Why I Am Observing the Ramadan Fast
Why do I fast this Ramadan?
First, I fast because Ramadan is a sacred segment of time for me--30 days of fasting and the accompanying stringency of habit and thought that it brings with it. I don't practice the Ramadan fast because I'm a Muslim but because I'm a member of the world's freest-wheeling Sufi community. In that community, Ramadan is a communal act of voluntary want among people who otherwise would not go without food during the sunlit hours of the day. Our teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said almost every time he ever spoke that we should make the hunger of others our own. So I fast as an act of contrived, finite starvation to signify solidarity with those for whom this aspect of Ramadan is a daily, unrelenting, infinite reality.
Second, I fast because it brings an almost peyote-like awareness of life and a glorious spiritual intimacy. One feels as if one lives in a kiva of consciousness--praying, working, even sinning, with a kind of heightened, granular understanding. It is like a closeness between worlds that can be forecast on an annual basis.
Third, I fast because it induces suspension of addictive thought and desire. It is amazing to me how I use food and consumption as repetitive reliefs from tension and fear. I buy things as a vain macho defense against money worries. Usually, they are habitual things like books and CDs. Junkie Dave says he will someday give them to his children. It sounds plausibly noble until I wonder if they'll keep the CDs free of scuffs and threaten in my mind to assign these holdings to other heirs. Suddenly, I have made another Ramadan joke of myself.
Fourth, I fast because fasting sustains me. Ramadan is an exercise in non-duality, the most precious point of this birth for me. I used to think of the search for God in terms of frequent flier miles, vast acreage of rough terrain I had to traverse to find HIM. But as I have aged, a tropism has kicked in that makes God closer than my own breath. By God, I do not mean deity or anything particulate. By God, I do not mean anything separate from or other than me or the creation. The constant thought I have of God, now almost as constant as the howling Cartesian 'I am,' is like what geologists searching for diamonds call an "indicator mineral"--e.g., a garnet on an ant hill that confirms the existence of diamond country right where you stand. The word 'God' is the gleam of garnet that promises the resplendance of diamond. During Ramadan, God is the most constant thought and root of all reverie. By going without this creation and focusing on the Creator, there is a shrinkage of alienating distance and a freedom from the want you have vowed to live with. The 'I' becomes an abode, a sanctuary, where lives a cognizance of which all men and women are capable. This cognizance is a manifestation of unity that can be betrayed by distraction or worship of a pressing need but never broken. Why? Because all it needs to exist in this world is one true human heart.
Fifth, I fast as a way to pray without ceasing, to honor salvation as a chief mechanism--or constituent--of the human condition. During Ramadan, I have asked for a job and I have also asked for the view to never end. My prayers are like Ramadan itself, a holiday that drifts across the calendar, intersecting at shifting times of the year. This year Ramadan intersects with Yom Kippur, a kind of one-day condensation of the Ramadan fast that Jews practice and which also falls on variable dates. I like this variability because it means, as much as any holiday that can be marked on a bank calendar, that the day cannot be contained, that its presence lurks and haunts. Both Jews and Muslims practice understandable victimizatiion. So Ramadan and Yom Kippur allow fasting from such thoughts and the fury of blame and self-righteousness that they breed. I think, as a gesture of hostage exchange, Jews and Muslims ought to practice both Yom Kippur and Ramadan as if both were sacred to their own traditions.
Sixth, I fast to weaken and disarm my own demons. Unfed armies are ill-equipped for invasion and occupany of the mind. The fast is, at best and worst, a truce with the elements. Not that they can't take me hostage. But fasting leaves gaps in the wall, tunnels from this cell, and I can slip through the slats undetected.
Seventh, I fast because it is a gift from God, because Islam is not a religion you convert to but a state of conversion--not a Jewish or an Arab state, but a heaven on earth discovered by shrinkage of appetite for anything other than God. It isn't so much that "nothing is real," but that 'nothing is real apart from God.' Heaven on earth is non-duality. Ramadan is an affirmation of the unity of God and Man as well as Man and God. This unity makes men proofs of God--the One, the All. And whether you use the word God or Yahweh (have it Yahwah) or All (as in All! Ah!) as an indicator of this unity, or other indicators such as Buddha mind, or the Alone, or the Force, or whatever, this unity is our deepest self, our highest and best use as beings and our truest and most comprehensive heritage.
At this point, let me present an enactment of the Ramadan state of mind as I most frequently know it. It is not an ecstatic state like that you'll find in a Rumi poem. And the manifestation of unity/union is not as mannered as in Emily Dickinson or turbulent as in Rilke. My state is as much the byproduct of Samuel Beckett and the eternal way of negation, as Walt Whitman and the eternal way of affirmation. I still carry a portable bed of nails and wear Van Heusen hair shirts. I still treat this enclosure of consciousness as a ball of Saran wrap affixed Mafia-style to my face and making breathing frantic, if not impossible. I still have self-imposed waterboarding moments of hysterical drowning in fear for my life. Fasting, thankfully, slows my breathing for me so I can exit the illusion of suffocation.
What awaits in that cessation of obdurate soleness is what Robert Creeley, the poet I have read most the last two Ramadans, calls "relief" from the sufferance of separation. In the following poem, "The Mountains in the Desert," Creeley prays for a stay of this exisitential sense of aloneness (with a small but diamond-hard 'a') and implcit flight to the Alone. This is a poem that I often import into my prayers like a sura or a psalm. This is a poem I used to recite under my breath to my teacher to place before him an accurate picture of my struggle. This year, Ramadan has provided answers to Creeley's beautiful prayer. This poem will tell you why I became a Sufi. I hope to type out poems that show what it is like to be one in the upcoming days.
THE MOUNTAINS IN THE DESERT
The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,
I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.
Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.
--Robert Creeley, "Words," Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967
First, I fast because Ramadan is a sacred segment of time for me--30 days of fasting and the accompanying stringency of habit and thought that it brings with it. I don't practice the Ramadan fast because I'm a Muslim but because I'm a member of the world's freest-wheeling Sufi community. In that community, Ramadan is a communal act of voluntary want among people who otherwise would not go without food during the sunlit hours of the day. Our teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen said almost every time he ever spoke that we should make the hunger of others our own. So I fast as an act of contrived, finite starvation to signify solidarity with those for whom this aspect of Ramadan is a daily, unrelenting, infinite reality.
Second, I fast because it brings an almost peyote-like awareness of life and a glorious spiritual intimacy. One feels as if one lives in a kiva of consciousness--praying, working, even sinning, with a kind of heightened, granular understanding. It is like a closeness between worlds that can be forecast on an annual basis.
Third, I fast because it induces suspension of addictive thought and desire. It is amazing to me how I use food and consumption as repetitive reliefs from tension and fear. I buy things as a vain macho defense against money worries. Usually, they are habitual things like books and CDs. Junkie Dave says he will someday give them to his children. It sounds plausibly noble until I wonder if they'll keep the CDs free of scuffs and threaten in my mind to assign these holdings to other heirs. Suddenly, I have made another Ramadan joke of myself.
Fourth, I fast because fasting sustains me. Ramadan is an exercise in non-duality, the most precious point of this birth for me. I used to think of the search for God in terms of frequent flier miles, vast acreage of rough terrain I had to traverse to find HIM. But as I have aged, a tropism has kicked in that makes God closer than my own breath. By God, I do not mean deity or anything particulate. By God, I do not mean anything separate from or other than me or the creation. The constant thought I have of God, now almost as constant as the howling Cartesian 'I am,' is like what geologists searching for diamonds call an "indicator mineral"--e.g., a garnet on an ant hill that confirms the existence of diamond country right where you stand. The word 'God' is the gleam of garnet that promises the resplendance of diamond. During Ramadan, God is the most constant thought and root of all reverie. By going without this creation and focusing on the Creator, there is a shrinkage of alienating distance and a freedom from the want you have vowed to live with. The 'I' becomes an abode, a sanctuary, where lives a cognizance of which all men and women are capable. This cognizance is a manifestation of unity that can be betrayed by distraction or worship of a pressing need but never broken. Why? Because all it needs to exist in this world is one true human heart.
Fifth, I fast as a way to pray without ceasing, to honor salvation as a chief mechanism--or constituent--of the human condition. During Ramadan, I have asked for a job and I have also asked for the view to never end. My prayers are like Ramadan itself, a holiday that drifts across the calendar, intersecting at shifting times of the year. This year Ramadan intersects with Yom Kippur, a kind of one-day condensation of the Ramadan fast that Jews practice and which also falls on variable dates. I like this variability because it means, as much as any holiday that can be marked on a bank calendar, that the day cannot be contained, that its presence lurks and haunts. Both Jews and Muslims practice understandable victimizatiion. So Ramadan and Yom Kippur allow fasting from such thoughts and the fury of blame and self-righteousness that they breed. I think, as a gesture of hostage exchange, Jews and Muslims ought to practice both Yom Kippur and Ramadan as if both were sacred to their own traditions.
Sixth, I fast to weaken and disarm my own demons. Unfed armies are ill-equipped for invasion and occupany of the mind. The fast is, at best and worst, a truce with the elements. Not that they can't take me hostage. But fasting leaves gaps in the wall, tunnels from this cell, and I can slip through the slats undetected.
Seventh, I fast because it is a gift from God, because Islam is not a religion you convert to but a state of conversion--not a Jewish or an Arab state, but a heaven on earth discovered by shrinkage of appetite for anything other than God. It isn't so much that "nothing is real," but that 'nothing is real apart from God.' Heaven on earth is non-duality. Ramadan is an affirmation of the unity of God and Man as well as Man and God. This unity makes men proofs of God--the One, the All. And whether you use the word God or Yahweh (have it Yahwah) or All (as in All! Ah!) as an indicator of this unity, or other indicators such as Buddha mind, or the Alone, or the Force, or whatever, this unity is our deepest self, our highest and best use as beings and our truest and most comprehensive heritage.
At this point, let me present an enactment of the Ramadan state of mind as I most frequently know it. It is not an ecstatic state like that you'll find in a Rumi poem. And the manifestation of unity/union is not as mannered as in Emily Dickinson or turbulent as in Rilke. My state is as much the byproduct of Samuel Beckett and the eternal way of negation, as Walt Whitman and the eternal way of affirmation. I still carry a portable bed of nails and wear Van Heusen hair shirts. I still treat this enclosure of consciousness as a ball of Saran wrap affixed Mafia-style to my face and making breathing frantic, if not impossible. I still have self-imposed waterboarding moments of hysterical drowning in fear for my life. Fasting, thankfully, slows my breathing for me so I can exit the illusion of suffocation.
What awaits in that cessation of obdurate soleness is what Robert Creeley, the poet I have read most the last two Ramadans, calls "relief" from the sufferance of separation. In the following poem, "The Mountains in the Desert," Creeley prays for a stay of this exisitential sense of aloneness (with a small but diamond-hard 'a') and implcit flight to the Alone. This is a poem that I often import into my prayers like a sura or a psalm. This is a poem I used to recite under my breath to my teacher to place before him an accurate picture of my struggle. This year, Ramadan has provided answers to Creeley's beautiful prayer. This poem will tell you why I became a Sufi. I hope to type out poems that show what it is like to be one in the upcoming days.
THE MOUNTAINS IN THE DESERT
The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,
I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.
Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.
--Robert Creeley, "Words," Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1967
posted by David Federman @ 4:01 AM
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