nothing but the consequence of his connection with the Source of all existence. Just as a ray of light radiating from the sun has no independent existence, so too man is an effusion of Divine Being. But when man does not use his intellect and does not see in this essential way, he begins to imagine that his existence is real and that he is a “something” in its own right. Such a skewed view of reality results in a corresponding deviation of human will. Fallen man in this new and modern fashion of “seeing” now starts to appropriate powers and rights for himself that he previously saw as a trust from Heaven which he had to safeguard and be true to. As he is now the measure of all things, he is also the sole criterion of human activity, and henceforth, only he decides what is to be done and what is not to be done – a bona fide rebel without a cause.

It is when man is rebellious and a renegade from heaven that he does not see the need for mediums and conduits of grace that connect him with the Source of all being and all grace. He balks at authority – spiritual or mundane – and hopes to go it on his own. Unwilling to see anything beyond his own self, he fails to transcend his limited and relative reality and becomes a prisoner of his body and a slave of his carnal desires. Sensing this and the futility of his situation, he becomes desperate, and in an occasional act of vulgarity, lashes out at the very sources of grace and sanctity that could save him from himself and his dire situation. Hence, it is not a coincidence that profanity and blasphemy aimed at holy personalities are commonly observed in our modern era. But arguably that which is worse than the verbal or pictorial blasphemies is the general attitude of indifference and nonchalance that modern men have adopted towards religion and the sacred. It is one thing to vent “hatred” towards sacred realities; it is quite another to totally ignore them. In this vein, the very act of living a modern, liberal, secular life that is “untouched” by religion is the greatest of blasphemies.

Turning now to the social plane, it is the general conditions of the Fall which bear heavily upon modern man’s inability to have faith in God and the men of God. To explain, in opposition to the cult of progress that modern man subscribes to, traditional religious doctrines have always seen man’s entry into this world to be a fall from a higher realm to lower and lower ones. They speak of a degression, not progression. On the noetic plane, they hold that since the former generations of men had more of a direct access to Revelation and the vision of the prophet through whom the religion was established, the later ones – due to their distance and the entropic conditions of the Fall – have more difficulty in “seeing” the truth. They need to be helped from the outside, so to speak. They require aids to achieve the vision and intellection of the former generations. These aids and “artificial” constructs are providentially provided and are a part and parcel of the religious tradition as a whole. So while they are in reality instruments which compensate for the overall decline, they are seen ostensibly as “developments”. After the initial vision, there is for instance the development in the religious universe and orthodoxy of a doctrine, theology, ideology, sociology, and political system.

For a time, the constructs, ones that pertain to a discursive and rational understanding of religious truths, were satisfactory and sufficient, as reason was still based on higher levels of the intellect, and the sense of the sacred and holy was still alive and strong in traditional societies. Further on this was not the case, and reason was increasingly divorced from its higher principle – namely the sacred intellect or al-Aql al-Qudsi – and a purely human rationality came to take its place, a rationality that insisted that all aspects of being fall within the pale of its discursive and deductive methods. This led to the absolutization of the said constructs – things which are in principle relative – leading to their solidification, irrelevance, and eventual impotence. This in turn opened a Pandora’s Box of religious criticism, after which there was nothing sacred left. All things were to be dissected by man’s rational faculty and pronounced as dead after the event. Indeed, God himself was pronounced as dead at the scene of the crime that modernity represents.

Man without a sense of the Absolute is a man that is bewildered and distraught amongst countless relativities. In a world where there is no Sacred, everything is profane. In a profane world, profanity is indistinguishable from truth and noble speech worthy of man and his divine origins. Without such distinctions, man is free to bark everything and anything that comes out of his mouth, not realizing that the very freedom of will that he uses to express his profanity is only made possible by the existence of the sacred and supreme will of his Creator. Hence the profound statement of Meister Eckhart, “the more he blasphemes, the more he praises God” rings true in our day more than in any other. But the final word must be from the Master of Eckhart, Jesus (peace be upon him) who said:

“Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.” (Matthew 18:7)

(Shaikh Shuja Ali Mirza is a graduate of the University of Toronto. For the past 19 years, he has been studying at the Islamic seminary in Qom, Iran.)

Cameron is a genius but that may make it harder for people to get his message. For example do people really understand that Einstein proved that as things go faster, time slows down and lenghts and distances contract? Before the eclipse, over 100 top physicists said that his theory of relativity was nonsense.

Then the eclipse proved with precise mathematics that his theory was a law of nature and he was an overnight celebrity. The front page of the New York Times told all about him the next day. Before it was proven, physicists did not believe it since they could not understand it.

But Cameron’s movie can never be proven since it is subjective but it did break all box office records just like Titanic. Rose, have you seen that movie? If not what are you waiting for? The people wanted to destroy all that land for money in the movie. We are destroying the planet earth for money. Avatar is fiction but is so much more.

The N’avi live in the rainforest and we have tribes living in our rainforest that people want to cut down. Charles, Prince of Wales says that doing this is producing more carbon dioxide than all the cars, ships and boats in the world combined. See his 90 second commercial about this with the Dalai Lama, Robin Williams and Harrison Ford in this 90 second commercial– http://c-frog.notlong.com Then see his commercial with leaders of Google, Yahoo, amazon.com, Sony, Nike with Sir Richard Branson and Michael Dell. http://g-frog.notlong.com

Then there is the whole spiritual side of the movie that Debbie touched on. I think that Debbie is a genius just like James Cameron. In fact Albert Einstein says that Debbie is among the top 2% of the smartest people on the planet since she solved his Einstein quiz. That means that her IQ is over 132. http://www.phifoundation.org/einstein-intelligence-quiz.html Make sure to see this movie to see what you think. Before Debbie went to see Avatar I asked her who is more likely to cry during the movie, her or her sister. That was even before I saw it but I heard heard the reviews.

It did not win best picture, like Titanic, but that must be because of the controversy that I am still clueless about. I guess it was controversial since it does deal with how the greed of man is destroying life on the planet earth. The next step after destroying the land of the N’avi would be to make the N’avi slaves just like America did with black people. If that is how the movie ended, people would be outraged but they would come to see the sequel to it.
Chuck Bluestein´s last blog ..French Girl Gets a Baby Brother

Just saw your last post. well done. lol.