Daily Theosophy

Even in a well-organized world, old karmas lay always in wait – thoughts and initiatives of long past periods still had to come to fruition. Few people were aware of that, and they just lived their day-by-day lives.

(171)

(Always east)

Mustafa went further and further, always east. He felt he was approaching his destination, though so far he had not seen snow – at least he had not recognized it. Nothing he encountered was so white as what he had seen on pictures of snow landscapes. People also changed. They were smaller, and more adjusted to the mountain life. They seemed to know everything of their environment. He noticed that they had a very different religion from the one’s he knew from his own country. The had very few big prayer halls like in his own country, but small shrines with statues inside, in an enormous variety. Sitting or standing, dressed or nude, of black and of white stone, or painted in bright colors, or with snakes above their heads or animals at their feet. Some seemed mixtures of humans and animals. And people were going to these strange figures – which were often covered with half dead flowers and colored powders and stinking – can you imagine how it smells in a narrow shrine lit with lamps burning on butter for a nose which only knows deserts! All these things he had heard about during his studies, but had seemed unreal. According to his deepest meditations there could be only one God, who was visible nowhere, was beyond any conception of form (let alone a human or animal form) and in whose name one constructed nothing but the most refined architecture and geometric art. God could never accept this stench and these unaesthetic figures, he thought. Still the people who prayed to them where just as intelligent and broad minded as the people in his own country. He really wondered about these people’s mind. He asked someone, apparently a very holy person, and told her about his own ideas, and how to explain all what he saw here. She was an extremely calm lady. But she was stunned and impressed by the still greater inner calm of Mustafa. ‘He is a holy man,’ she thought. She answered ‘God is beyond God, has no form and has all forms. The wise praise the no-form, the people praise the manifestations of no-form, which are forms.’ It was if a light flashed in Mustafa’s mind. He understood her immediately. And she knew that he understood. They felt a deep spiritual friendship for each other. They were both different and the same. There paths separated after this short meeting.

From now on Mustafa understood the multiplicity of the higher human psychology. These deities, these idols, were not base expressions of total ignorance, as he had first thought, but were the multitudinous divine aspects as reflected in the human mind and psyche, that is, the higher human mind and psyche. All of these idols were the eternal omnipresent formless divinity. He learned that every deity represented an aspect: it could be as divine mind solving problems, as examples of supra-human courage, inventiveness, heavenly (i.e. non-material) wealth, divine or occult powers, compassion, purity, asceticism (he realized that he himself was an ascetic, though he had never thought in such terms), there were many idols representing messengers – or should he say prophets? – who had descended from their own invisible kingdoms to teach on earth, and had done so sometimes in an animal form (at least symbolically) about whom grand stories existed, movies were made, songs were sung.

He walked on and on, always east, along cities, centers of intellectuality and stunning landscapes, through forests and along gigantic waterfalls, through landscape parks and along highways and silk road lines, he saw sharp mountain peaks, crossed deep valleys with wild rivers, and ultimately saw snow-capped mountains towering far above the rest of the landscape. Everywhere he met signs of religion – shrines, temples, statues, empty rooms for prayer or meditation, and masses of devotional people, and people living withdrawn in lonely places, and small hamlets of mud huts or wooden shelters along friendly streams with holy men or intellectual women fully equipped with all internet facilities and all libraries of the world available online. He even walked for days in lands were nothing seemed to have changed in the last centuries: no technology, but simply old-fashioned agricultural communities – the people seemingly unaware of the rest of the world or indifferent towards it? He walked and climbed and descended for weeks and weeks, ever discovering new ways of how humans can live and think. He noticed that some simple people naturally knew things in their mind for which he had had to fight for years to understand them. So he learned still a lot.

Climbing to higher and higher landscapes he reached a town, and in that town he met a man who was a wonderfully sensitive and kind man. He made musical instruments and taught music. He understood the souls of the trees, and he knew intuitively which trees would produce the best music. It was the same man Shano would meet ten years later, the man who had been Shano’s brother in more than one life. Mustafa stayed a few weeks with the instrument builder and learned a lot about refined feelings in living nature, which was a sound supplement to his years of silence between sands and rocks. He also came to know about the stories and the scary or sacred land east of that town – and his destiny was east – and whatever might be the consequence, he had been ordered to go there and would never disobey his order. He went, and a month later he became one example added to the spooky stories, another man who had gone there and had never returned.

The weeks in the scary mountains were indeed scary, but totally different from when Shano was there. In fact he met many people, or man-like creatures who were extremely aggressive and stole all he had from him (but that wasn’t much), and was repeatedly beaten up, sometimes he was bleeding and two times he was almost killed – once after he was beaten unconscious on a mountain ridge, the other time, when all was quiet, he thought, in the middle of the night, when he heard a tremendous thundering sound of which he could not see the source. Suddenly he was covered by snow. There was no more sky above him, and he could hardly breath. It was pitch dark and extremely cold so that all his limbs and senses became numb. If it would not have been for a miracle, he would have been dead. Then suddenly he felt the whole body of snow in which he was buried shake and shift. He was powerless and carried down with the snow at leas 35 meters. When the snow stopped shifting his eyes saw stars. With his very last force he could climb out. Perhaps it was not even his own force. It felt as if ‘someone’ helped him to stand up.

He did not come to Shano’s cave and did not have Shano’s experience, but he encountered hardship after hardship, went twelve days without food and almost froze to death at night. He had to walk on through the nights, and often encountered howling snow and hail storm coming from eastern direction, and the very purpose of the storms seemed to be to throw him of the mountains to fall to pieces in the deep and often unexpected precipices. He lost his weight and his shine. Every hair of his now pretty long black beard had frozen into a white icicle. No philosophy could help him. He stumbled on and on, always in the direction of the rising sun. Still it never came to his mind even for a split second to give up, because what he was doing was his duty, following the direction of that one man he had met in the desert where he always thought and meditated, one day before he left forever. He never even had an evil thought or fear for the aggressive humanoids. His willpower and courage put that of a forefront army general to shame. His duty, his mystical dedication was incorruptible, even when the devil himself would be left lose on him.

He reached the monastery, totally exhausted. He was welcomed by the abbot – who had the same kindness and unconquerable stability as the man who had ordered him with one pointing finger to go in this direction. Immediately he trusted the Abbott completely – no doubt would ever rise in his mind concerning this man. Immediately Mustafa knew that he had found his home.

The Abbot asked Mustafa: “What motivated you to come here, and to undertake this long and arduous journey?” The Abbott knew very well what motivated Mustafa, but still he wanted to hear it from his own lips.