Had I been introduced to this earlier, I would have not, as it were, fall into the depths of depression, or whatever you call that, for now this seems to be universal for anyone, found almost anywhere now, lost into this complete meaningless of things, that they seek cheap thrills in drugs, or temporary fixes, that seem to induce such illusions of being on higher planes, when you are trespassing some boundary that you are not permitted to.
(This I’m saying to specific people. So yeah, you know who you are. Trust me, you do not want to be medicated for all sort of stuff, seeing shrinks every other month, locked in a mental ward, have people pity all over you, over a span of several (heh) years. God-awful, I tell you. Want a personal shrink? Go ahead. They’re no good. At least not good enough of me. Just don’t bother missus pot. Some people have difficulty in expressing emotions, except in certain forms and manners. Cryptic even (!). But this is beside the point. )
I’m not saying I’ve matured/cured or anything close to it, fact is, I am still as I was then (in a sense), but if anything changed, it was having a sort of realization. As much as I hate ignorance of people, en masse, believing myself as distinctly unique, solely realizing on my own experience to make interpretation of things – a sort of existential apathetic bullshit misanthropic loserdom- not withholding the fact that I have been, for a long time, ignorant of the things that were, or whatever that was already laid out, only waiting to be discovered. We mistake ourselves as being the most tragic being ever to exist, not realizing, or unaware, that there had been others before, and more to come. So we dwell ourselves in our own self-pitying misery, and sometimes moan, to attract another, or two, to join in the communal pit of that so called ‘strife against life’, complementing each other. Heh.
Naquib al-Attas said, in his book Islam and Secularism, that one of mistakes/flaws of the Western people, or the secular ones, was that they are continually ‘becoming’, yearning for something that they are not clear of (its goals), forever seeking things in the name of modernization and progress, that are without limits, and greedily too, instead of ‘being’.’Being’ being the realization of them having a spirit. The goal of life is, ironically, ultimately, to die. In a sense, this means that the meaning of life, for man, is to come to realization of his original state as a spirit. This is what is meant, that the prophet Muhammad once said, “Die before ye Die“.
There is a whole lot of stuff behind this too, after reading several books about it for the past few months. I don’t remember much. Or I just don’t care to go about explaining them yet. Too much need to be understood. I go back and forth between things a lot. Mostly to find ‘kesinambungan‘, or a certain commonality between anything I’ve read for these past few years and comparing it with all these stuff. Kierkegaard, Chuang Tzu, Dostoevsky, and Marie Lois Franz’s essays (from Man and His Symbols, edited by C.G.Jung), come to mind. I find myself mostly abandoning many previous uh, principles and beliefs. So yeah, if any of you readers (!) have been uh, monitoring my progress for a long time, you would notice a difference. Or two. But whatever.
But I’d mostly recommend, anything written by Al-Ghazali, which isn’t really hard to find here in Malaysia, since he’s easy to read, although a bit vague at times (for his own discretion, which I find amusing). There’s also stuff by Martin Lings, and Muhammad Asad, but I haven’t been able to procure much of them works, so yeah. Mostly Sufi stuff, if it was given any sort of definitive thematic label. I like the fact that my father has been collecting stuff over his university years, so I get to read some of them, although the pages keep falling out. I’m glad that I found some point of common interest between us, though he never expresses much of it. He’s bent over the issues of Fiqh too much. But glad nevertheless.
So I guess, yeah, I’ve made peace with most of things.
Truth be told, we are all yearning, either we realize it or not, for something higher. To find meaning behind all this… mess. Jung once wrote, somewhere, that the only worthwhile struggle left for mankind in this modern age, is the struggle of the self. Or something that sounds like that. I grew up, believing that I had a higher purpose. “She believes in a higher purpose”. Superfluous gila.
Sartre, when told of stories of saints, wrote;
“These stories helped me; I became even more inclined to set myself above worldly possessions, of which I had none, and I would have found my vocation without difficulty in my comfortable penury; mysticism suits displaced persons and superfluous children”
Does all of this even make sense?
perkaraperkara 