سُکوت

شام آتی هے تو پهر گورِغریباں کی طرف
دفعتا اس کے قدم اُٹهتے ہیں
اپنے آنچل میں لیے پهول اورہاتهوں میں چراخ
جا کے اِک ٹوٹی ہوئ قبر کے پاس
وہ جلاتی ہے چراخ
پهول کو قبر پہ آهستہ سے رکهه دیتی ہے
اورپهر ٹوٹتا ہے گورِغریباں کا سکوت
جب لرزتی ہوئ باہیں اُسکی
اجنبی قبر کو سینے سے لگا لیتی ہیں

گردشِ ایام

درِ مے خانہ کے پهیلے ہیں سرِ شام سے ہاتهه
کاش اک بار تو مل جائیں مرے جام سے ہاتهه

جب سے برہم ہوے گیسوے مقدر یارو
ہم نے بهی کهینچ لیے گردشِ ایام سے ہاتهه

مثلِ آئنہ وہ تکتا هے ہتهیلی اپنی
اُس نے جس دن سے سجایا هے مرے نام سے هاتهه

شدتِ دردِ جگر کا نہیں احساس مجهے
میرے سینے پہ رکها کس نے یہ آرام سے هاتهه

بے قراری کوئی اس دل کی بڑها دیتا هے
دیکهکر مجهه کو ہلاتا ہے کوئی بام سے هاتهه

جهومتی آتی ہے گنگهور گٹها ساون کی
ایسے عالم میں ہٹاے گا کوئی جام سے هاتهه

اب کسی اور کی جانب نہیں بڑهتے جوہر
تیرے ہاتهوں میں گے جب سے گئے کام سے ہاتهه

مسیحا

مسیحا بن کے ستم کرتے هیں عدو کی طرح
هم اپنی خو بهی بدل دیں گے تیری خو کی طرح

یہ کس مقام پہ احساس کی تپش پہنچی
هواے سرد مجهے لگ رہی ہے لُوکی طرح

وہ گهر جہاں پہ تیرے قہقہوں کی بارش تهی
وہاں سکوت برستا ہے آج ہُو کی طرح

وہ لوگ گردشِ ایام کو بدل دیں گے
رگوں میں وقت کی دوڑیں گے جو لہو کی طرح

هزار کوششیں کی تهیں مرے رفوگر نے
رفو نہ دامنِ دل ہو سکا رفو کی طرح

میری تلاش نہ اُس تک پہنچ سکی ورنہ
وہ اک وجود تو بکهرا تها رنگ و بوُ کی طرح

The word was made flesh

By - S. Jauhar Mehdi Naqvi
	Mir Ahmad Navaid has dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the finest poet of our era, full of grace and truth. Yes, The words he pens down come from the fullness of his heart,certainly, they are carrying with them some perfume,some fragrance of his inner space and if you are silent, the word becomes inessential and the fragrance that it is carrying becomes essential. His poetry is nothing but the overflowing of the flood that he has received into his inner most being. These couplets are not only those of a poet, but those of a mystic- one who knows,knows by living it, one who has tasted God, who is drunk with God.  Mir Ahmad Navaid displayed great originality or depth of feeling. He is simply an extraordinary gifted poet, a perfect versifier, a wondrous lyrist, endowed with a grace, ease and power of expression. Mir Ahmad Navaid imbibes his feelings from the poisoned lips of life. His intelligence is born in his heart hence there is freshness,his words are not borrowed, they blossom in the garden of his heart. His intellect,emotions and intuition are such intertwined that reader is swept away by the impeccable beauty of his eloquence. When the poet comes to talking about his spiritual explosion, he uses metaphors and similies. I am reminded of Rubaiyat Omar khayyam,it is misunderstood in its spirit.The Rubaiyyat talks of wine and women and khayyam talks of the women, he is talking about God and the wine is that which happens between the lover and the beloved,it has nothing to do with grapes, The alchemy which happens between the seeker and the sought, between the worshipper and his god- that is wine. let me echo Ahmad Navaid here. i Ahmad Navaid is a rare flower. He hasn't lost his contact with his innocence. One can easily feel the ardour of his simple love through his words. the man inside him doesn't seem to have lost his paradise. He is filled with awe and wonders about the mysteriousness of this world. He looks at the world with empty eyes of a child. Mir Ahmad Navaid keeps his intellect alive with his doubt. he denies all the prejudices of his age and doesn't accept the world as it is with its absurd moralities,its conventions and institutions and social classes. He has the completest independence of mind. He utterly refuses to accept established opinions just because they are established. he probes into the right and wrongs of things. Belief is blindness; thinking is finding one's own eyes, By being blinded with belief, the men are deprived of their eyes forever. Actually, there is no greater sin than killing the capacity to think. Mir Ahmad Navaid inspires his readers to discover his inner light and think afresh about his values. He lays especial emphasis on reasoning so that one can look for new ways of life. For him, Doubt is the beginning, Doubt is the search, trust is the achievement so whosoever begins with doubt , sometime or other does reach trust. Unless you are in a deep communion with the master, everything else that goes on in the name of spirituality is nothing  but spiritual entertainment. In your mosques, in your synagogues. what goes on is simply entertainment. People go to mosque for their whole lives and nothing happens to them. Once a man asked Jesus Christ. What is prayer? Can you teach prayer to me? Jesus replied," It can never be taught, it can only be caught." This is how things are developing in churches,in temples everywhere, there is nobody there to share his being, to share his light, to share his growth. All these rabbis and pundits and the mullahs are people just as drowned in darkness and unconscious as one possibly can be. Mir Ahmad Navaid believes, the future belongs to the creative man. A very stupid idea has prevailed in the world, that only saints are religious, Infact, almost 99.9 percent of saints are not religious. The real religious people will be found in creative dimensions- dancers,poets, painters, singers, musicians,sculptors. So sing without any hesitation, without being worried that you will be thought crazy, Unless a singer is thought by the world to be insane, he is not a singer at all. If a dancer is not forced into a mad house, the world has not given the certificate. All geniuses are bound to be thought of by the world in this way, "something has gone wrong with these poor people." Vincent Van Gogh, one of the dutch painters, couldn't sell a single  painting in his whole life. Now only two hundred paintings have survived  out of thousands that he painted because nobody could take care of them. The man himself was forced into a mad asylum when he was only thirty two. And he was forced because of his paintings- he was not violent,  he wasn't doing anything to anybody but anybody who looked at his paintings  was absolutely sure this man was mad and unreliable. He should be put in a mad house. Every week, his brother used to give him enough money to last for ten days and he was fasting three days in a week and eating four days because that was the only way to purchase the canvas and colors and brushes to paint. Painting was more important than life. He committed suicide at the age of thirty three. Just after his release from the mad house, he painted only one painting, which they had prevented him painting in the mad house. He wanted to paint the sun. It took him one year. he lost his eyes. the burning sun, and the whole day long, he would be watching  all the colors, from the sunrise till the sunset. He wanted the painting to contain everything about the sun, the whole biography of the sun. Everybody who was sympathetic to him told him, "this is too much, just studying it one day is enough;it is the same sun. Van Gogh said, "You don't know, it is never the same sunrise twice, never seen the same sunset again. When the painting was complete, he wrote a small letter to his brother:" I am not committing the suicide out of despair- because I have done whatever I wanted to do in spite of the whole world condemning me, I am the most successful person in the whole world, I am immensely joyful but this was my last wish, to paint the whole biography of the sun, now there is no need to live. I was living to paint; painting was my life, not breathing and he shot himself dead. Every creative artist  has to understand this: the moment people start thinking about him that he is a little bit off centre, he should rejoice that he has crossed the boundary of the mundane and the mediocre, now he has grown the wings. Socrate says, I would rather be an unsatisfied socrate than a satisfied pig. This flame of discontent glows in mir Ahmad Navaid being, he is aflame with the desire to actualize his potential therefore on the altar of poetry,  he has sacrificed everything, his health, his relationships nevertheless he doesn't grow loathsome but sometimes he falls into the abyss of dejection. Blessed are those who have met him for in his presence,the formless descends and becomes a presence and through him one can have a look at the farthest star,through him, you can have a feeling of God himself, through his word, silence speaks, and through his eyes, the infinite peeks at you. He is vehicle, a bamboo flute on the lips of infinite. If you allow his vibe to reach you, you will move into the same wavelength in which he lives. This is a discerning utterance, no flippant jest.( koran ) Ahmad Navaid sayings are not moral maxims. These sayings are more concerned with inner transformation. In addition, they unfold another aspect of his being. They are so penetrating and possess great insight about our living. Ahmad Navaid has given all the keys possible to enter into the inner mysteries. He has said everything that can be said. He is, in a way, a full stop. His book sada e navaid is to be studied again and again; only then slowly it seeps through you. It starts touching you, it becomes alive then it is no longer a book but a person. As Imam Ali has influenced almost every great poet of urdu, persian, arabic and even punjabi tradition so has he taken hold of Mir Ahmad Navaid poetic vision. In manqabat, he holds on to his peculiar style which was imitated even by his contemporary poets.His love for Imam Ali shines all through his religious poetry. He has seen him through his own insight therefore the reader encounters so many novel and new ideas and feels enriched in his soul. he himself says. NOHA is another genre where Ahmad Navaid manifests the delicacy of his fine poetry. These nohas pass through his innermost feelings. his words don't lose the touch with reality. The agony and sufferings of Imam Hussain and his family seem to have destroyed the whole phenomenon of time and space in his poetry and can be felt poignantly. In this aspect, he surpasses every other poet. As time goes by,Mir Ahmad Navaid fame will not know any boundary. Just as a stone is thrown into a silent lake and then ripples  arise and they go on and on,pushes another, to the very boundaries of the lake.

A higher synthesis

The procession of history has arrived on a crossroad where the whole human heritage should be claimed as ours  without making any distinction. The shallow boundaries of race,nations,religions and cultures will blur if I and thou attain to that uplifting vision which allows us to see each other as a part of one organic unity. The man whose welfare is the end to be achieved in this world by the political leaders and in the other world by priests is found to be liquidated at the altars of means for he still wages war, sends his sons to be butchered in the battlefield on the name of religions and nations. The mad mind never halts to see the causes of it's miseries on the contrary it moves bewildered from one holy city to another  to release itself from its besetting troubles and ends up being dissipated in vain efforts,and the worst of all is that it never looks where the truth is.

It's truth that liberates but you are fed lies with your mother's milk or rather half-truths and these half truths are more dangerous than lies for they carry the sense of being true thus you are conditioned. By and by it becomes ingrained and you never bother to see the urgency to break away from your conditioning. The conditioned mind is always seized with fears. A strong doubt is constantly lingering as an undercurrent beneath the calm surface of its belief. It clings hard to its belief and if it happens to find reason against its doctrine, it turns sour against the reason. Such a dull mentality can't conceive the idea of jumping into the oneness, the solidarity among  human beings. We should move along the fundamental line wherein we can have respect not only for human beings but also for being like rocks and trees.

there is a reference in Jesus life when a person asks him about Abraham. He replies, before Abraham ever was, I am. Here he implies of the eternal nature of consciousness that runs like a thread down through the Abraham to him and from him to Mohammed but unfortunately Christians will ignore to see the splendor of Mohammed and Muslims will not pay any heed to the message of Jesus which is pregnant with an immense meaning. The irony is that the messiah came to Jews who had been waiting for him but the veil of prejudices befogged their vision and they nailed the same person.

                           ذہن عالم ہے اسیر اے میری آزادا روی 

     .اور کچھ دن ستم کعبہ و بتخانہ اٹھا

سراج الدین ظفر

Whatever I have said may look improbable to you because much darkness has been shed on the unhealthy division of human beings by a few scoundrels who secretly dream to keep people in their fold and Their whole investment consists in setting people apart from one another, sometimes on the name of nations and sometimes on the pretext of religion.

Farewell

My grandma used to say, 'I  like people coming but their farewell saddens my heart'. Yes, a heavy sadness descends on our soul when a beloved is departing since every moment lived with him becomes alive again and one finds oneself at a loss whether he should live with those memories or die with this ever-deepening pain, and mind you, I am using a word 'live' not 'spend' so as to kindle a feeling in your heart that there was so much togetherness that the thought of separation can never creep in. The walls of space and time are smashed down when the gloomy evening of some bleak and dismal day throbs with the music of silent steps of the gone by and releases the fragrance of memory that fills my solitude with presence.

Blind alley of beliefs

Dear readers,The ensuing few lines that i am scrawling on the paper don't offer any dogma or belief rather i would be delighted if u would ponder over them.
  Belief is a sod of  disease that has plagued our whole earth.It has created a divide line in the consciousness of humanity. It blurs the primal wondrous eyes of a child and makes the mirror of our consciousness clouded. It has reduced people to being hypocrite for they proclaim of something which they don't experience in themselves. They believe in God but that divine glow doesn't manifest in their being. In comparison with theist, I found atheist more sincere, they strove to find God and when they couldn't see the hand of providence behind this cosmic drama, they conceded that we failed to find God. I am reminded of a great sufi saying, there is no God until you have met him.

Things that happen in our inner space will unravel only upon those who have tasted something of it. Knowing dawns only when we unburden ourselves with theories, doctrines and second hand ideas so as to experience the reality directly and thereby we discover our values anew. These experiences make you authentic and gives birth an integrated self in you.

You believe into something because you don't know that thing consequently your belief is based on your ignorance.You lose your initiative to find out the truth on your own and lean on borrowed knowledge.you cease to be creative and never experiment new ways of thoughts,feeling and actions. Once you awake to inquiry, Each step will call for a rising awareness,you will question everything, you will revolt against the bondage of this rotten society that has been devising schemes to manipulate you.