I am not disposed by fire, air, water and dust. I am neither A Hindu nor a Turk, my identity lies neither int he wilderness of Arabia nor within the walls of Lahore. I am not the secret essence strenuously revealed by creed and religion. I was not born of Adam and Eve. I did not adopt my name nor can I own any. I am neither stationary nor adrift. can I know who I am?
It is I myself I know to be the beginning and the end. Neither do I recognise any other being. It is nowhere else but within myself that perception and knowledge are embodied. Then who is he that stands as the Other? And who am I? Can I know bulleh?
----Bulleh Shah

Time has no loyalty;
the single moment is our treasure.
Dance in the loyal covenant from the beautiful ones.
Constant seeking is delight-
why do you think of getting over it?
Give up walking-
dance at the sound of the caravan bell.
---Ghalib.

(astarte, if you have a better translation please do float it along)

I was one, then I was two, then one again. But one is not a number. There are so few places for the way I feel. Why do you search for the unsearchable, for a place that lasts forever? You do not know. It is strange now that you think of it. The past, even though never really completed, can never give birth to the future. But neither is this unraveling of the thread any use to you. You are not a mystic, it's not in your bones. If there is no pattern, no unity, but a series of discontinuous fragments, as if one were passing from one dream to another, then you have no name.

To see the world like a tree, through the latticework of a thousand unanswered prayers. Sky rain, and cloud intermingle..it's on your skin. Open to the elemetal, sometimes light strikes. Satori : the illumination of emptiness. But we see everything separately, abstractly, from a distance. And our lights are our own. On a clear night you grow in the lightness of the moon; we, on the other hand, are reduced to speaking in metaphors. Neither poetry nor philosophy, neither words nor thought gets us there.

Early this morning whilst walking past some trees I wondered to myself: why do we put nameplates on trees? Is it because they have no title, no signature of their own? Strange to think they were here before us, as Fate would have it. Like gods, panging for finitude. Pillars of eternity. I pass another. Someone has carved a heart on it. The scar, the wound, the only sign of humanity?

Autumnal

Autumn has finally broken through. Fading, soaring. All of summer, the memories of warm sunshine, have been rolled into these early mornings. These turning points are passageways, the dihliz. The brilliant crisp light conceals a certain sadness. It breathes of all that is new, of all the possibilities that quiver with expectation, hovering over our lives, waiting for the moment to enter the world and open us up to it. This bitter-sweetness is of an intensity that cannot be explained. Today the world is merely a fact. The trick is to but tilt one 's head, look at it at a slight angle to the universe.

Today the swami reminded me of that rare bird, Mr. Lewis. Here was a man who was dying of cancer and knew that he had only a few months to live. What does he do? Buy a sports car. Seeing that the swami is upset by this he says, "Don't worry, I'm not going to die". He then tells Ubo that he is going to run away with the swami. But what goes through the mind of such a person? At his death bed he sees that the swami is sad. "But why so sad, you'd think you're the one who's dying! I told you, don't worry, I'm not going to die." And still he goes on, undimmed, the flame unconquered -even if slightly bluer now. The last words of the man, though, say something unique and speak of what it is to be human, all too human: "Who will look after my mother now..will she be able to survive in a home?" That at such a moment he could transcend his own suffering to think of his old, silver-haired mother, that he could imagine those quiet, empty days when she would have no-one to tell those stories to, those evenings of the mind when the dull, monotonous humdrum takes over and the orange street lights burn with such loneliness,..can there be a greater gesture of the human soul?

You've got to stand your test in judgement,
You've got to stand it by yourself,
Ain't nobody can stand it for you
You've got to stand it by yourself.
---Big Bill Broonzy

She's gone forever
I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
She's dead as earth...
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?
Thou'lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never!
----King Lear.

August 16, 2007

~~~~

My kismet: alas, what is beautiful reminds me of death.

(hey, what did you expect with a name like Black Sun?)

A Ph.D will not help you die..it won't even help you live! What knowledge can? Philosophy won't take you there. If you've got it, you've got it. It's a gift.

I remember the swami looking at my thesis for a good two minutes before casually flinging it to one side. What is this rubbish? It's nothing but equations. There are no words. If an ordinary person like me cannot understand it, what's the point?

Love it!!! My thoughts exactly. All those pointy heads. I think Kenneth Clarke said they're as thick as swans.

A dear English friend said, how traumatic that must have been.

Er..no, actually, I thought it was a pretty good assessment :)

~~~~

Was in the video store -you can tell how old I am since I still use words like that or "disco" or marathon rather than the bastardised Americanism, 'snickers'-and two young kids were joking about dying. "You don't think I'll be blown up by a suicide bomber do you"
"No, why do you say that, shazada"
"Who knows, these 'sister-fuckers' are everywhere nowadays."
"But they haven't hit Lahore, yet?"
"I know, I'm going to Pindi though"
"Yaar, make sure you give my 300 Rs back before you go"

Then a bearded security man walks in with a rifle and I overhear him talking about videos.
"No, we don't sell them any more. We haven't had any for ten years, which world are you living in brother?"
When he leaves, shuffling his feet (head down) as he does so, they laugh to themselves. "Dumb ass!"

~~~~

I just had to cut and paste this from Ali's blog.
The fanaticism of a 'western' (probably American) muslim:

The urban elite is only Muslim for Ramadan so they can stuff themselves with their greasy stinky foods into their disgusting pot bellies. Other than that, they are largely classist, racist, materialistic pieces of shit. They mix freely with the opposite sex,make porn tapes, wife swap, and all types of scandalous shit. I know cause I’ve seen this firsthand. Everybody lies and fronts, their parents are corrupt businessmen. This is what I’ve seen in Dhaka, I doubt Karachi or Lahore is any different. So much for respect for elders. This is just desi Muslims, its even worse with Arabs (”they should;ve never gave these niggas money”) and Persians and etc.

Tawakkul

And unto everyone who is conscious of God, He always grants a way out of unhappiness, and provides for him in a manner beyond all expectation; and for everyone who places his trust in God He alone is enough. Verily, God always attains to His purpose: and indeed, unto everything has God appointed its term and measure.
Q:65:2-3

It is highly inappropriate to cite verses like this, out of context, and without any formal education or training. But the words strike me as expressing such a truly remarkable quality, a dazzling human quality -that of trust-that I felt compelled to do so.

Last night I had a terrible dream. I was praying in an open field but I couldn't understand the language of the leader of the prayers. And the old man had a strangely elongated face (something like an old Russian icon I'm familiar with). Everyone wore tall, rounded black hats and some prayed with gnarled hands outstretched to the heavens. And the frightening thought occurred to me: what a terrible thing it must be to lose one's faith and what a gift it is that one has any....

(the dream ended on a positive note as I followed a white horse until I came to a small green gate in a wall....)


From 'Radical Hope':

After the destruction of the Crow's way of life it was difficult to comprehend anything. Did anything make sense any more? The very frame of reference had shifted. One is reminded of the ethics of the horizon, the limit, when Agamben talks about the camps. What sense can there be when one is beyond the bounds of reason-bounds that have been set by the way of life?

She laments, ' I'm living a life I don't understand'.

Plenty Coups sees in a dream the ending of the traditional way of life. But he sees something else as well: The tribe relied on what it took to be the young men's capacity to receive the world's imaginative message; it relied on the old men to say what these messages meant.

What did Plenty coups see? He saw the dissolution of the old world; he saw that he and his people were living on the edge, that a radical discontinuity in their narrative, their lives, was about to take place. In short: he had imagined the unimaginable. But to imagine is not to know. [It goes without saying that the dream is not merely a subjective experience, as the moderns would have it].

Plenty Coups is told that his people will survive, but they will only do so if they learn to listen, learn to be open; this, in effect, means a radical openness to the new, to the possibility of possibilities. By doing so they would know which month of winter they are in. This entails a suspension of the traditional ethical life, what they have always considered as the good. It is, as Kierkegaard says, the teleological suspension of the ethical in order to lead into a higher life or, as in their case, to preserve the holy.

And here is the key passage, the words that Lear infers Plenty to have spoken or thought about when understanding his dream-vision.

God-Ah-badt-dadt-deah -is good. My commitment to the genuine transcendence of God is manifest in my commitment to the goodness of the world transcending our necessarily limited attempt to understand it. My commitment to God's transcendence and goodness is manifested in my commitment to the idea that something good will emerge even if it outstrips my limited understanding of what that good is.

A commitment to good that transcends our own understanding, our own subjectivity. Such a thing is difficult in normal circumstances; in the face of tragedy and despair it requires superhuman resources and I can only imagine that such trust is , in itself, given to us (as Citizen might say, a matter of grace).

~~~~~~

"..because when these birds feel that the time has come for them to die, they sing more loudly and sweetly than they have sung in all their lives before, for joy that they are going away into the presence of the god whose servants they are. It is quite wrong for human beings to make out that the swans sing their last song as an expression of grief at their approaching end; people who say this are misled by their own fear of death, and fail to reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or distressed in any other way; not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, whose songs are supposed to be a lament. In my opinion neither they nor the swans sing because they are sad. I believe that the swans, belonging as they do to Apollo, have prophetic powers and sing because they know the good things that await them in the unseen world; and they are happier on that day than they have been ever before."

I heard Lesley Chamberlain read these words on the Radio the other day and there was something wonderfully reassuring about the incantation-like quality of her voice. Of course, the notion that there can be any serenity-even if for but a brief moment- strikes our modern sensibilities as outrageous, if not impossible. And yet, and yet, might it not be that in the swan's song there is a hint of sadness, since it touches on the passing away of the life she has known? No, it is not "fear", but a lament for the erasing of her identity, her isolated self-will. Wasn't that the very quintessence of her being: to long much, to desire much? Didn't deepness reside in the yearning, in the hope?

The swan does not sing because she now knows that there is 'the good'. This she has always known, even darkly. It has always been there, it's reflection had always been here.

We find God everywhere in the world, seeing in material things the spiritual relaity which is beyond them. For the spirtual and the holy we are to look at toward all the world, not toward our isolated self-will.

--Iris Murdoch.

But she sings at the approach of the good, as a lover does at the drawing near of the beloved. She wants to die in that circle. But why lament then? I want to live I want to die. How, in a state of bewilderment, can memory still exist? How is it possible to exist like this, fading, soaring ?

But then she thinks: it has always been so! Have I not always been this dying white star, alone in this infinite dark ocean, this black sun? There were reflections. They were nothing, they were everything. I am still me, you are still you. But I look at me, think of you.

Stray Reflections

Fragments of a fragment....Not wanting to place these fragments in their respective places it is, perhaps, better to just assemble them here, haphazardly, without any logic; instead of trying to harmonise the others they will just remain here, displaced, discarded; that way the past will never be completed and be always open to additions, further cancelations and deletions....

The whole world is made of fire, the whole world is fire.

----Heraclitus.

Why so downcast, my soul

why do you sigh within me

--------Psalms.

We live and dream of other lives; our life itself is part of the life and dreams of others and just as a dream only occurs within a life, so a life only occurs within that other, dream-life which is the realm of possibility.And all are contained within the orbit of that greater circle, the iris of eternity, that single moment that is the Life of God, the "blinking of an eye"

....Shamanism is a stray descendant of Sufism.

-------Ted Hughes.

Augustine.Our desire for the world makes it , in some sense, "the world"; fleeting, because we die even if it endures. To lose oneself in the dispersion of the world, "worldliness", is a way of losing the sense of fear that the good will pass away.

Iris M.

Anything that consoles is false. We live in an age that is sceptical of happy endings (the Romantic legacy).

Anselm.We can 'conceive' of something beyond which nothing can be conceived. Which is to say that we can know our limits and therefore have some "idea" of infinity. To affirm transcendence requires a degree of immanence.

American Artists' Congress, 1936.

The individual is identified with the private ( that is, privation of other beings and the world), with the passive rather than active, with the fantastic rather than the intelligent. such an art cannot really be called free , because it is so exclusive and private...An individual art in a society where human beings do not feel themselves to be most human when they are inert, dreaming, passive, tormented or uncontrolled, would be very different from modern art.

Outside William Morris' house.

The shimmering light on a slow, dark stream. The dull gold is broken up, fragmented, by the stream into a number of smaller circles, then stars, then points of white light and finally they disappear into the hidden depths....and then the sun is reconfigured, as if all of the points were gathered up together again in a loving embrace...and this process of flux and stillness repeats itself, endlessly, eternally. Perhaps it is the ceaseless movement of the stream that allows such an image to form in my mind; it is hard to know what keeps the sensations together otherwise. Without constant change it is doubtful whether there would be a reflection at all. Or perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps we only see the ripples of light and the passing of time because of the permanent presence of the sun?

Or perhaps it is something more mysterious altogether..my desire for it to be so. Without that longing could there ever be rapture? The image is not nothing, nor is it a mere floating dream in a floating world; black suns exist. But they are not the sun.

By evening the sun will have started to fade and the stream return to being a shadow, a black hieroglyph of time. Without its illumination the stream is nothing but a memory, a thing that exists only in the mind as a possibility, empty and alone.

Courtesy: the perfect matching of inward intentions with outward gestures.The Gita: holiness within, selfless action without.For the moderns courtesy will appear as something wholly artifical, superfluous and trivial. The mechanical repitition of the set phrase, the cliche, spoken at just the right time and the right place, lacks "authenticity", "individuality". However, for an aritstocratic soul it is precisely this sense of balance and proportion that is the highest virtue since it is at one with nature; from the perspective of the 'outward eye' there is only a mindless formulaic act; but the medievals would have understood "the deed" to be a sober, outward act and a state of inner freedom, "drunkenness".

Isaiah Berlin on Naivete: The naive, in contradistinction to the sentimentalist, is not conscious of the rupture between "thought" and "action", feeling and expression. There is a pre-lapsarian harmony and unity. This will appear to be superficial, shallow, too peaceful. The sentimentalist, on the other hand, is always searching for that lost unity..he is always outisde nature, alientated from himself and from society... not joy or peace but conflict with nature or society, unsatiable craving, the notorious neuroses of the modern age, with its troubled spirits, its martyrs, fanatics, and rebels...."

He comes to delight in his inability to find "home", a strange sort of accomodation with this refracted light, his divided self is reached. More than anything, he wants to stray, wants to be nothing more than a stray reflection.

Courtesy of Jacky.

Soul Man

You know, if you're watching Bergman or Fassbinder, cut it out. This is what I always feel like telling the students: Bugger off and sit under a tree or something.
Anything but this riduculous attempt to always appear clever, to say something "meaningful", to analyse everything under the sun.

Take your shoes off, you know, get soulful.

But music is more than notation, or compositions, or styles. It is an ocean of philosophy, a mountain of knowledge, an eternal teacher whose student I will always remain. Through music I try to know myself, within and without. I try to comprehend the universe and the vastness of the cosmos. The planets, the tides-all have their movements and when at last I must face my Creator, I shall say, "I know nothing, I am thirsty, lease me a few drops more from the well of music."
--Kishori Amonokar

Darf ich hoffen?

Life's such a wonder of contradiction.
Give thanks to God when he squeezes you so,
And thank Him when he lets you go.
----Goethe

There's always something special about meeting an old friend from Lahore, that oldest of cities. The friend in question is someone who cannot reach the end of a sentence without thinking that what he said at the start was somehow wrong. As long as we are unsure we are alive.

There were the usual stories of personal traumas, multiple affairs and the indecision which riddles his life. But with him had tagged along a young kid who had spent twelve years studying in a religious school in the backwaters of the Punjab. A poor and simple man visiting the country for the first time, he was as calm and reserved as D was restless and animated. He seemed completely unphased by the licentious discussion and brushed over it lightly without the slightest feeling of moral superiority or contempt. We talked about NY (where D lived) but the kid, lost in his own world, only seemed interested in plotting his bus ride through London on a tattered old map that he had brought with him.

We gulped down large swigs of milky tea and scoffed down some Chelsea buns (which he admitted were quite good) . But he forgot to pay for his stuff (normally , if there are three Pakistanis it would be unheard of if more than one paid for the food but we -D and I-had disregarded all etiquette and allowed him to pay for his own food). I thought about this. Was it that the kid had spent so long in a religious hostel that he wasn't used to paying for food? He was terribly embarrassed but D laughed it off by saying : I know the food's crap in this country but you actually have to pay for it ! And that, to me, summarises so much of the charm of the East. Here, to pay for someone else usually elicits the response : I owe you one. Thankfully, some of the old ways still survive.

We went to Saint Bart's, one of London's oldest and most beautiful churches. "B", he said, "this is the first time since I've come to London that I've found any tranquility". Yes, that's right I told him, so much better than the mosques back home which are full of people. He laughed like a child.

We said our goodbyes and promised to write eachother. I doubt we will. His world is infinitely different from mine. He is a student of theology and a translator of religious texts and has , as they say, 'given his life' to this. Ours is but a religion of the mind. But there is always hope.

Hans Jonas relates the story of how he came back to Germany to meet his esteemed former teacher after a span of twelve years-years that had seen Germany ravaged first by fanaticism and then by war:

There he sat, as always, at his desk, pale and emaciated, collar and suit too wide on him , but peace in his face. In instant recognition he hastened to meet me in the middle of the room...Jonas had with him a book under is arm which he had been asked to take to him since civilian military services hadn't resumed after the war....

May I hope that this is the second volume of your Gnosis?"At that, there entered into my soul too, still rent by the Unspeakable I had just learnt about in my erstwhile home-the fate of my mother and the untold others-for the first time something like peace again: at beholding the constancy of thought and loving interest across the ruin of a world. Suddenly I knew: one can resume and continue that for which one needs faith in man.
---from Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality

Initially posted, August 14, 2006.
~~~~~~~

I was reminded of this by a strange (or perhaps not so strange) co-incidence: Antonia had written an interesting post on hope and how it was related to the mind (or the European mind and its "crisis"). At the same time, the very chap mentioned here sent me an e-mail completely out of the blue about a petition against wikipedia for showing the image of the Prophet.

At this stage I feel like saying (former students and family avert eyes now): for fuck's sake, haven't you got anything else to do in life?

And now I look back it, this was written on a day when a star and a crescent were born, when hope became a reality-at least for some. For others it ended in tragedy.

Goethe's lines are so, so very hard to live. To give thanks in either case is no mean feat. But it is there nevertheless, as a possibility, as an asymptotic ideal, a direction..a hope.

Chain of Sighs

All truth is on the boundaries.
--Tillich.

I don't know why, but I sometimes feel there's something extreme in modern western sensibilites, always this outreaching, this desire to "find oneself," to cross frontiers and seek exhaustion, to never be still in an empty room (Bacon!), to colonize and name the 'exotic'. I think Levinas was right here: Escape!

There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human:the human of the living humus. About the real blue-eyed person there is something abstract, elemental. Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and abstract, uncreate element, water, ice , air , space, but not humanity. Brown-eyed people are people of the old world: 'Allzu menschlich'. Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract...like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. He cannot belong to humanity. Cannot.

Of course, there are fanatics everywhere, always have been. But is there something peculiar (perhaps a heightened intensity) in this desire to destroy the past, all that is solid (George Steiner writes, to my mind persuasively, about how the destruction of the Jewish people was an attempt to obliterate those who could remember God). Modern Man, the great alchemist, wanted to control time and has ended up being devoured by it: Time is everything, Man is nothing (Marx). This 'fanatic of disaster' wants the heart to break, loves to pick up the pieces, add our moments to time's. From now on, Isaiah Berlin writes, all truth is in history, is of our own making.

What is this fanaticism of the Right and the Left, this shrill voice that cannot abide imperfections, impurity..that must make the world over, 'do people in'? A thought-tormented age, a tortured soul. And they want to convince us that this is deep! Insomina, lament, suffering, the heritage of despair, hysteria (Luther, Durer's eyes), boundless energy, restlessness, melancholic brooding, the heirs of torments, a chain of sighs, anarchical souls, a consciousness of ourselves that is incarnate: Blut und Boden. History is Biology.

But what can become of all this searching? If there is 'no there, there', nothing 'north of the future', then what is one left with: an endless and emaningless process, a 'bare forked animal', with it's spasmodic reflexes:The nervous system is everything.

To revolt against all that is 'given', the hegemony of essence, contemplation, the static 'East' with its naivete, its childlike 'wisdom'. Our disease: centuries of attention to time (and appearances..the fever of the visible). Fashion, surfaces,the four seasons, not universality or eternity. And the neurotic, the obsessive, acrobats straining at the extreme limits of themselves, the mad are taken as the only really interesting people. We can only understand ourselves at the extremites of ourselves. But at that extremity there is no understanding. There are only 'brute facts'. And this mirrors, in a strange way, the bewilderment of the Sufis just as the subconscious can mimic the supraconscious...

Time will heal everything.
Time is the wound.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves.

But there are no things-in-themselves, only surface illusions, only a rebellion, a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. A rebel without a cause. And this, we are told, is our crowning glory, our very freedom! Doubt everything, analyse everything. The diabolical is another word for division, for time. Every subject is a break with the quietude of Unity. Well, yes, but do you only see things from the perspective of discontinuity!

To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence.

~~~~~

Now, all this is very exciting I guess, if you're a teenager, but I find it so predictable, so lacking in innocence, charm and good humour, good manners! I guess you have to go through Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud nowadays to be considered intelligent, to see the obvious falseness of religion, that "life is meaningless". Yes, all very well Bacon old chap, but pass the tea whilst you're at it.

As Marley sings,

Don't let them fool you
Or even try to school you, Oh! No
We've got a mind of our own
So go to hell if what you're thinkin' isn't right
Love would never leave us alone
In the darkness there must come out to light

Yes! Sunrise

The swami relented.

'Oh, okay, go on then. But just this once. And none of your despairing melancholic stuff, that fake, brooding inwardness. It's all a bit tiring, predicatable. Aren't you done with that yet?'


Perhpas you'd like to write it, then! ?


'No, you go ahead. But even if you tell of this decaying, crumbling edifice, mention how we lovingly called it 'home' once. And do say how when the lights failed we brought our own, how occasionally the light transformed a piece of rubbish and made it look beautiful for a while, how it glistened on the crows like oil and would suddenly break in after the rains and illuminate everything, as if we were seeing objects for the very first time...Remember there is an "up" and a "down", there is heartache and exaltation. Didn't your Goethe say give thanks for that? And tell again how all life was here, how these things were given to us from time immemorial, that even though things may fade or be half-forgotten, they are never truly lost.'


Let me be a mirror. I will try and gather, then, the light and fire, hold it in my outstretched palms and offer it to you. But open hands are no match for the love the earth gives us, mother...


Fire. You break up the intelligence of the mind and all that is solid. Some say you are life itself, the vividness of the gold in the green, the glint of light that bounces of chestnut trees. Blue and the Red. Mournful silence, exuberant spontaneity. The shape of the world is moulded by your hand. Giver of light and warmth: solar generosity. Pure excess and unconquered flame. Even 'the Fire' is called a "friend". Always changing, and yet always the same. And even though there is anarchy in your heart there is still a spacious order of the sun: volo ut sis. You help the dead across the boundary, and transmute all forms. Are you time itself?



In the monochrome early-morning light even the council flats have an alluring beauty, as if these lunar buildings, a perfect mathematical equation, were carved out of marble, moonstone. One is reminded of how light can transform our own ugliness.





This, which flickers at night..
The thin glimmer striking down here
wasn't that of a match.

---Montale





But vastness blurs and time ' beats level.
Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion!
Away grief's gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam.
' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

---Gerald Manley Hopkins

'In the gloom, the light gathers the light against it
Such light is in sea caves
where copper throws back the flame'




And from Rinku:



But everything glorious is around
us already: black and blue graffiti shining in the rain's
bright glaze, the small rainbows of oil on the pavement,
where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening
street, this radiant world.

But what are we to make of those who talk only about 'brute facts', who think life and words are meaningless, religion futile?

The swami was silent on hearing these words and became pensive.

'Is there not still beauty in this world?'

There is !

The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a movement towards selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of perfection which are objects of love...The sun may be far away but its reflection in beauty is near..a sense of renewal in a aprticular place, a sudden vision in art and nature, joy experienced as pure, witnessing a virtuous action, a patient suffering, an absence of resentment, humble service, persistent heroism, innumerable things...Every individual has a collection of such things which might be indicated by various names and images: refuges, lights, visions, deep sources, protections, footholds, icons, starting points, sacraments, ..ritual forms, holy images. Thus may we learn that other worlds and other centres exist

.