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CONTINUED FROM PART 2.

The answer to question 2. P = Prophecy (East), S = Speech, J = Judgement (Fire) and L = Love (Water)

When the news of the arrival of the Prophet at Medina reached ‘Abdullah ibn Salam, he went to him to ask him about certain things.He said, “I am going to ask you about three things which only a Prophet can answer: What is the first sign of The Hour? What is the first food which the people of Paradise will eat? Why does a child attract the similarity to his father or to his mother?”

The Prophet replied, “Jibreel has just now informed me of that.”

Ibn Salam said, “He (Jibreel) is the enemy of the Jews amongst the angels.”

The Prophet said, “As for the first sign of the Hour, it will be a fire that will collect the people from the East to the West.”

The Professor began to explain the meaning of the answer to the first question. He spent a long time explaining the difference between the Real and the Symbolic and the nature of Symbolic Functions. Essentially he said that the Real is what actually is, while the Symbolic is our differentiated, linguistic relationship to the Real, made possible through a life consisting of assembling the signs in particular ways (speaking, thinking, acting, proving, judging). And essentially by symbolic function, he meant something very much like a Jungian archetype.

Then he discussed the second answer of Prophecy.

The group of Muslims were very patient listening to him, but it would have been easy to see that (apart from the more mystically inclined sister amongst them) the majority were beginning to get rather uncomfortable with his eccentric understanding.

Nevertheless, he battled on with his tafsir. He spoke as follows:

As for the first meal which the people of Paradise will eat, it will be the caudate lobe of the fish-liver.

Before entering into this second answer we make the following observation regarding Isra’iliyyat specifically and the relationship between the Final Revelation and its Judaic precursors. This is necessary because anyone with a reasonable (though not necessarily wide) familiarity with Jewish theology would recognize immediately this answer can be found in the Talmud: a form of salted preserved fish is first on the menu in paradise. The Talmud Baba Bathra identifies this fish one of two Leviathan, a vast sea creature. The fish to be eaten is that of the female Leviathan slain by God in the first six days of the world’s creation.

Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: All that the Holy One, blessed be He, created in His world he created male and female. Likewise, Leviathan the slant serpent and Leviathan the tortuous serpent he created male and female; and had they mated with one another they would have destroyed the whole world. What [then] did the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He castrated the male and killed the female preserving it in salt for the righteous in the world to come; for it is written: And he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. (Talmud Baba Bathra 74b:19-20)

The male Leviathan was castrated (to prevent the cataclysm that would have resulted had they mated) and still dwells in the depths of our ocean:

There go the ships: there is that Leviathan, whom thou hast
made to play therein. (Psalm 104:26)

That Leviathan will be killed in the world to come. The male Leviathan will be slain at that moment and his skin will form a sukkah — a tent or shelter — in which this meal of its mate will be eaten. The Sukkot festival is an important event for religiously observant Jews. Makeshift shelters are constructed in which all meals are eaten in anticipation of this first meal of the righteous in the next world.

Of course, these points of comparative religion do not, in and of themselves, provide us with much understanding of the actual hadith — let alone our satiate our desire to unlock of the sparks of divine intimation hidden within signs of Prophecy’s answer. Why the Leviathan? Why any kind of fish? And why would this knowledge be enough for this important Rabbi to be convinced of the Prophecy and convert? Presumably anyone could have found out this Judaic belief (it is not a secret): why would this our messenger’s reiteration of this peculiar story be amongst the three things that sign his Prophecy?

Because Prophecy has built the Rabbi exactly a sukkah that mirrors the one of the afterlife, and a meal of fish that intimates the meal of the righteous: through the first and second answers. A shelter against the dangers of existence, the dangers of what we perceive, the dangers of what we speak, the dangers of what we might create.

But what is this shelter? The shelter is one of balance: of fire running from east to west, and then of waters crowning the fire.

The first question is a mastery of judgement, of temporality, of northern fire. The fire of the east, running through the Rabbi’s fields, will purify him through their regulation: these fires will form a righteous shariah for him. The fires of judgement have been transmitted via the agency of Prophecy into the Rabbi’s field of representation, the Rabbi’s fields are now burnt by this judgement. He is be crowned by fire.

But the second question is also a crowning, one of the southern water. There are two perspectives we can have of water: an immanent perspective (total immersion) and a separated, individuated reflection. Water is the South and the South is Love. Love — all Love, all forms of Love — are ultimately manifestations of God’s Mercy. All life comes from water:

And We have made from water every living thing. Will they not then believe? [2:30]

And Allah sends down rain from the skies, and gives therewith life to the earth after its death: verily in this is a Sign for those who listen. (16:65)

And as water is Love, so all life derives is formed from Love. But the {\em manner} in which live our lives is also a form of water sport: we are ships ploughing through this water, given command over it, apparently differentiated from the water that formed us, in order to pursue our lives in Time, in order for their to be a journey to seek our Reward in Love through Time:

Allah Almighty has also subjected to you the sea so that, out of it, you may
have fresh food and also what you use as your ornaments. You see how the
ships plow through the sea carrying you forward in quest of His bounties so
that your efforts may fructify. (16:14)

We are formed from the Oceans of Love, but are separated from them, distinguished, so that we can seek Love! And so we have a relationship, a differentiated relationship, from this true nature of daily existence, from the Truth behind our lives (that lives are permutations of Love): the relationship is one of mediated consumption and garmenting — “fresh food” and “ornaments” extracted from the sea.

But the moment we have been given separation from Love, the moment the seas are subjected unto us, then there are dangers. There are dangers within this secondary, differentiated relationship with the seas of Love. There are dangers in the depths of the ocean of love: the Leviathan.
What is the Leviathan, though? What is this danger?

The most obvious negative manifestation of Love within a human is the kind that transforms the veiling of the Beloved into an idolatry, and establishes proxies objects of worship that distance ourselves further from the goal and meaning of existence. This is a minor negative manifestation, what might be called a Love that leads to negative attachment or fixation. It is still engaged upon within the ship, however, not in immersion with the waters (in fact, it is often easier to conduct such attachment by first denying the waters themselves).

There is a greater form of idolatry that abides within the depths those southern waters: and this is the closed-loop. Essentially it is a kind of idolatry through immediate, premature or wealthy immersion into the immanance of the Sea — a  denial of our selfhood and separation from the sea. An obliteration of our subjugation of the Sea. It is of wanting to be a Leviathan, rather than human. It is the obliteration of Pharoah, or the drowned disbelievers of Noah’s time.

Let us go more slowly and play the tune on a more contemporary set of instruments.

First, we reiterate our position that each of the signs contained within this answer are symbolic functions, predicating upon each other in such a way as to engender in us Gnosis. Furthermore, the questions and answers are not independent: they are also symbolic functions that predicate upon each other. In slightly more modern language, the sukkah formed by their mutual predication determines a complex, a configuration of symbolic functions whose interplay structures our reality and journey. Like Freud’s Oepdipal complex, this configuration is not merely a set of symbols that embody some metaphorical aspect of existence — they are an interdependent, dynamic, transformative composite function, that governs how we might find mental health or otherwise.

Thus we might say the sukkah of the hadith, the tent fashioned through Prophecy for the Rabbi, is a symbolic complex whose function is to protect against the dangers of our own inherent psychological components: the dangers of our life-as-judgement and the dangers of our judgement-to-love.

Let us present a small example of these dangers from everyday life, couched in a language of psychology, but now not of elite Lacanian anachronism, instead perhaps of pop Oprah Winfrey self-help.

We have said that the ego’s facism/paranoia, the Pharonic principle, the judging Imaginary Father-God of the semantician, the paranoid cancer of life-as-signification (the signification that burns itself), stems ultimately from judgement itself. The Imaginary emerges from the Symbolic order. These bad things that hider our journey derive from the nature of the journey itself. When the symbolic function of the fire is unadulterated, when not predicated upon by Prophecy. Hatred derives from that side of the body: the ego is formed here, the commanding self emerges from this. The Demiurge (ourselves projected onto the unknowable) comes from this.

But there is a particular form of anger — the strongest form of anger — sources from mismanaging the entry into the seas of Love. Because hatred and fascism requires us to be individual, distinct, separate from the rest. But strong anger does not require an individuality. This anger derives not from the fire of judgement (and, we might say, individuality). Rather, it derives from the waters of Love, and the Southern dangers located therein. The danger of Love, its flipside (rather than its dialectic opposite) is Fear. It is absolutely essential that we relate to all angry people appropriately — with adab: adab in the literal (“ordinary”) sense of good manners. The reason is not some prosaic understanding of diplomacy or promoting good relations with non-Muslims. The reason is cosmic: adab in relation to people — intersubjective adab — mirrors the deeper Fires of extra-subjective Adab that a seeker must cultivate in order to enter the Eternal Aeon of Light and become one of the higher generation. If we lose our decorum and manners in relation to others — irrespective of how they behave to us — then we lose ourselves in the Loving waters of Creation and suffer a real danger of finding ourselves drowning, like Pharoah. We will cease to be individual, and be only Water (full fathoms five thy father lies … those were pearls that were his eyes).

And this fearful form of dissolution of selfhood — exactly the wrong way of dissolving into the sea of Love — is the Leviathan.

The Sufistic irony is that this man’s anger — like all anger — is not one of hateful attachment to some ego — but, rather, it is a fearful loss of selfhood (a breakage of the “perfect mould” gifted to us by the Hand of the Craftsman) into Love. Imam Ali could handle such a fana: his sermons often speak purely from these waters. The rest of us are in real danger of being consumed by this Leviathan below: observe how anger speaks — reflect upon yourself, the rare time when you have become really angry — anger flows like dark water, a torrent of anger. The anger no longer has an indiviual human being speaking behind it: instead, it is pure, egoless speech.

We must cultivate, therefore, the Fires of Adab in our judgement through the mirror of personal adab: in this way, the Seas of Love will part for us and we will consume the flesh of the Leviathan in the next world.

The sukkah of Prophecy given to the Rabbi is a complex of symbolic functions that, on the one hand, identifies the interplay between the dangers and, on the other, builds the structure of their resolution (the ultimate shelter that we will reside in at the End of Days). (In preemptive obscure precision, we can symmetrically identify this as a left Harunic control of right’s the annihilation of water through mastery of matyrdom).

This complex, viewed as a movement from first to second answer, the two crossed beams of the answers, understood in faith and illumination, encountered as Wisdom, is a shelter, an act of distinguished submission to the Love. Still “separate” from the Love (so as to maintain the joy of submission), but, following the predication of Prophecy into Femininity, our Body of the Real finds itself now crowned by the waters — not immersed, but walking upon the waters — giving it life abiding within the eternal shelter of Love. The movement succeeds the Final Hour and enters into the recreation of the New Body.

We can say more about the nature of the sign of the Love/South/Water. Symbolic functions correspond to an analogous aspect of the Real. In the case of the South, it is a sign of the Body’s origin and future itself and is, as such, a felt effect of the Real, of the Body that is corporeally reflexive (the Body physically reflects upon its own Bodily contours — reflects upon their trajectory that can never leave the surface, but are “propelled” by nothing more nor less than their surface’s own Reconstitution to the Beloved).

In this sense, the South here is a symbolic function that regulates our life as the sign of the resolution of the Real’s meta-embodiment of contact with the Symbolic, a contact that comes about through the Wife of the first question. The South is Love, and that is what we are moving towards in Time. The South is also the resolution of that journey, that Return to Love. As a symbolic function then, the South palpates a contour, an embodiment of the Real: which must be none other than the contour of the Real that signifies the Real’s final dissolution and recreation as a New Body — a meta-embodiment. This Southern sign of resolution works through the Real’s recreation into a New Body that preserves the Symbolic True and casts the Symbolic False into the eternally burning fire. The False is distilled away via the agency of the the precursory fires of the first question.

The Real is currently in a sublimated form. The danger of the Leviathan lies in the failure to negotiate this state of sublimation through drowning in the seas that gave it life. The victory of the second question derives still from the predication of Eastern Prophecy (already crowned by fire) upon Water and this transmission (via the established axis of the first question) into our current Symbolic space (into our current life, as the New Body has yet to come). In other words, the victory of the second question is that it can be answered, symbolically, and presented to us, right now.

Now, the North-South complex also takes on a sexuality here, a secondary sexuality, inasmuch as they predicate upon the Eastern-Western marriage (and, as we shall see shortly, are themselves predicated on by a more primordial union). The Book of Tobit, long lost to modern Judaism, preserved within Orthodox Christianity and, we might hypothesize, understood at least in its Truth by the Rabbi, describes the journey of a Prophet named Tobit who journeys along the river Tigris in search of his bride, Sarah. Sarah has married seven men, though remains a virgin, because upon marriage, each man is killed by a demon. The Angel Raphael instructs Tobit to take a fish from the river and then extract and burn its liver in order to remove this curse and to successfully marry himself to this Bride.

And Tobias went forward, and the dog followed him, and he lodged the first night by the river of Tigris.
And he went out to wash his feet, and behold a monstrous fish came up to devour him.
And Tobias being afraid of him, cried out with a loud voice, saying: Sir, he cometh upon me.
And the angel said to him: Take him by the gill, and draw him to thee. And when he had done so, he drew him out upon the land, and he began to pant before his feet.
Then the angel said to him: Take out the entrails of the fish, and lay up his heart, and his gall, and his liver for thee: for these are necessary for useful medicines.
And when he had done so, he roasted the flesh thereof, and they took it with them in the way: the rest they salted as much as might serve them, till they came to Rages the city of the Medes.
… And Tobias said to him: Where wilt thou that we lodge?
And the angel answering, said: Here is one whose name is Raguel, a near kinsman of thy tribe, and he hath a daughter named Sara, but he hath no son nor any other daughter beside her.
All his substance is due to thee, and thou must take her to wife.
Ask her therefore of her father, and he will give her thee to wife.
Then Tobias answered, and said: I hear that she hath been given to seven husbands, and they all died: moreover I have heard, that a devil killed them.
Now I am afraid, lest the same thing should happen to me also: and whereas I am the only child of my parents, I should bring down their old age with sorrow to hell.
Then the angel Raphael said to him: Hear me, and I will shew thee who they are, over whom the devil can prevail.
For they who in such manner receive matrimony, as to shut out God from themselves, and from their mind, and to give themselves to their lust, as the horse and mule, which have not understanding, over them the devil hath power.
But thou when thou shalt take her, go into the chamber, and for three days keep thyself continent from her, and give thyself to nothing else but to prayers with her.
And on that night lay the liver of the fish on the fire, and the devil shall be driven away.
But the second night thou shalt be admitted into the society of the holy Patriarchs.
And the third night thou shalt obtain a blessing that sound children may be born of you.
And when the third night is past, thou shalt take the virgin with the fear of the Lord, moved rather for love of children than for lust, that in the seed of Abraham thou mayst obtain a blessing in children.

By the consumption, the crowning of Southern Love, the liver of Tobit’s fish, Prophecy is facilitated finally in its marriage to the Bride.

Through this predication on the Sukkah of the Leviathan skin by the Prophecy/Bride complex, we encounter a taste of the Tranquility of the New Body, here and now. The Prophecy/Bride correspond to Real contours upon our current Body. But in predicating upon this sign of a Love to come, the sign of the shelter of the afterlife, the complete axes palpate the transformation from this Real to the New Real in the sense that they palpate a corporeal shelter that sources its being from its future. This is another way of understanding the sexuality of the afterlife, the reason why the Feminine sexuality of now (that which I desire as a male) literally derives and provides a Real taste of the Feminine sexuality to come. If someone asks — is there sex in the afterlife, the mainstream have the correct answer: absolutely, yes, the best sex you’ve ever had in your life — the sex that you have only momentarily tasted in your symbolic intimation, the sex that, in fact, defines post-fact what sex is for you now.

And this combined complex then forms an effect of the Real that provides a physical sense of the New Real to come, so that the sukkah that is formed, and comprehended in illumination, becomes a shelter that is felt here, as if we are (like the Rabbi) walking in the afterlife.