WHAT YOU SEEK IS SEEKING YOU by Baraka Blue /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

What you seek is seeking you
and what you speak you speak into
existence in a realm you’ll soon
awaken from this dream into.

When the being of light descends
and says “it’s now
my time to meet with you,”
then opens up the body’s cage
and lets the spirit free in you.

The mystery is deep in you:
If you yourself could peak in through
the veil of “you” that isn’t you,
but that you’ve come to think is you.

The one who poured before
is pouring more;
is there a leak in you?
You’re thirsty as the desert for the rain
but there’s a spring in you!

An oasis in the placeless—
come inside and have a drink or two.

This is no mirage,
the mirage is what
you think is true!

All is a mirage except the Face
that always speaks to you
through every single tongue—
all Praise the One
who is Uniquely True.

Rays of the feathered sun
point to one who casts its heat in you;
all the mirrored forms
reflect the Light,
look how it beams in you!

Who receives this breath of life?
And who is it that breathes in you?

The path of letting go of “you”—
is the only path that leads to you.

That paradisal tree, whose leaves
eternally, are deep in bloom.
The secret of all secrets is
you hold its very seeds in you.

The treasure that was loving
to be known
has hid its keys in you.

Is not the chest that holds its jewels
the chest that you are breathing through?

Mount the back of the Buraq
and grab his reins—the noble steed’s in you.
You think yourself a single drop of rain
and yet the sea’s in you!


Give yourself completely now!
Don’t wait until He seizes you!

You think yourself a creature made of clay
and yet He sees in you.

The ear through which He hears,
the very hand which He seizes through,
ma ramait itha ramait
it wasn’t you
but it was We who threw.

What you seek—
before a “you” to seek—
it was seeking you.

And the only thing
that’s keeping you from Oneness
is your seeing two.

---------


Video by Peter Wintrip
Shot in Fes, Morocco

(Press CC Closed Caption on video to see the words simultaneously)

Bhagavad Gita 2: 47, 71 /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

To the enlightened brahmana all the Vedas are of no more importance than is a small well in a place flooded with water on all sides.

...

That which is night for all beings, in that the self-controlled is awake. That in which all beings are awake is night for the sage who sees.

- Bhagavad Gita 2: 47, 71

eternity /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

“Blessed eternity is lived in the love of the knowledge and the knowledge of the love”—F.G.

The road to union is not what we imagined;

The world of the soul is not as we thought.

The source from which Khidr drank the water of life

Is in our own home, but we have buried it. 

  • Sadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d.673/1273–74)

(An nîst rah-e vasl ke angâshte-îm vân nîst jâhân-e jân ke pandâshte-îm ân chesme ke Khezr khorde z-ou âb-e hayât dar khâne-ye mâst lîk anbâshte-îm.)

“Secularism inherits from imperial Christianity a fundamental impetus either to convert, to control, or to radically domesticate other epistemes. … " -- Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “SECULARISM AND RELIGION IN THE MODERN/ COLONIAL WORLD-SYSTEM,” 382

“The “spirit of conquest,” embedded within the inner existence of Westerners, “goes under the guise of ‘moralist’ pretexts, and it is in the name of ‘liberty’ that they would force the whole world to imitate them!”  They “force everyone to interest themselves exclusively in what interests them, to put economic concerns above all, or to adopt the political regime which they happen to prefer. . . . And the most extraordinary thing is that they have similar pretensions not only with regard to the peoples that they have conquered, but also with regard to those among them,”  - Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 159

“On economic policy Democrats are indistinguishable from Reagan-era Republicans. On foreign policy they're indistinguishable from Bush-era neocons. But they're still able to sell the idea that they're progressive…, by copious lip service to social justice.”

the sun /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

"It matters not under what star you were born, only that you die under the sun of la ilaha ilaha illa Llah.”- Ahmad Ghazali

—-

‘Be true in your relationship with the Sovereign Creator, for He is the greatest one with whom you could relate in all your affairs and states. Know that He cares for those who turn to Him; relieves difficulties for them; is there for them in every circumstance, condition and change; and He shelters them in His Mercy, Grace, Pardon and Forgiveness. When light engages the heart, it causes an illumination of the path, a purification of the consciousness, an enlightenment of the intellect and an establishment of the foundations of dhikr and shukr and of beautiful worship.’ - Sayyidi Habib Umar bin Hafiz (May God raise & preserve him).

Meister Eckhart /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

All beings

are words of God,

His music, His

art.

Sacred books we are, for the infinite camps

in our

souls.

Every act reveals God and expands His being.

I know that may be hard

to comprehend.

All creatures are doing their best

to help God in His birth

of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.

He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent

for a while,

worlds are forming

in my heart.

Meister Eckhart

Jay Electronica --- on Kanye West - Jesus Lord pt 2 / Donda /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

from min 4.36

--- /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

The presence of God in form is Beauty, the presence of God in the will is Virtue, and the presence of God in the intellect is Truth.

"If the worldly kings knew the ecstasy we were in, they would send their armies with swords to try and take it from us."  ~Ibrahim ibn Adham (قدس الله سره).

"Islam began as something strange, and will revert to being strange, so give glad tidings to the strange ones."  ~The Holy Apostle Muhammad (ﷺ), as related in Ibn Majah.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable. - Seneca

"The first act of charity is to rid the soul of illusions and passions and thus rid the world of a maleficent being; it is to make a void so that God may fill it and, by this fullness, give Himself. A saint is a void that offers itself for the passage of God." - Frithjof Schuon

Sidi Ahmed Tijani r.a, Fez, Morocco

Excerpt from SYMBOL & ARCHETYPE by Martin Lings /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

'Eid Mubarak to all

"The openness of the Eye of the Heart, or the wake of the Heart as many traditions term it, is what distinguishes primordial man —and by extension the Saint—from fallen man. The significance of this inward opening may be understood from the relationship between the sun and the moon which symbolize respectively the Spirit and the Heart: just as the moon looks towards the sun and transmits something of its reflected radiance to the darkness of the night, so the Heart transmits the light of the Spirit to the night of the soul. The Spirit itself lies open to the Supreme Source of all light, thus making, for one whose Heart is awake, a continuity between the Divine Qualities and the soul, a ray which is passed from Them by the Spirit to the Heart, from which it is diffused in a multiple refraction throughout the various channels of the psychic substance.

The virtues which are thereby imprinted on the soul are thus nothing other than projections of the Qualities, and inversely each of these projected images is blessed with intuition of its Divine Archetype. As to the mind, with its reason, imagination and memory, a measure of the ‘moonlight’ which it receives from the Heart is passed on to the senses and through them as far as the outward objects which they see and hear and feel; and at this furthest contact the ray is reversed, for the things of the macrocosm are recognised as symbols, that is, as kindred manifestations of the Hidden Treasure, each of which has its counterpart in the microcosm. Otherwise expressed, for primordial man everything, inward or outward, was transparent: in experiencing a symbol he experienced its Archetype. He was thus able to rejoice in being outwardly surrounded and inwardly adorned by Divine Presences.

The eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree was the attachment to a symbol for its own sake apart from its higher meaning. That violation of the norm barred man’s access to his inward centre, and the consequent blurring of his vision made him no longer able to fulfill adequately his original function as mediator between Heaven and earth. But at the fall of the microcosm, the macrocosm remained unfallen; and though its symbols had become less transparent to man’s perceiving, they retained in themselves their original perfection. Only primordial man does justice to that perfection; but at the same time he is independent of it, in virtue of being himself a symbol of the Divine Essence which is absolutely Independent of the Divine Qualities. Fallen man on the other hand has a lesson to learn from the great outer world which surrounds him, for its symbols offer him an enlightenment which will be of guidance to him on his path of return to what he has lost, inasmuch as their perfection can further the perfecting of their counterparts within him which have suffered from the Fall. The clouds of the macrocosm are never permanent; they come only to go, the luminaries still shine, and the directions of space have lost nothing of their measurelessness. But in fallen man the soul is no longer the vast image of the Infinite that it was created to be, and the inward firmament is veiled. That veiling is the decisive result of the Fall, which did not sever the connection between soul and Spirit, between human perception and the Archetypes, but placed there a barrier that is more or less opaque— increasingly opaque as far as the majority is concerned, this increase being the gradual degeneration which inevitably takes place throughout each cycle of time. But in the context of our theme the barrier can and must be described as more or less transparent, since it would be pointless to speak of symbolism where there cannot be at least some intuition, however faint, of the Archetypes. Moreover the science of symbols is inextricably linked with the path of return which, being against the cyclic current, makes for an increase of transparency.

If the symbols of the macrocosm, taken collectively or separately, are reminders for the spiritual traveller of man’s lost perfection, it might none the less be said that the most direct reminders will be microcosmic, that is, True Man himself, personified by the Prophets, the Saints and, more immediately, by the living Spiritual Master. But although there is no doubt a wealth of truth in this, it would be a simplification to reduce macrocosmic symbols to a second place in any absolute sense as regards their spiritual significance for man, since much will depend on the individual and on circumstances. Moreover otherness, as well as sameness, has its own special impact. The Qur’an affirms the efficacy of both; We shall show them Our signs on the horizons and in themselves (xli 153)."

——
Footnote: The capital letter is used to denote the distinction. Moreover since this centre reflects a whole hierarchy of centres which transcend it, the term Heart is also sometimes used of the Spirit, and ultimately of the Supreme Centre, the Divine Self.

—
SYMBOL & ARCHETYPE by Martin Lings (Fons Vitae)

Kid Cudi - Moon (live) /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

liberty /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Be thou not haunted by the soul’s fantasies;

Be not subdued by idle moods,

But keep thy liberty; unshakable,

Leave folly to the outer world.

Just as the eagle, circle in the heights —

Has thine intelligence not told thee that?

Thou bearest in thy soul a holy land —

Go there, when dreams torment thy mind.

Under the clouds it may be dark;

But above them there is sunshine.

Tell me: what is the sickness of the soul?

Something is lacking: it is gratitude of the heart!

-Thank you my friend Ahmed Mouneimene

Rabi'a on resignation /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

In what appears to have been her last illness, Rabi‘a was said to have been visited by three of her friends, Hasan of Basra, Malik Dinar and Shaqiq Balkhi, and they, like the friends of Job, endeavoured to teach her the duty of resignation.

Hasan said, "He is not sincere in his claim (to be a true servant of God), who is not patient under the chastisement of his Lord". Rabi‘a said, "I smell egotism in this speech". So Shaiq took up the thread and said, "He is not sincere in his claim who is not thankful for the chastisement of his Lord".

Rabi‘a said, "Something better than this is needed". Then Malik Dinar tried, "He is not sincere in his claim who does not delight in the chastisement of his Lord". Rabi‘a said, "Even this is not good enough". They said, "Do thou speak", and she shewed her idea of the true resignation in her reply, "He is not sincere in his claim who does not forget the chastisement in the contemplation of his Lord".

- Rabi'a Basri: the mystic and her fellow saints, p. 43.

Sacred Heart 2 (A Fragment–) /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Geography comes to an end,
Compass has lost all earthly north,
Horizons have no meaning
Nor roads an explanation:
I cannot even hope for any special borealis
To rouse my darkness with a brief “Hurray”!
O flaming Heart,
Unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,
You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found You.
Here will I love and praise You in a tongueless death,
Until my white devoted bones,
Long bleached and polished by the winds of this Sahara,
Relive at Your command,
Rise and unfold the flowers of their everlasting spring.

–By Thomas Merton, from “The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton”

"Tribute" - Yasiin Bey /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

The new Blackstar song produced by Madlib featured in Dave Chappelle's Netflix special 'The Closer'.

[Verse: Yasiin Bey]

This is for my favorite band of human beings

The faithful, the graceful, the tragic, the classic

The evidence of things unseen, the book of life

The mansions of the moon, the bones of Firuan

Recently discovered and everything but note

The doubter's doubts about it never made unsure, life!

The gift, peace out the pressure

Can't remember how you came

Or win a bet on how you'll exit

From the start, the only thing certain is the end

Promise to all and none, knowing not when

Heartbreak from yesterday a fret for tomorrow

I leave you now filled with anxiety and hollow

If you pray don't worry, if you worry don't pray

My homie told it to me just the other day

From the tall castle walls to the mean teeth streets

I hope you get what you are

And that you are what you need

Ameen...

Written by Talib Kweli Greene, Otis Lee Jackson, Yasiin Bey

Performed by Talib Kweli & Yasiin Bey

Courtesy of Talib Kweli & Yasiin Bey

Mos Def and Kanye West from JEEN-YUHS, upcoming 2022. /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

miscellanea /  by Mustafa Gouverneur

Laziness is a kind of sadness - Thomas Aquinas

When transcendence, truth and symbolism are removed from the cosmos, we are left with a utilitarian universe containing little more than the useful and the useless, the pleasant and the unpleasant. - Joseph Lumbard

"We can now recognize that the fate of the soul is the fate of the social order; that if the spirit within us withers, so too will all the world we build about us. Literally so. 1/2

"What, after all, is the ecological crisis that now captures so much belated attention but the inevitable extroversion of a blighted psyche?" 2/2 - Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends

Postmodern/CT folks refuse to *ever* explain how, if language/ reason/ knowledge is produced by power, how *their* language/knowledge/reason somehow escapes that determinism. - Caner Dagli

“Wait guys, if the human subject is itself constructed by power relationships, doesn’t that mean *your* ideas are constructed by power relationships too, making them just as suspect?” - Caner Dagli

The Master said: At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart, without overstepping the boundaries of right. - Confucius

Also from Prof. Dagli:

“We teach people that they are accidents, and we spend *zero* time in the public sphere talking about how this cradle-to-grave indoctrination of purposeless mechanistic biology might just make it impossible for people to take morality and truth seriously at a deep level.

We cannot teach generations of human beings that each and every one of us is a random pattern of molecules, and then be surprised when large numbers of us decide that it makes little sense to care if people they don’t know and will never meet will live, die, or suffer.

The critics of so-called social Darwinism have the same exact account of human nature as those they deplore. What arguments can they offer as to *why* they shouldn't act as if other people were meaningless cosmic accidents, which "smart" people are required to believe anyway?”