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Inspired by the recent flourishing of cleave poems on here (I think probably best credited to @ two-bees-poetry, check her work out if you haven't already it is phenomenal) I wrote my own short little thing about the meeting of two early sufi saints, Hasan al-Basri and Rabi'a al-Adawiyya.

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Infinitely many such cases. This happens to everyone everywhere at every single moment. The occurance you speak of is a very profound example of the universal interconnectedness and mutual interpenetration of all phenomena

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I think I wouldn't mind most of these under the workers' state. Like most of the awfulness of work and the terrible working conditions associated with some of these fields is caused by capitalism, the further we develop society on the path towards socialism the better work would become for everyone.

I definitely wouldn't want to work in:

Mining. Spending significant amount of time underground would depress me. Maybe working above ground with something related to mining, but not as a miner myself, at most.

Engineering. Just seems miserable to me IDEK why LOL

Soldier or police. There isn't going to be a standing army as such or even a police-force in the same way that we talk about police today, at least not once the workers' rule has become firmly established. *1

"Party worker". Because I'm assuming that's a euphemism for bureaucrat, and they wouldn't exist in a healthy workers' state either. *2

But the rest would be fine. I think I'd like to work in a few different fields throughout my life, actually. Maybe. Probably the top ones I would want to work in here would be:

"Customer service". I quite like working the front of the house in restaurants for example, and without the pressures of capitalism and the accompanying devaluation of customer service workers I think that'd be pretty nice work. I like talking to people and being nice to strangers. Maybe working in a communal caféteria could be cool.

Childcare. This is where most of my actual work experience is, and I find the work both fun and enormously gratifying. It's a lot but you get a lot back. Under the workers' state it'd definitely be highly valued work and working conditions which right now are quite difficult in this field would be better then.

But I'd like to try farmwork, logistics, or factorywork, too. All critical fields for society obviously, and I think ideally it would be good for a person to at least have some experience in one of them. Again with better working conditions associated with the rule of the working class over society I think it'd be good enough.

Maybe later on when I'm more grown I could undertake university studies in some field or another. Astronomy is a childhood dream of mine, that'd be cool if you'll allow me to dream. I'm interested in linguistics, too. That might be cool, but I probably wouldn't want to be a linguist. I've thought about speech therapist as a potential future profession, combining my liking for phonology with helping people.

*1: State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin (1917). Ch. III: Experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx's Analysis, s. 2: What is to Replace the Smashed State Machine? Link

*2: State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin (1917). Ch. VI: The Vulgarisation of Marxism by Opportunists, s. 2: Kautsky's Controversy with the Opportunists. Link

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Just got recommended a "hijabi fetish" 'community'. May you people be cursed

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Slightly spicy and polemical so do forgive me, but related to the last post. If a lot of the self-professed Marxist-Leninists of the world read what Marx, Engels, and Lenin wrote on the dictatorship of the proletariat without knowing it was written by them they'd call them anarchist utopians. Obviously being a bit cheeky, but I think it's true!

Engels literally calls the workers' state a ''state not in the true sense of the word''. See his letter to Bebel criticising the Gotha programme where he even argues that the word "state" should be dropped from the socialist programme entirely and replaced with the word "commonwealth"!

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In my view, if you want to understand salat it is of central importance that you understand that the whole universe is always praying.

Do you not realize [Prophet] that everything in the heavens & earth submits to God: the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains, the trees, & the animals?

Surat al-Hajj ayat 18, (transl. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem)

Islam, submission to God, is the natural state of the creation. Humans & jinn are unique in being the only part of creation endowed with free will & capable of disobedience: we are not always engaged in prayer & remembrance, but the rest of the world is. This means that not only are we alienated from God, we are also alienated from the rest of creation, from the ceaseless prayer which reverberates through the universe.

Salat is the manner in which we attune ourselves to the melody of the worshiping world & momentarily return to our natural state of submission. I think salat in its movement has a rhythmical quality involving the whole body. It is our gate into the universal dance and song of worship.

In salah, we are first & foremost praising & pleasing God. But the manner in which we do that is by uniting ourselves to the whole creation. I believe this is why prayer times change with the seasons; I believe this is why the most intimate & sacred position, sujud, is the one which makes us closest to the earth; & I believe this is why the tradition of the Prophet (s) urges us to prostrate on clay or another natural material. Salat is an acknowledgement of the supremacy of God, & in being that it is also an acknowledgement of the unity of all creation, an acknowledgement that we too are clay (15:26), dust (22:5), & water (24:45).

Sujud is making yourself low so that you may come to reflect the Most High. Through salah, we mend our alienation from the world, & in rejoining the rest of the worshiping world we are connected to God & transformed by Him. It is a means by which we can be made whole.

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How do people live, honestly? I used to be able to, maybe it's just that we were two so I didn't need to work full-time. Everybody is working too much at jobs that stress them out and drain the life out of them and studying isn't much better is my impression. Every career is evil. Meanwhile everything gets worse and rich people are burning up the whole world and selling weapons to aid a genocide. How the fuck do we keep living like this? Is it me who is insane?

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They hate me for my ugly swag and abstract effeminate sex appeal. but i do remain funny with it

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The cumber: 🥒. And yes, I'm cuing it

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i believe on principle that all natural human languages are beautiful. at the very least they all have the capacity to be beautiful. so far i've never found a language which would make me change my mind on that. i subjectively think some languages are more beautiful than others, but all are beautiful as such.

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Remarkably few such cases. You're one of only 5 people in world history whom this has happened to

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Like now that I've been very active on the internet for about a year straight I think I can say with some certainty that it's mainly functioning as a distraction in my life. And that's not all bad, you need to distract yourself sometimes.

But I feel like pretty consistently if I have the option of either being on the internet or doing something actually productive (whether that's enjoyment-stuff like making something or life-stuff like obligations) I will tend to choose internetting. And on the one hand of course I am very definitely depressed right now, so I seldom have the energy to do that, and being on the internet is like a much less energy-consuming way to get some enjoyment or distraction. So I get it. But maybe having that low-energy option is actually in the long-run hampering my escape from depression. Maybe, I won't know until I try to change it.

Anyway I think I'm probably managing my internet usage in a relatively unhealthy way as it stands now.

At the same time it must be said that especially finding beit-el has been a massively positive influence on my life, by and large. I've met friends who I never would've offline, that's the most important positive impact.

I've also learnt an immense amount and I think to some degree it has helped my spiritual thinking grow. Although at the same time, being a text-medium, it's all sort of in the intellectual mode, right? Like it's growth only in the mode of thinking. Meanwhile, my actual spiritual life outside the confines of the thoughts in my own head has experienced a very severe retraction rather than growth.

And I don't like that much, although chances are it might've happened anyway. Obviously internet usage isn't the only thing which has made the past year different for me spiritually—I think some of this development may just be the process of apostasy. As I've further distanced myself from Islam, I more and more lack a spiritual practice, because without Islam I don't really have one.

Anyway that's all tangent, to resume the discussion on intellectualising: Especially now that I've landed in that conceptual understanding isn't very much the point of religion, being so very active in a religious discord server where the only way to engage is by sort of intellectualising, that actually in a way works counter to practically detaching myself from that in life.

I think that the personal relationships I've formed there far outweigh any such problems, no doubt. But for me it's worth thinking about and interrogating a bit nonetheless.

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Just a friendly reminder that if you don't think this or that sanctimonious vaguery about such and such obscure internet phenomenon then you are a morally abhorrent and impure scoundrel who ought be drawn and quartered in the street

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"Everything is fine" (minutes later: leaves town never to return without saying a word to anyone, head to a different city and wander the streets without sleeping for three days straight)

"I've absolutely had it I'm not being funny it's time for me to go proper wild" (minutes later: pan fries store bought mozzarella sticks in a generous amount of rapeseed oil for dinner)

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Zebun Nessa mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh. From this Dezeen article.

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I often dream about travelling. Not daydream, while asleep. They range from stressful to nice, usually something in between or both.

I go anywhere and everywhere, by train or by plane, often by mistake. Usually I'm lost, less or more severely. Once I was in the the rural south of France walking past vineyards, another I was on top of a mountain overlooking Bogotá while the sun was setting, a third time I was aimlessly searching for my terminal at a busy airport in Australia.

Every time, wherever I go, I don't speak the language. I'm alone and isolated. Not necessarily lonely, at least not desperately or terrifyingly so. It's a relatively banal, sort of mundane kind of loneliness. I definitely feel distinctly other though, alien.