Why should I care what Amina thinks? What does Amina have to do with anything anymore? We just are what we are. I’ve got to close this door to Amina. Luyen comes over at night and we sleep. We part ways in the morning with hardly a word and ignore each other throughout the day. Then she comes over at night and we sleep. The past two nights at least we’ve been talking about our relationship.
The Islam seminar has been rewarding. I don’t consider the other people in the class a bunch of idiots anymore. They are just getting different things out of the class than I am. I’m more into the metaphysics and how things work and how pieces fit, they’re more into talking about their personal experience. Just because I couldn’t care less about their personally inspiring reflections and anecdotes, that’s just me. I don’t listen to them with disdain anymore.
Professor Morris had everybody bring in an object that “makes us feel closer to God”. I don’t know, it seemed rather hokey and new-agey. I didn’t really do it. But someone else had brought in a sculpture of some sort. It was a piece of driftwood with a bird skeleton mounted on it. I was next to Prof. Morris while he was examining it and he very casually pointed out, almost more to himself than to anyone else, that a knothole in the wood behind the skull looked like a halo. I blinked in surprise. I wouldn’t have seen it, but it seemed so obvious. But it’s only obvious if you know what to look for.
Life is like that, like any work of art, literature, music or movie. You appreciate it more and you get more out of it when you know what to look for; if you know what’s going on or what the inspiration was or how it works and what it’s doing. It has more meaning if you know how to look for the signs.
My line of thought is very simplistic, though. I noticed it tonight in my vocabulary. When I go into metaphysics mode, I find myself resorting to a limited vocabulary and I use words like “illusion”, “illusory nature”, “manifestation”, and “Real” over and over. There is something linear about my thought which misses many complexities and subtleties. Things like “everything is just as it was meant to be”, “everything is good and has benefit”, and “there is a reason for everything”.
Everything is so intellectualized and I don’t know how to break out of it. I have moments of epiphany but they get supported by intellectualizations as I figure out what made that thing work and why it was so neat for me to get ecstatic over it. If only I could have the ecstasy without the intellectualization, perhaps I would get more out of things. But at this point, they come hand in hand and there’s no way to separate them. It’s something to learn to let go.
