The Delicate Secret: Relationship of Humans, God and Universe

Posted on June 24, 2013 by sufiways

by Navid Zaidi

کیہہ کردا نی کیہہ کردا نی

کوئی پچھو کھاں دلبر کیہہ کردا

وچ مسیت نماز گزاریں،بت خانے جا وڑدا

آپ اکو کئی لکھ گھراں دے،مالک ایہہ گھر گھر دا

اکے گھر وچ وسدیاں رسدیاں،نہیں ہوندا وچ پردا

جت ول ویکھاں اُت ول اوہو،ہر اک دا سنگ کردا

See, what He does; See, what He does, friends!

Let someone ask, “What does the Beloved do?”

He offers prayers in the mosque,

Then He enters the temples adorned with idols.

He is One, and the houses are many.

He is the Master of every house.

To dwell joyfully together in the same house,

There cannot be drawn any screen in between.

Wherever I look, I find Him present

He is ever in the company of all……………..Bulleh Shah

These verses of Bulleh Shah awaken in us a higher consciousness of our manifold relations with God and universe. The Lord is within us and He pervades in everyone and all places. This is the delicate secret Bulleh Shah has unraveled. God is to be found not only in mosques but also in the temples adorned with idols. Indeed, God resides within every human being as his or her Master. He is present not only in His lovers but also in His enemies.

However, this gives us a pantheistic view of God which needs a closer examination and makes us wonder about our relationship with God and the universe.

In order to grasp completely the ultimate nature of existence we must be able to study such a case of existence that is absolutely unquestionable. Now, my perception of things around me is superficial and external. But my  perception of my own self is internal, intimate and profound. Therefore, my own conscious experience is the ultimate point of departure in the direction of Reality.

What do I find when I fix my gaze on my own conscious experience? There is nothing static in my inner life; all is a constant movement, a perpetual flow of states in which there is no resting place; I am changing without ceasing.

Similarly, all levels of experience—the level of matter, the level of life and the level of mind and consciousness—have all been reduced to movement, vibration and energy according to the new physics. Consider these words of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck, the father of Quantum Theory, as he accepted his award for the study of atom:

” As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as the result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together…..We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Thus, a close examination of our own conscious experience finds that the universe is a free creative movement. The ultimate nature of life is a psychic activity. The universe is not something static but a structure of events with the character of a continuous creative flow.

The Ultimate Reality (God) consists of a rationally-directed creative life in which thought, life and purpose inter-penetrate to form an organic Whole. We cannot think of this Unity except as the unity of a Self—an all-embracing concrete Self—the ultimate source of all individual life and thought.

Thus, based on the analogy of our own conscious experience, God is an individual. He is the most unique individual. All life is individual; there is no such thing as universal life. However, to interpret God as a Self is not to fashion Him after the image of humans. It only means that life is an organizing principle of unity. It is not necessarily pantheistic. The facts of our own conscious experience lead us to the conclusion that the ultimate nature of Reality is spiritual and must be conceived as a Self.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the universe. The universe is not an independent reality standing in opposition to God. It is not something co-eternal with God that is being operated upon by Him from a distance with space in between. It is, in its nature, one continuous act. But our thought breaks it up into a plurality of mutually exclusive things.

Space, time and matter do not exist per se. They are only interpretations which our thought puts on the free creative energy of God.

In other words, God is not a transcendental being, prior to universe, and operating upon it from outside. The universe is not a finished act; it is still in the course of formation. There can be no complete truth about the universe because the universe has not yet become ‘whole’. The universe is only self-revelation of the Ultimate Self. It is not an accident in the life of God that might not have been created.

From the standpoint of God, there is no ‘other’. In Him, thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating, are identical. From the Divine point of view, there is no creation in the sense of a specific event having a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’

We have conceived the Ultimate Reality as a Self; and we must add that only from the Ultimate Self selves proceed. The creative energy of the Ultimate Self functions to unite all the selves.

Every atom of Divine energy, however low in the scale of existence, is a self. But there are degrees in the expression of selfhood. The selfhood gradually rises in the entire gamut of existence until it reaches its perfection in the human being.

Therefore, humans occupy a genuine place in the heart of Divine creative energy and thus possess a much higher degree of reality than things around them. Of all the creations of God, humans alone are capable of consciously participating in the life of their Maker.

God is an individual and the universe is an association of individuals. But the members of this association are not fixed. New members are constantly coming to birth to cooperate in the great task of creation and formation of the universe. The human beings also take their share in this great task, inasmuch as they help to bring order into at least a portion of the chaos.

Says Dr Allama Iqbal: ‘Like pearls do we live, move and have our being in the perpetual flow of Divine life.’ In other words, we are distinct but not isolated from God. The gap between us and God is not physical but informational. The greater this gap, the less our individuality. We become unique by becoming more and more like the most unique Individual by closing this informational gap. He/She who comes nearest to God is the completest person. Not that he or she is finally absorbed in God. On the contrary, he or she absorbs God into himself/herself.

The human beings are endowed with the power to imagine a better world and the human self aspires to use all the various environments on which it may be called upon to operate during the course of a timeless career.

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (Korzybski)

Posted on June 23, 2013 by sufiways

“The map is not the territory”—Alfred Korzybski (Polish-American philosopher, 1879-1950)

Contributed by Modaser Shah

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“Ha Ha Ha” Sufi Style

Posted on June 22, 2013 by sufiways

by Kamran Zafar

A little humor goes a long way in our daily lives. Modern science and studies have found laughter to be similar to good medicine for a sickness. The history of humor, of course, is as old as human beings. Personally, I cannot perceive life without humor. It would perhaps be like a picture without colors. One great evolutionary achievement of humans may be the ability to use humor to tackle, or better resolve, complex day-to-day problems. Everyone is familiar with humor, but only a few possess it in the art form. These humor artists have used humor to teach us very valuable life lessons.

The Sufi mystics are known to have conveyed their message through personal example, poetry, and humor. A great name in Sufi humor is that of Mullah Nasruddin, also known as Hodja Nasreddin. Although many countries and cultures lay a claim to him, he is believed to have been a Sufi of the Seljuq times who lived and died during thirteenth century in Akshehir near Konya, the capital of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, in today’s Turkey. He is considered a satirical philosopher, an off-kilter Sufi, and a wise fool. He is remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes. His stories usually have subtle humor and a mystic message. A Nasruddin festival is celebrated in July every year in his hometown.

Here is an anecdote ascribed to him.

One day Mullah Nasruddin was passing through a busy bazaar of his hometown. Many of his disciples followed him. They were copying every move the Mullah was making. If he looked skyward, they looked skyward. If he bent down to touch his toes, they bent down to touch their toes. If he spread his arms in the air, they spread their arms in the air. All this looked silly to the onlookers. Wondering what was going on, one shopkeeper came to the Mullah and inquired. Mullah Nasruddin replied rather casually, “I am enlightening their minds.”  “How?” asked the confused shopkeeper. Mullah replied, “It is simple. Every morning when they come to me, I count them and whoever is missing I consider his mind enlightened.”

Related posts on this blog:

The Relativity of Truth

Fear of God

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Sufi Snaps: Curves (A photo and a story)

Posted on June 20, 2013 by sufiways

by Ali Hammad

IMG_0400 - Version 2

A CIRCLE OF SURREALITY

The jalopy that overtook me on the curving mountain road was not worthy of being on the road, let alone of zooming past my hot rod. It went so fast I couldn’t catch a glimpse of the driver; one would have thought it was driving itself.

I seethed, shifted down into lower gear, and slammed my foot on the accelerator. The Lamborghini Aventador Roadster roared a 700-horse-power-V12 roar, and lurched forward, as angry as its driver, ready to make mince meat of the audacious heap.

For a short while it seemed that the Lamborghini was closing the gap, but I still couldn’t tell anything about the driver of the clunker. Inside the rear window of the jalopy, I could see a speck. It looked to me like a fly, but I was sure it was something bigger, its seeming smallness a function of the distance I was from it.

Then I began to get dizzy.

Working against me, I knew, were the curves in the road. I had never liked curves, sickening curves. The most perfect of curves—circles—whether ferris wheels or merry-go-rounds or roundabouts, even circular logic or people talking in circles, made me nauseous.

Soon I was overcome with vertigo.

I couldn’t tell if the surroundings were spinning around me, or if I was spinning within the surroundings, or both, or none. Then I was floating above the scene. I looked down on the road. At first I saw the tandem cars zigzagging down the road. Then the road was empty. Neither car was on it. The next second, I was back in my car, my forehead moist with a cold sweat, my hands clammy. I hated the feeling. Curves and giddiness, I thought, were for the philosophers and the mystics, and miscellaneous screw-ups. For scientific and logical people like me—the fast achievers—were straight lines and clear-mindedness.

The jalopy was again widening the gap.

Then it took a hard bend around the mountain and disappeared from my view. I kept up the chase and took the same bend at top speed. Just as I completed the turn, I saw that the road had ended. Off the road I went at top speed.

In B-movie slo-mo, the car and I fell down a sheer precipice. My seatbelt must have come undone and I ejected from the roofless roadster, since I fell down separately from the car. In my slow fall, I did notice that the jalopy was nowhere to be seen, as if the road had come to an end only for me, the crate probably still zipping up a continuing mountain road.

My car shattered on a rocky outcrop at the base of mountain. My fall of more than a thousand feet came to an end in a thicket of bushes several yards away from the car. My spine had broken in many places. My skin had curving gashes from the twigs of the dense shrubbery. Many of my ribs had broken. Breathing was increasingly hard. I was struggling to keep conscious but was losing the struggle. I heard a drone, that of a fly. The image of the speck on the rear window of the junker flashed across my mind. Then I saw a large, green-bellied fly hovering over my face, probably attracted to the blood trickling down the myriad cuts. The fly seemed eager to quaff on my blood, but it was patient, willing to wait.

In that moment, I was angry and jealous; yes, jealous of a damned fly. As consciousness receded from my grasp, a strange thought stayed: I wished I were the fly that was readying to perch itself on my soon-to-be corpse.

Photo and story by Ali Hammad

Related post on this blog: Metamorphosis: The Fly

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Characteristics of the Mystic Experience

Posted on June 19, 2013 by sufiways

by Navid Zaidi

One way of establishing connection with Reality is through sense-perception. The other way is through direct association with that Reality as it reveals within the soul.

Sense-perception must be supplemented by what the Quran calls Fuad or Qalb, meaning ‘heart’. The ‘heart’ is a kind of intuition or insight.

Rumi says:

The heart feeds on the rays of the sun and brings us into contact with aspects of Reality other than those open to sense-perception.

The Sufi’s experience is not a special supernatural faculty. It is rather a mode of dealing with Reality in which sensation, in the physiological sense of the word, does not play a role. Yet, the value of this experience is real and concrete. It is not psychic or supernatural.

The facts of this experience are just like other facts of human experience. Unfortunately, we do not have a really effective scientific method to analyze the contents of this mode of consciousness. The new mind and body science research may shed light on the value of this vista of experience.

The Sufis emphasize experience rather than theory. To approach its meaning, we have to ask what are the characteristics of this experience. In his book Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal (Indian poet and philosopher, 1877 to 1938) has made some general observations on the main characteristics of mystic experience.

1. The mystic experience is immediate. In this respect it is not different from other levels of human experience. It supplies data for knowledge just like any other experience. For example, if someone is angry with you, you can immediately experience the anger. The immediacy of the mystic experience means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts with mutual relations. Its only reference is experience.

2. The mystic experience is an unanalyzable whole. In the mystic experience there is no distinction between subject and object. In our ordinary experience Reality presents in a piecemeal fashion, selecting isolated sets of stimuli. In the mystic state, thought is reduced to a minimum and data invade our consciousness as a whole and piecemeal analysis is not possible.

3. The mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a unique Other Self. We may ask how immediate experience of God, as an Other Self, is at all possible. In this respect, it is not different than our daily social experience. Our knowledge of other minds remains inferential only. Yet we feel that our experience of other minds is immediate and never have any doubt as to the reality of our social experience. The mystic experience has a resemblance to our normal experience and may belong to the same category.

4. Mystic experience cannot be communicated. That is because the quality of mystic experience is directly experienced and it is obvious that it cannot be communicated. Mystic states are more like feeling than thought. The interpretation that the mystic or the prophet puts on such experience can only be conveyed in the form of judgments and propositions. This is evident by the existence of large body of Sufi writings, scriptures, poems and tales.

The non-communicability of the mystic experience is due to the fact that it is essentially a matter of inarticulate feeling, untouched by discursive intellect. But, it has a cognitive element as well. It is because of this cognitive element that this feeling ends up in the form of idea and words. So there is a sense in which the words are also revealed to the Sufi.

5. The mystic experience does not mean a complete break with serial time. Although the mystic’s intimate association with the eternal gives him/her a sense of unreality of serial time it does not mean a complete break with serial time. The mystic remains related to common experience. The mystic state soon fades away but it leaves a sense of deep authority after it has passed away. Both the mystic and the prophet return to normal levels of experience but there is a difference between the two. The Sufi’s return does not mean much for the mankind at large. The prophet’s return is creative. He returns to insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history and change the course of mankind.

Posted in Classic Teaching, Navid Zaidi, Original Essays | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Does Eternal Life Belong to Those Who Live in the Present?

Posted on June 18, 2013 by sufiways

by Modaser Shah

“Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present,” Wittgenstein, in Tractatus, quoted in Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Žižek.

Some random associations:

This sounds more like a koan than a philosopher’s proposition, hence the meaning is not obvious, or, like many a koan, it may be perceived as self-contradictory or even non-sensical. It is certainly not a scientific claim, for how would one go about verifying or, à la Karl Popper, falsifying this statement? Yet it does not strike one as a senseless statement; there seems to be something there, something that draws our attention, something profound, yet it also at the same time calls forth skepticism, perhaps because it feels alluring, enticing, something too good to be true: living in the moment promising eternal life. And what does living in the moment mean? Totally disregarding the past and the future would be reckless, irresponsible. What does eternal life mean and what relevance does it have to our day to day lives? This seems to be its distinction from the usual type of koan, which seems like pure non-sense, or a logical impossibility, a confusion of categories. It does not, by itself, seem to promise anything but confusion and torment, like a puzzle with no solution. Both are possible metaphors for human, perhaps all, life.

It may be that the process of struggling with these contradictions, conflicts, absurdities and impossibilities, this struggle itself—rather than a solution or a group of solutions, which can be turned into  an ideology—is what this and other koans are meant to impel us to engage in. This inner struggle with one’s demons, or conflicts and contradictions, theses and antitheses requiring constant synthesizing, is, perhaps, the greater jihad, spoken of by the Prophet of Islam and various Sufis.

As is usual with Wittgenstein, he is not necessarily telling us something but showing us, and what this statement shows will depend on the state of mind and body of the recipient and one’s stage of development as well as a willingness to leave the comfort zone of received ideas and concepts, to unlearn in preparation for learning. This also seems to me to be at least one function of Zen koans.

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A Sufi Thought for the Week (Zhuangzi)

Posted on June 16, 2013 by sufiways

IMG_0408 - Version 2

“Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” — The Butterfly Dream as translated by Lin Yutang and contributed to this blog by Salman Yunus

http://taoism.about.com/od/chuangtzu/a/Butterfly_Dream.htm

IMG_0402 - Version 2

Photos by Ali Hammad

Related articles on this blog:

Sufi Snaps: Fleeting (A photo and a story)

Zen, Tao, Sufism, Wittgenstein (and Lacan?)

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Sufi Snaps: Curves

Posted on June 15, 2013 by sufiways

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Look always for ensō, the circle, the perfect curve, in your life.

Photo and thought by Ali Hammad

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What is Sufism? Part 3: The State of Trance

Posted on June 12, 2013 by sufiways

by Navid Zaidi

As the soul is completely withdrawn from the body and concentrated within, it is said to be in a state of trance. It has awakened from deep sleep. It is at this stage that man is able to know his reality as a soul.

Once Buddha was sitting under a tree in a contemplative mood. Someone passing by asked him, ‘Who are you? Are you a god, a genie, an avatar, or what?’ Buddha replied, ‘I am awake’.

Socrates would say, ‘Know thyself’. It is in this profound sense that he appealed to his students. It is in this sense alone that knowledge of the self leads to knowledge of God.

Jesus says:

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.  (John 3:6)

The process of withdrawal of the soul from its attachment to worldly desires and material stuff has been called ‘dying while living’. Says Bulleh Shah:

نِت  نِت  مراں  تے  نِت  نِت  جیواں
میرا  نِت  نِت  کُوچ  مقام

I die daily and daily I come to life,
I am daily in transit.

In the Bible this concept is called ‘to be born again’:

I say unto thee except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.  (John 3:3)

To rise above the physical body and enter spiritual realms within is what is implied by the expression ‘to be born again’.

Sufi saints have often used the expressions fana fillah and fana fil sheikh. Literally, the word fana means annihilation or passing away- merging into God or the Master. When the soul leaves the company of the body, mind and senses it merges into the Master or the Lord. With the disappearance of the ego from within the individual merges into the Universal and becomes one with God.

Amir Khusrow writes:
من تو شدم ، تو من شدی ، من تن شدم ، تو جاں شدی
تا کس نگوید بعد ازیں ، من دیگرم ، تو دیگری

I have become You, and You me,
I am the body, You soul;
So that no one can say hereafter,
That You and me are apart from each other

Jesus expressed this concept as follows:

I will come again and receive you unto myself. That where I am, there ye may be also.  (John 14:3)

The state of annihilation is not merely a passive belief in one or more propositions of a certain kind; it is living assurance that comes from a rare experience. Strong personalities alone are capable of rising to this experience and the higher fatalism implied in it.

In the state of trance the Sufi is in intimate association with the Eternal. However, this does not mean a break with serial time. This unitive experience remains related to common experience. The state fades away but leaves a deep sense of authority after it has passed away. It means self-affirmation for the Sufi, not self-negation, and finds expression in such phrases:

I am the Creative Truth………Mansur Hallaj
I am Time…….Prophet Muhammad
I am the speaking Quran…….Imam Ali
Glory to me……..Bayazid Bistami

Posted in Classic Poetry, Classic Teaching, Navid Zaidi, Original Essays | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Sufi Snaps: Fleeting (A photo and a story)

Posted on June 9, 2013 by sufiways

by Ali Hammad

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A TALE OF  FLEETING MOMENTS

The eatery was bustling with customers of many nationalities. The wait to a table that morning was five minutes. I got a corner table for two at the back. I took the seat facing the hall and kept the other for my friend. He had said he would meet me there when done with his morning rounds.

The redeye from O’Hare to Heathrow had sapped me. “Just some Earl Grey tea for now, please. I’ll order breakfast when my friend arrives,” I said to the waitress, loudly, to be heard over the ambient noise, and leaned back in the chair.

I nodded off for no more than a fleeting second. As soon as my head fell back, I jerked awake.

The scene had changed. The café had fallen silent. There were no customers or attendants. All tables were now vacant. The only other occupant of the room was a gray-haired woman sitting catercorner from me, by the floor-to-ceiling glass window. She was bent over a book. Outside, the always-busy London thoroughfare was devoid of all vehicular traffic. I could see some humanoid silhouettes, but they seemed frozen. The scene was also drained of all color: now reminiscent of a daguerreotype.

I pinched my arm, then bit my wrist. It hurt. I was not dreaming. It was real.

I decided to walk over to the woman. As I approached her, some color seeped into the scene, a little red, a little gold—sepia, I’d say. “Ahem,” I cleared my throat, as I got closer to her. She remained oblivious, lost in her book.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Do you know what happened here?”

She lifted her eyes, a transfixing gaze. The room brightened, a little more gold thrown into the tint. “What happened here?” she repeated my question.

“I mean, where did everyone go?” I said.

“There never was anyone here but you and me,” she said.

“There were many people here,” I insisted. “The hall was packed a moment ago and noisy as an oriental bazaar.”

“Perhaps you dozed off, and the people you describe were in your dream.”

“I didn’t dream that. It was real, as real as we are.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

Until then I had only been puzzled. Now I began to panic. Then I thought I saw her smile—a tiny, fleeting smile—lips in steep pink, like a photoshopped image. “Fine, go back to the dream you came from,” I heard her say.

I stumbled back to my table, perplexed and scared. As I sat down, I shut my eyes for a moment to contemplate my next move.

When I opened my eyes, the people were back, along with all the color and the cacophony of a cosmopolis. I looked catercorner from where I was. The lady was gone, but the afterimage of a pink smile lingered where now sat some Eastern Europeans laughing over a joke. Then I saw my friend enter.

I pinched my arm, then bit my wrist. It hurt. I was not dreaming. It was real.

Photo and story by Ali Hammad

Posted in Ali Hammad, Original Fiction, Original Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments