allahu.cipher

The exegesis of the Qur’anic verse: {But the godfearing shall be amidst gardens and fountains}, Surat al-Hijr.

Most people think that Paradise is a place distinct from this mundane one, somewhere up in the heavens beyond the reach of satellite eyes and probing rockets. Or maybe it’s on a distant planet sphere, or maybe even this one, but deep in the future after God has had the opportunity to mop it up and polish it after it’s been trashed by so much sin and corruption. But the remoteness portrayed in this mythopoetic conception is only a means of understanding a more obscure kind of separation that exists between us and the state of Paradise.

Paradise is here in our midst, but made to appear remote by the obstructions of the diversionary order. It is itself the living order, the awakening of the vision of the heavens and the earths above us, below us, to our right and left. This Paradise-world is comprised of an infinite array of gardens, each unlike any other, and each progressing one moment to the next like fountains effusing in all directions and with every intensity.

Some paradises are made up of gemstones of overwhelming brilliance and delicacy, others are made of green things — fruiting plants and trees bursting with abundance. Others are composed of endless rolling dunes of sand, every grain of it a miracle-cosmos, radiant with a light of the darkness of absence unlike any other.

To be “godfearing” in the words of this verse means to shake off the diversionary state in all its psycho-spiritual and physical forms, and dive into the annihilating waters of absence, which is allah.cipher.

Those gardens are waiting here, eternal rewards, fermenting and churning just beneath the surface of this mundane, consensual world.