Abdallah bin 'Amr reported Allah's Messenger as saying: 'Fasting and the Qur'an intercede for a man. Fasting says, ³Oh my Lord, I have kept him away from his food and his passions by day, so accept my intercession for him.² The Qur'an says, ³I have kept him away from sleep by night, so accept my intercession for him.² Then their intercession is accepted.' Baihaqi transmitted it. Ibn 'Abbas said that when the month of Ramadan began Allah's Messenger set every prisoner free and gave to every beggar. Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger assaying: 'Ramadan, a blessed month, has come to you during which Allah has made it obligatory for you to fast. In it the gates of the Garden are opened, the gates of the Fire are locked, and the rebellious shaytans are chained. In it Allah has a night which is better than a thousand (1,000) months. He who is deprived of its good has indeed suffered deprivation.' Ahmad and Nasa'i transmitted it. It is clear that fasting plays an important part in the human science. Also it has a structure. There is the obligatory Ramadan fast which is annual and dated by a lunar calendar so that it swings through the years with a lunar orbit. The opening of the fast is dependent on sighting the new moon of the holy month just as the dawn prostrations must coincide with the white thread of light on the horizon. The fasting month itself has an inner structure. The Messenger said that it was a month whose beginning was mercy, whose middle was forgiveness, and whose end was freedom from the Fire. Its climax comes with the Night of Power – Laylat al-Qadr, during which the Messenger received the Qur'anic revelation. That night is hidden, and the seeker must watch for it, knowing that it is one of the last uneven-dated nights of the fast. There is never any doubt when it comes which night it has been. There is no more open night in the year for direct experience, or rather, for awakening. The fast is from dawn to sunset and is broken immediately the sun has gone down. The fast is total and is also an abstention during the same hours from sexual intercourse. It is also understood that fasting implies a control of one's temper and one's tongue. The eye should fast with the other members, and the ear should refrain from listening to what is not pleasing. The total impact of the month's fast is quite shattering and its effects on the solidity fantasy of the nafs (ego) is extreme. What it does, of course, is affect the whole basis of the separate-self illusion by breaking the established adult feeding pattern which in turn opens up the memory of the infantile feed. The resonance of any imbalance and fear that was contained in that held basic memory structure is released and sounded as it were like a gong whose reverberation had been smothered and is now allowed to shudder to silence. It is an opening therefore to the whole substructure of the nafs, whose otherness has emerged in the infantile phase where feeding both implies a unity of self and environment on the one hand, and, when the feed is removed, delayed, or given with anxiety, on the other implies separateness, isolation and fear. To the person setting out on the Path, Ramadan inevitably proves the most difficult time of their new life, and if they see it through, for the same reasons, the most rewarding. The voluntary fasts which are mentioned in the Hadiths above follow the same pattern, certain days and dates of the months being the most in harmony cosmically with the act of fasting. The highest fast is the one which most drastically breaks the feed-order, the fast of David AS, which both liberates the self from the dependency picture of imagining that the food comes from 'outside' and opens the awakening mind to the reality of the Unity through the Qur'an. The fast opens one to the Divine Compassion and the Attributes – Ar-Razzaq, the Provider, and Al-Wahhab, the Generous. We should not avoid seeing into what the nature of the fasting experience is. There is no use expecting it to be the basis of some 'higher' experience, when the wisdom of the fast lies in the very act of separation which is simply not eating. The human being experiences an inner emptiness which first expresses itself as hunger or thirst: when it is satisfied, the experiencing self in its dynamic form-making energy goes on to place this emptiness out into the emotional sphere. The person then becomes greedy for the 'other'. The other is eaten up. First the milk, then the mother. Once the nafs moves out into the whole world picture, the appetite moves outwards from food and emotional encounter to every stratum of experience. Conquest and war are nothing but the continued devouring of the unsatisfied child. The Messenger, peace be upon him, has said that the mother gives the child milk, and something along with the milk which is Wisdom. There should be no symbolising, or abstracting of this crucial statement. It is the heart of the wisdom picture. Milk/Wisdom. Compassion is the nature of the life-experience.The reality is that we are fed – but the true feed contains 'something along with it' – an energy that, if it is healthy, gives the child a sense of its safety in the Divine process, and if it is poisoned, will transmit the mother's fears and anger into the child. So that the woman is the first teacher of the child, and it is the child who has been well nourished – in that complete sense – who more readily feels 'full': while the child who has not received that sense of well-being will panic and seek in the food itself for the compassion that 'goes along with' the food, but in its case was missing. So a person's expectation of the world – of dunya – of those grapes hanging so near and yet always out of reach – no matter how the form may change in the appetite-picture – it could be for reputation, popularity, punishment, power, land, wealth, anything – would never be anything else than a futile expectation of the missed infantile wisdom-transaction. This is a pattern with no blame – for this is nothing else than the Seal of the destiny. Nor can we ever know what we imbibed in the first child-feast until the whole picture of the life is complete. There may be a memory of great love in that first transmission and it may be covered over and its uncovering is the Path, or one of the vital dimensions of the Path, for the wisdom-transaction is one that involves the whole transmutation of the nafs which exists by virtue of our experience of the body as a separate phenomenal form. We cannot pretend to a mental unity when we are entrenched in the solid body.

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