Personal Development Through Islam

Sin is when we think we exist!. Everything that exist will burnt away, lost, broken. Pain? it’s because you think you exist so you feel pain in your assumed body. Success? it’s because you achieve something and when relate to other existence/time it’s felt superior.

To avoid sin : Pain? Istighfar, beg a pardon since you still feel it because you still relate yourself with your physical existence. Sucess? Alhamdulillah, claim none, merge what happen with infinity then you will safe from being attached to it and fear of loosing it. Sad? Inalillah wa inna ilaihi roji’un, all comes and goes by, from and to Allah, judge none, emotionalize none.

Sholat is the pilar of your religion, Sholat is loosing your and any other existence on the face of Allah (Ihsan). Sholat is cleaning your “SIN”.

• Emotion is human heuristic, it is made to speedup decision making process to achieve what we know as the best for us
• It can be outdated, when it does it can no longer process new/recent input effectively
• Too sever outdated-ness can make it go into infinite-loop (depression, stress, confusion), takes up resources and crash the system
• Adapting/updating/upgrading emotion done by non-direct means like reading, writing, meditating and visualizing
• Effective and uptodate emotion could simplify a person’s life while the ineffective one could confuse one’s life.

Some example of emotion and where it is used effectively :

• fear -> avoid potential harm, effective when ended with decisive choice that move away from what the fear is hinting
• sad -> an alarm for restructuring/remanaging of resources to compensate for a lost , effective when followed by a regrouping activity
• angry -> basically fear break loose, effective when fear that base it is identified and choice is taken like item 1 above
• envy -> an alaram that saying we haven’t done our best, effective when followed by identifying what is our homework left neglected

General ineffective use of emotion : find the source and solution/followup of an emotion on other people/thing. Example :

• angry -> “he angers me!”
• envy -> “he is not supposed to win that!”

One of consequence of Believing in Allah is live only doing ONE thing, serving only ONE master. In essence, that is. So, if we feel scattered, being dragged around doing several confusing things for several different conflicting poeple at one time, our “software” need a big rework.

The biggest sin in Islam is a sin of Association, that is having several different “Gods” to serve, manage or fight in the form of boss, nation, parent, spouse, children, other people.

You are a muslim when you see you serve nothing but Allah when you serve your neighbour, you hurt other than Allah when you hurt someone, you are neglecting Allah when you neglect your body or your intellectuality.

Stop seeing things as separate and multiple things, see instead convergence, singularity, integration and oneness in your act and sorroundings. See treating others as treating yourself, and in essence, treating Allah. Allah has given his “names” within your “hands” to be expressed.

Act of Muslim is an act based of Oneness and Love not an act of separateness, doing things to others, hate and revenge.

Only from this view what Muhammad taught makes sense. No zakat done properly without us seeing it as healing the part of ourself. since no logical person would give his belonging sincerely to other person. No Qurban is being seen as correctly done until we see it as giving part of ourselves to ourselves. No Sujud is serious without us loosing our ego and merge with the infinity.

When zakat become tax, when sholat become an obligation (obligation to who? where?), it’s when your religion start to make no sense.

You don’t know about appreciation untill you experience it and going through the path. It’s a state that you enter when you are in peace with all things and accept things the way they are. Peace and Accpetance is the zero state where you can start going to positive state of appreciation. You need to get to this zero state there first from the negative and the low-levelness of disappreaciation, dissatisfaction before going up to Appreciation.

Why bother with reaching appreciation state? because there lies the bliss and happiness. Aren’t we all looking for it? But mostly in the wrong direction. We thought it lies in the better and more things and by being dissatisfied with matters we hope we can push ourselves to get those better and more things which we assume eventually will get us happiness. But what we end up getting is just stimulation and excitement which only feed our ego instead of happiness and joy for our essential Self.

Forgetting the appreciation, we end up feeding the beast, the horse, the dogs and forgetting to help the master reach it’s goal (which, when we focus on it instead, would feed the beast, the horse and the dogs automatically/contextually as long as it’s relevant to the master’s goal).

On the appreciation, even a button click of an appreciated software would make you cry.To those peaceful soul out there.

From Seth Godin blog, got this Article on Tom Peter’s site

I think that when one badmouths one’s competitors or tries to limit their activities, the “word gets around.” And one develops a reputation as prickly and egocentric—and, well, as a selfish jerk.

That’s how it goes in the business world. From spiritual perspective, you only hurt yourself when you hurt someone since in the essence you are one. You serve your Essential Self when you server other people. Hence, sharing and giving is being advised consistenly in religion.

In a programming world, good code need less documentation, it act intuitively and as close as the expectation. The code reveals it’s intention clearly within itself, it is self-explaining, nothing hidden or work a bit different that what it actually says. It need very view additional information and very small overhead of metadata and support materials. It’s variable reveal what it is used for and it’s context, the functions doesn’t do what it does not say in it’s name or silently changing some sate and it does what it says in it’s name as expected. The structure doesn’t lie about the groupings of things, it doesn’t mixed up things.

Good person with high integiry speak with his act and rarely need to speak for justifying himself or as a defence. His talk and act is for progressing, fixing and producing something instead of defense, justification or gossips. His internals is well-structured, his thoughts is well-founded and being thought well internally. He has done his homework and ready to contribute instead of crying for people’s attention, approval or materials unfairly due to conflicting internal values.

Working with good code is fun as also being together with good people. We feel safe and know what to expect. Working with bad code or bad people makes us want to run since we don’t feel safe and don’t know what to expect. Any random act from us could get the code/person to some undesirable state, the program crash or the person instantly being angry or upset without us knowing why.

Let’s say you met Boss’s daughter on the road, how do you behave?. Whatever you behave, you probably have several things on your mind i.e: stuff that relate the consequences of your behavior with her to your relationships with your Boss. What happen when you don’t realize he’s the Boss’s daughter?. Depends on your personality it could be catastrophic or beneficial .

With this in mind, how do we understand the saying of Rosul

“Other person is Allah’s witness on earth”

How does that change our general standard in treating all other people with no exception?.

You could setup lots of stuff in your computer, make backups, install some software, tweak it up, optimize, add something here and something there.

But…. if Allah wish, those can be broken in an isntant. Harddisc fail, earthquake?.

We need to appreaciate things, seeing them with full eye and heart, grasp the beauty. But we should not attach our existence, our passionate love to things, to a pc, to a system. Attach ourselve to Allah and see things with appreciative eyes, deep care and love without having to tight our existence to it. Expand our perspective from our small world. Beyond our system there’s network, an open source community, servers, way bigger world than our pc. Appreciating larger context give healthy perspective to our problem so it will not be that big anymore.

When something gone wrong on your system : Get over it!

Qur’an talks about gardener, his garden, crops and storm. It’s time to take the analogues to another field, our field with harddisc, sysadmin, programmer, hd fail and other terms in it.

I find that I feel better and increasingly positive when I do things with AtomicIntentions i.e: do one task, done, take another task, repeat, and I feel lost when I do things with ChainReactionIntentions that blows out of proportion.

Doing AtomicIntention means start with the intention, focus on it along process, finish and get done with it (it could be the task is done, canceled, delegated and tracked somewhere or any other deterministic status). It requires clean ContextSwitch, clean registers and buffers, when doing new task. All ongoing tasks being dumped to Stack (or any other appropriate data structure) for later followup.

The magic keyword : done, finish!.

Having Inner-focus religion is when someone realize he has Truth within, try to identify it and perceive what come to him as a help to do that including formal-description of religion.

Having Extern-focus religion is when someone think himself as a blank, empty box in term of spirituality and look to religion(s) to fill it.

Is our religion Internal or External based or a mix of both?, what’s the best perspective to use or to focus?.