If You Believe as I Believe

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

If you believe as I believe, that the waters of the world are the overflowing bounty of life emanating from God’s love, then the pollution of oceans, seas, and rivers is a sin, as we are corrupting the source of all life and love.

If you believe as I believe, that the air we must breathe is part of the very nature of life on land and sea, then the pollution of the skies is a sin, and we are corrupting the foundation of our very existence.

If you believe as I believe, that the earth we live upon is sacred ground for ourselves and the generations to come, then the pollution of the earth is a sin, and we are corrupting the ground we tread, the soil we sow for food, the rock on which we make our home.

If you believe as I believe, that the world in modern life, with its wonders and dangers, is part of the evolution of life and humanity toward its Source, then pollution of water, air, and earth is a crime against ourselves and a blasphemy against creation, of which we are all guilty, all sinners.

May God forgive us, and may we learn to live in peace and harmony with our world and with each other. Amin.

Ya Haqq!

Note: See also the poem, Blessed are the Peacemakers

Book Notes – Master of the Jinn

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Alhamdulillah! (Praise God!) Sang Raja Jin, the Indonesian translation of Master of the Jinn, has sold out its third printing, thanks to the beautiful new cover, and will soon begin its fourth. It is well on its way to becoming a bestseller there :)

Meister der Jinn, the German translation of Master of the Jinn, is also selling well, and will soon be published in Ebook format, inshallah. You can already read a preview of it on the German Amazon’s Look Inside feature, and also on Google Books.

Master of the Jinn will be translated and published in Croatia in May, 2009. The title is Gospodar Duhova.

Note: I am also looking for book publishers to translate and publish Master of the Jinn in France, Italy, Spain, the Spanish speaking countries of South and Central America (Spanish translation has already been completed), as well as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

If you know of any book publisher or book editor that might be interested, please let me know by email at: Irvingk1945 at gmail dot com

Bless you for your help :)

EBOOKS Note: The New Kindle 2 Book Reader has just been released from Amazon. Master of the Jinn is one of the 230,000 plus books that can be read on the Kindle, so if you own one, please buy it (it’s only $3.99) and let me know how it reads.

Master of the Jinn is also on the Mobipocket Ebook site for $4.99, one of the least costly books there. I have purposefully lowered the prices on all the Ebooks so that anyone can afford to read them . And you can download the Mobipocket ebook reader on your PC and many electronic devices, including PDA phones, Blackberrys, and other book readers.

Ya Haqq!

Benefits of Acquiring Knowledge

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Acquire knowledge because doing so is good. Seeking it is worship. Reviewing it is glorifying Allah. Researching it is jihad. Teaching it to the ignorant is charity.

- Mu’adh Ibn Jabal (ra)

Ya Haqq!

All of us or none

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

“They say that other country over there, dim blue in the twilight, farther than the orange stars exploding over our roofs, is called peace, but who can find the way? This time we cannot cross until we carry each other. All of us refugees, all of us prophets. No more taking turns on history’s wheel, trying to collect old debts no one can pay. The sea will not open that way. This time that country is what we promise each other, our rage pressed cheek to cheek until tears flood the space between, until there are no enemies left, because this time no one will be left to drown and all of us must be chosen. This time it’s all of us or none.”

– Aurora Levins Morales

With gratitude to Sister Yafiah at the Wild Darvish Writes blog for introducing me to this remarkable poet.

Ya Haqq!

Healing through Compassion

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

My wife grew up on a farm, and has an unerring affinity with nature in its most organic forms, with plants and animals and humans. Last summer, for instance, when she noticed that the bittersweet vines were extending its tendrils and choking off the rose bushes, she devoted many hours to cutting them away. The next day she looked at the roses for a moment and smiled, “They’re happier now,” she said.

She had seen the roses become happier. Even knowing this about her, it took me a long time to realize that the woman I live with is a healer. I had known her only as a mother and recently a grandmother, whose fierce love for her children caused them always to seek out her presence and her comfort and her counsel. I have seen that same love for her granddaughter; her endless patience in playing a game or reading to her, giving her leeway to set her own course, but always with a keen and watchful eye. They delight in each other beyond the need for words.

This true core of love, which is the deep well of her being, is the essence of healing, I think. At a wedding recently, while helping the bride to get dressed, she healed both the bride of badly bruised ribs and the bride’s sister of chronic neck pain, by laying her hand precisely on the injured spots for many minutes. They could not stop talking about it afterwards. When I asked her how she did it, she paused, as if trying to find the right words. Finally, she said, “The pain called to my compassion.”

“The pain called to my compassion.”

This is the deep well of love which marks a natural healer. Jesus healed the sick through this all-embracing love; the pain of the world calling to his compassion.

Many Sufi Masters of the past, who had completed the path of Love, were said to possess healing powers. And in the presence of my own Master, I have often felt a powerful spiritual energy and uplifting of the heart, an immense wellbeing of life. Perhaps healing itself is a spiritual uplifting on a physical level; the energy of the compassion of love healing physical pain.

It is no accident that passion is the root of compassion, whose original meaning was to suffer together. This com-passion, this deep, empathic, encompassing love is both the goal and the result of walking the Sufi path; at each step another drop is poured into the heart, and as love enters, one begins to see God in all of His creation. Perhaps healing is simply God’s Love expressed in the form of this compassionate energy, moved from one human being to another.

Compassion is love moved forward.

And healing is the divine spiritual energy of that love responding to emotional or physical pain. Healing through compassion is an ancient concept, though I had no frame of reference for it until I met my wife. There really is no mystery to it. I would not even call it a miracle, except insofar as all human life and its capacity to love is miraculous; a Divine gift unlike any other, and from which all mercy flows.

Ya Haqq!