Heaven

Mysticism

My meeting with the caliph left me with questions. It surprised me—how could someone so obsessed with material wealth, so ruthless, possess so much wisdom? 

Even in Osada, so far removed from the rest of the world, a battle was being fought over religion—over whose religion was true. The blood that was shed over this struggle, I was sure, outweighed that spilled over struggles for material gain. And what was worse—many times they went hand in hand. 

But I saw now that there really was no question over which religion was true, because they were all true. And why shouldn’t they be? I had grown up surrounded by the tales of the pagan gods, I was educated in the Christian Church and later I studied the Alcoran. Each presented a mythology—a world of stories. But their status as myth didn’t make them any less real than true history. On the contrary, I would suggest that they were even more real: Historical events are things that happened one time, but myths happen every day. Myths express the inherent truths of human life. And those truths, which compose the sense of life, is what we call God. I think that’s what the caliph meant when he said that both the Moslems and the Christians were fighting for the same thing—they’re the same person in different raiment. 

Christian, Muslim, Jew, pagan—they’re just names. Names are dangerous things. Calling something “water” or “cloud” is simple enough, but if we try to come up with names like “happiness,” “shadowy” or “Christian,” names begin to mean very different things to different people. By adopting names for abstract things, we abandon thinking for ourselves, becoming more like each other. We allow our nameless concept to shed its idiosyncrasy in order to conform to the common usage of a word. Soon we extract our beliefs from the name we use, rather than the other way around, and we portend things that we don’t mean to. This may be necessary for communication, but it makes precision impossible.  And that trade-off becomes dangerous when it costs lives—as it has in the case of religion.

Why must the entire panorama of human self-discovery, curiosity and faith sit comfortably in three boxes with proper names? Why must one box be better than another? Even a simpleton knows that three jars set outside cannot possibly catch all the rain that falls, wide though they may be.  

During my time in the Azara, I asked myself on several occasions, “Does God exist?” I could never hope to prove whether he did or not, and so I came to the conclusion that God must be a human invention. But that does not make God any less real. After all, humans invented painting also—and tilework and calligraphy—but that doesn’t make these pursuits any less true expressions of the spirit. Does anyone fight over whether music or dance or plastics is the greater art? Does anyone quibble over whether painting, design, sculpture or calligraphy is more noble? No, because as Abualjafna showed me so long ago, they are more valuable in symphony than alone. They contribute to the richness of the world. 

There are those who may criticize me for concluding that God was invented. But what is an invention but a discovery? The materials we use in paint, the clay we form into tiles, the mathematics we use to modulate the world—that has existed for all of eternity. All we humans did was discover it—invent it.

I knew what I was meant to do. I had spent far too long thinking—living in the past or getting caught up in the future—looking for an escape from where I was presently. I had forgotten who I was, and it was time to remember.