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Showing posts from September, 2008

One of my efforts to become Lateef

The book I am currently reading “The Zahir” by Paulo Cohelo is teaching me some more of what I have a little idea about. It is adding - of knowledge, some more about Ishq e Haqiqi and Latafat. Latafat to me as I have described in my earlier post is “being light spirited” in a way that allows you to think freely/creatively/with an open mind. To pursue latafat I have decided to start another blog called “ chasing after wit ” and so to develop this “light spirited-ness”. Writing a blog makes one very focused. You have to rewrite the draft so that it improves...you have to think along the pattern of the blog and you are always on the lookout for ideas that can go on the blog. So naturally writing a blog dedicated to wit is the best way I think of developing my wit and to improve to some degree my state of latafat.

Lust for life or Passion for life?

Everybody is teaching you how to be happy in one way or another...that seems to be the lesson most people care about, whether it be Reader's Digest or the religious mystics. The editorial team, the researchers, the scholars, some are happy themselves some are not... I keep trying to learn rules and principles which will keep me happy; rules that can always be replaced for better ones...another such rule that I think will help in my journey to ITHACA to fight the Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,the angry Poseidonis ( click on here to read about my post on ITHACA), this, a lesson I have picked up: the realisation that people who want to grow like me can go about it in two ways. These I describe as: 1) a traveller with the lust for life; and 2) a traveller with the passion for life. These two I have described below: In the lust for life you push yourself headlong into anything that will make you grow and move up at the high cost of hurting yourself and hurting others. You may hurt your

About a Sufi

While there is no precise definition of a ‘Sufi’ the description of one is of a person who is ‘pure’. By being pure it is meant that the sufi rids from himself his impurities that have been a part of him owing to his being human. This is a journey to perfection. God has gifted humankind with a very powerful gift: “knowledge” and using this gift you rid yourself of impurities. I have written about this in my post: “Why Ego is bad” and also in my post: “How to achieve the ultimate goal”. While on this journey your “shaoor” (urdu) improves, i.e. you come closer to enlightenment. By this I mean you understand reality better and you come closer to the “ultimate reality”. The Quran it is said is a book of wisdom – a book that has said many things in parables. And by wisdom is meant “truth of the ultimate reality”. Wisdom it is because knowledge is derived from it. All knowledge is derived from wisdom which I have already described. And this knowledge is the key to becoming ‘pure’ or closer t

How love works

In an excellent lecture on the MIT Open course ware site I learnt about how love works. This helped remove some of the misconceptions I had and explains the process in an intuitively appealing manner. Lesson 1: There is no psychopathalogical method to fall in love By a psychopathalogical method I mean: we do not fall in love because we are mad as is commonly proposed in literature and by poets such as (it would appear) Ghalib. There is an infatuation which is possible along those lines but love cannot derive solely from this experience. The reason why is answered in the last lesson. Lesson 2: People don’t fall in love because of a certain ‘chemistry’ Indiana Jones is an excellent example of what would be proposed by the proponents of the chemical theory of love. They would say: two people work together and suddenly realize they are in love; it’s the chemistry that is actually at work that brings this about. This is also not true. Lesson 3: How it works There is a theory called the soci

How to achieve the ultimate goal

The measure of value of a person is directly proportional to the measure in which he holds the following qualities: 1.Pre-disposition to think critically 2.Knowledge 3.Self control With these qualities every man can achieve his goal weather he be a philosopher, businessman, Sufi or even a school going student. Critical thinking has the following components: 1.Rules of logic 2.Socratic Method: adoption and comfort level with it – the heart of critical thinking 3.Values: accepting every idea after putting it through an: “intellectual due process”, however difficult that may be either socially or against one’s preferences 4.An upside-down worldview: awareness that many things in the real world work differently from how they first appear It develops by acquiring knowledge of science and thus understanding the body of knowledge experimentally proved by scientists ,whether this be natural sciences or the social sciences. It also requires lateral thinking in order re-pattern, previously held

Why Ego is bad

I met a person some time back to whom I had gone to advice regarding a career in a bank, he worked in a bank and was about to join the CSS service – the bureaucracy in Pakistan. In the conversation I had with him he mentioned I should take advice from my parents in the matter to which I told him that such an effort would be pointless because banking was an alien domain for my parents. In the course of events I said that he wasn’t getting it and that we should move on. On his persistence I finally told him: “what the hell is the issue here…my parents won’t be able to help!”. At this he said: “You don’t know what I can do to you, you should not talk that way to me.” In an intellectual explanation of his statement: his rationale, he said: “You don’t know how much ego I have, you can’t even imagine. It is much more than you can ever have”. Now that statement caught me and I thought to myself: “how in the hell can ego be a good thing. It is the one thing I have always known is bad, strange