Mirage In Desert Quotes

I couldn't take my eyes off him. Like a desert wanderer afraid of mirages, I gazed at my oasis, but he was real.

But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me. You've got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.

If you give your soul up to anything earthly, whether it be the wealth, or the honours, or the pleasures of this world, you might as well hunt after the mirage of the desert or try to collect the mists of the morning, or to store up for yourself the clouds of the sky, for all these things are passing away.

I asked him if it were a mirage, and he said yes. I said it was a dream, and he agreed, But said it was the desert's dream not his. And he told me that in a year or so, when he had aged enough for any man, then he would walk into the wind, until he saw the tents. This time, he said, he would go on with them.

She thirsted for love, but found only a mirage. Some hearts are a desert you can die wandering in.

God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.

The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors.

Where renunciation and longing for liberation are weak, tranquillity and the other virtues are a mere appearance, like the mirage in the desert.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

As for those who disbelieve, their deeds are like a mirage in a desert. The thirsty one thinks it to be water, until he comes up to it, he finds it to be nothing, but he finds Allah with him, Who will pay him his due (Hell). And Allah is Swift in taking account.

The house smells like an Italian restaurant when I walk through the door. I turn to Logan, who shoots me a WTF look, and I shrug as if to say fuck if I know, because I honestly don’t know. I bend down to unlace my scuffed black boots, then follow the mouthwatering aroma to the kitchen. When I reach the doorway, I blink like I’ve just stumbled upon a desert mirage. Hannah’s sexy ass greets my eyes. She’s angled over the oven door, wearing Tuck’s pink oven mitts as she pulls a steaming pan of lasagna off the middle shelf. At the sound of my footsteps, she glances over her shoulder and smiles. “Oh, hey. Perfect timing.

Emma's heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of moments he looked like someone who'd been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from the sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage. "Still no Mark?" Emma said hastily as Cristina reached them. Not that there was a real reason Cristina would know where Mark was; Emma just didn't want her looking at Julian. Not when he looked like that.

Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. “It’s a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven’t figured ’em out yet,” he said. “You-all got a little too close to it today.

It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.

For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.

The wise camel is not swayed by desert mirages; instead, it trudges on, in search for true water.

Let not the world deceive thee with its beauty. It is the dream of a dreamer, a mirage of the desert.

And the Saved?" "Ah, the Saved...what happens to them is best described as the opposite of a mirage. What seemed, when they entered it, to be the vale of misery, turns out, when they look back, to have been a well; and where present experience saw only salt deserts memory truthfully records that the pools were full of water.

Food of Love Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II I'm going to murder you with love; I'm going to suffocate you with embraces; I'm going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you're dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain you remaining brackish well. With my female blade I'll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move towards me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you'll begin to die again.

When I tell people this story, they assume the miracle I am referring to during that long-ago blizzard was the birth of a baby. True, that was astonishing. But that day I witnessed a greater wonder. As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama's, there was a moment- one heartbeat, one breath- where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another. That miracle, I've spent thirty-nine years waiting to see again.

You dream of a desert, where mirages are your rulers and tormentors, yet these images come from you.

Sarah is a mirage after all; an oasis in this arid, amnesiac, desert mindscape. I fear if I get too close she too will turn to dust.

where all the differences in schooling and money and skin colour evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression.

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring.

The fantasy bond (really bondage) is the illusion that someone is there for them, someone who loves and protects them. The fantasy bond is like a mirage in the desert. Once set up, the denying fantasy bond functions automatically and unconsciously. Years later, when reality is no longer life-threatening, the fantasy bond remains. This explains why abandoned (abused) children are described as having a compulsion to protect their parents.

It wasn’t quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t nothing before it. There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.

The tavern haunter wanders lonely in a desert And sees the whole world as a mirage. The desert is limitless and endless -- No one has seen its beginning or its end, And even if you wandered in it a hundred years You would not find yourself, or anyone else. Those who live there have no feet or heads, Are neither "believers" nor "unbelievers." Drunk on the wine of selflessness, They have given up good and evil alike. Drunk, without lips or mouth, on Truth They have thrown away all thoughts of name and fame, All talk of wonders, visions, spiritual states, Dreams, secret rooms, lights, miracles.

There's an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl's dreaming. They aren't real. They aren't the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend's father trying to lure you into his car. They don't lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages.

When I came to this city, I would have agreed with anyone who said there was little mystery left in the world. But in you, madam, first in your image, then in your living self, I saw the allure of something far away and as secret as the stars. As I reached towards this unknown, I began to feel like a man who has ridden through a vast desert, never knowing anything but the sand around him and the dry road under him, then comes upon the mirage of a garden and a city, and finds that the mirage is real, and that it is bigger than the desert; that the desert was, after all his walking, only a small part of the mirage” “Then you felt love, which is the state of feeling desire and the fulfillment of desire at the same time,” she said.

You are willing to be abused for the mirage of fame in the desert of your life.

The desert is too quiet place for our thoughts.

At long last we have arrived... In the land of the lost, where we all belong.

It seems to me that I have lived alone— Alone, as one that liveth in a dream: As light on coldest marble, or the gleam Of moons eternal on a land of stone, The dawns have been to me. I have but known The silence of a frozen land extreme— A sole attending silence, all supreme As is the sea’s enormous monotone. Upon the icy desert of my days, No bright mirages are, but iron rays Of dawn relentless, and the bitter light Of all-revealing noon.**** Alone, I crave The friendly clasp of finite arms, to save My spirit from the ravening Infinite.

Life without strife is a rose without thorns. Alive as one is thriving today towards tomorrow, Nowhere is the past but simply a school of memory. Dreams, wishes, goals then becomes a wheel of “wills,” Spirit of a unique being on each soul breathing. Care to ponder some matter or another? Awareness sliding towards discovery gliding… Peace, contentment, fulfillment, Enwrapped like a mirage enchantment. Soaring freely, excitingly, happily home-love-bound! Over precious moments in a breathing of a soul, Flowing high emotions, feelings, hearts in bliss. All around any season of one's existence, one asks: “Anyone out there? A heart of a soul that didn’t harden? A touch of a soul that didn’t hurt? A life of a soul that didn't love?” Sands of time, rough, warm, indefinite, simply spreading, transforming, mounting. Oasis of a soul from a desert journey, flourishing with endless beauty and security. Utmost bliss, fulfillment and contentment, under covers a struggling, hopeful soul, Laboring service, living justice, loving peace and tranquillity passed on to humanity!�

one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

The man angered her, made her feel like she wasn't wanted, and yet her damned libido still wanted him. It was just her dry spell, and he happened to be an oasis in the desert. A Mirage. That was it.

A dessert to a deserter in the desert burst, "You trust your thirst. And you are too hot! You scream for ice cream. And believe it or not, I may not be your first. But I might be your lust! Give it a shot...

At these moments, after battle, after all the confusion, antagonism, and disorder of their lives had exploded in a moment of strife, they gained an hour of repose in which they saw themselves with sad tranquillity. They were like men who, driving forward desperately at some mirage, turn, for a moment, to see their footsteps stretching interminably away across the wasteland of the desert; or I should say, they were like those who have been mad, and who will be mad again, but who see themselves for a moment quietly, sanely, at morning, looking with sad untroubled eyes into a mirror. Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.

The heat outside was like a blow on the skull and the road back to the house was a long mirage, liquid and rippling in the glare, the leaves on the vines drooping, the farm dogs silent, the countryside stunned and deserted.

The monotony of driving becomes meditative: The mind unwrinkles. As the usual anxieties and concerns vacate, daydreams flit in. Occasionally, a wisp of an idea appears out of nowhere only to recede, a shimmery mirage in a desert. Other times, an avalanche of memories tumbles forth, loosened by an old song on the radio or a déjà vu–inducing landscape. The interplay between geography and memory becomes a conversation. They spark and spur each other.

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, “speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives.” That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby’s great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald’s great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. “Splendor,” Fitzgerald came to understand, “was something in the heart.

Emma’s heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of moments he looked like someone who’d been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage.

As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment—one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another. That

Limitation of our humanity, unable to grasp the truth. What we saw was nothing but an illusion. It is like a thirsty wanderer to see a mirage in a parched desert. We have seen what we want to see, but it is not the ultimate truth. It is a form of thirsty traveler's longing.

Who cares,' cried Van, 'who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter—Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mud.

You make me feel…like a dying man in the desert. And you’re the fresh spring, the oasis. The water for my parched fucking soul.” He shuddered, a movement that spread through his whole body. “But I’m terrified,” he whispered, “absolutely fucking terrified…that you’re just a mirage.

All four of the boys were frozen, mesmerized, the weirdest chill washing over their skin while they watched this miraculous growing animal devouring the earth in every direction, every direction where there was grass and not bothering them at all on the pavement. The fire came as high as their waists, their chests, gorgeous beyond anything they'd seen, the rippling orange sheets hanging in the air like a desert mirage, like something that was there and not there. Black smoke curled above the flames, announcing to the neighborhood this very private thing that Albie had made. Fire! Fire! they'd be calling in the industrial park, even though it was already starting to die out around the edges. The fire needed so much. The boys could see it looking for more grass, anything to keep itself alive. It would have happily burned them up if it meant going for another minute.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. VI.

A Mirage It glitters. It is extraordinarily appealing. Unbelievably beautiful. It possesses all the ingredients of reality, Except the reality itself. It is falsehood. A fleeting hope. A passing phase. A false pool of water On a desert road, On a sunny, dry day. It's an aberration. It's a mirage

But that day I witnessed a greater wonder. As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment—one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama's, there was a moment--one heartbeat, one breath--where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another. That miracle, I've spent thirty-nine years waiting to see again.

I don’t quite know why, but I felt somehow that Linda had been once more deceived in her emotions, that this explorer in the sandy waste had seen only another mirage. The lake was there, the trees were there, the thirsty camels had gone down to have their evening drink; alas, a few steps forward would reveal nothing but dust and desert as before.

But that day I witnessed a greater wonder. As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment—one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another. That miracle, I’ve spent thirty-nine years waiting to see again.

I looked up at the ivory towers above us all. Nowhere else equals the feral design of this city. Tall skyscrapers that act as gorges hollowing out between flat cement dancing into narrow alleyways like bottomless pits. Building walls rusted the color of blood. Sometimes when you look down the horizon from afar the city looks wider than it is, like a thin field of magical lights gleaming with the hopes of children and idealists; a light on at midnight in one of the penthouses or the changing hues of the Empire State Building. Most of the time though, the city is covered with a layer of honking cars and greed, sirens and the war cry of solicitors, all full of brambles and impenetrable conscience; garbage, steaming manholes, and heat waves twirling smog and pollution through your lungs like mirages as you walk breathlessly through a boiling desert.

When I tell people this story, they assume the miracle I am referring to during that long-ago blizzard was the birth of a baby. True, that was astonishing. But that day I witnessed a greater wonder. As Christina held my hand and Ms. Mina held Mama’s, there was a moment—one heartbeat, one breath—where all the differences in schooling and money and skin color evaporated like mirages in a desert. Where everyone was equal, and it was just one woman, helping another.

I thought Dad would be furious, but he wasn’t. He was sort of quiet. We stood on the street watching the flames devour the shack. Dad had an arm around each of us. He said it was an incredible coincidence that he happened to be walking by. Then he pointed to the top of the fire, where the snapping yellow flames dissolved into an invisible shimmery heat that made the desert beyond seem to waver, like a mirage. Dad told us that zone was known in physics as the boundary between turbulence and order. “It’s a place where no rules apply, or at least they haven’t figured ’em out yet,” he said. “You-all got a little too close to it today.

We are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. ... We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty workingman. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich.

I have been all day thinking of a legend," he said. "I don't remember whether I have read it somewhere or heard it, but it is a strange and almost grotesque legend. To begin with, it is somewhat obscure. A thousand years ago a monk, dressed in black, wandered about the desert, somewhere in Syria or Arabia. . . . Some miles from where he was, some fisherman saw another black monk, who was moving slowly over the surface of a lake. This second monk was a mirage. Now forget all the laws of optics, which the legend does not recognise, and listen to the rest. From that mirage there was cast another mirage, then from that other a third, so that the image of the black monk began to be repeated endlessly from one layer of the atmosphere to another. So that he was seen at one time in Africa, at another in Spain, then in Italy, then in the Far North. . . . Then he passed out of the atmosphere of the earth, and now he is wandering all over the universe, still never coming into conditions in which he might disappear. Possibly he may be seen now in Mars or in some star of the Southern Cross. But, my dear, the real point on which the whole legend hangs lies in the fact that, exactly a thousand years from the day when the monk walked in the desert, the mirage will return to the atmosphere of the earth again and will appear to men. And it seems that the thousand years is almost up . . . . According to the legend, we may look out for the black monk to-day or to-morrow.

The accident has occurred, the ship has broken, the motor of the car has failed, we have been separated from the others, we are alone in the sand, the ocean, the frozen snow I remember what I have to do in order to stay alive, I take stock of our belongings most of them useless I know I should be digging shelters, killing seabirds and making clothes from their feathers cutting the rinds from cacti, chewing roots for water, scraping through the ice for treebark, for moss but I rest here without power to save myself, tasting salt in my mouth, the fact that you won't save me watching the mirage of us hands locked, smiling, as it fades into the white desert. I touch you, straighten the sheet, you turn over in the bed, tender sun comes through the curtains Which of us will survive which of us will survive the other

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away. Chapter 6 — Hundreds of People The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the waves of four months had roiled over the trial for treason, and carried

Deary me, boys, why? Why would someone with so much going for him have... have... ended it all in the way he appears to have done? 'Oh father, you see, it could be for any number of reasons ,' Andy said, serious and fluent, as if he was an expert on the subject. 'Personally I think it's a miracle that any of us survives.' What do you mean? said the Priest. 'I mean' continued Andy, 'there's this one moment as you're growing up when the world suddenly feels more or less pointless- when the terribleness of reality lands on you, like something falling from the sky.' 'Something falling? Like what? asked Father Frank, trying his best. 'Something big, like a piano, say, or a fridge. And when that happens, there's no going back to the time when it hadn't landed on you.' ‘But what about the pleasures and the joy and the purpose, like sport, music, girls and the like?’ Father Frank was nearly pleading now. ‘Fiction,’ sighed Andy. ‘Mirages in the desert of life, to make people feel like it might be worth it.’ ‘Oh,’ said Father Frank. ‘Oh I see, and do all you youngsters get this feeling?’ ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Andy, not even asking anyone else for their opinion, but most of us learn to live with it.’ ‘Well that’s a relief, I suppose.

It is always wise to retrace One's steps before getting lost in translation. It is said that dark energy is a mysterious force that underwrites the universe. Now I Am certain of the following. Yes. Dark matter is Self. Yes. Dark energy is Self. Self turns itself into Light out of the darkness. So it is. Out of the darkness Oneself turns itself into Light. It must be said that Self prefers to associate itself with Light. Ultimately however, even the words 'dark' & 'light' are abstractions. Why? Here's Why. All that is here is Self. Self is One. Oneself Is. Naturally there is no division. Division is as real as a mirage in the desert. Self perceives itself as itself. Diversity is Self-perceived for Companionship. Companionship being synonymous with Love. Perhaps Self could name the above Self-Interpretation the Eigen-Interpretation, better yet, the Wassermann-Interpretation for after all; it has dawned upon Self that Self itself is and that otherness is merely Self perceiving otherness not to be alone, to experience Companionship, to Love and Be Loved in return. As such the Age of Aquarius is Now otherwise known as Self. None of the above matters for all that matter's Love. Love is the purpose of Life, there is no purpose but Love. So Love, let us Love.

Division debunked; there is no death. There really is no such thing as death. The concept of death relies on the illusion of separation also known as the fallacy of division. Division is an erroneous construct of modern man detached from the reality of its own undivided Godly nature. There never was, is, nor ever will be division. Division is a non-event. Division is a delusion created by the mind of man who has sought to separate itself from God, from its true undivided Self for there is only Oneself which is God. Division is the greatest trick modern man ever pulled on itself! It will soon be understood that the concept of division is on very shaky grounds and ready to tumble. Division is as real as a mirage in the desert. There where otherness is perceived is but Self perceiving otherness not to be alone in the current! Humankind must know there is no division and as such there is no death. Death can only exist when humankind perceives itself as separate, as divided from its true Self which indeed is God. When it is understood that division does not exist, Humankind will understand it is Deathless and Eternal. Humankind will then automatically understand that the perception of diversity is but itself perceiving itself as diverse not to be alone, for Companionship, for Love. Humankind now understands it indeed is Pure Spirit also known as The Holy Spirit and that it itself is The Holy Spirit perceiving itself in the current for the very purpose of Love. As such is the promise of the Golden Age of Truth known as the Satya Yuga and the Age of Aquarius. It will be the end of the Age of Darkness and such ridiculous concepts of Dark Energy and Dark Matter based on Parrot like concepts which have been repeated for centuries. The Age of remembrance is upon us. Self will remember it is One without a second. Self will remember it is Undivided. Self will remember it is The Eternal One. In conclusion: Truth is One, One is Self! There is no death. The meaning of it all is Love, to experience Companionship, not to be alone. All that is here is God. All that is here is ॐ

Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say I smashed my father’s idols and walked away. Or walked towards a desert of barren promises. Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice, ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me your father, but it was yourselves you were describing. You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life, that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage. Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah. When she stepped inside my dream the curtains shivered, whole mountains entered the room. It always seemed a question of which love to honor. The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to? It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb. One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you? Where have you left your own morning of promises? You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle you want aches inside the trees. Why believe anything except what is unbelievable? I never thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves turn into messages that are simply impossible to read. The roots turn into roads as they break through the surface. How can I even know what I mean? Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep on the grass. We have to turn into each other. One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word. Inside us, our shadows will walk into water, the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful. Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds. Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.

He looks through the windscreen at nothing. They are returning to Cuba. The announcement came after the droids withdrew. An auto-animated voice. It did not proclaim their furlough a success or failure. Ibn al Mohammed does not know if the others will accept implantation. He believes they will not, as he will not. Temptation is legion, yet what does it mean? He is not of Satan’s world. What would implantation bring except ceaseless surveillance within a greater isolation? That, and the loss of his soul. Sun-struck and empty, so immense it frightens, the desert is awesome in its indifference. Even as he stares at it, Ibn al Mohammed wonders why he does so. The life that clings to it is sparse, invisible, death-threatened. Perhaps they will cast him out just here, he and all others who do not cooperate. No matter: he has lived in such a place. Sonora is not the same as Arabia, or North Africa, or The Levant, yet its climate and scant life pose challenges that to him are not unfamiliar. Ibn al Mohammed believes he would survive, given a tent, a knife, a vessel in which to keep water, a piece of flint. Perhaps they will grant these necessities. A knife, they might yet withhold. As if, wandering in so complete a desolation, he might meet someone he would want to hurt. As he watches, images cohere. Human figures made small by distance, yet he knows them. His mother, in a dark, loose-fitting, simple abaya. How does he recognize her, in the anonymous dress? Ibn al Mohammed has not seen his mother in a dozen years. He knows her postures, movements she was wont to make. He sees his sisters, also wearing abayas and khimars. What are they doing? Bending from the waist, they scrounge in the sand. Asna, the eldest, gentle Halima, Nasirah, who cared for him when he was young. They are gathering scraps and remants, camel chips for a fire. Where is their house? Why are they alone? It seems they have remained unmarried—yet what is he seeing? Is it a moment remembered, a vision of the past? Or are these ghosts, apparitions summoned by prophetic sight? Perhaps it is a mirage only. His sisters seem no older than when he left. Is it possible? His mother only appears to have aged. She is shrunken, her back crooked. Anah Kifah, who is patient and struggles. He wonders how they do not see the ship, this great craft that flies across the sky. The ship is in the sky, their eyes are on the ground. That is why they do not see it. Or his windscreen view is magnified, and Halima and Nasirah and Asna and Anah Kifah are much farther away than they seem, and the ship is a vanishing dot on an unremarked horizon. If he called, they would not hear. Also, there is the glass. Still, he wishes to call to them. What is best to say? “Mother … Mother.” Anah Kifah does not lift her head. His words strike the windscreen and fall at his feet, are carried away by wind, melt into air. “Nasirah? It is Ibn. Do you hear me? Halima? Halima, I can see you. I see all my sisters. I see my mother. Asna? How has it been with you? Do you hear me? It is Ibn. I am here—far away, yet here, and I shall come back. They cannot lock me always in a cage, God willing. In a month, in a year, I shall be free. Keep faith. Always know God is with you. God is great. God protects me. God gives me strength to endure their tortures. One day, God will speed my return.” The women do not lift their heads. They prod the sand, seemingly indifferent to what they find. Straining toward them, Ibn al Mohammed cries out, “Mother! Nasirah! I am alive! I am alive!” [pp. 160-162]

People want leadership. They are so thirsty for it they will crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

VOA no longer felt like a sanctuary but rather a mirage and we were desert wanderers.

The Bedu of Central Arabia herded camels in empty deserts where there were no mosques or schools. They produced warriors, not scholars, and their understanding of Islam was limited. The original idea behind the Ikhwan, or Brotherhood Movement, was to settle the Bedu in order to improve their religious practices.

In the 1890s, Kuwait offered a dramatically more cosmopolitan and commercially vibrant environment than Riyadh. As a result, by his middle teens the future King of Saudi Arabia had acquired firsthand experience of dynastic politics, humiliating exile, and desert warfare. He spoke some English and had watched Sheikh Mubarak conduct commercial and diplomatic relations with Europeans. He was a very unusual young man for his time and place, and he stood six foot, four.

In November 1922, Abdulaziz and Sir Percy Cox met again—this time at Al Uqair, a small port north of Dhahran on the Persian Gulf. The treaty signed at Al Uqair was a significant event in Saudi history. For the first time, it gave formal, internationally recognized borders to the Al Saud’s realm. “Cockus,” as the Arabs called him, wanted lines on a map denoting international boundaries. Abdulaziz wanted the allegiance of as many tribes as possible so that he could tax them and divert their trade to ports where he collected customs duties. For him what mattered was a tribe’s allegiance, not which side of an artificial line it happened to be grazing on. The Bedu saw it the same way. For them, the desert was like an ocean where the nationality of a ship depended on the flag it flew, not which part of the sea it was sailing upon at any particular moment.

Because of his declining health and preference for desert camping over cabinet meetings, Khalid allowed Crown Prince Fahd to act as day-to-day ruler. A Royal Decree issued in May 1975 granted Fahd full responsibility for the routine management of the kingdom.

Because you're not what I would have you be I blind myself to who, in truth you are, Seeking mirage where desert blooms, I mar Your YOU, Aaah, I would like to see past all delusion to reality: Then would I see God's image in your face, His hand in yours, and in your eyes his grace. Because I'm not what I would have me be, I idolize Two who are not any place, Not you, not me, and so we never touch. Reality would burn. I do not like it much. And yet in you, in me, I find a trace Of love which struggles to break through The hidden lovely truth of me, of you.

King Abdulaziz ruled for fifty-one years and saw his realm transformed from a remote, desert chieftaincy into a founding member of the United Nations. Yet he created no governing institutions beyond himself.

The question for Saudi stability remains not whether the official government scholars will desert the monarchy—that prospect remains unlikely—but whether they will be outflanked by more radical clerics who incorporate Muslim Brotherhood ideas into their preaching and contest the ulama al-hakim’s authority to lead the Wahhabi mission.

The Ministry of the Interior also has a specifically tribal security force, known as the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen, who know their local territories intimately, constitute a civilian police force that patrols the thousands of miles of oil and water pipelines that wind though the Saudi desert.

If it rains, winter provides the best grazing. This is when the Bedu disperse into small family groups, taking their herds deep into the desert. In spring the grass begins to wither, and by summer it is dead. Then the Bedu must congregate at deep, permanent wells where their camels will live off the fat that they have stored in their humps during the winter. If you are a tax collector or other government official, summer is when you know where to find the Bedu. Spring is the time of sandstorms and the harbinger of hot, dry, hard times to come. Whoever coined the term “Arab Spring” was clearly not a Saudi, for to the Bedu, autumn, not spring, is the season of hope, rain, and renewal.

The war cost the United States and Britain very little. Saudi Arabia covered nearly all of their direct in-country costs for food, fuel, and housing—and made a substantial, additional cash contribution. The Saudis not only supported the boots on the ground, they often paid to get them there. Many nations that sent troops had been longtime recipients of Saudi aid, and there can be little doubt that $2.5 billion in direct Saudi aid and credits to Moscow helped to secure a favorable Russian vote on the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the war.43 Having gone to great lengths to respect Saudi culture while they were in the kingdom, all but 10,000 American forces were gone in a matter of months after Operation Desert Storm ended.

Each year more than two million pilgrims arrive in Mecca for the Hajj. They gather on an empty desert plain to pray; listen to sermons; and sacrifice thousands of goats, sheep, and camels. This immense, multinational congregation provides Saudi leaders with a rich opportunity to promote their views, demonstrate their special role in Islam, and host important Muslim leaders at a spiritually significant moment in their lives.

I felt as though I were in the desert, hallucinating a mirage. I couldn’t believe that something so devastatingly beautiful existed, yet I wasn’t allowed to touch. My eyes crawled up every dip and curve, imagining what they’d feel like when I finally could claim her. She owned me so completely. Her mind and her ambition and her innocent eyes drew me in.

But like a pointillist painting, the true nature of this solar monument was clear only from a distance: the colosal horse-drawn chariot sitting like a mirage in the middle of the forlorn desert, still undisturbed and untouched by solar totality since the Mogul Empire.

Everything about my life was a lie and remained so until after his death. What I set as my primary goal in life was all a mirage in a vast, empty desert.

We seem to have all the power and control in the world over our information, and at the same time no power or control at all. Our digital information could either be indelible, affecting how others see us and how people will remember us for evermore, or it could vanish, eliminating any evidence that we ever existed and rendering us victims of a twentyfirst century Dark Age. And while the era of information might have dangled the tantalising prospect of perpetuity in our faces, death has always found ways of defeating our fantasies of immortality. Everlasting life has always been an illusion, a mirage in the desert, and the digital age may not change that as much as one might expect.

Our team walked through the women’s empowerment center, which was operating in a multistory building, one of the stops we were contemplating for the First Lady. The young man and woman escorting us took us to the roof as part of the tour. I looked out over the city, and other than the bright blue sea, most everything I saw was dusty, arid, and brown except, off in the distance, where I noticed a patch of vibrant green. There were nice buildings and what appeared to be trees and grass. It looked like a desert oasis, or a mirage. “What’s that?” I asked. “That,” our consul general said, “is an Israeli settlement.” “But it’s so green. I thought you said there was very little running water here.” “That’s right,” he said. “There’s limited running water here. The Israelis control the water so twenty times more goes there than comes here.” It was the first time I saw up close what it was like to live under the daily humiliation Palestinians had suffered for years. There it was, a better, easier life, starting right at them.

In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.

Suddenly, she understood the meaning of the look on his face on that day. She remembered the kiss she had extended towards Apurva’s face and retreated from half-way. Within the confines of her room, like a thirsty bird chasing a mirage in the desert, she extended the same kiss towards the opportunity that had passed her by, but nothing seemed to quench her thirst. The only thoughts that kept crossing her mind were—ah, if only I’d done this on that day, if only I’d said that when he asked me the other day, if only. — Rabindranath Tagore, from the short story “The Conclusion

~Infernal Serpent ~ Winds are venomous these days. Masked under a dark silhouette, their smile parades the fossil roots of deceit. Nibbling wings, of which they learnt to fly. Hands blemished red Have you slaughtered a rose lately? The face bleached in dismay tongue weakened. I ain't, the fear following you Like a cloud passing above your shadow. Run!! How far? There is no path across the desert. Fright of a nomad creates mirage in distance Standing in silence, I want to witness the snake shedding its skin again.

The perfect partner is the mirage we see after crossing the desert of insufficient love.

Worship is when you’re aware that what you’ve been given is far greater than what you can give. Worship is the awareness that were it not for his touch, you’d still be hobbling and hurting, bitter and broken. Worship is the half-glazed expression on the parched face of a desert pilgrim as he discovers that the oasis is not a mirage.

When stranded in a desert, and you’re dying of thirst, a mirage is the cruelest trick the mind can play. And when you are a stranger among regular folks, and you’re in search of love, a disillusioned or misguided heart is the cruelest thing.

The belief to finish TODAY’S work TOMORROW is like a MIRAGE in the desert. The thirsty ones see the water, but upon reaching there, they find nothing but sand; similarly, TOMORROW shines like a savior from all problems, but when we reach there we find nothing but TODAY, which will have its own burdens to be passed over to a new TOMORROW.

Silence of the desert! The Summer flower and the lover, The night sky and the moon light lovelier, The rain and the monsoon that is wetter, A moment in time forever and a moment called never, The high that balances with the low, The deep of ocean at the shores is shallow, The midday Sun in the night is Moon’s glow, The summer colours like rainbow and the Autumnal yellow, The bound cocoon and the the free butterfly, The web and the spiders ploys, The vast sky and the wings of freedom to fly, The responsible manhood and the careless wanton boy, The right that knows the wrong, And the wrong that sometimes never knows where right does belong, Life that walks and death that never likes life’s song, The day chasing the night and the night chasing the day to create eternity’s song, A feeling of never ending silence over a vast desert of sand dunes, Climbs and walks past the sinking steps of time in these dunes, To greet me in the Summer land of my life while it is playing the love tunes, And as the silence spreads I am reminded of you and me together, just like the silence over the sand dunes, Without you the Summer exists, but never feels so, Because with you around, even the desert feels like Summer and then this feeling does not go, Then it is always the Summer flower and the lover, wherever I see or I may go, Then the chase between night and day ends and it remains so, So I often visit this desert of silence, this desert of time’s sinking foot steps, Because in this silence as my heart beats, I only hear your steps, The whispers of silence which are like your billion foot steps, All marching towards me , you, your memories, your feelings riding these footsteps, Then the stillness, the silence, the sand dunes turn into a mirage of gleaming beauty, A gateway unto you and your endless beauty, And there in this silence I become a part of this new nativity, The stillness, the silence, the vastness and in the midst of all this, the desert blooms like the summer bearing your beauty!

Desert rose! Like the traveler who wants to go everywhere, Like the sunshine that falls on everything, I want to travel too, but in one direction, that can be anywhere, As long as it leads to you, because without you, the world means nothing, Like the desert I want to spread endlessly, Like the wind I desire to be free, And chase your mirages over sand dunes tirelessly, And then wherever you are, there I shall be, Like the desert let your love be clear and unobstructed, Like the calm of the desert let us spread everywhere, Then in this desert let everything else be restricted, Because I want it to be your representation everywhere, Like an oasis oozing from the bosom of the desert, Like the mirage of water to a thirsty desert wanderer on a hot day, Let your love just one feeling assert, That like an oasis you will flow through me everyday, Like the beautiful desert rose, Like the endless desert, Let your feelings of love within me repose, As I slowly, but surely into your devout disciple convert, Like it first my love, before you begin to love it, Like the desert rose then let me love you, And finally as I, my soul to you shall submit, Let me see the desert, the oasis and the desert rose, and eternity in you!

A collection of facts is as far from forming a body of knowledge as a mirage in the desert is from being a real oasis.

desert is an empty canvas; it is you who give it features and a mood, who work at creating the mirage and making it live. But I was incurious; the desert was deserted, as empty as I felt.

I drove my feet through a desert Whose mirage fluttered like a host. Voracious for glory, greedy for danger, I roamed the horizons of al-Kulab. Watching time level mountains In its search and its hunger for me. And I saw the sparrows swiftly approach, Bolder than the onrushing wolf. They spread in the tree of my youth. I heard the flock in my branches And was caught on their beaks and claws!

Desert wears many faces, yet He has none.

Every man is a shelter for himself in the desert.