The Mood of No Mood

In the writings of the Persian mystic, Suhrawardi (ca. 1153-1191), we encounter the “Eighth Climate”; he also calls it Na-koja-Abad, translated as “land of No-where” (link). The word utopia is equivalent, taken from the Greek for “no place,” but Suhrawardi refers to the regions on the other side of the border, thus what we often refer to as the Beyond. Antiquity counted seven climates on the earth; hence, similarly, Suhrawardi’s Eighth Climate refers to one beyond those found in this dimension.

Got to thinking this morning that the first step in reaching that Land of No-Where while still in the prison of this dimension is by cultivating the mood of no mood. It comes when we make an effort to achieve a contemplative state. That state, simply put, is one in which we stop identifying with all that we hear and see and become clearly self-aware. It differs from the ordinary state in which we live, call it our habit mood. That last is not a bad state, by and large. We’re there, we’re aware, we’re acting—but the object of our awareness is out there, in the world. The best way to experience the mood of no mood is when we happen to be in a dark or somber state. Then the effort, in practice reachable by meditation, say, or writing a diary entry in which the focus is our own state of mind, produces an interesting result. In a short while the dark mood recedes, indeed it disappears. We find ourselves in a state often labeled as detached. The world out there remains the same. The problems or conditions that plagued us are still there. But the self seems as if it now floats above the fray. We are temporarily out of this world—and the winds of the Na-koja-Abad can touch our face. We’ve just made an elementary move towards another climate. Frequently repeated, it becomes a journey.

Of interest here is that the practice of recollection, concentration, meditation has palpable results. And the Eighth Climate is not empty either. It is very real—more real than this dimension. Our deepest longings are to return there. Curiously, when in a state of contemplation, that longing is also absent. Is that because, although we are still blind to it, we are already there?

Pondering Desolation

I picture the borderzone as a thinly populated region, indeed as a desert where the wind blows and the sand flies, where the sun stares fiercely down at desolation and the sky at night’s a thick, rich brilliance of stars, but rare indeed the hermit who wanders these wastes and communes with barely visible clumps of dusty vegetation and mosses that, here and there, lend the rocks a somber, greenish hue.

What people want is cures from ills, a job, and help in love relations. Strange theories of origins and soaring speculation, wonder at the meaning of it all—the overwhelming numbers—thus billions of galaxies, and never mind just one of them that holds 200 billion stars like ours—all such things are beyond comprehension and light years distant from the busy brain driving in thick traffic in the morning while it rehearses items on a crowded list of things to do.

Nonetheless—and I look back on quite a crowded life—it seems to me that my passage through its turbulence—the turbidity of pools as ibn el-Arabi once described it—has been greatly blessed by the occasional hour I’ve forced relentless Schedule to yield me for such contemplations. The descent into matter must have been attractive. What did it promise? I do wonder… A resolution of the mysteries--now that I’ve finally reached the basics? Going, I think, in the wrong direction, all the while, in seeking the ultimate answer? What I’ve found, instead, is that in that direction lies the shatter rather than the unity, and that the approach to a kind of silence, symbolized by deserts, empty spaces, and what only seems like desolation produces riches far beyond whatever might be on that shopping list even after I’ve won the lottery, and I don’t mean the ordinary kind. I mean the big one.

Our Strange Environment

Someday we may discover—after we have passed the border—just how strange an environment surrounded us in life, especially if we spent our time in a modern, highly mechanized urban civilization, out of intimate contact with nature.

Out in nature we’re always in close relationship with living systems, whether we live an agricultural, hunting-gathering, or a herding life. Of course I don’t mean modern agriculture with all of its endless machines and chemical underpinnings. These thoughts occur because I’ve been reading, again, the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective. In that book quite frequently we are reminded of an earlier way of life, herding cattle in the arid regions adjoining the Kalahari desert in Africa.

The other root of this notion arises from retirement—and age. In a way, with leisure, I’ve been thrown back into my youth, a period of greater openness, then, as now, to the world of intuitions and ideas, not in the sense of concepts but of perceptions of a higher character. And these, it seems to me, are often indistinguishable from the perceptions that reach us by way of the natural world—the plants, the grasses, the trees, the birds, the animals. The living things, strange though it may sound, are also the worlds of poetry, music, epics, tales, novels, great dramas, and immortal myths.

That on which we focus our attention—that, in turn, takes root in us. Attention is a kind of identification. If we attend to the myriad issues and problems of modern life, that modern life invades our soul and takes up its residence in us. And our perception of reality then becomes, well, industrialized. We see everything in terms of the outer—because we attend to it, indeed must do so.

One of the powerful tools we have to combat this invasion of our natural waters by alien flora and fauna is recurring, periodic detachment. That doesn’t have to take the form of meditation, diaries, worship, or things of that nature. We can also recover our fundamental reality by walks in parks, gardening, or working with our hands outdoors or in.

With age—in which experience has amassed a great deal of visceral as well as formal knowledge—attentive listening eventually produces the strange feeling that what we take to be reality is an artificial construct. It mostly hides that which are, in our essence, and that which really surrounds us, not just in the immediate quarter-mile or so but including the heavens above reaching infinitely far outward (on the visible plain) and in realms only known from myths (in the invisible).

Keep notes. Someday we may have occasion to compare them.