Apple ithink

Isn’t the world just different during the age of innocent, when all your troubles are trivial? When you think you understand everything or you think you have seen everything that this world has to offer. Like a fish in a pond who sees everything in two dimensions; untroubled by the fact that this world can be experienced in its entire splendor with three dimensional spatial senses. In short, being a fool, who is oblivious about a plethora of nuances about this world.

A proverb goes: An apple a day keeps a doctor away. How I wish the subject matter of apple is really that simple. Well, it used to be that simple. The famous story about a poisoned apple did not make it any more complicated than it used to be. However, the man-made Apple – ipod, imac, iphone, etc. - made the subject matter a little bit more interesting. But that alone is not worth mentioning. How strange that an apple floating in a river can cause such great affliction and misguidance, when someone naively picked it up and eat it. An apple should keep a doctor away. But an apple can also cause grievous misguidance. It may lead you down the sophisticated road of ‘I pod, I don’t think’ or the sufisticated road of blind, unfounded allegiance.

"The inner reality of veneration for the Divine Law is to follow it with neither excessive license nor obsessive strictness. The goal is the straight path that leads the one who travels it to God. But there is not one of God’s commandments without two ways of approach to the Devil: one by deficiency, the other by excess. It makes no difference between the two errors overtakes the servant: they appear in his heart as equal. If he is already inclined towards ease and license, the Devil seizes him in his way. He slows him and sits him down, afflicts him with laziness, sloth, and inactivity. Then he opens for him the door of interpretation, [vain] hope and other [illusions], until perhaps he abandons entirely the commandments.

If the Devil finds him vigilance, activity and energy, he abandons his attempts to seize him from the one direction and instead spurs him on to ever greater efforts, whispering to him, ‘This is not enough for you. Your aspiration is higher than this. You should accomplish more than others, and if they let up, you will not. If they break their fast, you will not. If they wear down, you will not. If one of them washes the hands three times, you will wash yours seven. If one of them makes ablution for prayer, you will take the complete bath’ – and other extremes. Therefore, the Devil urges to do so much that he passes up the straight path through excess; when he urges the first person to do so little that he never reaches the straight path nor even approaches it. But his aim with both is [the same]: to keep them off the straight path, either by not drawing near to it or by passing it up. [Surely], many are so afflicted and there is no deliverance [for them] save through deeper knowledge, faith, and the strength to resist them and to keep to the middle way. And God is the Helper”

*Al-Wabil al-Sayyib min al-Kalim al-Tayyib, by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, translated by Michael Abdurrahman Fitzgerald & Moulay Youssef Slitine, pg 15-16, The Islamic Texts Society.