Charles Le Gai Eaton Quotes

Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books, their thoughts or their private fantasies.
The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of being trapped without hope of escape.
A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia, entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of assimilation are inevitably weakened and certain numbness sets in; nothing is fully savoured and nothing is properly understood. Even fear (which exists to forewarn us of danger) is suspended. This would be so even if speed of change were the only factor involved, but the kind of environment in which a large part of humanity lives today --- the environment created by technology at the service of immediate, short-term needs – does much to intensify this effect. Outside of works of art which embody something beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us. Those who, when they have built something and admired the

God gave to Adam and to his descendants the gift of intelligence, asking in return, not for blind praise, but for a lucid and joyful understanding of the nature of all things and their source.

The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to "think for himself" and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit, like pieces of jigsaw puzzle, into a pattern which has nothing random about it.

Those who know in their hearts that they are not really necessary
and are entirely replaceable
must inevitably be tempted to misrepresent the nature of their work and build up a false notion of its importance. A further alienation from truth takes place, a further loss of contact with reality. And one thing we can be sure of is that self-deception, whether on the level of the wind and the rain or on that of spiritual reality, must always come up against the real sooner or later, and that its destruction is very painful.

And yet I needed to know the meaning of my own existence. Only those who, at some time in their lives, have been possessed by such a need can guess at its intensity, comparable to that of physical hunger or sexual desire. I did not see how I could put one foot in front of the other unless I understood where I was going and why. I could do nothing unless I understood what part my action played in the scheme of things. All I knew was that I knew nothing - nothing, that is to say, of the slightest importance - and I was paralyzed by my ignorance as though immobilized in a dense fog.

A man might spend a lifetime reading spiritual books and studying the writings of the great mystics. He might feel that he had penetrated the secrets of the heavens and the earth, but unless this knowledge was incorporated into his very nature and transformed him, it was sterile. I began to suspect that a simple man of faith, praying to God with little understanding but with a full heart, might be worth more than the most learned student of the spiritual sciences.

Each man's destiny is hung like a medallion around his neck.

Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence
the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice.

People are not always what they say there are - or even what they think they are. There is but One who sees us objectively, and heave reason to be thankful that He is called the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Forgiving

One of the fundamental themes of the Qur'an is man's flight from reality. Given the basic premise that God is, and that His being both transcends and encompasses all existence, then unbelief is precisely such a flight. Men and women throughout the centuries have tried at every opportunity to evade total Reality and to take refuge in little corners of private darkness. Even at the simplest everyday level there is constant avoidance of the thought of death; there is evasion of our inward solitariness, which no amount of conviviality can entirely overcome, and there is a refusal to acknowledge our limitations and our sins. Not only is it the innate tendency of fallen man to 'forget' God, but there comes about a luxuriant growth of forgetfulness in every sphere.

A few years before his death in 1934 the great Algerian Sheikh, Ahmad al-'Alawi, became friendly with a Frenchman, Dr. Carret, who had been treating him for various minor ailments. One day Carrett tried to explain his agnosticism to the Sheikh, adding, however, that what most surprised him was that people who did claim to be religious 'should be able to go on attaching importance to this earthly life'. After a pause, the Sheikh said to him: 'It is a pity that you will not let your spirit rise above yourself. But whatever you may say and whatever you may imagine, you are nearer to God than you think'. In this confused age in which we now find ourselves there may be many a believer who is a kafir under the skin, and many a kafir who is closer than he knows to the God in whom he thinks he does not believe.

It is important to be aware of these paradoxes because the distrust of religion - or at least of 'organized religion' - which is so widespread in the Western world, derives less from intellectual doubts than from a critical judgement of the way in which religious people are seen to behave. The agnostic does not concern himself with the supernatural dimensions of religion, let alone with ultimate truth. He sees only that part of the iceberg which is visible above the surface, and he judges this to be misshapen. The whole sad story is summed up in the wise child's prayer: 'Lord, please make good people religious and make religious people good'.

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the 'scientific' theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience - the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man's experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun 'rises' for me today as it 'rose' for the man of ten thousand years ago.

Men who scorn the idea of submission to the divine Will and are outraged by the notion of a God who requires submission are among the first to demand total submission to the process in which we are involved and seem to attach a kind of moral imperative to willing participation in it. Any other attitude, so they say, is reactionary or escapist or anti-social. Perhaps, after all, they have found a divinity to worship; and, if they have, the only charitable comment must be: God help them!