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Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it … - Gai Eaton
" "Everything becomes a blur when you travel beyond a certain speed. Distant objects may still be clear in outline, but the blurred foreground makes it impossible to attend to them. This landscape is unreal and the passengers in the express train turn to their books, their thoughts or their private fantasies.
The subjectivism of our age has a good deal to do with this imprisonment in a speeding vehicle, and the fact that we made this vehicle ourselves, with all the tireless care that children give to a contrivance of wood and wire, does not save us from the sense of being trapped without hope of escape.
A further effect of such vertiginous speed is a kind of anaesthesia, entirely natural when the operation of the senses by which we normally make contact with our environment is suspended. With no opportunity to assimilate what is going on, our powers of assimilation are inevitably weakened and certain numbness sets in; nothing is fully savoured and nothing is properly understood. Even fear (which exists to forewarn us of danger) is suspended. This would be so even if speed of change were the only factor involved, but the kind of environment in which a large part of humanity lives today — - the environment created by technology at the service of immediate, short-term needs – does much to intensify this effect. Outside of works of art which embody something beyond our physical needs, our own constructions bore us. Those who, when they have built something and admired the finished product for a decent moment, are ready to pull it down and start on something new have good sense on their side.
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About Gai Eaton
Charles le Gai Eaton (also known as Hasan le Gai Eaton or Hassan Abdul Hakeem; 1 January 1921 – 2010) was a British diplomat, writer, historian, and an Islamic scholar.
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Charles le Gai Eaton
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It is clear that if we are to fulfill our true function, we must first identify and then become our true selves; the man alienated from his own centre is alienated from all things, not only a stranger to himself but also a stranger in the universe. Yet he cannot find the centre nor can he ‘become himself’ without help. For the Muslim, the Prophet not only shows us the way to the centre but, in a certain sense, is himself the way, since it is by taking him as our model, or by entering into the mould of his personality, that we are best able to travel to our destination. Action which springs from our own true centre - ‘without external cause’, as the dictionary has it - is the only truly ‘spontaneous’ action, and it is therefore in imitating him that we achieve spontaneity.
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Not everyone - to say the least - seeks communion, dialogue with God; most of those who turn towards the heavens in prayer do so from desire or from fear, and those who do so from fear are in search of forgiveness. We are told that God does not greatly care about the motive so long as people do turn to Him and thereby establish the essential link. This is brought out in an astonishing hadith which might have been considered doubtful had it not been recorded by one of the most highly respected of mutahadithun: ‘By Him in whose hand is my soul, had you not sinned Allah would have removed you and brought a people who sin, then ask for Allah’s forgiveness and are forgiven.’ According to a hadith qudsi, ‘Allah has said: O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you what you have done and I shall not care. O son of Adam, though your sins reached the clouds in the sky, if you were then to ask for My forgiveness I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins almost as great as the earth [itself] and then face Me, ascribing to Me to “partner”, I would bring you forgiveness in like measure.
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