A Return to the Beginning

The eleven years since my conversion to Islam have been the most rewarding, the most difficult, and the most perplexing of my life. In these years, it seems that I have learnt much - especially about myself, and what is often called human nature. I have experienced - again - one personal loss and then another, and then a great personal tragedy; I have been in love, again, several times, and been loved; felt happiness, joy, sorrow and - yes - felt remorse, doubt, and despair.

During these years, I have undertaken more travels (most to study and learn, but some to visit friends and relatives, including my daughter, far away, who now has a family of her own); written many, many things - from poetry to articles in praise of Al-Islam and of Jihad, to essays concerning National-Socialism and what I have called The Numinous Way with its ethics now firmly based upon empathy and compassion, with such essays and items about NS and The Numinous way initially being written to develope those world-views so that co-operation, between Muslims and others, against the tyrannical, ignoble, un-numinous and mis-named "New World Order" might occur.

Furthermore I have, yet again, and possibly out of arrogance, but often from what I believed to be a desire to do what is honourable, tried to inspire people through words and deeds. But, perhaps most of all during these years, I have thought, deeply, about life, my life, my experiences, my beliefs, and come to know not only my own mistakes but also know - to feel - the nobility that is Al-Islam.

Thus, it is true to write and say that I learnt a great deal from my involvement with Islam - about myself, and the world. I also came to appreciate, and know, how unethical, for instance, racism was and is, and to know that Islam expresses, and has expressed, the Numen, the sacred, in the modern world, just as for some people in the West Christianity once did, and occasionally still does - although the people in the West are increasingly losing the sense of the Divine in their personal lives, and in their societies. But was, and is, Islam the answer, for me? I admit there was a time - several times - when I began to doubt it was. Was Islam - for me -  just another naive following of an ideal? A desire, yet again, to re-make the world somehow in an idealized and perhaps unattainable way with all the suffering that such a striving for such an ideal seems almost always to involve? That is, I came to consider, and strove to answer, ethical questions concerning the causes, and the cessation of, suffering; and questions relating to ethics, to the very meaning and purpose of life.

I remember, several decades ago now, my first wife saying before we married that she did not believe in God - except when she listened to some of the music of JS Bach. I loved her for that - for there, in such music, I also sometimes felt an intimation of the Divine, an expression of the Numen sufficient to bring us, even if only for a moment, to the feeling of humility we surely need to keep us human, to prevent us from committing the dishonour of insolence, of hubris: that moral crime against reason which the governments of the West, their officials, representatives, and minions, have committed, and are increasingly committing, and which some of the peoples of the West themselves are also increasingly committing in their prejudice and arrogance and support of a new colonialism.

So it was that I found this intimation of the Divine, in Islam - in the striving of the many Muslims, world-wide, who saught and who seek to be reasonable and honourable, and who sometimes succeed, bringing thus a civilized way of life into this world, just as many people, of various Ways and faith, and none, did and do, and just as some people of the West did, and still perhaps do, despite the machinations of their governments, despite the loss of the Numen in the everyday life of the peoples of the West, and despite the increasing dishonour and hubris among the peoples of the West.

Furthermore, and on the personal level, some doubts arose because I have for most of my life only ever felt a true inner peace, a harmony, a oneness, when I am among Nature. I feel I belong among the open hills; by the rivers; in deserts; on mountains; in the forests; on the open sea; in small fields, working with my hands. In these and other such places I seem to have my being - having always felt I do not belong in this modern world with its destruction of night by electric light; with its cars and fast transport; its noise, manic pace, intensive farming, consumer ethos, material greed, cruelty to animals and humans in the name of progress, and its almost total lack of manners and courtesy.

For most of my life, man and boy, I found a special kind of peace in Nature, as I have often felt that our very humanity is defined by our awareness of Nature with its slow, quiet, natural, rhythm which modern life and living has almost totally destroyed. Thus, there was for me - after my discovery of Islam - a joy in, as a Muslim, praying daily according to the rhythm of the Sun, and in following a lunar calender: an awareness of our connexion with Nature, the world, the Cosmos, made real through Namaz; a realness which touched me very deeply when as a Muslim I ventured on two occasions to travel alone in the Sahara desert to feel, to know without words, how slim was the thread by which I seemed to cling to life, and knowing, feeling, the nearness of God, of Allah.

I had felt, known, something of this feeling before, in Taoism, decades ago; and during my time as a monk when, for instance, between Matins and Lauds I would walk outside in the quietness, often the darkness, feeling, feeling a beauty, a wordless ritual of joy knowing the centuries for the imposters they were...

But were such intimations, such moments, enough?  What was most important - being-with Nature through a natural spontaneous way of living, and thus wu-wei, or striving for a Way of Life even if, or especially if, such a striving involved causing suffering to others and a personal detachment from Nature?

Some years ago, and for many months, living alone, in rural isolation, I once again deeply pondered such questions, and many other questions, trying to arrive at some kind of synthesis, perhaps thus confusing some people about my intentions and beliefs as I expressed or attempted to express some of this synthesis, and my own thoughts and experiences through various essays, poetry, and in some of the personal letters I wrote to friends.

But were these doubts of mine - recurring over several years - just the inevitable doubts of faith that should - that must - be cast aside for the sake of loyalty and honour? To me, it seemed then as now that one of the main differences between monotheism (exemplified by Islam) and the way of Nature is that the way of Nature seeks: (1) to create a type of Paradise here on this Earth, believing that this Paradise exists in Nature, as Nature is - wild, isolated places where human beings are at best small communities of farmers or nomads, bound by a common cultural and folk ethos, and at worst travellers who are only passing through; and/or (2) accepts that Paradise is already here, within us, when we cease to strive for illusive abstractions, and thus know and strive to let life unfold as it unfolds, in its own way, in its own species of causal Time; there is then φύσις, wu-wei. In contrast, monotheism understands Paradise as existing in the life-after-death.

Furthermore, the way of Nature sees us as a part of Nature, dependent on it, whereas monotheism sees us as masters of Nature, with Nature existing to provide for us.  To attain Paradise, through the way of Nature, we have to care for and protect Nature, and restrain our desire for more comfort, more material things, and come to see our self for the illusion it is.  To attain Paradise, through the way of conventional religion, it seems we can use Nature - build and dwell in large cities; encourage industry and create a modern-type of developed nation with its large farms and meat-producing factories where the urban way of life dominates.

Where can I, personally, find peace? Where should I strive or rather hope to find peace?  In the Gardens of Paradise after my death - or here, on this Earth, among the beauty of Nature, aware of my connexion to Nature, to all Life, to the very Cosmos itself? What, in truth, is peace? Is our mortal life a test given to us by the Supreme Being who can reward us with eternal life and who gave us reason and free will to pass this test? Or is our mortal life - our reason, our consciousness - the product of evolution, with us as creations of, and dependent upon, our mother, Nature? We seem to have struggled painfully slowly over thousands of millennia to transcend our savage animal past - and yet we are still half-savage; still prey to our savage instincts which can overwhelm our reason, our judgement, our fairness, our honour. I myself had struggled for decades through and because of diverse experiences to what I believed to be a certain insight and understanding - and yet, and yet...
 

Thus, for me, the dilemma of honour returned, starker, greater, than before - for I had the memory of her life, her death, before me, to remind. Thus did I then seem trapped between dishonour and dishonour. For many months I wavered, trying through will, words and deeds, to dispel the renewed and rising doubts. It did not work, for I remembered the many mistakes of my past. I remembered the beauty of a simple letting-be: of the Numen of Nature, of the slim crescent Moon in the sky before Dawn when the rain of night had gone and I was left to wander down the hill in the warm almost humid night of almost mid-October to feel such joy, such tragedy, such suffering, such promise as brought the tears of life: century upon century of suffering and strife; century upon century of love, one person to another. Such much death, so much hope as when a man olding in years but young waited one late morning in early Spring for her to open her door: then, she was there, with that strange, quixotic smile, half-happy, half-troubled, doubtful still of her beauty, her life; doubts which left her a moment but for only a moment as we embraced to be in that flow the essence of life's meaning, happiness, goodness, and hope...

    In essence, I came to understand - through pathei mathos, through thinking deeply about certain ethical matters, through reflexion upon my experiences, my diverse past - how honour is only and ever personal and relates to, depends upon, empathy and thus is connected to compassion - to the desire to cease to cause suffering - and that such personal honour does not and cannot reside in loyalty and duty to some abstraction, to some-thing, or to some person no longer alive.  Thus there was a knowing that it is the striving for, and loyalty to, some ideal, some abstraction, some dogma, some causal human-manufactured form - be it or they political, or social, or religious, or whatever - which causes or which contributes to personal suffering and which is thus unethical, wrong, dishonourable, and disruptive and destructive of Life itself.  That it is empathy - and its cultivation through a personal living honour, and through compassion - that captures and which can and which does express the essence of The Numen, and thus the essence of our humanity.

But even this personal understanding did not - for over three years beyond the death of a loved one - stop the occasional forays back into the realm of abstractions, for I was, it seemed, still in thrall to my own old nature which bade me, sometimes, to react to some dishonourable event, somewhere, and try to do something to counter such dishonour against others in whatever way I could. Thus did the new compassionate, empathic, Cosmic perspective of The Numinous Way - my new perspective of a numinous living-honour - give way to the old perspective of someone bound by old oaths, sworn years ago, someone reacting to non-personal events, and thus were there, on occasion, more missives, occasional deeds, based upon one particular Way where there was an acceptance of a supreme Being, and of revelation from that Being, and upon that old non-living type of honour which was bound to abstractions or to someone long dead.

How stupid, how very stupid, was this forgetting of my own understanding, this negation of my own empathy and compassion? How very indicative of one fallible, foolish, error-prone, human being. Thus, it began to seem, to feel, as if the genuine, lasting, transformation, within me which was necessary - which was required for me to always live my own answers, to always be the person born from, transformed by, experience - was rather like falling out of love, of mourning for a lover who has forsaken you, for another: a slow, often sad, lonely process, replete with regrets, suffused with so many memories and feelings of times past. Thus, the dilemma for me became instead: how to remember to not forget, again? To always live the knowing that thinking, that pathei mathos, had brought, wrought? 

    Now, there is a feeling of nearing the end of a four-decade long quest; a hope, within, of having at last found satisfactory, honourable, ethical, answers. A hope that such inner conflict as has occurred these last almost four years is honourably resolved, so that I will no longer sally forth on behalf of some abstraction, whether religious or whatever. But, as I have written elsewhere, I have believed that about myself before, and been mistaken.

Conclusion:

"There is - was - no excuse: the failure, the weakness, the forgetting, was, and is, mine. And so, I ask again: how shall I never forget, again?"   

As for my dream, my life-long vision, of a Galactic Empire - of the exploration and settlement of Outer Space -  there was a time, not that long ago, when I veered toward the conclusion that we human beings were still too ignoble, still too barbaric, still too uncivilized, to do this, and that, if we did undertake such adventures beyond the Earth, we would only be spreading dishonour: spreading our disease of hubris, spreading our destruction of the Numinous. But now - now as I approach, this year, the sixth decade of my life - I  feel that we can possibly avoid such things: that there is a cure for the disease of hubris and of dishonour, and that were we to be cured - and thus return to our natural human wyrd - then we could and perhaps should, sometime in the future, so venture forth. But to do this - to cure ourselves of hubris - we, as individuals, need to develope empathy, as we need to have compassion and live our lives according to the code of a personal, numinous, living, honour.

But, there need not be - and should not be - any detailed explanations, from me, of the life that now is mine, of the why that it is; and others can make of all this - of me - what they will, for I no longer care about being understood, for the flow of Life goes on, and there is the perspective of the life of Nature, of the life, the being, of the Cosmos - our own smallness - to take us beyond the primitive, selfish, perspective of both our present and our past.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
 

In my end is my beginning...

David Myatt
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