Returning to Point Zero

After those long years spent observing the deep moral gap and examining silent manuscripts that no one did justice to, I reached, in 1997, at the age of twenty-five, the point of no return: the moment I understood that to remain in the old harbour was shirk itself. My decision to break free of ready-made moulds and to withdraw from sects and movements was no passing intellectual rebellion or wish to stand apart. It was an inevitable inner explosion, dictated by the laws of truth, which could no longer bear the narrowness of sectarian vessels. I found with complete certainty that everything we had been given in those traditional sanctuaries was a set of broken scales: measuring instruments designed in advance to produce results that served the survival of the religious establishment and reinforced the authority of the elite — not to let the divine Source shine clearly in people’s hearts. I discovered that the collective mind suffers from a terrifying inflation of Concretion. Every party is absorbed in its own limited image, sees its own school as the one final and authoritative edition of the truth, and classifies everyone else as a deviation to be corrected or excluded. This hateful fragmentation convinced me that we are not in fact turning our hearts towards God, the abstract Absolute. We are turning towards human mental images, distorted by the conflicts of history and weighed down by the whims of men who created for God, glorified is He, an image that suited their concretised perception. From this was born my bold decision: a complete clearing-out of every inherited belief that could not withstand the proof of the spirit, and a return to a pure point zero, so that I could receive the lights of revelation without intermediaries and without dust. As al-Mutanabbī said, expressing the pride of a will that seeks the truth and refuses the prison of the familiar: Let me reach the heights that no one reaches; the hard heights lie in hardship, the easy in ease. You want to meet with glory at a bargain — but there is no honey without the sting of bees. Burning the old ships was necessary, so that the Self would not look back and could begin to build itself on foundations of absolute Abstraction, which frees the human being from the yoke of deifying persons and sets him face to face with his own perfection as a vicegerent. The year 1997 was the year I broke free of sectarian gravity and set out into a space of consciousness bounded by no walls, measured not by the defective scales of human beings but by the pure Balance of divine truth. We do not demolish in order to be left in the open. We demolish to make room for the light of our primordial nature to rise again, far from the noise of concretised ideas that have hidden from us the face of truth. Hashem Nassar All rights reserved