(Philosophical tales II) Looking for the silence
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Said the sufi master Bayazid : "When I was young I was a revolutionary and my only prayer to Allah was:"Lord, give me the strength to change the world. "When I was, by then, close to middle age and realized that half of my life had passed without I could change anything, I changed my prayer:"Lord, give me the grace to change all those who come into contact with me. Just my family and friends, and I'll be happy".
But now that I am old and my days are numbered, I begin to realize how foolish I was. So my only prayer to Allah is now: "Lord, grant me at least the grace to change myself cause, If I had prayed this way from the beginning, I would not have wasted my life". -
Great lesson to be learned from the sufi master Bayazid.
:thankyou: for posting this. ;D
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Thank you for reading LBC :). Religion and phiosophy often come together especially in those works of historical framework where the theology branch gets mixed with philosophy as a religion philosophy. Choosing religion and philosophy as topics of a web forum seems to imply though the necessity of considering also different perspectives right? ^-^
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For myself life has always been about different perspectives and trying to find the "value" in them. ;D
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Sure LBC we look for and find the values and maybe, if we happened to be a little pissed off, even the… "disvalues"
. So one could even emit the hypothesis that we put more than find these thingies somewhere.
Back in topic though, the lesson Bayazid felt to give us may be seen as interesting and useful but, at a given point, since all the mystics coming from different religions (the sufism was and is an islamic form of mysticism) end with resembling each other, the most interesting lesson we could get from the all of them is about a vision of a "god" who speaks for my/your/oursingularselves common denominator. Mysticim was seen in fact as the purely individual art of penetrating the "secret", the mystery (mystikòs) hiding in the nature of the things through not conventional instruments: neither the words, nor the writings, nor even the thought. Its instrument was the breath: breathing first the air, then the environment, the beings populating it and, in the end, god. So, like the apophatic god, not an authoritative god but a god who cannot lend her/him/itself to a human, too human will to power. Including the power of bashing some other than ourselves ones: gays, jews, niggas, women…
