BARAKA BASHMENT

Closure exists internally and externally. Both stations are manifestations of human agency. Closure is not static. Externally it floats above subjects and rests where the human-mind atrophies. Closure hovers over subjects, perceptions, like a saucer eventually mating with the atrophied consciousness. The human stands on the ground posturing like a metal rod. The closure pauses. There is a feedback loop maintained by the static of the human and that of closure. This feedback devops into a pillar. A solid structure. There is an impasse. In order to make sense of the structure it is given a name, an identity. Whether it is the simulation of Truth, or the idol of homogenaic-orthopraxis, this pillar grows like teeth and bone—from the inside it feeds off closure. It expands outward. Where it once grew, it becomes a growth. A tumor.

If the tumor is really a knot it can be massaged (out) and with clear/clean attention/intention it may soften and become more receptive to touch. It becomes sensitive to subtle stimuli.

If the tumor is a tumor it may be extracted. In worse case scenarios an exorcism may be necessary. Here, the greatest of all idols manifests as “reality” and preceeds love, God consciousness, to such a degree as to be animated in the human through body, mind, speech, and gesture. Hatred is fear. Fear is Iblis. Iblis is closure. Closure is atrophy. Atrophy is rigamortus. Rigamortus is death. The human becomes wood. Wood is a multipurpose material. One can build. One can burn. One can burn to build. One can build to burn.

Our beloved Willow offered a unique way of reading Sura II. What it takes to be God-conscious is few. What it takes to be (perceived in mind and heart) God-separate is difficult and laborous. Here is a look at 2:1-5

Alif. Lam. Mim.

This is the book of which there is no doubt a guidance to all who undermine the disconnective impulse,

Who believe in the unseen, and establish worship and prayer and communication with the Divine, and spend of what the uncontainable presence has given to them,

And believe in what was revealed to [Muhammad] and also what was revealed before him, and are certain of what occurs after this.

These benefitting people depend on guidance from the all-encompassing force of life. These people are successful.

If there is such a thing as purity, than this is a pure rant. Of course it’s not me. It’s that other person that shows up.

Akh. Erg. Ugh.

I’m sooo bored of capital-Islam right now. I posted for about 30 minutes some back-and-forth nonsense some nonsense had with my nonsense about “freedom of expression.” S/he gave the basic “a person shouldn’t abuse their freedom of speech” cover-up of “What I really want is to limit what peple can say and if I had the opportunity I’d limit what they thought as well” bulldonk. Ugh. I swear. Muhammad(p) I am calling out to you right now. I suggest you get over here immediately and straighten this out, cause if I’m supposed to refer back to The Good Book in order to make every decision do-able, than I suggest you just “make it plain” as Malcolm said and lay it out there so I can tell you to either “try again,” “shove it,” “keep it,” “run it up the flag pole,” or I’ll swallow it whole and move on happy as a lizard in the sun.

Did I just say that? Was that me who just begged for clarity? Was I asking for a singular meaning? Oh my goodness, this religious honk is completely getting to me. The Murji’ah were able to defer, and today it seems I am only able to confer.

Con-fer. It is a con.

What on earth does an organic-macrobiotic-homegrown-erupting-from-the-local-Earth spirituality look like?! Can someone please tell me? Capital Islam is boring because it’s limited to a fossilized dogmatism and Prophet-mimicry desguised as “respect.” The so-called margins of Islam are boring because it’s patchwork and self-appreciative to the point of being lazy. A merging of the great naked Aghorin Shiva-Kali with the clean-big-mind-sensuality of Islam and the explosion of forms through Dzogchen Bon-Shamanic Buddhism seems like the only means to an interesting end.

Or what? What else? Am I grasping? Am I syncretizing? I can’t bare to be a syncretist. And I can’t bare to be a purist, a singularity. And I can’t bare to have to prove myself and to some culture that doesn’t even really exist that: no homosexuals do not fuck eachother in the ass because they are evil sinners and are acting against nature while every hetero-fascist jerks off ten times a day even after getting a most “unnatural” handjob from their girlfriend. But apparently all the righteous are practicing coitus interuptus now a days anyway Mantak Chia via the Tao, so you know, there’s a loop hole there.

The truth is, I can’t have these discussions about “freedom of speech” and “women’s roles” (”women’s roles”? Are you f-ing kidding me!?) with people who have a book—a book that contains some of the most beautifully liberating translogical polylinguistic open-ended unpuncuated verse I have yet to come across and yet the biggest concern is “people’s place in society.” And if you’re listening out there Laury, I hold the “tradition” itself accountable. While all currents are actually composed of other multiple currents within, the sonic dominance, the dominant sound, the loudest current manifests at the beckon of the populous. It is maintained by the populous. AKA: the people (another false identity if I ever heard one, but I use it so I’m a hypocrite) determine the dominant paradigm. While not existing in a vacuum and flanked by military atrocities on all sides, a current can not be expected to exist in a pure non-influenced state, where blame can be place squarely on a single person. However, it still stinks.

And while the “other option” (in the circles I run in) is often some vague concept of the “heresy” that more often than not resembles the very consumer culture it so arrogantly proclaims to detest, I am stuck between fascism and fake-ism.

But why can’t I join the discussion regarding gender issues and freedom of expression Islamically?

Simple. Any tradition of debate that has as its base a text and a list of supposed sayings and actions by the vehicle for that text is bound to an access-based heirarchy and a skewed power dynamic. That is, the person that has read more wins. Why? Because the tradition has decided that all thought-action needs to be placed against the thought-action of the text. He (and usually “he”) who has access to the text wins. He who “knows the language” wins. He who has the opportunity and the money to study the text wins. He who doesn’t have enough money and winds up in some madrasa wins. He who carries the books wins. As such the playing field remains terribly uneven. And why? Because the tradition has developed in such a way as to privelage literacy and scholarly access over innovation. And unchecked innovation of thought and the overthrowing of any personal thought on any given day for whatever reason is wonderous.

Maybe.

Or do I just want a club to join like everyone else?

No. In order to chant down Babylon, the Babylonian impulse to control another human being, a person (me for example) needs a form that is personal, organic, dare I say in English?, challenging, deviant in goodness when store-bought deviance becomes passe, and relatively peaceful. The question of women’s so-called role is left up first and foremost to women and all forms of polysexuality are not only “tolerated” but are understood to be mere continuations of the line on which so-called heterosexuality hangs from.

And yet everything will exist in a blissful and perpetual state of “Sometimes.” For sometimes is better than never and never is worse than always, which is worse than sometimes.

As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said: “Zen is just two words: Not Always So.”

I’ll take that over Divine Punishment any day.

Seen.

At least for today.

SERIOUSLY. PAPA BURRO BANTON CIRCA ‘85 W/ “SEKKLE YOURSELF.” THIS IS FROM A PNP RALLY FEATURING TENOR SAW, CUTTY RANKS, YAMI BOLO, ETC… RIDICULOUS!!! FASCISTS GETTIN’ SERVED SINCE WAY BACK. I JUST HAD TO POST THIS. I SWEAR I FEEL INDESTRUCTABLE WHEN IT DROPS. ENJOY!!!

Not quite in the shower, but getting into the shower is when I often find myself having these This is going to be it! thoughts. By now I am old enough to realize that these are little pieces to a greater complexity of thoughts and movements (little, not flag waving) or repositionings. As such, however, I find it best to engage these ideas as if they were in fact IT so as to give them the attention they deserve, or at least necessitate to flower.

With that in mind, I want to offer something to you. Something that I have been looking into over the past year or so. It’s a somewhat forgotten, totally marginalized, more or less vehemently declared to be heretical aspect of the Islamic tradition. And yet, such is the case with me concerning most marginalized aspects of culture, it is the aspect of Islam that I find most promissing. Not for its “decadence” (or maybe deca-DANCE), but because it presents itself as alltogether anti-arrogant. It is not that I want to be heretical. It just seems that that which is often deemed heretical is often the most interesting and offers the most umpff in moving towards a personally radical/engaging lifestyle/reality construct. The little rule of thumb seems to more often than not hold true: if the “majority” reviles it, and the “majority” is boring, than that which is reviled should at least be looked into, if only out of curiosity. It’s not a hard and fast law, but sometimes something interesting pops up. Sometimes an entirely new way of engaging the world presents itself.

Introducing the Murji’ah. My first introduction to the Murji’ah was through a relatively unbiased statement that said they were those early Muslims who refused to condem either Uthman or Ali to hell fire, because frankly, how could anyone know except God. Thus they received their nom de plume “Those that postpone judgement.” I acquired this information before I quickly found out that this group has since been deemed heretics and anything they have to say is more or less irrelevant to Islamic discourse. The case being made that Murji’ah in the end had to say that a person’s “Islamness” could not be judged by their actions but only by their iman, their faith. As such, even the most reviled of humans may have a place in heaven. Imagine that!?!?!?! This basically takes the rule of intention to its logical conclusion, that if a person is acting out of love and in accordance with what they feel is best for themselves and humanity that someone like Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush could no doubt end up in the land of milk and honey. Blasphemy!!!

Not for me.

To me, and I am guessing a number of people out there, this seems the most obvious conclusion that can be made, especially in light of Divine statements like “I forgive whomever I forgive” and “I know though you know not” etc etc etc… For those of us who have actually internalized at least a fraction of the vast implications of Allahu ‘alam, God knows better, it seems only natural to align ourselves with others who understand that we are in no place to judge another person’s Islamness, especially in relationship to the laws that will govern that person’s rights. I.E. who is in the club and who is out. So for me the murji’ah are a perfect platform from which to move forward in creating a new paradigm in which the limitless nature of Allah is embraced rather than rejected and a new approach is to be developed.

It comes as no surprise to me that a movement like the Murji’ah has been completely hereticized. At the core, Murji’ah values undermine the fascist impulse to codify and regiment the borders of identity. If a person’s place within Islam can not be clearly defined, how can that person be punished when they step outside of those limited definitions? The move to not only postpone judgement of another human being, but to “defer to one’s expertise” (i.e. defer to the greatest knowledge of them all, Ya Allahu!) is an act of kindness and humility. An act of charity to humanity and a nod to the fact that in the end, we simply can not know, and those who profess that they do know the nature of another person’s complexity is by far the worst idolater of them all. For they worship their own judgement. What a pity. What boredom!

The immediate question one may ask, however, is what would a society based on these principles look like? Surely it will crumble into murder and mayhem some will say. For others perhaps only civilization a la Derrick Jensen (scroll the name for double links!) will crumble and possibly not into murder and mayhem. Are we really that base? For now I ask that we put all that aside. We are not even remotely there yet, nor are those scenarios inevitable. But may I suggest as an aside and off the top of my head (Off with his head!) that the rules governing small enclaves of mini-communities could be based on the Golden Rule AKA The Ethics of Reciprocity and mutual aid AKA not being a hoarding jerk. Maybe a law or two regarding the unacceptablity of limiting a person’s engagement with the world so long as it does not limit another person’s engagement of the world, etc etc, but I digress. Did a semi-self-proclaimed “anarchist” just speak of laws?! Come now, we’re just talking. Who knows? We’re not there yet and Allahu ‘alam.

So I am officially putting it out there. I would like to develope a Murji’ah Think Tank. I can’t do this on my own, and information on the Murji’ah is limited at best. Whether its two pages out of the 1200 pages of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s mammoth tome History of Islamic Philosophy, or a little blip here and there in some other “The Concise History of Islamic Theology,” most of what you will find will run the likes of:

They advocated the idea of “delayed judgement”. Only God can judge who is a true Muslim and who is not, and no one else can judge another as an infidel. Therefore, all Muslims should consider all other Muslims as true and faithfull believers, and look to Allah to judge everyone during the last judgement. This theology promoted tolerance of Ummayads and converts to Islam who appeared half-hearted in their obedience. from Wikipedia

An aspect that doesn’t jibe with me is their take on the allegiance to rulers regardless of their faith. While, I don’t think a persons faith should be taken into account (ever be taken into account?) as much as their actions, I obviously contest the entire notion of a leader and allegiance to thereof and offer the envisioned essence not (indescriminate?) violence of the Hashashin (Assassins) as a possible antidote or check to Murji’ah complicity. The crime of course being the heralding of unquestioned authority.

Which brings me to another impetus for even bringing this up, which is to suggest something much more personal and mundane, but no less revolutionary. That is, the construction of a personal silsila or lineage.

More on that tomorrow insh’ Allah

If there ever was a soft body
as it is thinking itself into being
represented back to itself a body . . .

If not a body than what?

What than if not a body?