A lot of Muslims listen to Allah admonishing the Jews in Surah Baqarah and take away the wrong message. If you pay attention you’ll see every single thing the Jews were charged with we’ve committed ourselves. They’re used as an example so we take heed not to feign superiority.
Some of humanity’s oldest myths contain the same warning: not to look back. Lot’s wife looks back at the world she was leaving and turns into a pillar of salt. Orpheus looks back for Eurydice before they have completely escaped the underworld and loses her. In Japanese mythology Izanagi looks back at Izanami in the land of the dead and discovers that the woman he remembers no longer exists. Different cultures, different stories, but all have the same message….that there are thresholds in life that can only be crossed by accepting that what was behind you is gone.
This doesn’t mean we have to forget the past. But it does mean refusing to live there. The past can teach you, shape you, and become material for the Great Work, but it cannot be inhabited again. We become frozen when we keep trying to resurrect an old relationship, an old life, an old identity, or an old version of ourselves. Transformation requires something to die so that something else can be born. Sometimes the final test of an initiation is simply this: can you keep walking without turning around?
Took a B12 vitamin this morning in hopes it not only solves all of the issues I currently have internally but but also globally, reaching people in all corners of the world
‘O my son! What is a believer to do if he does not weep? Indeed, weeping is a means of inviting mercy. If you are able to spend your entire life weeping, then do so. Perhaps Allah will have mercy upon you, and you will thereby be saved from the Fire.’”
Like I remember once in a book an author described a place as palimpsestic, and I was like wtf is that, I googled and apparently it means a paper which has been erased and rewritten on but you can still see traces of what was erased, and I loved learning that