Helping to float

Dear Yousef,

Your letter posted on Iranian.com [
Army of the sky] was bold, truthful, clear, scary, and foolish. When one has an experience of a connection with the Divine or “god” as you called it, one becomes closer to his or her own power center. He or she becomes more clear about his or her own intentions and becomes motivated to achieve his or her goals.

Also when one is challenged with Bipolar disorder, on the manic swing one could be riding on a high energy and say the things you have said in your letter. As Joseph Campbell puts it, “the difference between a schizophrenic and a mystic is: The mystic swims in the ocean of mysticism with the guidance of a good teacher and a schizophrenic is drowning in it.”

There is also a third possibility and that is: one could have such great yearning for truth that God directly intervenes and helps the seeker float on the sea of mysticism. For example it is possible that the book on Sufism that you came across it in the library and the Sufi man you met are Divine interventions to help you float rather than sink into madness.

From your letter I can tell that you are a true seeker of Divine truth. A young, immature seeker at 20 years of age but a true seeker. You have shown courage to write and submit such a letter, also intelligence to know that you have to take your own path in life even if your father strongly disagrees with you. I am not advocating disrespect for your parent but when one hears The Call and answers yes to it, as you have, one needs to leave home to take the Heroes Journey. It may sound glamorous but it is not an easy journey once you get on that path.

The Quintessence of Loneliness

I am like a heroin addict
I am longing for a sublime state
.
Now that the heart has held
That which can never be touched
My subsistence is blessed
Desolation

And from that I cry for more loneliness.
I am lonely.

I am so lonely dear beloved,

For the quintessence of
Loneliness,

For what is more alone than God?
Hafiz,
What is more pure and alone,

Magnificently sovereign,

Than God.

Translated by Daniel Landinski

The most powerful and truthful part of your letter was this: “but in the last year i have started to change, my mind is changing very much and i am no longer upset about my family. but i still did not know what my life was for? one day i was in the shower and i got angry with god, i shouted at god to tell me why everything is going wrong in my life. i became very angry with god, but then i cried and i begged god to help me, i told god that i would do anything, i just wanted to know what i am meant to do. i did not hear any voice and i did not have any vision of god.”

Research is showing that more and more people are entering therapy and even become physically ill due to the fact that they can't find their calling in this world. Years ago it was simple. If you were a son of a shoemaker you were gonna be a shoemaker and a woman was suppose to take care of the home and raise children. Life was may have been limited but simple. Now it takes work to find one's vocation or calling.

The other part of this paragraph from your letter that was significant was “I cried and I begged god to help me”. Whether you were aware of it or not you ask a higher power, that creative force which has created you, or “god” to help you. You did that in humbleness, spontaneity, and total surrender and you received a connection. That connection can make anyone high specially if there has been a period of depression before that.

We feel love in its unconditional and pure form even if for a second in a flash. This could happen anywhere and anytime when in humbleness we invoke the name of that which has created us. On the subconscious level we all know this connection exists for all but some people are afraid of such connection, they rather get temporarily high on drinking, take drugs, or stay in depression than humbly ask for divine intervention.

If you want to be of service to Iran and the world I encourage you to ask for the Divine guidance on daily bases in how to be of service. A person of devotion and service always makes the time to humble him or herself daily, to let go of his or her identity with the ego, and to look for what comes naturally through him or her. You did this in the shower, and now I encourage you to create a more sacred space to pray, meditate, or simply sit in that space daily. Find moments to be in communion with nature. Find moments to cultivate love with another person.

Service, when you are asked to practice, does not have to be great or grand. Some days it may be a little voice telling you to call someone and ask if there is something you can help him or her with on that day. The goal is to keep paying attention to that voice. Is it in the present time, Divine, God's voice, and resonates as truth or is this voice of someone consciously or unconsciously manipulating you to do something?

Yousef, you are on the path to tune in to what is truth. But on this path there are detours that sound exotic and attractive which will take you away from your destination but you are drawn to them because of what you need to learn from them. Raising and army sounds like a detour to me and I see the reason you have chosen this detour and what lessons you are seeking. I will spell it out for you as clearly as I can but I am not doing it to make your journey any easier. No one can make you journey any easier, it is your journey and you will learn what you are destined to learn if you keep rising above to meet your destiny.

Raising an army is a concept that is immensely loaded and touches on so many nerves in so many people. Study how the war between Iran and Iraq started, lasting eight years, costing hundreds of thousand lives and ecological damages. It is possible that you are channeling old ancestor-energy both from Persia and U.K. They were both great empires at their perspective time in history and ruled over vast territory.

I invite you to entertain the possibility that it is your DNA that is deciding on how you can be of service and not “god” deciding it for you. By DNA I mean the belief system which you have inherited and store it within your psyche, and your energy anatomy. That kind of ancestral programming is telling you that raising an army is what you need to do.

We don't have to go as far as old ancestors, centuries ago such as King Cyrus the Great or King Arthur. You may even be channeling or giving voice to your own father's wishes. Maybe one reason that he got angry with you or as you put it “he became crazy” when you told him that you want to raise an army was because you exposed his own subconscious wishes.

I am only speculating this about your father but every now and then I either read or hear people, in your father or grandmother's generation, who wish that someone would come along and carry out a similar scenario as you have describe in your letter: “my dream is to build an army to change iran”, and change everything back to good old days. But your father seems to understand that it can never be, therefore it is foolish to even talk about it.

I also called your letter foolish. If you study the Fool as an archetype you will see that it can take on a negative, positive, or neutral state. It is very likely to me that the Fool Archetype is one of the main guiding archetypes for you. I called your letter foolish not critiquing it as negative but seeing it as neutral with the potential to reveal the more positive side of the fool. In other words you can manifest the positive side of the fool which is walking to the edge of the abyss but and experience every possibility of being but not falling. On the negative side one can be fooled, tricked, or miss the truth. He or she can miss the true will of God and mistake it with someone else's will for will for him or her.

Would it be possible that the Iranian Sufi man you met has a similar wish and you are giving voice to his wishes that Iran can be changed to good old days by force of a military army from outside. Yes I know I am pushing it and walking a fine line here too casually but I am trying to make a point. By surrendering in that spontaneous act in the shower you became an empty vessel yearning to be filled for a mission to help a nation and on to helping humanity. So then the question in front of you was how to achieve that? If you had a mentor such a Mother Theresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Manuela you wouldn't want to change Iran with an Army.

Iran has a population of some 70 million people and they are in their own course of growth and maturity. They have had eight years of war, with living scars on the faces of men in their 30's and 40's to show for and with horror war stories to tell. I don't think they are at a mood to welcome war!

You also say that: “we iranians have a force in our hearts. it makes us want to live in peace and happiness. our force gives us an energy that shows with our music, our poems our culture. we do not wish to fight war with any other nation, but when our peace is disturbed, when our freedom is threatened, our energy turns to fire, and we become strong and show great courage in battle. our enemies know of us and they fear our strength. they do not wish for the iranian people to have a stable nation, for they know that we iranians were once great, and that we can be even greater.”

Yes as in every nationalist country Iranians have show great courage in battle and they will fight if their national security is threatened. But these “enemies who fear our strength” who “do not wish for the iranian people to have a stable nation”, who are they? I ask who are they but the fragments of Iranian ideologies fighting against each other? Yes I am aware of the CIA's covert operation in 1952 to bring Shah back from exile and in power. But who were the people who took CIA's money to help them bring Shah back? Were they not Iranians?

At this point the primary nation fearing Iran's strength is Iranians living in Iran, and Iranians living outside Iran. Iran and Iranians need to recover a sense of economical integrity. And the first step to recovery is to admit what has gone wrong. On a personal level that could be a tall order and it could take a person a long time to come to that point. On the national level that could take even longer time. My sense that the Iranians living in Iran have more willingness to face the shadow side of the nation's psyche and in that regard are step closer to recovery.

If you haven't been to Iran yet I recommend that you go there. I will not grantee your safe passage but I will tell you this. I am Zoroastrian by birth, I have been living in the West (U.S.) for over 25 years, and I don't know a lot about Islam but I know what the word Islam means. It means to surrender. If you go to Iran, arrive there in total surrender to God's will. Would you be welcomed or taken to detention? I don't know.

I don't know when it is a good time for you to go to Iran, in one month, one year, or one decade. But from my own experience – walking in the streets of Tehran, breathing the air of The Caspian Sea, shopping for pajamas in a small market in a village and humorously haggling over the price, talking to people of all ages, or experiencing a shared taxi ride and what people say in them – is what some of us, Western-Iranians, need to experience in order to continue with our life more wholly.

If you decide to go for a visit to Iran I have some tips to give you or you can rely on your own intuitive sense of what you need to do to be safe and feel love in a healthy way.

May you be blessed with love on your journey.

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