Ahmet Özcan
“I defend you against yourself, O human!”
—Nuri Pakdil
Much can undoubtedly be said about time. However, the Indian conception of time certainly offers a wise perspective rooted in a distorted Abrahamic essence. This perception of time, which is also the origin of the belief in reincarnation-samsara, includes the concept of a cycle-perpetuation-wheel of fortune within the material world in the Hindu-Brahman-Buddhist belief system. In the Abrahamic essence, everything is based on the concept of a cosmic cycle in which a creator creates anew at every moment and in which creatures die and are resurrected. The key theological distinction lies in differentiating between the Creator as subject and the created as object. The deification of the universe, nature, history, and laws (pantheism) versus the idea of a Creator governing all existence or non-existence (monotheism) are two fundamentally different levels of belief and perception.
The human effort to know and understand God, the universe, nature, objects, and oneself is undoubtedly the most valuable human endeavor and in this sense, grasping the spirit of the time is actually one of the keys to understanding many other things.
Living in a Dead World
In this context, if we try to understand the present using the mathematical language that conceptualizes time in Indian philosophy, we are truly living in a Kali Yuga—the Age of Doom—and it feels as if we are experiencing all the features of the pre-apocalypse described in all ancient beliefs. We are living in a time that seems to be dying, among the dead, and on the threshold of death. Living is like the last agony before death. In a world turned into a graveyard, we search for traces of life and living beings to hold on to among zombies, vampires, deformed skeletons, and severed limbs. We try to breathe in an atmosphere covered with the dust of death. As it were, “Time is an invisible graveyard; poets wander around it chanting pure verses.” (Attila İlhan)
Why have we come to feel this way? Because the world has long been ruled by what seem like vampires and zombies. They eat humans and drink blood. They take pleasure in killing and feed off the unknown energy that death emits, that is, they make their living by producing and selling lethal weapons. They monopolize all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge, belief, art, and abilities to create living-dead people. They constantly provoke the instincts of the devil-satan gene in mankind, such as ambition, greed, lies and jealousy; they try to extinguish the mind-will and the heart-compassion and make these demonic desires dominant. They encourage behaviors that simulate the effect of living through eating, drinking, mating, dancing, fighting, quarreling, empty talk, alcohol, gambling, and so on, and destroying any sense of shame and thereby eroding the dignity of being human. With technological advances, especially artificial intelligence, we are now heading toward a completely dehumanized world. While past eras saw the exploitation of human physical and mental labor, today’s age shifts that burden onto robots and computers, reducing humans to mere consumer beings and yet where this era is leading and what kind of post-human stage awaits remains uncertain for now.
In a world created and ruled by a necrophilic demonic force that does not like anyone to live as a human and seeks vengeance against the breath of life, there is nothing meaningful left beyond the painful and sorrowful struggle for survival by a handful of Adamic souls striving to remain human and alive.
In this age of inhumanity, ancient non-human entity imaginings have also resurfaced. On the one hand, fantastic conspiracy theories such as aliens, Annunaki, Reptilians; on the other hand, beliefs about beings of uncertain nature that are believed to have co-existed with humans, influence the minds and perspectives of ordinary people in a Middle Ages-artificial intelligence era hybrid more than concrete theories, ideas and ancient religious beliefs. We now live in a world where films like Star Trek, The Truman Show, A Beautiful Mind, and The Matrix, and dystopias like Brave New World and 1984, have either become reality or are merging with it.
Today, this world is increasingly explained not through categorically evil definitions like exploitative ruling classes, tyrannical pharaoh-like leaders, enemy nations, or imperialist states; but rather through non-human beings and their malicious actions, expressed with metaphysical concepts such as the devil, satan, and jinn. So much so that instead of focusing on the ecopolitical structures of social systems, we now use alienating, fear-inducing, and demonizing definitions for the people around us or for those perceived as different and other. People are becoming misanthropic, blaming anyone who doesn’t suit them, whom they dislike, or who harms them by labeling them with non-human terms. Although, in the final analysis, this situation contains an instinct to exanorate humans of evil, much like how the concept of Satan serves to exonerate God from evil, expressions such as devil, Satan-spawned, possessed, beast, or vile creature, which exist in every language, are now being used in place of older maligning labels like infidel, polytheist, pagan, heretic, rafidhi, or 20th-century terms like bourgeois, imperialist, exploiter, fascist, and oligarch, all of which ultimately manifest a deep-seated misanthropy.
As genetic science and new anthropological-archaeological discoveries advance, this malicious language accompanied by evolutionary biological theories, name of the species of the prehuman, that is, pre-Homo sapiens like Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons or Homo erectus are used to refer to unloved people. There are also many conspiracy theories that these species are jealous and hostile towards the human species that have completed their evolution, that is, the descendants of Adam (Homo sapiens), and that they imitate humans; that most of them feed on the flesh of vampires, zombies or that they were cannibals, and that they live by eating human flesh, brains and hearts. These approaches, which define every person who deceives people, steals what they have, leads them astray, confuses their minds, exploits their emotions, uses and disposes of their bodies, and makes them serve them, not with their concrete existence and actions, but with an abstracted, metaphysical alienation, serve to think without human. Yet Marx aimed to explain such issues through tangible relations, as a philosophy of praxis, saying: “Capital is dead labour that acts like a vampire: it comes alive when it drinks living labour, and the more living labour it drinks, the more it comes alive.”
In ancient beliefs, the Devil, the satan, continues his lineage by mating with the demiurge humans. Just like that original sin. That is why our human ancestors always emphasized lineage, and the most common curse words were “son of a bitch” or “bastard”. But here, lineage isn’t used in a class, racial, or ethnic sense; rather, it denotes the essence of being an Adamite. Similarly, the condemnation of immoral women doesn’t signify moral judgment, but instead a warning of corrupted lineage. The memory of Adam encoded those who harmed him, led him astray, lied to him, envied him, killed him, or taught him evil as a lineage of non-human beings. Because man is noble, honorable, exalted—and evil is unbefitting of him.
Today, humanity is like the first Adam, trying to exist perhaps as an explanatory shelter, perhaps as a search for meaning, in the face of the suffering, oppression, and ambiguous and vague developments of the existing world. It is as though in a graveyard, captive in a world where cannibals, vampires, and zombies drown humanity in blood and tears, while billions of ordinary people live and die in anguish, hunger, deprivation, oppression, and suffering; as if it is in state of half dead. Therefore, it is in search of real life, vitality and breath, soul and heaven. The greatest magic that makes people ineffective, passive and enslaved is death. Killing people or making them watch death or enchanting people by killing their emotions enslaves them. Pharaoh once said, “I give life and I take it.” Today, unmanned aerial vehicles and weapons that rain down death have enchanted all of humanity, making them unresponsive, ineffective and passive. Yet the reactions of a small number of people still signal that the Adamic essence is alive and resisting.
According to divine teaching, the human being is a noble creature brought into existence by God’s breath, endowed with the capacity to know himself, the world, and objects and thereby fulfill his existence. What distinguishes him from other beings is his possession of reason and the sense of responsibility that reason enables. Reason is a partial manifestation of God’s will; the human is a microcosm of the universe and nature. “Find Adam, become Adam; Adam is hidden in the universe / Do not insult Adam, the universe is hidden within the Adam.” (Yozgatlı Fenni)
The purpose of existence is to transcend the time and space limitations of nature and participate in God’s creative action; thus, transforming both oneself and nature and creating new worlds from the potential in one’s essence. The essential condition of this existence is to choose good over evil, truth over falsehood, and righteousness over wrongdoing; to avoid evil, deficiency, error, and lies. A human becomes truly human only through this choice.
Every person who pursues goodness, who chooses goodness, every person who tries to be good and stay good is of Adamic origin. This effort represents the struggle to suppress the demonic gene—present in the blood, genetics, and lineage of every person since the original mixture of the genealogical tree—and to become purely Adamic. The ability to discern between good and evil and to choose good is what separates the human from the pre-human, Adam from the devil, and this is an existential measure. Evil is not a choice but the residue of failing to choose good.
Becoming Human Is a Process of Choice
The Indian philosopher Muhammad Iqbal said that the human being is born with human potential and becomes truly human (or not) through the choices made in this worldly life. He argued that the paradise we came from—which is here in this world, the Golden Age in the Hindu cycle of time—is not the same as the paradise we seek to reach; and in this sense, most people have not yet left paradise. In other words, the irresponsible, uninformed, unconscious, animal-like state of people in the paradise on earth (the state of nature in Africa according to anthropology) still continues. Indeed, we are children until we comprehend the world into which we were born; and once we do, we reach the age of reason. Most people either remain in their good childhood and never grow up, or they flee their bad childhood and spend a lifetime searching for a good one. As the human being uses their mind and distinguishes between good and bad, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, they becomes Adam. And the most tragic part is that this maturity is always reversible. Life often causes people to regress from being human to becoming pre-human again. “My judges, the real issue is not to avoid death but to avoid injustice; for evil runs faster than death.” (Socrates)
In this sense, becoming fully human is a process of choice, effort, and labor. Goodness is the name of this choice and effort. To be evil is a kind of genetic deadliness, an instinctual pre-human state. In this view, only the good are truly human; the rest are not. As Heidegger put it, only humans die; everything else merely perishes. That is, death and resurrection are for humans alone. Belief in the afterlife—the faith in dying, being resurrected, and receiving one’s due in judgment—is unique to the descendants of Adam. On the other hand, death, metaphorically, means the atrophy of every act, ability and function related to life, wasting one’s breath and becoming meaningless. In this sense, the Qur’anic parables of Abraham (pbuh) and Jesus (pbuh) resurrecting the dead are symbolic of breathing divine life into half-dead people and societies, reviving them through the Adamic essence within. For God is the one who brings the dead to life, who brings forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living. Breath—soul is the life energy with which God revives the dead. Life (Hay) is from Hû—from Him. Adam is the living. Those from whom God has taken back His breath are the dead. Even if they appear alive, in essence, they are lifeless.
Time is not a creator god – Dehr – Kronos; it is a testing period that sorts this mixture and separates good from bad, an illusionary atmosphere and a wheel of fortune that exercises the counting and sequencing ability of the human brain. Homo sapiens, or Adam, is the sum of the rhythm faculty of the reptilian-mammalian layers in their brain and the counting-sequencing faculty of the uppermost Adam layer, after the human species mixed with other species. In this sense, ancient sages called man a partial will and a small world, that is, both a small summary of the universe and a partial representation – manifestation of the Creator. With this capacity, the human being can perceive beyond appearances and possess true knowledge and emotions. This is the essence of creation. If you can only see visible light and hear spoken words, then you are neither seeing nor hearing. (Socrates)
This is the trait that distinguishes and elevates humans above other beings. This elevation is not a hierarchical rank, but a difference in responsibility and in the capacity for accurate perception that is, the ability to exist through thinking, with accountability toward all other beings, fellow humans, and the Creator. In this respect, the human being is the only creature with the potential to alter both nature and himself, to establish a habitat under any condition, and to determine his own destiny. Human has the ability to live with the instinct to continue its race in the cold of the polar, in the heat of the desert, on the mountain tops, in war conditions, in prison, in hunger and famine; to produce new tools, objects and items that do not exist in nature; to discipline its animal instincts by aestheticizing its relationships; to embellish its daily life; to make life more bearable and to abstract it with philosophy, art and literature. While humans learn the instinct to resist death and survive from nature, animals, and plants, it is the uniquely human quality, the Adamic essence bestowed from outside, that allows them to transform all of this into a comprehensive construction of life, make choices with a sense of responsibility, add meaning to life, and truly exist within the cosmic order. This is the creative power, God’s divine touch, that makes the human species a personality capable of existing for itself. “The universe is a Sacred Scripture from beginning to end / Whatever letter you touch, its meaning is always God.” (Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem)
In this sense, the distinction between Creator and created, belief in the afterlife (that every human action has an end and a consequence), and the life-giving, healing, and merciful relationship of the Creator with His creation is the safeguard of Adam’s innate tendency toward goodness.
Kali Yuga is every moment, every era, every day in which that safeguard, that is our innate moral compass grows weak, fades, or is overpowered. Both all of humanity and each individual human being live – and can live – all of time simultaneously, within the same lifetime. Every person experiences a golden, silver, bronze, and iron age throughout their life. And they also possess the knowledge, perception, and traits of this ancient cycle of time. The shortcomings of the Indian concept of time are that it deifies the universe as a wheel that turns in an unknown tautological cycle of time; that it ignores human reason, labor and choices; that it sees man as a helpless creature of fate and destiny, like a passive creature of nature. But everything that belongs to the human, time included, and every material and immaterial product of human endeavor is a manifestation and blessing of the Absolute Creator, and reflects a unique characteristic that sets the Adamic lineage apart from all other beings. There is no time in the universe, nature, or among other created beings. As Niyazi Mısri said: “What has happened has already happened; what will happen has already happened.” Science’s current hesitation between dominating time and submitting to its rule is the product of the helplessness and despair of the devil, who did not prostrate himself to Adam but learned all the names – the knowledge of nature – from Adam. The Adamic descendant see time only as an opportunity for purification, a period of becoming human, and they try to manage it with a curiosity “as if they will never die – as if they will die immediately.” Humanity’s role as vicegerent on earth, its status as the most honored of creation, and its awareness of being Adam begins with the quest to grasp the essence of the Eternal and Infinite. Adam is not a product of time; he is the result of his own essential potential. Life and death are a metaverse cycle that emerges in time and space, enabling the perception of being Adam. For this reason, divine religion defines worldly life as a temporary stage and presents the meaning of life as the opportunity to know both the Creator and oneself, thereby earning an existence beyond time and space, that is eternity. Not just life, but death too becomes a mercy only when understood through this awareness.
In contrast, Indian philosophy and other pantheistic or materialist belief systems, lacking a Creator and a purposeful existence, regard the human as the willpowerless product of nature that forever repeating in an endless cycle. The sole aim is to live in the moment, to attain the best possible worldly life, and after a possible death, to return to an even better form of worldly existence. Since each person enters and leaves this world alone, they outwardly express the fear and hope embedded in their genes. (Perhaps humanity itself is nothing more than billions of repetitions of a single human’s dreams.) This belief is the product of the deficiency of the prehuman’s limited brain, which is incapable of high abstraction, and this is the reason why today the global elites are trying with all their might to force people to live with the reptilian and mammalian brain, to incite and encourage animal habits and to dulling the Adamic brain. The attempt to rule societies through psychological disorders, that is, pathocracy, has become the dominant politics of the age.
Dehumanization is the result of this very purpose. Throughout history, the aim of political, economic, and deviant religious doctrines that enslaved the majority of humanity was exactly this. In this context, the whole struggle of the divine teaching of monotheism, which tries to elevate man and make him a person of dignity and personality, is to destroy the habits that make man a living dead and to resurrect Adam.
The Ashraf al-Makhluqat, the most noble of creatures is a state of existence that does not exist in the universe and nature, that is, is beyond time and space, the dimensioning of that first substance in time and space. In this sense, it is a potential archetype, that is, a position of choice that can be reached by being chosen. The effort to reach this position is the position itself.
To live is to resist
Today, cyclical time consists of four elements; sun, fire, light, brightness and darkness… We live in a world shaped by the perception of universe-nature-god-religion-science-life-human, which consists of these concepts and facts. Without questioning this world, without asking again “What are Iblis, Satan, jinn, human, and Adam?”, we cannot properly understand the Abrahamic revolution, nor Moses (pbuh) and Jesus (pbuh), nor Islam, nor the fabricated history we’ve been taught, nor the capitalist world of today, nor the fearful and uncertain future. We cannot understand divinity, the afterlife, or prophethood. We cannot know what Ashraf al-Makhluqat truly means.
What is human, posthuman, quantum, artificial intelligence, energy, information, the race to reach space? Why the competition to build deadlier weapons? Why the rise in incest, pedophilia, bestiality, alcohol, drugs, adultery, usury, hoarding of wealth, racism, tribalism, sectarianism, deviant religiosity, financial gambling, astrological sorcery, fake spirituality, stray animal worship, human hatred, and nihilism? To escape from the vicious cycle and bottomless pit of the Kali Yuga era, we must always remember the most ancient, the most innate truth, and never stray from that awareness.
In a dead world, among the dead, in an environment where those who are about to die are in agony, without falling prey to vampires and zombies, the effort to keep goodness superior, which is the only medicine that will defeat them; means that the life – energy – created by the cosmic cycle of real life, divine breath, fire, water, air and earth, deserves eternal existence by becoming Adam.
To hold on to life against the satanic dynasty that kills children; to defend goodness under all circumstances, against everyone, whether strong or weak; to stay away from evil means to be the Most Merciful of Creatures, Ashraf al-Makhluqat. This is to remain human. This is to be Adam.
Humanity must remember this perception of life again, and people must be able to choose this perception over all prehuman habits. If there is to be any universal or social salvation, this is where it must begin.
And while rethinking and re-evaluating everything, perhaps we will arrive at something already said under the sun. But at least today, we can find what we are looking for ourselves. If we know what we are looking for, of course.
*According to Hindu Vedic Teachings: Cycles of Time
The Indian philosopher Swami Tejomayananda summarizes Hindu philosophy’s concept of cyclical time in his book Purajana Gita as follows:
“According to Indian understanding, the universe consists of different periods called ‘Yugas’. Just as a year on Earth is composed of four seasons, the universe also goes through four recurring ages. The greatest cosmic cycle is the Maha Yuga (Great Age), which consists of four successive Yugas: Krita Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga. These periods are not of equal duration. In Vedic calculations, one divine year is considered equivalent to 360 human years.
In the Bhagavad Gita, it is stated: ‘By human reckoning, a thousand ages are but a single day of Brahma. And so is his night also of equal length.’ These four cycles that comprise the Maha Yuga differ in length and in their modes of life.
Krita (Satya) Yuga: The Golden Age / Age of Truth. This corresponds to spring in the human seasonal cycle, an age of rebirth and vitality. Human consciousness is at its highest. People live in unity with the universal spirit. With pure intentions and strong willpower, all desires were fulfilled. The bright and golden age when virtue and morality reigned was a time when there was no need for shelter, when nature provided them with everything they needed; everyone was born good and lived a happy, beautiful life. People devote themselves to thought, the highest virtue, and live morally and justly. All people are enlightened. There were no deities, no buying or selling, no rich or poor. The greatest virtue was renunciation of worldly desires. There is no disease, aging, hatred, arrogance, or evil thoughts. Unity and wholeness prevailed.
The most striking detail for this age is that people meditate intensely and can achieve anything they want through the power of thought. No sickness, aging, pride, sorrow, or fear. The incarnation of the divine power worshipped was “Narayana”. People strictly adhered to the four basic principles of renunciation, purity, mercy and truthfulness. There are no class, caste, or religious distinctions and everyone was treated as one. The average lifespan is 100,000 years. Toward the end of this age, the principle of renunciation begins to decline.
Treta Yuga: The Silver Age-Treta Yuga, the mankind era, coincides with the summer period. As heat increases, so do disturbances. Mahabharata describes it: “Virtue diminished; offerings began. People began obtaining what they wanted through work and giving.” Virtue and morality begin to wane. People are devoted to acquiring knowledge instead of thinking; a more passionate, jealous, insatiable humanity, coveting the property of others and trying to gain power by oppressing the weak, has begun to emerge. People start destroying nature to create spaces to possess. Productivity and abundance decrease, and survival requires effort. It is a time of rising evil and growing division.
People begin to worship through rituals and offerings. Only three of the four core principles remained: cleanliness, compassion, and truthfulness. The average lifespan was 10,000 years. Toward the end of this age, the principle of compassion begins to decline.
Dvapara Yuga: The Bronze Age-This is the age of decline. It is a period when the positive and negative aspects of life are half and half. It’s autumn and the weather starts to get colder and the colors start to turn yellow. Consciousness decreases. Desires and wishes increase; disasters and diseases come. There are efforts to keep good and bad in balance. The duration of this age was half that of Krita Yuga. People began to lose their moral sense; the Veda (knowledge, sacred texts), which was a whole in the beginning, began to split during this period. The level of awareness is now half of what it was in the first age. Honesty, goodness, and virtue begin to disappear. The quest for ‘truth’ vanishes.
People now began to worship in temples. Only two core principles, cleanliness and truthfulness, were followed. The average lifespan was 1,000 years. Toward the end of this age, the principle of cleanliness begins to decline.
Kali Yuga: The Iron Age- Kali means conflict and war. It is the Dark Age, the age we currently live in. It corresponds to winter. It is a period of increasing material and spiritual corruption, chaos, conflicts, wars, diseases, anger, fear, despair, grief, natural disasters, and a period when negative energy is very high. People are detached from nature but value it only for the minerals found under their lands. Good moral values and justice have disappeared, and a lifestyle that prioritizes personal interests has emerged. Money and material values were held above all else. Dishonesty and lying were seen as normal and even necessary to be successful. Lust and sexual desire spiral out of control. Only the poor retain virtue. The only remaining virtue is goodness. The Vedas (knowledge, sacred scriptures) will be forgotten, and both material and spiritual purification will vanish. Those wishing to escape this corrupt system will return to nature. Harsh natural conditions will shorten human life, and so the Kali Yuga will gradually end with the extinction of the human race. (Sources: Purajana Gita, Tulasi-Ramayana, Uttara-Kanda 96–103)
In this age, people begin to chant the divine names as a form of worship. Known as the age of strife and conflict, this period is plagued by constant natural disasters, diseases, and wars. Believed to have begun approximately 5,000 years ago, this is when ‘the Vedas’ were written down. Previously, humans could retain knowledge effortlessly in their minds, but with the loss of this capacity, it became necessary to record information. The ancient texts of India ‘the Vedas’ were divided into four parts: Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva. This division brought about classes in society (priests–teachers, rulers–warriors, agriculturalists–merchants, workers), each of which assigned people of a certain class to a certain set of activities and groups.
But more importantly, there was a division into castes, separated by a system of ritual cleansing. Indian society was divided into five castes: priests, warriors, merchants, workers, and slaves – untouchables who were prisoners or their descendants. In this era only one of the four fundamental principles, truth, was followed partially. The average life expectancy is 100 years.
According to Hindu understanding, creation will begin again within this cycle, and these same ages will be repeated endlessly.”
*(Source: Nilgün Çevik Gürel – dusunuyorumdergisi.com)