Rafiq's Blog - Posts Tagged "god"

The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

This excerpt describes a moment in the tenth chapter, at the middle of the book, when a spiritual quest begun years earlier comes to a beautiful turning point through a chance meeting with a man straight out of a Taoist tale. If I hadn’t gone with the flow, I might have missed what this flawed wayfarer was going to reveal to me about myself.

Part of my spiritual quest included exploring mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. In the tenth chapter, I find my way back to the teachings and practices of the Sufis when a young woman on the Baja Peninsula gives me a book of poetry by the Sufi master Hafiz.

Here, toward the chapter’s end, I am living in a camperized 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon – the “whale” of the book’s title – when those teachings find their sudden expression in me. And I am both surprised and humbled.

Excerpt

By New Year’s Eve everyone in our group had moved on. Some north, most south. I had editing work to finish so I stayed. When the propane tank for my fridge and stove ran dry, I used bags of ice to cool my food and a Coleman burner to cook it. The nearest filling station was a hundred kilometres away.

Then one day a Mexican family came to the beach in a beat-up Volkswagen bus. Its windshield was cracked all the way across, it had no hubcaps or taillight covers, the sun visors were gone, and its signal lights didn’t work. But it ran fine. The father said that they were headed north to Guerrero Negro, but first he had to stop at a junk lot off the highway. I’d driven past it. A graveyard of Volkswagens, boats, and motorbikes.

I went along. I wanted to see if I could add a valve to my propane line so that I could bypass the tank in the van and use a portable one. Something that I could fill in town. We pulled into the yard and were met by a squat, tattooed, mean-looking German. The father asked about the parts he needed. He wanted them cheap. “I’m no American,” he said. “Look at me. Look at my kids.” His three shirtless boys were watching us through the side window of the bus.

The German held one eye open with his grease-blackened fingers. “Do you see anyone in here who cares?” he shouted. Then he went around the yard and gathered up all the stuff. He even took a windshield out of a gutted blue and white bus. And he let the whole lot go for five hundred pesos. Less than fifty bucks. The guy had a heart after all. He said that he would help me with the propane valve, change my oil, and rotate my tires. I just had to come back next week.

When I saw the German again, he came with me to Mulegé to get an oil filter and the parts for the propane refit. I needed him to speak Spanish at the hardware store. As payment for installing the valve, he asked me to buy him dinner. He was starving. As he devoured his southern-fried steak with mashed potatoes in a pool of gravy, he told me his story.

He was an ex-con doing time on the Baja to avoid a life sentence back home. He didn’t say for what, only that he’d had his first run-in with the law when he was sixteen and working as a doorman at a brothel in Hamburg. One night at closing time a man who didn’t want to leave threw him against a wall. The German lunged at the towering brute and clamped onto the guy’s crotch with his teeth until blood was running down his face. When the guy buckled in two he clobbered him in the head without having to reach up.

That was the day he learned how to fight the big ones. The first thing he did whenever he got put in the joint was take on the biggest guy he saw. He would hammer him in the balls, wait for him to come down, and then beat him with the frightened fury of a small man. He said that people always left him alone after that. I wondered what I was doing with this guy.

We went back to the junk lot and he worked on the propane line until after sundown. He was bruised up because his chopper had fallen over on him without anyone around to lift it off. He was lying on his back in the gravel grunting in pain. He had to work by flashlight but he got the bypass line put in. I had propane again.

I came back a few days later so that he could rotate the tires. He was cranking off the lug nuts on one of the wheels when I saw that his arm was scarred. The tattoos were melted together. “What happened there?” I asked.

“Barbecued,” he said. A drunk in a pick-up truck had pulled into the road and cut him off while he was on his chopper. He was left knocked out in the ditch with his arm under the hot exhaust pipe while the drunk sped off to find “witnesses” that he could pay to lie for him. A nurse at the hospital said that she could see the driver was liquored up but the German told her to forget it. He saved the drunk from jail so that the guy could pay for the damages to the bike.

But the German needed parts. So he asked his friends in California to deliver some stolen goods to the drunk at his house back in the United States. All the guy needed to do was mail them south. But he never did.

“Now the motherfucker’s dead,” the German said. His eyes grew wide. “It’s not for nothing I’m an ex-biker. I phoned up there and told them to kill the son of a bitch.” He rolled over in the dirt to adjust the jack. “Was it the right thing?” he asked. “I think yes.”

I was talking to a murderer. He was confessing to me. Asking for absolution. “You should’ve let him live,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“So he could’ve seen what a prick he was,” I said.

“If he didn’t know it already, he was never going to,” he said.

I watched the German sweating there on his back in the gravel and ground-up seashells of what was once an ocean floor. Like he was lying at the bottom of the world. And all I felt was forgiveness. Love.

I recalled what an American man had said to me in Nizamuddin. How the important thing was to choose one path and follow it to the end. At the time, I’d scoffed. That would be like reading only one philosopher. I’d forgotten what the Hindu thinker had said about all religions being a finger pointing at the same thing. The unifying, indwelling quality of God. I felt like I’d followed the path of Sufism to its end. Love for all in All. And I’d found my heart again.

Terry Vacheresse and Rafiq

In April 2019 Terry Vacheresse of Portland, Oregon, a caterer and mother of five, was in the yoga and surfing town of Sayulita on the west coast of Mexico when she stumbled upon a reading and documentary film screening by writer and filmmaker Rafiq at a local café. Terry returned home from her trip with a copy of Rafiq’s political-spiritual memoir Days of Shock, Days of Wonder (2016) and later began a correspondence with him while reading his book Gaj: The End of Religion (2004). What follows is drawn from that conversation.

Terry: I am certain my trip to Sayulita was to meet you. When I got home last night there was a book in the mail: it was your Days of Shock, Days of Wonder. I had ordered a copy for my Mom, who is a very spiritual lady. She is part of a prayer circle and had been praying for me to be enlightened, and after meeting you, I was! When I was getting things to take home to my kids, I was told I had peaceful eyes. About thirty minutes later, I saw a man from Portland I know from a twelve-step meeting we both go to – we couldn’t believe we were both there – he told me I seemed at peace! Then that evening, when I was getting off the plane back home in Portland, the flight attendant told me I looked so peaceful. I felt happy with lots of love and gratitude.

Rafiq: That peace you carry is entirely your own to draw on always. It is your birthright, your divinity. But don’t forget that the ego is there too, needing to be nurtured and coaxed along, for we are forever two-part beings, the temporal ego and the timeless divine. I have spent too much of my life swinging between the two and living in extremes not to make note of this ultimate need for acceptance of the human condition and, as the Buddha said, the need to find the middle path between the two.

With any experience of enlightenment – by which I think you mean a knowledge (beyond faith) that there is a spiritual energy inside you and outside you with which you are connected – keep in mind that our paths are not linear but follow an ever-tightening spiral, one that brings us back around to the same opportunities for insight and growth again and again rather than carrying us in a straight line. All that to say, if the signs become fewer and farther between or if the high dissipates, know that you are still on the right path.

Terry: I am reading your book Gaj: The End of Religion and loving it. The first page says so much. I was wondering what your belief is today? Has your perspective changed?

Rafiq: As I discuss in Gaj, it is possible to move from belief into knowledge. Whereas Gaj is a book about a belief regarding the divine, my memoir, as you know, is about knowledge regarding the divine in everyday life gained through countless synchronous events and encounters, bolstered by signs and wonders.

So to answer your question, my perspective hasn’t changed. Rather, the belief regarding the divine that I describe in Gaj has only been confirmed by knowledge I have gained through experience. What has changed and continues to change is my understanding of how the ego and the divine relate to one another and interact within ourselves.

Terry: How do you define pantheism and monotheism?

Rafiq: Pantheism and monotheism both profess one God. The difference between them lies in where this God is said to be located. The one God of monotheism is said to reside outside of creation and thus outside of us, whereas the one God of pantheism is said to reside in all things; it is energy itself, which manifests consciousness and whose highest expression is love.

Pantheism should not be confused with polytheism, which professes many gods, although the faces of these many gods may really just be stand-ins for one pantheistic God, as they are in Hinduism, where this one God within all the others and within all things is called Brahman.

So clearly, I reject the monotheistic idea and embrace the pantheistic idea. It is ultimately a mistake to place Jesus between us and the divine as a conduit, or at least it is a mistake if that doesn’t ultimately lead a person to move beyond needing the conduit in order to identify the holy spirit within, as I think Jesus wanted us to do.

Terry: Do you believe we see ourselves in others eyes?

Rafiq: I know that the divine spark resides in all of us and that it is possible to see that part of ourselves looking out at us from the eyes of others.

Terry: Beautiful, very nicely put, thank you! I see you as a prophet, personal conduit, do you believe that to be true of yourself?

Rafiq: As I write in my books, the age of the prophets is behind us. Today, we can all be prophets. We can all inspire each other. And my ideas are not new. I am but one of many across time who have said the same things. I’m just trying to say them in a way that makes sense to the modern ear.

Terry: Reading your book, I feel like I miss you.

Rafiq: Perhaps you miss the part of yourself that you beheld in me. It is hard not to hold tight to externalizations of the divine because they can seem so much more tangible than our own inner sense of the divine. Of course, we need both – the internal and the external – but we have to be careful not to long for what we already have.

Terry: “Now, I have no choice but to see with your eyes, so I am not alone, so you are not alone” – Yannis Ritsos

Rafiq: I like the reciprocity expressed in these words. As a writer, the most I can hope to do is give others moments when they feel less alone in their experience, and when readers feel that way, I too feel less alone in my experience.

Terry: What makes our soul different from our spirit? And what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom?

Rafiq: I think that “souls” are individual sites of the one energy that is the divine, whereas “spirit” is another word for that one energy. Souls are made of spirit. As souls, we live and express spirit. But we also live and express ego. Within ourselves, there is a constant pull between the ego and the spirit. All of a soul’s experiences across all of a person’s lifetimes are made possible by this coexistence and tension between the divine spirit and the human ego within each of us.

Knowledge is about facts, whereas wisdom is about knowing how to act on those facts. A knowledgeable person might know that quantum entanglement is a real phenomenon that shows the interconnection of all matter/energy in the universe, but a wise person will act on this knowledge in such a way that his or her behavior is not divisive or competitive but is consistent with, or in harmony with, this holistic aspect of reality.

Terry: I was born and raised Catholic, but as an adult I don’t practise Catholicism. My spirituality has been shaped by a twelve-step program and yoga. That is where I found my tribe. I have experienced miracles in my life, and as I continue to pay attention, more is revealed to me. I have heard many different ideas about who God is, and to many there is no God. Believing in a Higher Power, of one’s own understanding, is what works for most.

Rafiq: The shift from monotheism to pantheism is a paradigm shift that requires many subtle adjustments in our thinking and language. For example, I would say "inner power" (pantheism) rather than "higher power" (monotheism).

At the same time, the problem with thinking only of an inner power is that we must also look outward and recognize the divine in nature and in each other. We are all concentrations and expressions of energy in a single field of energy that connects us all and that can be observed both inside and outside of ourselves. That is where the metaphor of the matrix and the Tao comes in. All of life is inspirited, or animated by spirit energy.

Terry: So you believe in the idea of Indra’s net? The web? The matrix? Kismet? The Tao or “the way things are”?

Rafiq: I do very much understand the energy of the universe to be everywhere at once and yet singular, like a matrix or the animating spirit of the Tao. The key to spirituality is to harmonize our being with the “ways” of this energy – to get into its all-enveloping current – so that we can experience it fully, its highest expression being love for ourselves and for all others.

Terry: I have heard a few ideas about what happens to us when we die. What do you believe happens after death?

Rafiq: I believe that we are reincarnated again and again as we move ever further toward full consciousness, revisiting the same issues and themes as we travel along an ever-tightening spiral toward the ultimate point. The journey is not a straight line but a spiral because, as with all of nature, it is cyclic, with many births and deaths. As we revisit the same issues and themes, we are better able to navigate them, so instead of blaming ourselves for arriving back at the same place, we can congratulate ourselves for being ready to meet those moments with newly acquired wisdom.

I recommend reading Michael Newton’s Journey of Souls (1994), which documents case studies by a hypnotherapist who regresses patients back to the time between their past lives and is startled when, without any prompting from him, they all describe the same things.

Terry: I like the Leonard Cohen quotes throughout Days of Shock, Days of Wonder. I too am a big Cohen fan. Lines like “dance me to the end of love” and “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” have appeared throughout my life many times. The cracks in my heart are where the light shines brightest.

Rafiq: I love the line “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” but note how it is a monotheistic idea. If God is the light, then God is outside of us and enters through our cracks, or our wounds. I prefer Cohen’s line “in every atom broken is the name,” which locates God deep inside us and in all things, which is the pantheistic idea of God.

Terry: I carry a small book with me, Edgar Cayce’s Think on These Things (1981), and I open it to a random page each day and read a paragraph. What do you think of this quotation?

“Happiness is love of something outside of self! It may never be obtained, may never be known by loving only things within self or self’s own domain!”

Rafiq: I think “self’s own domain” here means the ego. Most Western thinkers conceive of the inner self in terms only of the ego. As this writer suggests, going outside of oneself and connecting with something larger than the self is the essence of a spiritual experience. But the divine, and thus a connection to something larger than the self, can also be found inwardly. The “self’s own domain” is not just the temporal ego but also the timeless mind of God.

Terry: My faith in God has been questioned a few times in my adult life. My mom has been in a close platonic relationship with a now retired Roman Catholic priest for the past thirty years. They have retired together, with separate sleeping rooms, but share a house. He has been a big part of our lives, but my views on the Catholic religion are a bit askew. I lost a son at birth, and I found myself very angry at God and struggled with depression for quite some time! I guess my faith has been challenged, but I have always believed in a God! I have spent the past twelve years being a single mom, and there’ve definitely been some very hard times but also some very rewarding times! I have become stronger and more independent than I thought possible! My faith has been renewed in times of deep darkness and in times of simply letting go! Today I believe not only in God but also in myself, and I have found that I am so much more capable than I ever knew. Do you ever question your faith? Do you believe in miracles?

Rafiq: I am sorry to hear about the son you lost. It is normal that we have the impulse to cry out against God when all goes wrong because our relationship to each other as separate individuals prompts us to regard God as a separate individual too. As we shift into seeing ourselves as expressions of God and therefore as not separate from each other either, we also shift into regarding ourselves as inseparable, even indistinguishable, from God. We are God self-experiencing.

But if that is the case, how should we respond to personal tragedy and the pain it brings? How can we make sense of it within the context of an idea of God? The most often heard response is that “everything happens for a reason.” We are told that since we simply can’t see the big picture, we shouldn’t look for this reason but should just trust that there is one, as if to say that the bad thing was meant to happen and is therefore good after all. I’m not sure about that. I think that a lot of things are obviously out of balance in our world, creating outcomes that are clearly bad and that could be avoided if we changed our ways.

I think the truth instead is that whatever happens in our lives, good or bad, can be a catalyst for growth. We have an active part in choosing how to make use of pain. This understanding allows for enough detachment to see that ultimately both the good and the bad are pure context for relational experience, which is the only kind of experience by which a soul, and thus God, can evolve.

You asked, Do you ever question your faith?

I went through a crisis of faith in my late teens, during which I rejected religion and God as the same thing and went on to embrace the atheistic, existentialist ideas I encountered at university. Of course, it was the monotheistic God that I rejected, not understanding that another idea of God was operative in all religions, an idea ignored by Friedrich Nietzsche and all of those after him who declared God dead, namely the pantheistic God that is the energy animating all of life, including us. One big difference between the monotheistic God and the pantheistic God is that whereas the former is a matter of faith, being something outside of ourselves, the latter is a matter of lived experience, being something that resides within. I do not need to have faith in this God but need only attempt to align myself with the current of this God and observe the outcomes.

You asked, Do you believe in miracles?

I have experienced many things that might be described as miracles because of the sheer improbability of the synchronicity involved. I have also spoken at length with Indigenous elder Four Arrows, author of Point of Departure: Returning to Our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival (2016), about experiences that most people would describe as miracles. However, none of these “miracles” defy the laws of physics. They don’t require an external God to intervene in normal affairs by altering the rules and fabric of reality. They do not require our belief but rather our broader acceptance of what goes on at the trance level of the subconscious, at the subatomic level, and within the unseen inspirited dimensions of reality. So, no, I don’t believe in miracles; rather, I experience them when I manage to align myself with the current of God, which flows through all things.

Terry: What do you think of this Cayce quotation?

“For the entity, as each soul, is a portion of the whole. Thus, though a soul may be as but a speck upon the earth’s environs, and the earth in turn much less than a mote in the universe, if the spirit of man is so attuned to the Infinite, the music of harmony becomes as the divine love.”

Rafiq: The idea that each soul is a “portion of the whole” is spot on. About this idea of the soul, I should probably add that even though I consider us to be God self-experiencing, there is a sense it which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That greater-ness is God. As ego-bound souls, we may be God self-experiencing, but we are not the greater-ness that is God.

Terry: How is quantum physics compatible with God? Where do Adam and Eve come from?

Rafiq: God is mind/energy, which can vibrate at a slow enough frequency that it can become matter. Quantum physics is the interface between energy and matter, the dimension at which we can see pure energy coalescing into matter. Spinoza said, where there is matter, there is mind. Einstein said, where there is matter, there is energy. God is mind-energy-matter. God is all.

The story of Adam and Even perfectly replicates the Big Bang theory because both in the Garden of Eden and before the Big Bang, we were united with God, whereas both after Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden and after the Big Bang, we were separated from God in the sense that the one energy that is the universe had divided itself into the many, creating the illusion of separation and thus making relational experience and expressions of love possible. With this illusion of separation comes the hardship of the human condition because alongside love, expressions of hate also become possible.

If you are asking if God created Adam and Eve, the answer is, of course, yes, since all is God. But the real question seems to be, “Where did God come from?” And the answer simply must be that God is that which is and has always been. As God says in the Old Testament, “I am that I am.”

Terry: “God is that which is and has always been.” That is the perfect answer, what I have been looking for, what I have always believed to be true. Thank you!

Rafiq: Funny how the truths we “find” turn out to be our own, which always reminds me of the Taoist parable about the guy wandering through the forest after dark with a burning lamp in one hand and a chicken in the other as he looks for a fire to cook his dinner. He already has the fire, it’s in the lamp, but he doesn’t realize it.

Terry: I understand to some point we have free will, how does that coincide with our destiny, or fate?

Rafiq: The concepts of free will and fate can seem contradictory. If our fate, or final destination (or perhaps many pivotal destinations), is carved in stone, then we are free to choose the path to that fate but we are not free to choose whether or not that fate will come to pass. If we do indeed have a fate, we can be said to have true and complete free will only if we choose that fate ourselves, and we can choose that fate ourselves only if we participate in the choosing of our life’s destination prior to our birth, suggesting reincarnation. That’s a lot of ifs, so I’m just speculating here, not making any claims about whether or not we have a fate.

Terry: I work at the Arlington Club, a private business club downtown. I do catering for breakfast and lunch meetings. I have been here for twenty-five years. I have five separate groups who do Bible studies once a week. They leave me their reading materials, and I have been given many books on different religious styles and ideas. They all have prayed for me and my kids at different times throughout the years. Luis Palau is a Christian evangelist I have known for twenty years, and he has given me the books he has written on faith and religion. Although I don’t know if I have the same belief system, I do stay open to new information. I have learned quite a bit by being exposed to the beliefs of others. My youngest daughter is an atheist and only believes in an energy. Do you believe in the power of prayer?

Rafiq: As I discuss in Gaj, we possess the power of creative thought, or manifestation. In this sense, all thought is prayerful. It is our means of interfacing with the mind within the energy of creation. That is why we must be careful with our thoughts and words. They carry there own vibrations and can be either negatively or positively creative. I don’t believe that we pray to an external God who may choose to answer our prayers or not. Prayers are effective, or “answered,” to the extent that what we seek aligns with “the way things are,” or the Tao.

Terry: Ever since our paths crossed, I have started to journal again, and I find myself writing about events I had forgotten about. So much keeps coming up. Three examples came to mind this morning that bring up questions about religion for me.

One of my best friends is a gay man who is sixty years old and has two sons and three grandchildren. He grew up in Ohio, a very conservative state, and married the mother of his children, but he was very unhappy and came out at age thirty-three, having known he was gay since he was twelve. His revelation was not accepted by his family. He was rejected by his mother and his church, and his wife had him undergo therapy so that he would no longer be gay. He became an addict late in life as he tried to find himself. Today he is a very well-balanced person and an amazing grandfather whose sons love him very much. How can a religion turn its back on a creation of God and judge him for the way he was born?

I am friends with a man who was a Catholic deacon. He was married for forty years and has four sons and many grandchildren. He is a recovering alcoholic who was a closet drinker for decades. When his wife confronted him, he went to the church with her and, at her request, confronted his alcoholism. His church demoted him, sent him to treatment, and asked him to take a leave, and his wife divorced him. He has never gone back to his church. How can anybody be judged in this way by an organized religious community, especially someone who has given himself to that community?

My uncle Jerry, my mom’s youngest brother, served as an alter boy from the age of twelve until he was fifteen. He was sexually abused by the priest. My grandparents, who were very devoted to the Catholic Church, refused to believe their son and stayed with the church. It is still looked at as a family secret.

I guess I question how there can be so much judgment in religion. We are all children of God, a reflection of each other, yet some are not accepted but instead are shamed for who they are. Why?

Rafiq: These are powerful anecdotes that perfectly illustrate the problem with the practice of much monotheism: it imagines that it can exclude some people from participation in God, and thus it is not ultimately loving. Religion must bring us to love for all in all, or it has failed. It must also bring us to the realization that we do not need religion in order to access God and must thereby set us free, or it has failed.

Terry: Here’s one more Cayce quotation:

“Only music may span that space between the finite and the infinite ... Music may be the means of arousing and awakening the best of hope, the best of desire, the best in the heart and soul of those who will and do listen.”

Rafiq: I feel that way about all art: that it is a bridge between the finite and the infinite, but that is especially true of music, which is closest to the vibrational stuff of life. In Indigenous cultures, making art is understood as an interaction with the inspirited realm, or the infinite, and since everybody can access this realm, everybody can make art, which we dismiss as handicrafts because in Western ego-centred thinking, the artist is considered to be an exceptionally talented individual rather than a humble conduit for expression of the infinite, or God.

Terry: How long did it take you to write Gaj? What inspired you to study theology?

Rafiq: I wrote Gaj over a period of four months in the summer and fall of 2004 to counter the idea that God or Allah could take sides in the “war on terror.”

The Western idea of God as an individual separate from us, and thus from our “enemies,” is destructive to our social and planetary well-being. It can also be destructive to our individual well-being, which it was in my case. For that reason, I began researching theology in my late teens in search of alternatives to the Christian God.

Terry: I just finished Gaj! Wow! Astounding. The more I read, the more I could get into it, and the easier it was to absorb. Very well written, I am amazed at your knowledge and how well you interpret it. Thank you.

Rafiq: Thanks for being such an enthusiastic reader. I’m glad my little book has resonated with you. I hope the short piece at the very end, “Gaj: In the Beginning,” gives you an idea of God’s frame of mind and a real sense of how we are both the playwright and the player in this drama called life.