The Seven Goblets

An Account of A Responder From A Metaphysical Search Engine

"When the rosebud.... an emptier of flagons becomes the narcissus in desire of wine.... a maker of goblets becomes...independent of heart is that one who like the bubble......even at the gate of the tavern.... intrepid becomes."
-Hafez


This is a story of an anomaly on several levels transcending the dualism of two cultures. One is here with me and the other is in the remote and far distant world of Afghanistan. Layered alongside these two are another two cultures. One is composed of rationality and logic deeply embedded toward processing information as combinatorial absolutes and the other requires formless silence, reception and stillness of such motion. In this one takes inward experience and translates this as a self referential codex. The other expands outward is transcendent of any calculation we can muster. In my case, in the sleepless wee hours before dawn I was taught an invaluable lesson of discernment of these territories which inexorably changed my life. My tutor had long since become a forgotten footnote in the volume of the historical world and had been allegedly dead for over a decade.

I was once referentially what is called a suit, a business type. This story begins with my standing alone purposefully in the dank bowels of Union Station, following my own allotted schedule waiting for a train. I had arrived early as I needed the time to gather and process a urgent dilemma concerning a transaction away from my desk, while en route home at the end of the business day.

As an autistic child of Asperger's Syndrome who compulsively observed and processed the outer world, I was typical in being highly focused and consequently abstracted by the minutiae of facts surrounding mechanical devices, especially trains.

In the shadows, the thrumming and coughing of an elderly switch engine caught my attention to turn around and look toward it's shadow at the end of the platform where it idled alone with no one aboard. My curiosity was cued and soon I stood beside it. It had seen several owners whose layers of decorative paint were revealed between it's rusting streaks of grime. It's creator's, who once formulated it's purposeful subsystems,,tractive effort and outline with slide rules, carbon paper and adding machines has all long since been lowered into the ground. Yet there it was. Throbbing, rattling and percolating....waiting for it's next assignment. I thought to myself the mechanical creations of man long outlive them in a strangely ironic form of an empirical afterlife. We ourselves are at best, ephemeral.

My own dilemma returned to pull my attention inwardly, as to a moral issue which was occurring some several states away in Arkansas in relation to my position of responsibility. A subcontractor whom I had hired had been pleading for payment from my employer through me. I had attended yet another meeting where my pleas on his behalf were visibly responded to in their reaction as if I was speaking mandarin while having three eyes and four arms at my disposal.

My train had pulled in and as it trundled along, I looked without seeing through the dirty window of the car. I saw my own reflection looking back at me as an echo of my own observation whispered; what men create lives long after them.

At the end of evening my wife and children had long since gone to bed and I could not.
I tried television, I tried reading and I tried sitting on the porch staring at the stars. The elderly man who was the subcontractor in question had only kept the business afloat in order that his son should carry it forward as he retired in a familial gifting of a way of life. If he was not paid soon, he would have to take a second mortgage on his home or declare bankruptcy and dismantle his business.

I walked over to the computer at 3am and began to search and type in nonsense just to see what would arrive in a purposeless exercise of existential anxiety.
As an autistic, I had developed a hard defensive shell, a persona of sarcasm and cynical pragmatism.
I recalled as I paused that seven was allegedly a magical number. Aha! I typed in seven...and up popped all sorts of chaotic nonsense..with one exception. A simple title for a random page. Seven Goblets.

There was a short biographical description of the author. He was an Islamic cleric whose task it was to call the faithful at the top of a minaret somewhere in remote Afghanistan during the Russian occupation of that country. They immediately ordered him to cease and desist calling the faithful to prayer and was imprisoned for his refusal during which time he wrote this exposition of the same title that was a question and answer formulation as to the purpose of why there was creation as well as a Creator. It was explained that this was a metaphysical tract and technique which was known as "the opening of the heart." It was advised that each goblet be "drunk" in order.I thought..well, this will be a challenge...as I read I noticed that this was no poetic or allegorical tract. It built itself in a logical entrainment of exposition and example leading the reader to come to his own decision as to the validity of the relational statements toward the other as though it were building an invisible yet tangible sensate conceptual model of reality that was so apparent it was hidden. You would call it quantum mechanics as I discovered many years later.

In short the sun faintly arose through the window as I drank in the last goblet. I cannot provide you with my experience.I cannot provide you with proof. When I finished for the first time in my life I truly wept,not from sorrow or loss or self comforting repentance...for the first time I understood that life is a gift from a selfless creator of such gifts and with it these gifts provide an honor of responsibility to serve as a co-creator....of life.

A moral dilemma...an old switch engine from a childhood...a random existential search..with a "magical" number.

The metaphysical tract ended with a postscript. The cleric was released from prison and immediately returned to his station atop the minaret and called the faithful to prayer. He was summarily executed by a bullet through the head.

The next morning, I arrived at the office and requested a meeting. I demanded they pay the gentleman in question as a matter of principle. They just grinned and asked me what was the problem?

He was paid and I then resigned my position as a matter of ethical responsibility. Since that day I remember the number seven, randomness, responsibility and a cleric whose creation lived on long after he had ceased to exist remain within me as a gift from a world you cannot touch and can only experience. To this day from time to time when things turn a certain way...I search again for that page..for over a decade I have unsuccessful. Only this much I know is true.

To my benefactor, I am reminded of a resonance in your gift that echoes in the words;

"When this you see
Remember me
And bear me in your mind
Let all the world
Say what they may
But speak of me
As you find."