A Concretised Tradition Too Narrow for the Abstract Truth

What I place before you in these pages is a careful record of the decisive moment when my consciousness broke away from the prevailing view. My departure from the mantle of conformity was no intellectual indulgence. It was an existential cry against an environment that tried with all its might to impose a forced Concretion on God Almighty — to confine Him within narrow texts and human commentaries, as though the Absolute could be imprisoned within the understanding of mortals. My first shock in those sanctuaries of indoctrination was the discovery of a vast gulf between the sheer bulk of the tradition we studied and the meagre ethical and aesthetic fruit its methods actually produced. I found myself facing a kind of human automaton, whose consciousness had been reduced to a storage vessel, programmed to reproduce material that had never touched his spirit. Religion had lost its power to be the great instrument of Abstraction that lifts human beings from the mire of matter into the expanse of light. We were expected to switch off our minds and become copies of our predecessors, sunk in the Concretion of husks and trivia, forgetting that the heart of existence lies in freeing the Self from its fetters so that it can reach its Creator without any intermediary. In those corridors I saw how the heart — which is to say, the intellect — was pushed to the margins in the name of transmitted authority, and how the doors of questioning were shut, though they are in truth the very gateways to pure truth. The sanctuaries of indoctrination in which I grew up sought to turn us from vicegerents who hold the reins of understanding and perception into followers who live on the crumbs of interpretations long overtaken by time. That is where my silent revolution began. Either I could accept this prison of knowledge and stay loyal to a Concretion that falsely diminishes the station of God, glorified and exalted is He, and turns religion into cold ritual; or I could choose the arduous road of Abstraction, where walls are torn down and fetters undone so that a new consciousness can be built — one that sees God in the beauty of the cosmos, not in the narrowness of words. That shock became the fuel that kindled in me the desire to seek the original religion, as it was before the hand of distortion tampered with it. It set me on the path of distinguishing between divine revelation, which is perfect and enduring, and human interpretation, which is bound by the circumstances of its time and place. And it led me to face the great question: how can we restore the heart to its rightful sanctuary, so that it becomes a partner in the making of consciousness rather than a mere imitator or spectator? Hashem Nassar All rights reserved