My computer is finally working again! Its humming along, doing computery things and being all computer-like in all of the expected ways. As far as I can tell, anyway.
While waiting for my computer's manufacturer to return this device to me, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking and research, continuing along the lines that I was discussing publicly here on the blog. This has led me to a number of decisions, including: I have decided to leave Islam proper. I no longer feel like I can serve God through Islam, institutionally or ritually understood. Indeed, I have begun to re-question the problematics of serving God within the context of organized religion as a whole; not that it is impossible to do so -- I don't have the wisdom to make such a judgement straight out -- but wondering whether or not organized religion has become, itself, a major breeding ground for egoistic tendencies, and whether or not it is worth the time it takes to root out such tendencies. If this is the case, it would go far in explaining why so many decent religious people have to waste so much time justifying their adherence to a particular religion both to others and themselves, particularly when confronting the horrible things done in the name of every religion on the planet, past and present. (It also explains, in part, the other common reaction: fundamentalism, and the egotistical belief that one's belief systems are absolutely correct.)
Of course, this is not necessarily a new line of thinking for me; indeed, its what led me, first, to the quasi-new age universalist Buddho-Taoist-Catholicism of my high school years, and then to the atheistic positions of my early 20s. I returned to the contexts of organized religion 10 or so years ago when I began to question the ego directly, and thus the individual's ability to rightly guide themselves spiritually without a teacher or at least a community. One of the traps of the ego being, of course, its ability to justify any action to sooth and aggrandize itself, including using spiritual excuses to circumvent its own dethronement. The dethronement of the ego is, I believe, among the primary goals of genuine personal spiritual development.
Hence, the question for me has become: how efficacious are the methods of spiritual development within organized religion in this day and age, given the issues I've listed above? I was quickly finding my prayer life becoming more and more shallow, and my concerns more and more surface and image oriented, as I've tried to deal with being a "Muslim" in our world. In the end I've found that this process was aggrandizing my ego, blocking my development as a human being, and thus my ability to truly serve the Divine in the world. This same process was what led me to leave the Catholic Church as a youth, abandon new age universalism as shallow, as well as led me to reject Atheism as morally irrelevant.
This, of course, does not mean that I am abandoning the teachings of the Prophet, or any of the Prophets. In fact, it was the universalism in the message of Qur'an that led me to convert in the first place. And due to my reading of the Qur'an, I have begun to question whether the complications of organized religion were ever the intention of any revelation. Time and again, we're told, Prophets came to simplify religion, to get people to center on the Divine, to follow what we now call the Golden Rule, to stop mindlessly following the ways of their ancestors, etc. Implicit in all revelations is, I think, this idea that that we're supposed to surrender to God and love everyone; not circle the wagons and argue about who's Prophet is better than who's, and who's revelation is more exact that who's. And, in the end, the Qur'anic principle that all believers of all faiths are "Muslims" and all faiths "Islam", as long as they remember the One and love everyone, forms the core of my beliefs. I have no interest in the divisions between the various sects of "Islam", other than academically, and am much more interested, on a practical level, in healing the breaches in the world than in increasing division through an over-focus on the theological and/or orthopraxic differences. I agree with the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem that evil is defined as separation -- between humans and God, as well as humans and one another, humans and the natural world, etc. Which means that an evil action is any action with furthers separation.
However, there is a problem in this approach: ego. Going one's own way is, as I noted above, just as problematic, egocentrically speaking, as getting overly involved in the vagaries of organized religion. Without community and/or spiritual leadership to challenge one, I think its very easy to get wrapped up in one's ego and descend into self-worship.
Hence, for me, this all means that, while I can no longer subscribe to a particular organized religious tradition, after several years as a darvish I will finally attempt to follow the recommendation of the former head of my Order, Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, in leaving the fold of Islam (and attachment to any exoteric organized religious form in general) in my effort to attain to islam. In so doing I will be trying to open my heart and mind to God and to all of the Prophets and peoples of all traditions and cultures, while grounding myself in the practices of the Nimatullahi Order: chivalry, remembrance, meditation, contemplation, and self-examination.
