For as we have shewn the doctrine of matter or corporeal substance, to have been the main pillar and support of scepticism, so likewise upon the same foundation have been raised all the impious schemes of atheism and irreligion. Nay so great a difficulty hath it been thought, to conceive matter produced out of nothing, that the most celebrated among the ancient philosophers, even of these who maintained the being of a God, have thought matter to be uncreated and coeternal with him. How great a friend material substance hath been to atheists in all ages, were needless to relate. All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it, that when this corner-stone is once removed the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground ; insomuch that it is no longer worth while, to bestow a particular consideration on the absurdities of every wretched sect of atheists.

you've been one for years now: reporting on the doings
of your compatriots condemned to selling their labor as
though it were some sort of shopworn, unwanted merchandise:
bearing on their shoulders the weight of all the sudden
accumulation of capital: underground workers laying
the foundations for the mushrooming suburban housing
developments: or on the doings of nouveaux-riches
bourgeois suffering from Antonioni-like neuroses, presumably
liberated, but deep down still pompous, self-satisfied,
impermeable: all the flies of Tangier would not suffice to
blot them out, and yourself along with them, their chronicler,
their professional observer, their photographer: with
your mind still reeling from the shock you push the little
door open and enter the shadowy corridor, lit only by a
dim, niggardly skylight

Listen, these tragedians, listen to them: the monstrously unappetizing republic of all-powerful idiocy, listen to them: this unsolicited shameless parliament of hypocrites ... There are the dogs, there is their yap, there is death, death in all its wild profusion, death with all its frailty, death with its stink of quotidian crime, death, this last recourse of despair, the bacillus of monstrous unendingness, the death of history, the death of impoverishment, death, listen, the death that I don't want, that no one wants, that no one wants anymore, there it is, death, the yap, listen, the unlawful drowning of reason, the refusal to give evidence of all supposition, the spastic smack of soft brain on concrete, on the concrete floor of human dementia ... Listen to my views on the yap, listen ... I want to try and plumb the thinking of the infernal tempest, the confusion of eras, Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, the monstrous Tertiary and Quaternary, the monstrously meaningless rejection of the great floods licking up from the depths ... Listen to me, I am going into the yap, I go in and I smash their fangs, I yell it with the thunder of my unreasonableness, I scramble its processes, its mendacious propaganda ... Listen, stop, listen, the seating stupid slavering dogs' tongues, listen to the dogs, listen to them, listen to them ..."

"There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state." As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn't a state ("no longer a state!"), it was something as ridiculous as a "squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo," in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was "only the great roaring" that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Out head of state was a "co-op manager" our chancellor "a market-day brothel attendant." The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers' assistants. Democracy, "our democracy," was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe's gut, completely indigestible, like an "ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot."

Whatever writers write
It’s nothing, compared to reality
Yeah they do write that everything is horrible
That everything is foul and corrupt
That everything is catastrophic
And everything is desperate
But everything they write
Is nothing, compared to reality
Reality is so bad
That it cannot be describved
No writer has yet described reality the way
It really is
That’s the horrible thing

Imam Ali heard someone abusing and blaming the world and said to him, "O you, who are blaming the world, who have been allured and enticed by it, and have been tempted by its false pretenses. You allowed yourself to be enamored of, to be captivated by it and then you accuse and blame it. Have you any reason or right to accuse it and to call it a sinner and seducer? Or is the world not justified in calling you a wicked knave and a sinning hypocrite? When did it make you lose your intelligence and reasoning? And how did it cheat you or snake false pretenses to you? Did it conceal from you the fact of the ultimate end of everything that it holds, the fact of the sway of death, decay and destruction in its domain? Did it keep you in the dark about the fate of your forefathers and their final abode under the earth? Did it keep the resting-place of your mothers a secret from you? Do you not know that they have returned to dust? Many a time you must have attended the sick persons and many of them you must have seen beyond the scope of medicine. Neither the science of healing nor could your nursing and attendance nor your prayers and weeping prolonged the span of their lives, and they died. You were anxious for them, you procured the best medical aid, you gathered famous physicians and provided best medicines for them. Death could not be held back and life could not be prolonged. In this drama and in this tragedy did the world not present you with a lesson and a moral?

Certainly, this world is a house of truth for those who look into it carefully, an abode of peace and rest for those who understand its ways and moods and it is the best working ground for those who want to procure rewards for life in the Hereafter. It is a place of acquiring knowledge and wisdom for those who want to acquire them, a place of worship for the friends of God and for Angels. It is the place where prophets received revelations of God. It is the place for virtuous people and saints to do good deeds and to be assigned with rewards for the same. Only in this world they could trade with God's Favors and Blessings and only while living here they could barter their good deeds with His Blessings and Rewards. Where else could all this be done? Who are you to abuse the world when it has openly declared its mortality and mortality of everything connected with it, when it has given everyone of its inhabitants to understand that all of them are to face death, when through its ways it has given them all an idea of calamities they have to face here, and through the sight of its temporary and fading pleasures it has given them glimpses of eternal pleasures of Paradise and suggested them to wish and work for the same. If you study it properly you will find that simply to warn and frighten you of the consequences of evil deeds and to persuade you towards good actions, every night it raises new hopes of peace and prosperity in you and every morning it places new anxieties and new worries before you. Those who passed such lives are ashamed of and repent the time so passed abuse this world. But there are people who will praise this world on the Day of Judgment that it reminded them of the Hereafter and they took advantage of these reminders. It informed them of the effects of good deeds and they made correct use of the information it advised them and they were benefited by its advice".

Some people are only able to perceive the crudest machine-structure in man, and can only recognise the mind as some odd ghost inhabiting a delicate house of tissue and nerve-endings. It is an odd ghost, for, according to their picture, it is enough that the delicate fibre-furniture be damaged for the occupant somehow, mysteriously, to be affected. This dualistic frame on which the pathetic crumbling structure of our hastily put-together modern psychology is erected, leaves us with a picture of something called 'behaviour' which ends up being classified into 'types' and the crude mechanistic picture soon bogs down in a welter of sub-types. It is inevitable that in our time the accepted cure for mal-function of this non-existent ghost in its bizarre house (electrocute the house and thus wipe out the house-keeper) should be an equally crude and massively administered chemical drug treatment. Although some modern therapists have recognised a quite profound and clinically identifiable picture of much greater subtlety which opens to the streaming, sub-electric energy-fields of the body, they in turn become so hypnotised by their own discovery that they again try to contain man within a bio-energy definition reducing the human being by that token simply to the sum of his energies. Utterly closed to the nature of an Unseen reality, because still essentially trapped in this basic duality which they quite rightly observe to exist in the world of forms, they relentlessly avoid the metaphysical question which in other sciences insists on attention. Now that we have uncovered the chromosomic level of patterning, and glimpsed the beauty of form-manifestation and recognised also our profound ignorance of these processes at the very point that certain key designs open themselves to us, we are forced to a threshold of activity which is, if you like, the 'edge of the Unseen', or more correctly, in the language of the Master Jalalud'din Rumi, the Non-spatial, the realm of mind itself, which so delicately and purely refrains from 'being' the brain, and yet so lovingly and seductively is its shadow-reality. I now do not refer to 'your' mind or 'my' mind, for in this picture I would have to italicise out of existence thus – 'your mind' and 'my mind'.

The word Sunna, meaning the Practice, derives from the root SNN, meaning 'to form'. It is nothing less than the form of man, that is, man as a living social organism, man in his wholeness. Any mechanistic or legal idea from your Judaic or Christian background must be removed before you can open to this reality which is utterly organic, physical and metaphysical, a spontaneous human creature in harmony with his creation being the end result, and not an inhibited and outwardly controlled animal. The error of the Jews was not that they failed to obey the Law, but that they turned what was a scientific Law about man – that is, if you do this, that happens – into a legalistic structure exterior to and imposed on man. The error of the Jews made it inevitable that when the existential reality of lawfulness, in its organic sense, the Messiah, appeared, they could not recognise him. So involved were they with the theory, they failed to identify the practice in a living and perfect exemplar. The error of the Christians was its counterpart – so determined were they to enshrine the metaphysical aspect of man's nature, so terrified were they of losing the secret of man's glory, that they felt obliged to enshrine it in a Mystery, in symbol and ritual, letting its protectors be an elite whose raison d'etre was to guard the Secret, until in the end these men did not feel obliged to respond to the social obligations of the teaching, so that they became immoral and corrupt in the name of the perfect Teacher. These two attitudes are what may be understood as 'religion', they are the forms that bind together (religio) a people in an exploitation that must inevitably lead to tyranny.

In the world of forms there is no god.

This is not absolutely over that. Allah is not, in this declaration of the Messenger, presented as the ground of being or as the infra-structure, nor is It presented as being identical with the totality of forms.

What we are presented with is an uncompromising affirmation of Unity. One reality, of which the forms are but appearances. The forms are certainly taken seriously and there is a whole science of how to be among forms, how to view them and treat them, including your own. But in affirming the One reality the forms are negated.

No god. Only Allah.

Properly speaking the Messenger, blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, abolished the state as the model of societal order. This does not mean he established either anarchy or some kind of mystic individualism, like Buddhism. Where the state was based on canon law and the imposition of order by force, empowered by taxation, the new order established in Madinah was altogether different. The Islamic community is itself a freely chosen social contract of believers who agree to live within its parameters. The proper translation of Shari'at is a road.

Abu Huraira reported the Messenger as saying, 'When a submitted one or a trusting one washes his face in the course of wudu every wrong action he contemplated with his eyes will come out from his face along with the water or with the last drop of water. When he washes his hands every wrong action they did will come out from his hands with the water or with the last drop of water. And when he washes his feet every wrong action towards which his feet have walked will come out with the water, or with the last drop of water, with the result that he will come out pure from offences.' Muslim transmitted it.

It is clear from this that what we are dealing with is a process of effective purification that is suited to man. Every creature has its grooming pattern. The cat's grooming is formal and an essential part of its life. The sign of an animal in captivity losing its life pattern and becoming ill is when it ceases to groom itself. This act of wudu is in quite the same way necessary to man. It is in the nature of the human creature that he imagines his actions adhere to him as idea-forms which he 'carries about with him' until this imaginary load makes life intolerable for him and he breaks under it. The man who has cast aside any recognition of an Unseen reality, and who has rejected any belief in a unified benign energy governing the total existence of the cosmos is, unsurprisingly, far from being liberated from this unfortunate tendency to hold to the idea-form of his actions and to feel burdened by his own illusory selfhood, which to him is nothing other than this accretion of mistakes and misfortunes on the one hand, and triumphs and pleasures on the other. Wudu by its acting upon the surface of the organism at the same time as upon the experiencing centre repeatedly makes a break in consciousness between action and the nafs. Actions have no reality. This is the shock impact of this first ritual action of the Way. The wudu in its turn, according to the Hadith, is useless unless accompanied by this vital inner awareness. That is why in the execution of the wudu, it is essential that there be vocalisation of the Supreme Name, for the act of calling on the Reality during the act is a guide to unifying the outward and the inward aspects of the event. When someone begins the practice of wudu, they will find that there are two basic tendencies of malpractice, one is to be careless and undefined in the separate acts of each state of the washing, and the other is to go through the whole process in slow motion, caressingly as if anointing oneself. Either of these extremes must be scrupulously avoided until the mean is discovered, filling the act with both vigour and dignity and remaining somehow anonymous, so that your doing of it resembles that of the person next to you. There is no individuality in any of the basic practices.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what the other man or woman is doing.