FROM SCHIZOPHRENIA TO ETERNITY
‘A sea of scorching blaze’ drives the world along... The reason is the toy of formulas. The conscious has fallen a deep nightmarish sleep. And human beings are imprisoned to the inhumane psychology of modernism that is groundless and
anti-eternity...
A woman in a far part of the world, “whose eyes got sick for she turned in her light for so long”, she is trying to explain things feeling “awfully alienated and under arrest”. The hors sounds in her ears, under the blood rains pouring from the sky... Let alone trying, she is fighting. This fight will first take her to schizophrenia crisis, then like an angel awakening her conscious will lead her to unity with the truth.
That’s why, according to her schizophrenia an incurable kind of insanity, a medically moody illness, is ‘a divine gift, a sign of superiority’...
Ayşe Şasa is deciphering the mystery of finding a spiritual path accompanied by pains which everyone can easily find within their conscious, fight of explaining things, questionings to awaken the conscious. Her fate is a traumatic one that affects you deeply... This is the story of a rough journey from the (fragmented) nightmarish hell of atheism to the heaven of divine eternity (unity).
The chaos she had experienced as a spiritual symbolic kind of death and the cure she has found through a divine help, her re-born experience, is like a saving prescription to the fatal indifference of our time.
Ayşe Şasa had traveled along the labyrinths of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia for Şasa is the result of coming to the end of modern ignorance. It is also the reward of looking for truth in herself, for her efforts to know herself.
According to the notes in the dairies kept in the country of insanity, Ayşe Şasa witnessed hell on earth, where she looked through the emotion ‘everything happened when I’m alive’. She struggled with ‘excessive paranoid hallucinations’ in a ‘darkness and fear framed with nihilism’. ‘Life was not something worth living. It was a dark absurdity tunnel that you are forced into it’. Universe was a cave. She was laying there like a wounded animal. ‘The cursed dead-end in the suffocating atmosphere of the cave...! Images in that cave and words that echoed there are: Alienation, solitude, fear, unbelief,... Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Picasso. Doomsday scenes. Wars. Secret weapons. Hitler, Gestapo, Marx. Executioners, murders, blood rains, suicide, bodies, mania... Screen in her mind kept visualizing the scenarios of these words like movie scenes... She is a synthetic person in the role she took on for herself in such a frightening, awful life. Experiencing a synthetic fate... A secret enemy was leading her to the great ‘Mistake’ which is going to be the end of the world... She didn’t want to submit to this, however, the only thing she could manage was to not give up trying to rationalize her fate...
She got estranged to the modern world thinking that all these could no way be the product of a human brain. She saw the hell that covers the earth with a schizoid look and wanted to escape from everything that modern world represents. But where? To what?
Cemil Meriç had once said that there were two ways for a person; either self-annihilation or becoming a real human. Becoming a human was the effort of a ‘disconnected and dislocated’ person to get to know her/himself with a move beyond time and place. It was the path of reintegration getting away from fragments. Just as ‘disintegration’, getting lost cannot be the end of human beings...
Ayşe Şasa’s exemplary internal journey represents such a ‘humanization’. This journey, Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’, is a saving epic that goes from reason to faith.
‘Schizoid phases like identity fragmentation are authentic to the spiritual path’. ‘When human beings fail to explain the universe through a meaningful frame, the smallest daily happenings takes up a shocking impact, traumas turn into neurosis and psychosis’. Şasa proves this with her experiences.
Insanity was an island that Ayşe Şasa took refuge. She says, “Nobody directly indoctrinated Allah to me since I was born. They taught me everything but Allah. That’s why insanity came to me as a conscious of eternal life”. “Like I said what pushed me into schizophrenia are the West’s shallow, sick, pathetic ruins... Those who programmed my life, who indexed me to a certain axis...”
However, she was going to partake in the axis of the Epic that glorifies human beings and harmonizes them with themselves and universe when she by fate had received a sign while lying like a wounded animal in the cave from a world that was then alien to her. Thus she reaches to ‘a heavenly poem from a hellish depression with a miraculous transformation that plain reason and shallow logic will fail to explain’.
Füsus by Ibn Arabi that is based on enbiya and evliya gives the good news of divine knowledge to Ayşe Şasa’s mind that was captive of hallucinations and to her wounded heart.
With the help of Seikh-ul Akbar she left the hell of ignorance behind and was re-born into ‘a place that is full of beauty, life and light’ of the ‘valley of light’. That dark, suffocating cave with its all images and sounds ‘gets suddenly drown in a glaring sea of light...’ Symptoms of re-borning turn up: light, hope, joy, liveliness’. ‘The result is a divine festivity, a beauty festivity.’
In addition to being a significant literary work with its striking narration, Ayşe Şasa’s epic is a biography you cannot miss for it deciphers humanity’s drama together with the salvation prescription and reflects modern world psychology.