Mirror Earth Birth · Muslim I
Lifting the Veil of the Self to Free the Light of the Heart
Who are you once the stories built by the self begin to fall away?
The Muslim edition’s first descent. Contemplative religious nonfiction in the line of tazkiyah — the purification of the self — written for the reader who has begun to suspect that the thing standing between them and the Real is not the world but the nafs.
The book works on the distinction that begins all of this: the nafs, the lower self that prefers any explanation leaving its rule untouched, and the qalb, the heart made to know Allah — the organ of perception, not of emotion. Between them hangs a veil, and the veil is self-made.
It asks who you are beneath praise and blame, beneath success and failure, beneath attachment and loss. Who you are with no false throne left to defend. That answer, the book insists, cannot be manufactured. It has to be received.
Adjacent to al-Ghazālī in intent, to modern spiritual memoir in voice.
About the Author
Art Aloka — Artesius Meltin Aloka — is a poet, healer, and independent researcher in human perception. Since the early 1970s, when his path began with Silva cognitive training, he has studied the veil: the layer of inherited story, defended reputation, and self-justification that stands between a person and direct perception. Five decades of practice have taught him that the obstacle is rarely the world. It is the self that insists on interpreting it.
He lives off-grid in a treehouse on Kīlauea’s eastern rift in Hawaiʻi, where fire moves unseen beneath a hardened crust for a long while before it finds its way to the surface. The book takes its title from that fact.
ISBN 979-8-951493-10-1 · 6 × 9 in · Forthcoming