That Which Has No Wall Has No Self
Manuchehr Jamali
Ahriman was a being who was forever closing himself in.
He was the first to draw a wall around himself.
And with that wall, he brought all other walls into being.
Then he declared:
“The self is a wall.”
Whoever wishes to be must possess a wall.
Only the one who builds a wall around themselves attains being.
And to the very extent that one is enclosed by walls, to that same extent one exists.
Whoever is without a wall is not.
To be, to possess, to think, and to love became the art of building walls.
And he taught humankind how to build walls around everything.
He taught them how to build walls around their thoughts,
so that thoughts might become doctrines, religions, philosophies, sciences, and worldviews.
He taught them how to raise walls around both their love and their hatred.
He taught them to build walls around those they loved,
so as to protect them from harm.
And to build walls around those they hated,
so that they might become slaughter grounds, hunting grounds, and places of plunder,
reserved exclusively for themselves.
But his greatest art was this:
where building a wall was difficult,
he simply drew a line.
That line was as fine and narrow as the Bridge of Ṣirāṭ.
From that moment onwards,
truth and justice, whose horizons had once stretched into the infinite,
were marked off by lines and boundaries.
Henceforth, only that which had been enclosed within a line counted as truth.
And whoever set out in search of truth
often found one foot still resting upon the ground of truth,
while the other was already slipping into the realm of falsehood.
He even drew a line around God,
and around all that is divine.
From that moment on,
even God no longer knew where God was and where God was not,
where religion ended and unbelief began.
The God whose being had always been open and unbounded
was thrown into uncertainty
whenever He sought to recognise His own frontiers.
He turned to Ahriman
to learn the limits of His divinity
and of His religion.
And He was grateful,
for with Ahriman’s help
He came to know the boundaries of His godhood,
the boundaries of His truth,
and the boundaries of His religion.
These walls made only of lines
became harder
the thinner they grew.
And Ahriman demonstrated
that when these slender lines become invisible,
they stand higher
and are more impregnable
than the Great Wall of China.
These invisible walls,
mere mist-like and shadow-like lines,
he inscribed
within the imagination of humankind.
And he gave them the names
tolerance
and
forbearance.
The Persian original > https://jamali.info/he-she-who-has-no-walls-is-not-themselves/