Everyone I met before leaving for Umra, who had been on the pilgrimage, said the same thing - On seeing the Kaaba tears would start flowing down your cheeks. The sheer magnanimity of the edifice, the surreal atmosphere, the ethereal ambiance, the other-worldly feeling is so strong, so vivid, so vibrant and fiercingly pressing that the only way one can respond is to break down and cry at the vanity of our every day lives and the irrelevance of our concerns in the the larger and truer scheme of things.
For a person like myself whose tear glands never work, and whose emotions and feelings have somehow gotten buried and submerged as if pressed under the weight and cold of a large ice glacier, this was discomfiting, to say the least! me crying! and that too in full view of other homo-sapiens? was too difficult a proposition and I dreaded every single thought of it.
The minute you enter the precincts of Makkah, the only place where non-Muslims are not allowed and it's announced loud and clear, it's like you've crossed an invisible barrier, you can't see it of course, but every single fibre of your body and soul feels it, it is as though some other time-plane has been entered into through a strange energy field. The whole city of Makkah is nothing but mounds of rocky hillocks, harsh, brown and black, dry, barren, and solitary and yet in that desolation there is this immense presence, this huge magnetic field that is throbbing like a pulsating life giving force. Kaaba is the sun around which supplicants circle mimicking the planetary revolutions in the sky, its a microcosm of the cosmos, of the proportion, of the harmony of all its parts working in unison. Kaaba is beyond this earth, it is actually a place where time is suspended, and the "I" in all of us evaporates, and all one can see, hear and feel is the presence of something larger than life, larger than all there is in this minuscule world, all there is in our puny brains and all there ever was and will be.
So why the tears? I don't think people cry because they realize their sins and beg forgiveness, or feel overwhelmed emotionally, no, I strongly feel the crying comes from a transference of our body and soul from this material world to another higher platform, its a transition, a huge and humongous change, a kind of coming into being, an entrance through a higher portal into an absolutely different reality which hits one like a massive shock-wave.
Did the iceberg within me budge a little? I'd have to say yes and that is with shock for not much moves me now, I have transpired beyond pain and remembrance and nostalgia and disappointments and in this never-land emotions of all kinds are a foreign entity. I cried for I could not bear the presence of something so large and grand around me, I cried for I couldn't quite understand my own feelings, I cried for I felt I have arrived where I ought to be and all that I had heard and learned in my life about GOD and Islam was not only true, but the only truth - how vivid and clear this truth was to me!
To understand and experience the strength of Kaaba one has to be there and be ready and open, in other words one must have blind faith, else, all is mockery and a waste.
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