When 'You' Is No More, and 'I' Dissolves
3/8/2025 – Pulau Duyong / Reflections from Jerejak/ Kapas and Beyond
"When this 'You' is absolved, when this 'I' is no more, only the One Divinity exists and shirk is no longer an issue."
In the soft morning light of reflection, I find myself returning—not regressing—islands of memory and mystery like Jerejak, Duyong, and Kapas, and from there sailing inward into deeper waters of being. What once seemed like jobs and routines—the ticket booth at the ferry terminal, the morning walk through dense undergrowth—have since ripened into metaphors, rituals, and living koans. The practice was always the same: to dissolve fear, to sit in the presence of the invisible, to watch the sun move slowly across the arc of time while I disappeared.
The sacred stillness I touched there is not confined to one faith or tradition. It is echoed across the traditions that have nourished my soul, most deeply, Sufism and Buddhism. It is here that I am drawn to a profound convergence of truths expressed in different tongues.
Wahdatul Wujud & Anatta — The Meeting Point
Wahdatul Wujud—Unity of Being—is a term attributed to Ibn Arabi, the great Andalusian Sufi mystic. It speaks not of pantheism, but of something subtler: that all existence is a shadow of the One Real Being (al-Haqq), and that nothing exists in truth but God. It is not merely monotheism—it is mono-existence. The multiplicity of forms is an illusion; the essence is One.
Compare this with the Buddhist teaching of Anatta, or "no-self." The ego, the self, is seen as a mental fabrication. Strip it away through mindfulness and compassion, and what remains is not nothingness but a luminous clarity, a vast awareness beyond division—free of self, free of other.
Are these not mirrors of each other?
In both paths, when the illusion of the ego—I and you, self and other, dissolves, what remains is not a vacuum but Presence. A Divine Is-ness. When we see this clearly, shirk—the act of associating anything with God—ceases to be an issue, not because we are better believers, but because there's nothing else left to believe in. There's only the Real, the One.
This is the Buddhist contribution to the Islamic Unity of Being.
Of Ghost Houses and Spirit Sanctuaries
Back on Jerejak Island, among the moss-covered bones of prison quarters and derelict worker homes, I found places haunted not just by human memories, but perhaps by those subtle presences of nature and time. These were no mere abandoned buildings—they were witnesses. Nature had woven itself around them like memory around an old scar. I proposed then, as I propose still, that such places should be preserved, not bulldozed into spas and resorts.
Why? Because they are portals. Because they whisper to us about impermanence (Sabi), beauty in decay (Wabi), and the deep breath of the Earth that continues regardless of man's so-called progress. They are spirit sanctuaries—and perhaps the last places where jinn, nature spirits, and unseen ones still dwell in peace.
We destroy such places at the cost of our own soulscape.
Beyond the Edge of Language
Language falters here. I use the terms I know—Allah, Brahman, Buddha-nature, Al-Haqq, Sunyata—but what I point to is wordless. You know it too, you who have sat in darkness awaiting a sunrise that never failed. You who have chanted the Name till the Name dissolved. You who have seen the illusion of separation and wept, not out of fear, but liberation.
As Rumi says:
"Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation."
So, I walk back down that dirt path toward the terminal. I board the ferry again. But this time, there is no destination—only the eternal ripple of the Real across the face of Being.
#WahdatulWujud #FanaFillah #BuddhistSufiBridge #NonDuality #NoSelfNoOther #OnlyTheReal #SufismAndBuddhism #UnityOfBeing #BeyondShirk #DivineSilence #MysticConvergence #OnenessAwakening
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