About
To empty the cup is a phrase found in all world religions and spiritual traditions, and is fundamentally an expression of the universal path of what today is popularly understood as Enlightenment. That by emptying your heart of all else besides God, the Universal, the Absolute, where all false idols of particularity reside within the heart to formulate the construct of the [false] self – the ego – you make room for Divine Light to pour into it, leading to the awakening of the True Self, defined by a higher or expanded state of consciousness called God Consciousness. We may say that all Divinely revealed religions are spiritual engineering projects, a phrasing that is especially pertinent in today’s world, which is dominated by predatory forces seeking to reengineer the human being in ways that deviates away from the sacred nature of man, ultimately making man a fallen being, a being that is lowly and base and easy to manipulate through algorithmic addiction. The spiritualizing project of authentic religion based on Divine Revelation is about effacing this spiritual slavery and cultivating high aspiration, the highest aspiration, the aspiration for God.
It is said that Islam is the last religion standing, the only religion left with its chain that connects us to a revealer who returned from the Divine Presence intact and unbroken. The emptyingthecup project is fundamentally a spiritualizing project through the lens of Islam. It is meant to apply the universalizing first principle of Islam, which is the metaphysical principle of the Oneness of God, a pure monotheism that combines transcendence with immanence, which finds the many in the one and the one in the many, the universal in the particular and the myriad of particularity in the universal, to the various aspects of our lives, from other religious systems to the pertinent questions of our lived experiences, such as mental health.
God is the Absolute, the incomprehensibly transcendent and the incomprehensibility near, a fundamental paradox that necessarily perplexes the mind. However, what it implies is that God cannot be reached by mere rational discourse or the intellectualizing tools of the mind, or by any of man’s efforts per se. To believe otherwise is to believe that God is graspable, that one may force God’s ‘hand’, as if binding the Divine to a contract based on conditions that you have set and imposed upon God, exalted is He above all that we ascribe to Him.
All that we can strive towards, in our desire to reach God, is to empty the heart of all else besides God, for that is both a sign of sincerity as well as the path to becoming sincere, for it is desire that defines sincerity, and it is sincerity that determines success. True desire therefore is the key to success; is a lover sincere when they love others besides the Beloved?
“Successful is the one who purifies their [self] soul”
قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَن زَكَّىٰهَا