A Placeless Sun : Toward Our Configured Destiny: Toward Our Configured Destiny

By Tishler, Dimitri

Book Id: WPLBN0100751220
Format Type: PDF (eBook)
File Size: 8.67 MB.
Reproduction Date: 07/09/2023

Title:	A Placeless Sun : Toward Our Configured Destiny: Toward Our Configured Destiny
Author:	Tishler, Dimitri
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Religion
Collections:	Authors Community, Religion
Historic Publication Date:	2023
Publisher:	The Ninth Bird Press

Member Page:	Dimitri Tishler
Citation APA MLA Chicago Tishler, M. D. (2023). A Placeless Sun : Toward Our Configured Destiny. Retrieved from https://www.self.gutenberg.org/

Description
A Placeless Sun is a metaphysical journey of my protagonist, Allison, who encounters the Baháʼí Faith in New York, after meeting a Persian Baháʼí named Hooman. They eventually fall in love, marry, and settle down in Harlem, a neighbourhood in Manhattan, New York and they begin to serve the needs of that community through the arts, photography in particular. The children in Allison’s photography group begin to explore their racial and national identity juxtaposed with the oneness of the humanity (the beauty of diverse cultures as they are contrasted against each other), an idea introduced to them by Allison. The story is also allegorical as it reveals aspects of the journey of the birds in the poem The Conference of the Birds by Farīd ud-Dīn Attar and also the mystical writings of Baháʼu'lláh, in particular The Seven Valleys and Gems of Divine Mysteries.

Summary
Allison's plane lands in New York on a wintry November afternoon in 1998, where she will begin a MA in philosophy at Columbia University. In New York Allison reconnects with an old friend, Nava, who introduces Allison to her brother Hooman. Allison strikes up a friendship with Hooman. Allison had begun to experience strange altered mental patterns that she feared could be an emerging madness, but with Hooman's help she eventually finds rhythms of convergence in her life within a mystical framework of ideas hidden within old Egyptian funerary texts, like the Book of Gates, and mystical texts written by Baháʼu'lláh, the prophet founder of the Baháʼí Faith. Together, Allison and Hooman come to realize that the world they knew never existed to begin with; a new world, both disturbingly beautiful and sublime, rises up to meet them, and they will never be the same again, connected as they are through time and space.

Excerpt
Praise be to God Who hath made being to come forth from nothingness; graven upon the tablet of man a measure of the mysteries of His eternity; taught him from the storehouse of divine utterance that which he knew not; made him a perspicuous book unto such as have believed and surrendered their souls; given him to behold, in this dark and ruinous age, a new creation within all things; and caused him to speak forth, from the midmost heart of eternity, and in a new and wondrous voice, embodied in the most excellent Temple.◊ And all to this end: that every man may testify, in himself and by himself, before the Seat of the revelation of his Lord, that there is none other God but Him; and that all may reach that summit of realities where none shall contemplate anything but that he shall perceive God therein. —Bahá’u’lláh, The Seven Valleys

Table of Contents
Preface A Word on Symmetry 1. Coming to America 2. The Girl with the Yellow Dress 3. The Lion and the Sun 4. A Book of Birds 5. The Harlem Apartment 6. The Ice Rink and the Christmas Tree 7. The Museum 8. The Symmetries of a Face 9. New Friends 10. The Philosophy of the Heart 11. Returning to London 12. Finding Mona 13. The Nightingale 14. Prayers at the Graves 15. The Paper Bird 16. The Symmetrical Destiny Map 17. The Book of the Dead 18. A Circle of Friends 19. The Shack 20. On the Road 21. A Charcoal House 22. The Notebook 23. An Image of Identity 24. My Brother 25. Decoding Reality 26. The Tourists 27. A Year in America 28. The Exhibition 29. The Lake Meets the Sun Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments Appendix 1: Brief Overview of Spiritual Principles and Teachings of the Bahá’í Faith Appendix 2: An Introduction to the Bahá’í Faith Appendix 3: Symbolism Appendix 4: Symmetry of Names and Letters About the Author ”