Material Consideration and the Greatest Suffering of the Human Being
There are three fundamental states in our relationship with matter. The first state is to hate matter, the second is to love matter, while the third is to not consider matter to exist in the first place. Since the third state may not be clear, it is important to first understand the meaning of consideration, because people who are attached to matter are, in reality, attached to their material considerations, and therefore they cannot tolerate being considered nonexistent.
You may hold on to matter either through love or through hatred. You may hate matter because you consider it deficient, and you continuously live within this consideration, feeling that everything diminishes your own consideration. You may also see matter as excessive and love it because you live within an increasing consideration. In both cases, you are still attached to matter; one considers it bad or deficient, while the other considers it good or excessive, but both live within the same material consideration.
Therefore, the greatest suffering for a human being is to lose their consideration. A person may say: “Torture me, do whatever you want to me, but do not consider me nonexistent.” This is one of the methods of torment and manipulation of the soul, because when a person is intensely attached to someone, they would prefer anything rather than being considered nonexistent. The example here can extend from a person's relationship with a particular individual to their relationship with matter in general.
From here, we must change our view of the absence of consideration. When fate, for example, does not give you consideration, or when someone does not give you consideration, or when they do not do what you expected them to do, do not immediately interpret the matter as an invitation to hold on more tightly. The meaning may simply be that they do not see you, do not consider you, or do not deal with you in the first place. It is not necessarily appropriate to immediately call that “mistreatment.” You may see someone as if they are treating you badly, while the reality, according to this conception, is that they do not see you at all and do not see anything in you with which they are dealing.
Here we return to the three states: the first is hatred of matter, the second is love of matter, and the third is not considering matter to exist. The third state is a nihilistic state, meaning that the human being does not consider matter in the first place, nor does the human being consider material existence in the first place. At this point, things become different, because people in the first and second states are trapped in materiality: one person hates matter because they consider it deficient and tries to pursue it with everything they can, while another loves matter because they see it as excessive and tries to empty it as much as possible. Getting rid of matter here does not necessarily mean something negative; rather, what is meant is emptying it.
Thus, both remain situated at the material core and within material consideration. One considers matter bad, while the other considers it good. If you conducted a worldwide survey and asked people, “What is your judgment of matter?” you would find that the answers would mostly revolve around “I love it” or “I hate it,” because the language of matter is the language of this interaction that we previously called the “story”: supporter and opponent. There are those who support and those who oppose.
If any social, political, intellectual, or other decision were made, you would see people divided between supporters and opponents, because the judgment here is material. If there were no such interaction between pleasure and pain, between hatred and love, and between admiration and dislike, there would be no matter in this sense. Matter exists in a state of consideration; that is, it is hated or loved, and from here it becomes existent for those who hate it and for those who love it. As for those who do not make material considerations, matter does not exist for them; it is neither little nor great, neither bad nor good, but simply nonexistent.
The less consideration a person gives to matter, the more matter becomes nonexistent for that person. Here we arrive at an important meaning concerning the story itself. Whenever you are affected by something, and whenever you oppose or support a person or an event, this opposition and support become a character within the story. You become a character in the story: either an opposing character or a supporting character.
As soon as you say, “I hate this particular story,” you have created a character for yourself within that story, a character that does not like it. And if you say, “I love this particular story,” you have also become a character within it, a character that loves it. In every case, whether you oppose or support, you are inside the program, inside the narrative, inside the story.
Even the movement of your eye becomes a movement within a certain context of the story, or within one of its subcontexts. You are either inside the main context or inside subordinate contexts that justify the main context. Your existence as an opponent, for example, may justify the existence of the supporter, and the existence of the supporter may enable that supporter to establish themselves through your existence as an opponent. Thus, both sides become part of the same story.
From here comes the fundamental idea: You cannot free yourself from consideration while you are still considering. If you have a judgment or a particular consideration concerning the story, that judgment will not take you out of it; rather, it will bring you further into it.
There may be a person who says that they are against the story and against everything happening within it, believing that because they oppose everything, they will become free from it. But according to this conception, they will not become free. Rather, they will remain one of the necessary elements of the story. They will be summoned again whenever the story appears again, because they were inside it, rejecting everything that happened within it.
Therefore, the best thing that can be done with any story, according to this perspective, is to consider it nonexistent and to consider that it never happened in the first place.
At this point, a person may say: “Does this mean that I am lying to myself?” The answer is that there is a difference between lying and truthfulness. Here, you are not lying, and at the same time you are not entering into the judgment of truth and falsehood. You do not say “yes,” nor do you say “no.” You do not say, “Yes, this exists,” nor “No, this does not exist” in the sense of entering into the issue; rather, you say nothing. Because when you say “yes” or “no,” you enter into consideration.
But if you say “yes” in order to embody it, you will embody yourself as a person who says yes, and if you say “no” in order to embody it, you will embody yourself as a person who says no. This is the trick: to believe that you are leaving the story through opposition, while in reality you are embodying yourself within it as an opposing character.
Take a clear example: when you go out into the street and demonstrate against a particular system, whether you support the system or oppose it, you remain within the system itself in terms of the story and narrative. You are still giving it consideration through your position toward it.
Here we arrive at another matter: people who are still attached to the characters of the story. These people remain attached to the past, and they continue writing in the past: “How much I loved this, how much I hated that.” They revive things that have died and no longer exist. They were merely stories, and they revive them by commenting on them. Anything you are attached to, in this sense, you are reviving something from the past because you are still giving it consideration.
To clarify the meaning of material consideration further, we can move to the concept of the table. A family has a table, and the word “table” is connected to matter linguistically within this conception; the table is the surface upon which food materials are placed. If food materials are not placed upon it, it is simply a table, and not a dining table in this sense. This explanation is important for understanding the symbolic idea.
If the table is the surface upon which food materials are placed, then the connection of individuals to the family can be understood as a connection to the table. The table becomes a symbol of the gathering of a group of people who share a particular material: genetic material, food material, or any other material. What matters is that they share some form of matter.
If the father, for example, is arrogant and considers one of his sons or daughters nonexistent, then this means, according to this conception, material deprivation. He may prevent that person from sitting at the table with him, and this is material deprivation, whose purpose is to keep the human being attached to the table to such a degree that they obey the lord of the table.
The lord of the table here is the person responsible for bringing the food, preparing it, and placing it on the table. The concept of the table is that food is placed upon it and shared. Therefore, the lord or head of the table is the person who gives consideration and demands consideration, because if he considers one of the children nonexistent, that child will not receive nourishment from the material.
By the lord of the table, I do not mean only the master of the household; rather, the meaning is broader. Genetic material, for example, is inherited from one or two parties, from a father and mother, and we inherit genetic material from them. Whoever does not give consideration to these ancestors and those connected to them is materially deprived and is not allowed to sit with them at the table.
Here we can see how the lords of tables operate in their relationship with matter. They have close and complex considerations concerning matter, and they exploit and control it. A person who extensively exploits matter can make people sit at their table, and their table becomes a dining table when food and nourishment are placed upon it.
As the person who exploits matter the most and exercises the greatest control over it, they divide it according to the authority they possess: they give to one, give to another, and may deprive someone else because they do not consider them or do not see them as deserving. Here, the conflict becomes a conflict over distribution.
The person sitting at the table is supposed to ask: Why do you want this? Because the owner of the table, in this symbolic image, believes that they possess a certain consideration, and may consider their judgment correct while considering the judgments of others bad. They may see their distribution as fair or unjust according to how much they have given to each person.
If they distribute provisions and give some people a great deal and others very little, the person who receives little begins to view the distributor as unjust because they were not given much. Imagine, for example, the large piece of meat: who used to receive it in the family in the past? Perhaps the grandfather, then the father, then the older brother, then the uncle, and so on. The table passes its roles through the old family structure until eventually reaching the youngest daughter, who may receive only a little or the leftovers from the plate.
Here the concept of the distribution of provisions appears: the person who does not receive much sees the distribution as unjust, not only because their share is small, but because they consider themselves to have less consideration. The larger portion was given to someone else, while they were given a smaller portion.
All of these, according to the idea being presented, are material stories. The conflict we see in the world can be viewed as fundamentally a material conflict: food and its distribution, who possesses food, who controls it, who receives a great deal of it, and who receives little.
For this reason, the Qur'anic chapter of Quraysh can be viewed from an angle connected to this meaning: “For the accustomed security of Quraysh, their accustomed security in the journeys of winter and summer, so let them worship the Lord of this House, who has fed them against hunger and made them secure from fear.” Food and security are connected here, because fear can be associated with a lack of food. A human being does not fear only a person who causes fear; fear may also arise from circumstances that threaten food and life. And the lord of the house is the one who provided material consideration to all members of the family; the consideration he provided fed their hunger and secured them from fear.
From here, according to this conception, we can understand why people sometimes believe in certain stories and worship certain lords, because the matter is related to food. Whoever brings food, whoever controls food, and whoever controls matter is considered a lord. This is the consideration that takes shape in their minds: the person who brings matter, controls it, and is able to distribute it as they wish becomes, in their view, a lord.
But behind all of this lies another hidden truth: matter itself is matter. Positive matter and negative matter, according to this conception, are not the original matter; rather, they are illusory matter, meaning matter that is not the original matter.
How does this happen? The human being attached to matter, who sees nothing outside matter and lives only on matter, becomes part of matter, or, in other words, becomes matter itself. At that point, the lord of matter and the lord of the table do not exist in themselves; rather, they exist only because of material considerations. Without material considerations, the lord of the table would not be a lord at all.
They are a lord because they control matter. Thus, they control people, whether those people love them or hate them. Those who love them love them because they share matter with them, while those who hate them hate them because they do not share matter with them or participate in it with them.
Here we can include genetic material, food material, scientific material, intellectual material, and every type of matter. Lords appear because there is a failure to share the same matter, and because people do not consider themselves to be made of one and the same matter.
A question remains that can be left for researchers: Is this real? And are the narratives that say that we are not made of the same matter true? Each lord among the lords of the different groups can say that the reason for their existence and the reason for their difference from others is that the others are not made of the same genetic material and that they do not share the same matter with them.
But according to the conception presented here, these are nothing more than fictional and unreal characters within a story, placed within the issue as food. They themselves are the food; either they feed or they are fed upon. They are the controllers or those capable of being controlled, and whoever does not feed upon them becomes, in turn, someone who cannot be controlled. Thus, the characters within the story are formed.
What matters here is that the characters you see in the story are already food, and they are already matter: genetic material, food material, scientific material, intellectual material, or any other kind of matter. The matter that helps you digest, helps you exist, and nourishes you is the matter with which you interact. If you support it, you raise your hand and say, “I am with this matter.” And if it does not help you or you do not see it as suitable for you, you say, “I am against this matter” or “I oppose this matter.”
But this support or opposition itself becomes nourishment for the story, meaning nourishment for matter and nourishment for the writer of the story or the reader of that material.
From here we can understand how those who control matter view people. They see you as matter. Take parents, for example. If you want to understand how some of them may view their children from a material perspective, imagine that they calculate the number of years they spent cooking for them, the number of years they spent washing for them, the number of years they spent bringing food from outside, the number of years they provided clothing, and everything else the child needed.
In this way, a human being can be transformed into numbers representing matter, and can be controlled through that matter. But before you say that this is good or bad, you should not enter the story directly. If you enter into judgment, you become part of the story. The materialist views the matter from a material perspective, and this is natural for them, because they consider themselves, in the first place, to be nothing other than this thing.
Thus, those sitting at the table become materials or batteries that are charged with a certain material so that they can be used again as batteries. “We have fed you,” “We do not need you now,” “We will summon you when we need you,” and during seasons or emergency circumstances, you are summoned again.
A similar symbolic image can be seen in Greek mythology, where the myths tell that the gods created human beings to be their servants. But according to the reading presented here, they did not truly create human beings in the literal sense; rather, they adopted human beings, emptied them of everything, then rewrote upon them and considered them batteries that supply them with whatever had been deposited within them.
Like a servant who goes to the storeroom, carries wine or food, and brings it to his master; he carries something that does not belong to him in order to give it to someone else. The servant here is a tool for fulfilling the will of the gods or masters. He is given something to carry, not necessarily to possess it himself.
Even the earth, according to this image, can be understood as part of the cycle of matter: do not ruin yourself too much, because eventually you come and are buried in the earth, and matter itself becomes food for matter. The earth consumes the body, matter feeds upon matter, masters exploit slaves, and slaves continue within the same cycle.
Here we arrive at the modification that occurred in the human being: obsession with matter. The human being was not this interested in matter, then this obsession entered into them, and they became highly interested in matter. From here, people became divided between those who hate matter and those who love matter.
But in order to hate something in this sense, the matter must be significant in your consideration. A person does not usually say that they hate something merely because it annoyed them a little. Hatred itself requires great consideration. Thus, love and hatred of matter become two faces of the same attachment.
A person should not reach the point of saying, “I love matter.” Because when you make love of matter the center of your life, you work in the service of matter. You may enter a job that takes your time, effort, and everything you have, and in the end you become nothing but matter, even if that matter is “loved.”
There may be a character in a film whom we love and for whom we do a great deal, but that character will remain inside that box, inside the film, inside the story. Therefore, the warning has always been about the issue of love—not love as love in itself, but about love turning into obsession.
There is a difference between love and obsession. A person may be loving, but when they become obsessed, the matter changes. More dangerously, some people think they are lovers when in reality they are obsessed, and some obsessed people think that they are loved. Therefore, sometimes the word “love” can be replaced with the word “obsession” in order to understand what is happening more clearly.
The human being who can no longer live except through matter, and who has been treated as nothing but matter, becomes part of the system that controls matter. This is the idea I wanted to clarify: the problem is not merely the existence of matter, but the consideration we give to it, the transformation of the human being into matter, and the transformation from a human being who deals with matter into a character who lives inside its story, nourishes it, and is used through it.
This is what was intended to be clarified: how consideration turns into attachment, how love and hatred turn into entering the story, how matter becomes a table, the table becomes consideration, consideration becomes control, and then the human being themselves becomes matter within the story, whether they support it or oppose it, as long as they have given it consideration in the first place.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment