TO
ALL
THAT THAT THAT
ISISIS
THE
LIVING REALITY.
THIS
WORK OF REVELATION IS A RESTATEMENT
OF THE ANCIENT WISDOM AND IS THE INTELLECTUAL
BIRTHRIGHT
OF
ALL
THE
RAINBOW OF THE COVENANT
O
NAMUH
SOW THE SEEDS OF THIS WORK WITHOUT
FEAR OR FAVOUR CREED OR RACE
ARISESTHATSUNSETSTHATSUNSETSTHATSUNARISESTHATSUN
OSIRISTHATSONSETSTHATSONSETSTHATSONOSIRISTHATSON
ADDED TO ALL MINUS NONE SHARED
BY EVERYTHING MULTIPLIED IN ABUNDANCE
THE
GREAT WORK
BORN
OUT THE IN OF THE
GREAT MOTHER WOMB
THAT THAT THAT
ISISIS
PRESENTED
UPON THE NETERS NET FROM
WHERE
IT IS
TRANSMITTING
WITHIN THE ETERNAL MOMENT ITS CONSTANT LIGHT LOVING ENERGIES
OF THAT BORN AGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS OF THAT
ONE
GREAT
TRUTH
THE
REVELATION MAGNIFICAT
OF
LIVING
MIND
MINS MIND MINS
DREAMING
MIND
IMPERFECT THIS WORK IS AS PERFECT AS IT SHOULD BE WITHIN THIS PARTICULAR JUXTOPOSITION
OF
INSTANTS THAT CONSTITUTE THEREIN THE STILLNESS OF REALITIES LIVING FOREVER
|
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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R |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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8 |
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9 |
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8 |
- |
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6 |
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- |
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8 |
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8 |
6 |
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1 |
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5+4 |
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- |
- |
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8 |
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9 |
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8 |
- |
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15 |
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- |
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8 |
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8 |
15 |
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19 |
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9+0 |
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= |
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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R |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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2 |
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9 |
2 |
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- |
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- |
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5 |
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9 |
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4+5 |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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20 |
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18 |
20 |
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- |
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- |
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5 |
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18 |
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1+3+5 |
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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R |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
20 |
8 |
5 |
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2 |
9 |
18 |
20 |
8 |
- |
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15 |
6 |
- |
20 |
8 |
5 |
|
8 |
15 |
18 |
21 |
19 |
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2+2+5 |
|
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= |
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- |
- |
2 |
8 |
5 |
|
2 |
9 |
9 |
2 |
8 |
- |
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6 |
6 |
- |
2 |
8 |
5 |
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8 |
6 |
9 |
3 |
1 |
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9+9 |
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1+8 |
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18 |
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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R |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
|
- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
10 |
1+0 |
|
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- |
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- |
|
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
18 |
1+8 |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
8 |
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- |
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- |
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8 |
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- |
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- |
8 |
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- |
8 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
32 |
3+2 |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
27 |
2+7 |
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- |
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1+1 |
1+8 |
- |
- |
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- |
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- |
- |
- |
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- |
- |
- |
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- |
- |
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3+4 |
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1+8 |
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9+9 |
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3+6 |
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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1+8 |
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B |
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R |
T |
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- |
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- |
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CITIZENS OF THE CITY OF NINE GATES
GREETINGS
CITIZENS OF PLANET EARTH
GREETINGS
CITIZENS OF THE UNIVERSE
GREETINGS
SISTERS AND BROTHERS
OF
THINE AND MINE
SENTIENT
BEINGS
ALL
PEACE LOVE LIGHT LIGHT LOVE PEACE
O
NAMUH
SCATTER THE IMMORTAL SEEDS OF THIS WONDERFULLY CREATIVE TIME WITHOUT FEAR
OR
FAVOUR UPON THE INNER MINDS EYE OF THE ALL AND SUNDRY THAT IS THE
ENERGISED EVERYTHING
OF
LIVING REALITY
DAILY MIRROR
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Veena Minocha
Page
33
"DOORWAY TO HEAVEN"
THIS
IS
"make no mistake, the greatest shift of consciousness
ever.The period between November 8 and 23 is a very special
time, when humanity will be assisted by all the Heavenly Beings of
Light to catapult their consciousness into the fifth-dimensional level.
After the lunar eclipse on November 8, a rare galactic alignment
will build powerful cosmic energies which will gather momentum until
the solar eclipse on November 23rd
THE STAR
OF DAVID
formation in the heavens will be the harbinger
of unprecedented showers of frequencies of divine consciousness. This
will have the effect of opening up a multi-dimensional portal of divine
consciousness into the heart and mind of the
THE
MOTHER FATHER
GOD
PRINCIPLE
THE
COSMIC
I
AM ALL THAT IS
Every man, woman and child will be treated to a
rare glimpse into the remembrance of their own divinity, and the one-ess
of all life. The light of divine consciousness will be shining
forcefully through the mental strata of the Earth, and a portal into
the divine mind of
GOD
will open within the mental bodies of all humanity.
The new solar frequencies of the fifth dimension will thus
become available to all those who choose it!
SOUL TO SOUL
These frequencies are aligned with the ascended
master frequencies, and will hum in tune with the patterns
of perfection in the Causal Body of
GOD
This is, make no mistake, the greatest shift of
consciousness ever attempted by the Heavenly Beings of Light, for
all humans to take advantage of. This gigantic shift of consciousness
was essential to the divine plan of anchoring
THE
LIGHT OF GOD
to the planet, to transform the Earth, as well as
humans, for if this was not done, it would be like trying to change
the image of humanity in a mirror, without changing the human himself
who causes the reflection. Outer-worldly situations only change if
there is corresponding change in the minds and hearts of men.
When every soul on the planet remembers the oneness
of all life, and that if we harm one another, we are in actuality
harming ourselves, then this profound truth will open up the mind-blowing
concepts of the interconnectedness, and the ultimate inter-dependent-ness,
of soul and soul. Can you imagine how people will interact
once the profoundness of this truth pervades their consciousness?
The above article by Veena Minocha Astrologer of The
Hindustan Times
THE
MESSAGE
unless integral to quoted work.
all arithmetical machinations, emphasis,
comment, insertions subterfuge and insinuations
are those of the Zed Aliz Zed as recorded by the
far yonder scribe.
STORM ON THE SUN
HOW THE SUN AFFECTS LIFE
ON EARTH
Joseph Goodavage
1979
Page 5
THE STAR
Chapter 1
"Eliminate the impossible. Whatever
remains, however improbable must be true"
Sherlock Holmes
DAILY MAIL
WEEKEND
Saturday 15th July 2006
Your week ahead
Jonathan Cainer
Page 85 (Number omitted)
TAURUS Apr 21 - May 21: 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave
these words to Sherlock Holmes. You don't, though, have to be a great detective in order to see their relevance in your life this week. Something seemingly far-fetched is taking place. The more you try to understand it, the more confused you become. Surely, something can't really be happening or someone has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Really, though;you had best believe the evidence of your own eyes. What's happening may be very strange but it is very positive.
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong 1993
The God of the Mystics
THE
BOOK OF CREATION
Page 250
"THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY
THE ACCOUNT IS UNASHAMEDLY SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS
OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH HE WERE WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE HAS BEEN ENTIRELY
TRANSFORMED AND THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS NO LONGER CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE
HEBREW ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE
SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED
THE MIND AWAY ROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS"
A
MAZE
IN
ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
THE
MAGICALALPHABET
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1+0 |
1+1 |
1+2 |
1+3 |
1+4 |
1+5 |
1+6 |
1+7 |
1+8 |
1+9 |
2+0 |
2+1 |
2+2 |
2+3 |
2+4 |
2+5 |
2+6 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY
THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE
AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED
THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF
THE
ALPHABET
IS
GIVEN
A
NUMERICAL
VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS
REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS
THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
ME |
- |
- |
- |
- |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
1+0 |
1+1 |
1+2 |
1+3 |
1+4 |
1+5 |
1+6 |
1+7 |
1+8 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
- |
- |
- |
- |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
ME |
- |
- |
- |
- |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
N |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
I |
1+9 |
2+0 |
2+1 |
2+2 |
2+3 |
2+4 |
2+5 |
2+6 |
N |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
E |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
S |
LIGHT AND LIFE
Lars Olof Bjorn 1976
Page 197
"By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium."
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER
ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
G Hancock
1995
Page 287
"What one would look
for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language
that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society
in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future.
Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of
them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost
civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics."
"Of all the other stupendous inventions,'
Galileo once remarked,
what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived
how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though
very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are
in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be
this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty
than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper?
Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3"
WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK FOR THEREFORE
WOULD BE A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE THE KIND OF
LANGUAGE COMPREHENSIBLE
TO ANY TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED SOCIETY IN ANY EPOCH
SUCH LANGUAGES ARE FEW AND
FAR BETWEEN BUT MATHEMATICS IS ONE OF THEM
MATHS MYTHS MYTHS MATHS MATHS MYTHS MYTHS MATHS MATHS MYTHS MYTHS MATHS
NUMBERS OF LANGUAGE LANGUAGE OF NUMBERS
I
THE
NINTH
HIEROGLYPHIC
ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
THE
MAGICALALPHABET
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1+0 |
1+1 |
1+2 |
1+3 |
1+4 |
1+5 |
1+6 |
1+7 |
1+8 |
1+9 |
2+0 |
2+1 |
2+2 |
2+3 |
2+4 |
2+5 |
2+6 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
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M |
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P |
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U |
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X |
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1 |
2 |
3 |
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5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END
Graham Hancock 1995
Chapter 32
Speaking to the Unborn
Page 285
"It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers.
Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.l Indeed the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been 'written' by the same 'author'.
Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to the shocked and demoralized survivors?
White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this / Page 286 / universal figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2 Viracocha, in South America, was said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood; Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops, mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.
Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?
And could the myths be attempts to communicate?
A message in the bottle of time
'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked,
what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3
If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It must be obvious that in such circumstances a written / Page 287 / legacy to the future would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense of it.
What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.
Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall see).
Another 'constant' in our solar system is the language of time: the great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost imperceptible reverse wobble that the sun appears to make along the ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars..."
"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them"
"WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THE
UPSIDE DOWN
OF
THE
DOWNSIDE
UP
ZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZ
987654321999999999123456789 ZXSONIH987654321999999999123456789
HINOSXZ87654321999999999123456789
H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H 8 9 14 15 19 26 26
19 15 14 9 8 H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H
HINOSXZ 7 7 ZXSONIH
H |
I |
N |
O |
S |
X |
Z |
8 |
9 |
14 |
15 |
19 |
24 |
26 |
- |
- |
1+4 |
1+5 |
1+9 |
2+4 |
2+6 |
8 |
9 |
5 |
6 |
1 |
6 |
8 |
H |
I |
N |
O |
S |
X |
Z |
H |
I |
N |
O |
S |
X |
Z |
8 |
9 |
5 |
6 |
1 |
6 |
8 |
H |
I |
N |
O |
S |
X |
Z |
I
THAT ISISIS THAT
AM
I
YOU ARE THAT THAT ARE YOU
Z+A Z+A Z+A A+Z A+Z A+Z
THE
DREAM
OF
THE
RAINBOW COVENANT
AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
ME |
- |
- |
- |
- |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
1+0 |
1+1 |
1+2 |
1+3 |
1+4 |
1+5 |
1+6 |
1+7 |
1+8 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
J |
K |
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
- |
- |
- |
- |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
ME |
- |
- |
- |
- |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
N |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
I |
1+9 |
2+0 |
2+1 |
2+2 |
2+3 |
2+4 |
2+5 |
2+6 |
N |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
E |
S |
T |
U |
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
S |
THE
FAR YONDER SCRIBE
AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE
THE
ZED ALIZ ZED
IN
SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS
NUMBER
9
THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE
Cecil Balmond 1998
Cycles and Patterns
Page 165
Patterns
"The essence of mathematics is to look for patterns.
Our minds seem to be organised to search for relationships and sequences. We look for hidden orders.
These intuitions seem to be more important than the facts themselves, for there is always the thrill at finding something, a pattern, it is a discovery - what was unknown is now revealed. Imagine looking up at the stars and finding the zodiac!
Searching out patterns is a pure delight.
Suddenly the counters fall into place and a connection is found, not necessarily a geometric one, but a relationship between numbers, pictures of the mind, that were not obvious before. There is that excitement of finding order in something that was otherwise hidden.
And there is the knowledge that a huge unseen world lurks behind the facades we see of the numbers themselves."
CATCHING THE LIGHT
Arthur Zajonc
1993
Page 44
ANGELIC LIGHT - HUMAN LIGHT
"HOW YOU HAVE FALLEN FROM HEAVEN, BRIGHT SON OF THE MORNING FELLED TO THE EARTH!"
Isaiah 14:12-15
THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
BOOK
II
THE EARTH CHRONICLES
Zecharia Sitchin 1980
Page166
The Stairway to Heaven
O, how fallen from heaven art thou,
a Morning Star, son of Dawn!
Felled to the ground
is he who the nations enfeebled.
Thou didst say in thine heart
"I will ascend unto the heavens,
above the planets of El I shall raise my throne;
On the Mount of Assembly I shall sit,
on the Crest of Zaphon.
Upon the Raised Platform I shall go up,
a Lofty One I shall be!"
But nay, to the Nether World you shalt go,
down to the depths of a pit
- |
|
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
L |
|
|
1 |
1 |
L |
12 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
21 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
1 |
|
3 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
1 |
|
5 |
5 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
7 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
74 |
38 |
38 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+8 |
|
- |
- |
7+4 |
3+8 |
3+8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+8 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
11 |
11 |
11 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+1 |
|
- |
- |
1+1 |
1+1 |
1+1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
- |
|
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
L |
|
|
1 |
1 |
L |
12 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
21 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
1 |
|
3 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
1 |
|
5 |
5 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
7 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
74 |
38 |
38 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+8 |
|
- |
- |
7+4 |
3+8 |
3+8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+8 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
11 |
11 |
11 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 |
|
|
1+1 |
|
- |
- |
1+1 |
1+1 |
1+1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
L |
|
|
1 |
1 |
L |
12 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
21 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
1 |
|
3 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
1 |
|
5 |
5 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
7 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
74 |
38 |
38 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+8 |
|
- |
- |
7+4 |
3+8 |
3+8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+8 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
11 |
11 |
11 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 |
|
|
1+1 |
|
- |
- |
1+1 |
1+1 |
1+1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
9 |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
L |
|
|
1 |
1 |
L |
12 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
21 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
1 |
|
3 |
3 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
1 |
|
5 |
5 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
7 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
74 |
38 |
38 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+8 |
|
- |
- |
7+4 |
3+8 |
3+8 |
|
|
|
|
1+8 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
11 |
11 |
11 |
|
|
|
|
9 |
|
|
1+1 |
|
- |
- |
1+1 |
1+1 |
1+1 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
LUCIFER |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
|
|
9 |
THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE
Prose And Verse From The Bible
A. G. Prys-Jones 1979
Page 123
HOW ART THOU FALLEN FROM HEAVEN, O LUCIFER, SON OF THE MORNING!
"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
HOLY BIBLE
Scofield Reference
ISAIAH
C 14 V 12
"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
HOLY BIBLE
Scofield Reference
Isaiah
Chapter 14
Page 726
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
HOW ART THOU FALLEN FROM HEAVEN O LUCIFER SON OF THE MORNING
HOW ART THOU CUT DOWN TO THE GROUND WHICH DIDST WEAKEN THE NATIONS
- |
|
- |
- |
|
HOLY BIBLE |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
Scofield References |
- |
|
- |
C |
|
Verse |
|
12 |
|
|
|
|
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
- |
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
46 |
19 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
39 |
12 |
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
64 |
19 |
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
|
50 |
23 |
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
52 |
25 |
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
|
55 |
28 |
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
|
15 |
6 |
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
|
74 |
38 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
48 |
12 |
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
|
21 |
12 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
33 |
15 |
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
|
90 |
45 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
46 |
19 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
39 |
12 |
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
64 |
19 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
44 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
|
56 |
20 |
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
|
35 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
33 |
15 |
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
|
79 |
34 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
|
51 |
33 |
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
|
56 |
20 |
|
|
|
|
|
6 |
|
59 |
23 |
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
|
33 |
15 |
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
|
92 |
29 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
First Total |
|
|
|
|
|
1+0+3 |
|
1+0+3 |
Add to Reduce |
1+2+7+4 |
5+0+9 |
1+0+4 |
|
|
|
|
|
Second Total |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reduce to Deduce |
1+4 |
1+4 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
HOW THOU HAST FALLEN FROM HEAVEN BRIGHT SON OF THE MORNING
FELLED TO THE GROUND WHICH DIDST WEAKEN THE NATIONS
H |
= |
8 |
- |
3 |
HOW |
46 |
19 |
1 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
4 |
THOU |
64 |
19 |
1 |
H |
= |
8 |
- |
4 |
HAST |
48 |
12 |
3 |
F |
= |
6 |
- |
6 |
FALLEN |
50 |
23 |
5 |
F |
= |
6 |
- |
4 |
FROM |
52 |
25 |
7 |
H |
= |
8 |
- |
6 |
HEAVEN |
55 |
28 |
1 |
- |
- |
38 |
|
27 |
Add to Reduce |
|
|
|
- |
- |
11 |
- |
2+7 |
Reduce to Deduce |
3+1+5 |
1+2+6 |
1+8 |
- |
- |
2 |
- |
|
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
B |
= |
2 |
- |
6 |
BRIGHT |
64 |
37 |
1 |
S |
= |
1 |
- |
3 |
SON |
48 |
12 |
3 |
O |
= |
6 |
- |
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
3 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
M |
= |
4 |
- |
7 |
MORNING |
90 |
45 |
9 |
- |
- |
15 |
- |
21 |
First Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
1+5 |
- |
2+1 |
Add to Reduce |
1+6+6 |
1+2+1 |
2+2 |
Q |
- |
6 |
- |
3 |
Second Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
Reduce to Deduce |
1+3 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
5 |
|
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
F |
= |
6 |
- |
6 |
FELLED |
44 |
26 |
8 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
2 |
TO |
35 |
8 |
8 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
G |
= |
7 |
- |
6 |
GROUND |
79 |
34 |
7 |
- |
- |
17 |
- |
17 |
First Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
1+7 |
- |
1+7 |
Add to Reduce |
1+9+1 |
8+3 |
2+9 |
Q |
- |
8 |
- |
8 |
Second Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
Reduce to Deduce |
1+1 |
1+1 |
1+1 |
- |
- |
8 |
5 |
|
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
W |
= |
5 |
- |
5 |
WHICH |
51 |
33 |
6 |
D |
= |
4 |
- |
5 |
DIDST |
56 |
20 |
2 |
W |
= |
5 |
- |
6 |
WEAKEN |
59 |
23 |
5 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
N |
= |
5 |
- |
7 |
NATIONS |
92 |
29 |
2 |
- |
- |
21 |
- |
26 |
First Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
2+1 |
- |
2+6 |
Add to Reduce |
2+9+1 |
1+2+0 |
2+1 |
Q |
- |
3 |
- |
8 |
Second Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
Reduce to Deduce |
1+2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
3 |
5 |
|
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
HOW THOU HAST FALLEN FROM HEAVEN BRIGHT SON OF THE MORNING
FELLED TO THE GROUND WHICH DIDST WEAKEN THE NATIONS
H |
= |
8 |
- |
3 |
HOW |
46 |
19 |
1 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
4 |
THOU |
64 |
19 |
1 |
H |
= |
8 |
- |
4 |
HAST |
48 |
12 |
3 |
F |
= |
6 |
- |
6 |
FALLEN |
50 |
23 |
5 |
F |
= |
6 |
- |
4 |
FROM |
52 |
25 |
7 |
H |
= |
8 |
- |
6 |
HEAVEN |
55 |
28 |
1 |
B |
= |
2 |
- |
6 |
BRIGHT |
64 |
37 |
1 |
S |
= |
1 |
- |
3 |
SON |
48 |
12 |
3 |
O |
= |
6 |
- |
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
3 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
M |
= |
4 |
- |
7 |
MORNING |
90 |
45 |
9 |
F |
= |
6 |
- |
6 |
FELLED |
44 |
26 |
8 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
2 |
TO |
35 |
8 |
8 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
G |
= |
7 |
- |
6 |
GROUND |
79 |
34 |
7 |
W |
= |
5 |
- |
5 |
WHICH |
51 |
33 |
6 |
D |
= |
4 |
- |
5 |
DIDST |
56 |
20 |
2 |
W |
= |
5 |
- |
6 |
WEAKEN |
59 |
23 |
5 |
T |
= |
2 |
- |
3 |
THE |
33 |
15 |
6 |
N |
= |
5 |
- |
7 |
NATIONS |
92 |
29 |
2 |
- |
- |
91 |
- |
91 |
First Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
9+1 |
- |
9+1 |
Add to Reduce |
9+6+3 |
4+5+0 |
9+0 |
Q |
- |
10 |
- |
10 |
Second Total |
|
|
|
- |
- |
1+0 |
- |
1+0 |
Reduce to Deduce |
1+8 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
5 |
1 |
Essence of Number |
|
|
|
HOW THOU HAST FALLEN FROM HEAVEN BRIGHT SON OF THE MORNING
FELLED TO THE GROUND WHICH DIDST WEAKEN THE NATIONS
- |
THE RAINBOW LIGHT |
- |
- |
- |
|
THE |
33 |
15 |
|
|
RAINBOW |
82 |
37 |
|
|
LIGHT |
56 |
29 |
|
15 |
|
171 |
81 |
9 |
1+5 |
|
1+7+1 |
8+1 |
- |
6 |
|
9 |
9 |
9 |
I
I
AM
LOVE DIVINE DIVINE LOVE
9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6
THAT LIGHT THAT
I
AM
THAT LOVE THAT
I
AM
THAT DIVINE LOVE LIGHT THAT
OSIRIS ISIS ORION
15 |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
45 |
4+5 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
9 |
6 |
5 |
- |
6 |
1 |
9 |
- |
9 |
1 |
- |
9 |
1 |
9 |
1 |
+ |
= |
72 |
7+2 |
9 |
NINE- |
9 |
- |
15 |
- |
9 |
15 |
14 |
- |
15 |
19 |
9 |
- |
9 |
19 |
- |
9 |
19 |
9 |
19 |
+ |
= |
180 |
1+8+0 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
15 |
18 |
9 |
15 |
14 |
- |
15 |
19 |
9 |
18 |
9 |
19 |
- |
9 |
19 |
9 |
19 |
+ |
= |
216 |
2+1+6 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
6 |
9 |
9 |
6 |
5 |
- |
6 |
1 |
9 |
9 |
9 |
1 |
- |
9 |
1 |
9 |
1 |
+ |
= |
90 |
9+0 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
1 |
+ |
= |
4 |
|
4 |
FOUR |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
= |
5 |
|
5 |
FIVE- |
5 |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
= |
18 |
1+8 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
+ |
= |
63 |
6+3 |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
90 |
|
27 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
+ |
= |
9+0 |
6+3 |
2+7 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
|
- |
- |
ORIONIS ISIS OSIRIS
7 |
ORIONIS |
99 |
45 |
9 |
4 |
ISIS |
56 |
20 |
2 |
6 |
OSIRIS |
89 |
35 |
8 |
17 |
First Total |
244 |
100 |
19 |
1+7 |
Add to Reduce |
2+4+4 |
1+0+0 |
1+9 |
8 |
Second Total |
10 |
1 |
10 |
- |
Add to Deduce |
1+0 |
- |
1+0 |
8 |
Final Total |
1 |
1 |
1 |
EARTH LIGHTS
SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS
Paul Devereux 1982
Page11
"And Albion knew that
it was the Lord, the Universal Humanity & Albion saw his Form
a Man"
William Blake
JERUSALEM
HUMAN YOU I NAME NAME I YOU HUMAN
I YOU MAN ME ME MAN YOU I
THE GALACTIC CLUB
INTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUTER
SPACE
Ronald N. Bracewell
Page 41
PROJECT CYCLOPS
"I think there is no
question that we live in an inhabited universe that has life all over
it"
George Wald
Page52
"
After this initial detection took place, perhaps their beacon would be turned on. What frequency might they choose for their beacon?
Where Is Their Beacon?
Possibly they would
choose to tune their beacon somewhere in one of our TV bands. Therefore,
we should all be alert for the first message,
which may show up on the TV set of anyone of us. During regular program
hours we might interpret extraterrestrial signals merely as troublesome
interference; conditions would be more favorable for re-ception late
at night after the local stations have gone off the air. Occa-sionally
one may catch glimpses of programs on vacant channels, usu-ally coming
from another station. Such reception of a remote station can occur
due to unusual atmospheric conditions, or as a reflection from transient
trails of meteors plunging through the upper atmosphere. In view of
these exceptional possibilities it would be
helpful to know what to expect in the way of an extraterrestrial message
as distinct from a terrestrial program.
What
Will Their Message Say?
In 1941 Sir James Jeans
reasoned that we could attract the attention of the Martians "if
any such there be" by shining a group of searchlights toward
Mars and emitting flashes to represent a sequence
of numbers such as 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,19,23 . . . , the prime numbers.
Subsequently, other authors have suggested that extraterrestrials
might use this same type of message to contact us. Personally,
I think it would be rather anticlimactic for designers of some high-power
radio transmitter in space to use their program time trying to prove
to me that they could also count! At the least I
would expect a little poetry or art. In any event, let's give them
credit for enough imagination to put on a program that would rivet
our attention.
Another thought regarding the message's content is based on the sup-position
that the beacon will have to remain turned on
for a very long time before any acknowledgment is received. A
dilemma faces our extraterrestrials. A long story runs the risk that
we tune in near the end. A short one repeated again and again bores
us to tears for decades while we try to acknowledge. This dilemma
has led to a further idea: / Page 53 / mes /
sages might be nested within messages-short
items, frequently re- peated, sandwiched between episodes of a longer
story repeated less frequently, all of which is contained within an
even longer communi-cation, and so on. Thus, no matter when we tuned
in there would al-ways be enough variety and recapitulation to keep
our attention."
EARTH LIGHTS
SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS
Paul Devereux 1982
Page 62
"One
of the most dynamic and original of UFO researchers is John Keel.
As far back as the 1960s he was questioning the reality of solid,
physically real UFOs. In an article in Flying Saucer Review 3 he claimed
that 75 per cent of all known sight- ings were of the ill-defined
lights and formless blobs' type. He calls them 'soft' UFOs. His investigations
into the metallic, physically 'hard' UFOs repeatedly failed to convince
him. Hoaxes were uncovered after in-depth inquiry, and psychic effects
frequently came to light in even the 'hardest' of UFO events. He explains
that his ideal UFO landing would have to meet stringent criteria,
such as the object appearing at all times as the same solid form;
being seen first in the sky and then being seen to land conventionally;
any occupants would have to appear as solid, biological creatures,
no matter how bizarre, and: witnesses would have to be demonstrably
free of any patho-logical or mental aberrations.
Keel has become convinced that the UFO enigma is one that has always
existed on Earth. It frequents 'window areas' of the globe, he maintains,
where geological conditions cause electro-magnetic conditions to prevail
that possibly help the phen-omenon to manifest. While I personally
agree with all of this, and subsequent research by others have tended
to confirm these aspects, I must confess to having been unnable to
find any 'hard' evidence published by Keel to demonstrate how he arrived
at these ideas. On the face of it, he seems to have simply come up
with his insight from an intuitive evaluation of data available to
him.
Keel coined the term 'ultra-terrestrial' to describe UFO entities
that he feels are 'elementals', other denizens
of the Earth
sharing it with us on another level and interacting with
us through various geophysical gateways, perhaps influencing or even
con-trolling the way we think and perceive reality. According to Keel,
these entities appear not only as UFO entities but also as the sinister
'Men In Black', the bland-faced swarthy characters who are often reported
as showing up in flap zones-often in curiously new-looking obsolete
cars-questioning or threat-ening investigators and witnesses. Other
researchers have con-sidered these disturbing fellows to be government
agents or / Page 63 / messengers of some
secret organization which rules the world in occult ways. Others feel
that the evidence for the actuality of such Men In Black is questionable,
to put it mildly. But Keel seems convinced that they are, in fact,
parahuman elementals, the devils, faeries and even angels of former
times.
Beings associated with the UFO mystery, Keel writes:
are part of our immediate environment in some unfathomable fashion,
and to a very large extent are primarily concerned with mis- leading
us, misinforming us, and playing games with us . . . They may have
watched other civilizations come and go. They may have sincerely helped
us to preserve the memories of those lost ages and those past mistakes.
Or it may all be rubbish, and we may be
nothing more than pawns with which they play their mischievous' games
In his classic Operation Trojan Horses Keel tells us that some-where
in the vast range of the electromagnetic spectrum '.
. . there lies an omnipotent intelligence. . . able to manipulate
energy. It can, quite literally, manipulate any kind of object into
existence on our plane.'
Along with many other researchers, I feel that Keel's ideas are
nudging us in the right direction. He has begun to direct our attention
towards telling aspects of the phenomenon. However, he still seems
to assume that some 'other' intelligence is involved; he invokes loose
concepts about 'rays', and has continued to find meaning in certain
dark notions of 'conspiracy'. In the final analysis, he never seems
to be really definite about the nature of his 'ultra terrestrials'.
He would doubtless counter that that is part of the whole problem.
Another major UFO researcher is an American-based French scientist
called Jacques Vallee. For many years he has produced
books and papers exemplifying the leading edge of thought on the whole
enigma, but it is in his Passport To Magonia that I feel he has achieved
his most important insight into the UFO enigma to date. In this book
he does not put forward a theory to explain the nature of UFOs-in
fact he goes out of his way to avoid doing so: he simply but very
effectively demonstrates that the basic motifs in modem UFO accounts
parallel those to be found in ancient folklore. Like Keel, and at
about the same time, Vallee pointed out that the faeries and elementals,
devils and visionary personages of former times bear'striking likenesses
to today's UFO entities. Vallee writes:
Page 64
When the underlying
archetypes are extracted from these rumours, the saucer myth is seen
to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic
countries, the observations of scholars of past ages, and the widespread
belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological
descriptions place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts6
There are three ways of interpreting the implications of this crucial
observation made by Vallee: (a) modern UFO patterns match those of
earlier folklore because UFOs and their entities have been visiting
our planet for thousands of years; (b) the patterns match because
today's UFOs and entities are merely repeats of earlier generations'
encounters with Earthbound elemental beings that have subtly changed
their appearance to correspond with current images of what other-worldly
beings should look like; or (c) the archetypal, universal nature of
UFO entities suggest that profound mental processes are somehow at
work in the whole UFO phenomenon. In Passport To Magonia Vallee dodges
the issue.
In the final chapter of his book, Vallee gets himself into some extraordinary
tangles, as if in drawing the parallels between folklore and the UFO
mystery he was left in a limbo of thought. He dismisses the ETH as
'naive', and then asks what the alter- natives are. He lists three
possibilities he patronizingly suggests 'imaginative science fiction
buffs could perhaps look into'. For one of these theories Vallee proposes
in outline what is, in my opinion, the correct way of dealing with
the UFO problem:
There
exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the
physical and the mental, There is a medium in which human dreams can
be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO
events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger
them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the
alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects
appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols.
This is in keeping with an earlier notion by C. G. Jung, as we shall
shortly see..."
THE
KORAN
EVERYMAN I WILL GO WITH
THEE AND BE THY GUIDE
Pages 423/4
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE
COMPASSIONATE THE MERCIFUL
SURA
99
WHEN THE EARTH WITH
HER QUAKING SHALL QUAKE
AND THE EARTH SHALL
CAST FORTH HER BURDENS,
AND MAN SHALL SAY WHAT
AILETH HER?
ON THAT DAY SHALL SHE
TELL OUT HER TIDINGS,
BECAUSE THY LORD SHALL
HAVE INSPIRED HER,
ON THAT DAY SHALL MEN
COME FORWARD IN THRONGS TO BEHOLD THEIR WORKS,
AND WHOSOEVER SHALL
HAVE WROUGHT AN ATOM'S WEIGHT OF GOOD SHALL BEHOLD IT,
AND WHOSEVER SHALL HAVE
WROUGHT AN ATOM'S WEIGHT OF EVIL SHALL BEHOLD IT
- |
99 |
99 |
18 |
9 |
5 |
NAMES |
52 |
16 |
7 |
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
3 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
10 |
99
NAMES OF GOD |
198 |
63 |
27 |
1+0 |
Add to Reduce |
1+9+8 |
6+3 |
2+7 |
1 |
Second Total |
18 |
9 |
9 |
- |
Add to Deduce |
1+8 |
- |
- |
1 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
5 |
BLESS |
57 |
12 |
3 |
3 |
YOU |
61 |
16 |
7 |
11 |
GOD
BLESS YOU |
144 |
45 |
18 |
1+1 |
Add to Reduce |
1+4+4 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
2 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
99 |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
NAMES |
52 |
16 |
7 |
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
3 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
10 |
NAMES
OF GOD |
99 |
45 |
18 |
1+0 |
Add to Reduce |
9+9 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
- |
Second Total |
18 |
- |
- |
- |
Add to Deduce |
1+8 |
- |
- |
1 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
TELL THEM THAT I AM SENT YOU
A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
1993
The God of the Mystics
Page 175
God can
'beget' a son. There is no deity but al-Lah
the Creator of heaven and earth who alone can save man and send him
the spiritual and physical sustenance that he needs.
Only by acknowledging him as as-Samad, 'the
Uncaused Cause of all being' will Muslims address a dimension
of reality beyond time and history and which would take them beyond
the tribal divisions that were tearing their society apart. Muhammad
knew that monotheism was inimical to tribalism: a single deity who
was the focus of all worship would integrate society as well as the
individual.
There is no simplistic notion of God, however. This single deity is
not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand. The phrase
'Allahu Akhbah!' (God
is greater!) that summons Muslims to salaI distinguishes
between God and the rest of reality, as well as between God as he
is in himself(al-Dhat) and anything that we can say about him.
Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible God had wanted to make
himself known. An early tradition (hadith) has God say to Muhammad:
'I was a hidden treasure; I
wanted to be known. Hence, I
created the world so that I
might be known.'25 By contemplating the signs (ayat)
of nature and the verses of the Koran, Muslims could glimpse that
aspect of divinity which has turned towards the world, which the Koran
calls the Face of God (wajh al- Lah). Like the two older religions,
Islam makes it clear
that we only see God in his activities, which adapt his ineffable
being to our limited understanding. The
Koran urges Muslims to cultivate a perpetual consciousness (taqwa)
of the Face or the Self of God that surrounds them on all sides:
'Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of al- Lah.'26
Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees God as the Absolute, who
alone has true existence: 'All that lives on earth or
in the heavens is bound to pass away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer's
Self, full of majesty and glory.'27 In the
Koran, God is given ninety-nine names or
attributes. These emnphasise that he is 'greater',
the source of all positive qualities that we find in the universe.
Thus the world only exists because he is al-Ghani (rich and
infinite); he is the giver of life (a/-Muhyi), the knower of
all things (al-Alim), the producer of speech (al-Ka/imah):
without him, therefore, there would not be life, knowledge or
speech. It is an assertion that only God
has true / Page 176 / existence
and positive value.
Yet frequently the divine names
seem to cancel one another out. Thus God
is aI-Qahtar, he who dominates
and who breaks the back of his enemies, and al-Halim, the utterly
forbearing one; he is aI-Qabid, he who takes away, and al-Basit,
he who gives abundandy; al-Khafid, he who brings low, and
ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names
of God play a central role in Muslim piety: they
are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra. All
this has reminded Muslims that the God
they worship cannot be contained by human
categories and refuses simplistic defmition.
The first of the 'pillars' of Islam
would be the Shahadah,
the Muslim profession of faith: 'I bear witness that there is no god
but al-Lah and that Muhammad is his
Messenger.' This was not simply an affirmation of
God's existence but an acknowledgement
that al-Lah was
the only true reality, the only true form
of existence. He was the only true
reality, beauty or perfection: all the beings that seem to exist and
possess these qualities have them only in so far as they participate
in this essential being. To
make this assertion demands that Muslims integrate their lives by
making God their focus and sole priority. The assertion of the unity
of God was not simply a denial that deities like die banat al-Lah
were worthy of worship. To say that God
was One was not a mere numerical defmition:
it was a call to make that unity the driving factor of one's life
and society. The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated
self. But the divine unity
also required Muslims to recognise the religious
aspirations of others. Because there
was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from
him alone. Belief in the supreme and
sole Reality would be culturally
conditioned and would be expressed by different societies
in different ways but the focus of all true worship must have been
inspired by and directed towards the being whom
the Arabs had always called al-Lah.
One of the divine names of the Koran
is an-Nur, the Light. In these famous verses
of the Koran, God is the source of all
knowledge as well as the means whereby men catch a slimpse of transcendence:
God is the
light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his
light is, as it were (ka), that of a niche containing a lamp;
the lamp is [enclosed] in glass, the glass [shining] like a radiant
star: [a / Page 177 / lamp] lit from a blessed tree-
an olive tree that is neither of the east nor of the west-the oil
whereof [is so bright that it] would well-nigh give light [of itself]
even though fire had not touched it: light upon light.
28
The participle ka is a reminder of the essentially symbolic nature
of the Koranic discourse about God. An-Nur, the Light, is not
God himself, therefore, but refers to the enlightenment which he bestows
on a particular revelation [the lamp] which shines in the heart of
an individual [the niche]. The light itself
cannot be identified wholly with anyone of its bearers but is common
to them all. As Muslim commentators
pointed out from the very earliest days, light
is a particularly good symbol for the divine Reality, which transcends
time and space. The image of the olive tree in these
verses has been interpreted as an allusion to the continuity of revelation,
which springs from one 'root' and branches into a multifarious variety
of religious experience that cannot be identified with or confined
by anyone particular tradition or locality: it is neither of the East
nor the West.
When the Christian Waraqa ibn Nawfal had acknowledged Muhammad as
a true prophet, neither he nor Muhammad expected him to convert to
Islam. Muhammad never asked Jews or
Christians to convert to his religion of al-Lah unless they particularly
wished to do so, because they had received authentic revelations of
their own. The Koran did not see revelation as cancelling out the
messages and insights of previous prophets but instead it stressed
the continuity of the religious experience of mankind.
It is important to stress this
point because tolerance is not
a virtue that many Western people today would feel inclined to attribute
to Islam. Yet from the start, Muslims saw revelation in less exclusive
terms than either Jews or Christians. The intolerance that many people
condemn in Islam today does not always spring from a rival vision
of God but from quite another source:29 Muslims
are intolerant of injustice, whether this is com-mitted by rulers
of their own -like Shah
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran
- or by the powerful Western countries. The
Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete
but shows each new prophet as confirming and continuing the insights
of his predecessors. The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers
to / Page 178 / every
people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition
says that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number
suggesting infinitude. Thus the Koran repeatedly points out that it
is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims
must emphasise their kinship with the older religions:
Do not argue with the followers of earlier
revelation otherwise than in the most kindly manner -
unless it be such of them as are set
on evil doing - and say: 'We believe in that
which has been bestowed upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed
upon you: for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is
unto him that we [all] surrender ourselves.'30
The Koran naturally singles out apostles who were familiar to the
Arabs -like Abraham, Noah, Moses and Jesus
who were the prophets of the Jews and Christians. It
also mentions Hud and Salih, who had been sent to the ancient Arab
peoples of Midian and Thamood. Today Muslims insist that if Muhammad
had known about Hindus and Buddhists, he would have included their
religious sages: after his death they were allowed full religious
liberty in the Islamic empirc, like the Jews and Christians. On the
same principle, Muslims argue, the Koran would also have honoured
the shamans and holy men of the American Indians or the Australian
Aborigines."
Page175
In the Koran, God is
given ninety-nine names or
attributes.
Page 176
"The Names of God"
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE COMPASSIONATE THE MERCIFUL
- |
99 |
99 |
18 |
9 |
5 |
NAMES |
52 |
16 |
7 |
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
3 |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
10 |
99
NAMES OF GOD |
198 |
63 |
27 |
1+0 |
Add to Reduce |
1+9+8 |
6+3 |
2+7 |
1 |
First Total |
18 |
9 |
9 |
- |
Reduce to Deduce |
1+8 |
- |
- |
|
Final Total |
|
|
|
- |
GOD BLESS YOU |
- |
- |
- |
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
8 |
5 |
BLESS |
57 |
12 |
3 |
3 |
YOU |
61 |
16 |
7 |
11 |
BLESS YOU GOD |
144 |
45 |
18 |
1+1 |
Add to Reduce |
1+4+4 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
2 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
99 |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
NAMES |
52 |
16 |
|
2 |
OF |
21 |
12 |
|
3 |
GOD |
26 |
17 |
|
10 |
NAMES
OF GOD |
99 |
45 |
18 |
1+0 |
Add to Reduce |
9+9 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
1 |
First Total |
18 |
9 |
9 |
- |
Reduce to Deduce |
1+8 |
- |
- |
1 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
5 |
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6 |
|
- |
|
6 |
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1+8 |
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|
- |
- |
14 |
|
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15 |
|
- |
|
15 |
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|
6+3 |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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- |
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2+7 |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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- |
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3+6 |
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- |
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- |
- |
|
- |
- |
14 |
1 |
13 |
5 |
19 |
|
15 |
6 |
- |
7 |
15 |
4 |
|
|
|
9+9 |
|
|
1+8 |
|
|
|
- |
- |
5 |
1 |
4 |
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
- |
7 |
6 |
4 |
|
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|
4+5 |
|
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10 |
|
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
|
= |
8 |
= |
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|
- |
|
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|
occurs |
x |
|
= |
10 |
1+0 |
|
|
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|
- |
|
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|
occurs |
x |
|
= |
18 |
1+8 |
|
|
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|
- |
|
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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2+2 |
1+0 |
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- |
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- |
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2+3 |
|
|
1+0 |
|
4+5 |
|
2+7 |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
8 |
|
- |
8 |
6 |
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- |
5 |
9 |
5 |
|
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|
4+1 |
|
|
= |
|
|
|
- |
- |
|
8 |
|
- |
8 |
15 |
|
|
- |
5 |
9 |
5 |
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|
6+8 |
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|
1+4 |
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- |
11 |
|
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
|
- |
- |
2 |
|
5 |
- |
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3 |
7 |
- |
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5 |
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|
2+2 |
|
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= |
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- |
- |
20 |
|
5 |
- |
|
|
12 |
25 |
- |
|
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5 |
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|
6+7 |
|
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1+3 |
|
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-- |
|
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
|
- |
- |
20 |
8 |
5 |
- |
8 |
15 |
12 |
25 |
- |
14 |
9 |
14 |
5 |
|
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|
1+3+5 |
|
|
= |
|
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|
- |
- |
2 |
8 |
5 |
- |
8 |
6 |
3 |
7 |
- |
5 |
9 |
5 |
5 |
|
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|
6+3 |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
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1 |
- |
- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
|
- |
|
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
3 |
= |
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4 |
- |
- |
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- |
|
- |
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5 |
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occurs |
x |
|
= |
20 |
2+0 |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
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|
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occurs |
x |
|
= |
6 |
= |
|
- |
|
- |
|
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occurs |
x |
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= |
7 |
= |
|
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
16 |
1+6 |
|
- |
|
- |
|
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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1+1 |
- |
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|
- |
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- |
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|
4+0 |
|
|
1+1 |
|
6+3 |
|
3+6 |
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- |
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- |
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|
THE GLORIOUS QUR'AN
IN THE NAME OF ALLAH THE BENEFICENT THE MERCIFUL
SURA
I
PRAISE BE TO GOD LORD OF THE WORLDS!
THE COMPASSIONATE, THE MERCIFUL!
KING ON THE DAY OF RECKONING!
THEE ONLY DO WE WORSHIP, AND TO THEE DO WE CRY FOR HELP.
GUIDE THOU US ON THE STRAIGHT PATH,
THE PATH OF THOSE TO WHOM THOU HAST BEEN GRACIOUS;- WITH
WHOM THOU ART NOT ANGRY, AND WHO GO NOT ASTRAY.
II
THE COW
99
VERILY WE HAVE REVEALED UNTO THEE CLEAR
TOKENS AND ONLY MISCREANTS WILL DISBELIEVE
IN
THEM
|
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- |
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E |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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5 |
9 |
5 |
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- |
5 |
9 |
5 |
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5 |
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6 |
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- |
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6 |
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6+4 |
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1+0 |
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- |
- |
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8 |
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14 |
9 |
14 |
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- |
14 |
9 |
14 |
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14 |
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15 |
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- |
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15 |
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1+4+5 |
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1+0 |
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- |
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E |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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5 |
2 |
7 |
- |
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5 |
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5 |
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- |
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5+3 |
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- |
- |
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5 |
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5 |
20 |
25 |
- |
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5 |
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5 |
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- |
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1+1+6 |
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- |
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E |
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- |
- |
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- |
- |
20 |
8 |
5 |
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14 |
9 |
14 |
5 |
20 |
25 |
- |
14 |
9 |
14 |
5 |
|
14 |
1 |
13 |
5 |
19 |
|
15 |
6 |
- |
7 |
15 |
4 |
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2+6+1 |
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- |
- |
2 |
8 |
5 |
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5 |
9 |
5 |
5 |
2 |
7 |
- |
5 |
9 |
5 |
5 |
|
5 |
1 |
4 |
5 |
1 |
|
6 |
6 |
- |
7 |
6 |
4 |
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1+1+7 |
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23 |
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- |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
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= |
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= |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
8 |
= |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
45 |
4+5 |
|
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
18 |
1+8 |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
8 |
|
- |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
8 |
= |
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- |
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- |
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A HISTORY
OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
1993
The God of the Mystics
Page 242
7
The
God of the Mystics
"Judaism, Christianity
and - to a lesser extent - Islam
have all developed the idea of a personal God, so we tend to think
that this ideal represents religion at its best. The personal God
has helped monotheists to value the sacred and inalienable rights
of the individual and to cultivate an appreciation of human personality.
The Judaeo- Christian tradition has thus helped the West to acquire
the liberal humanism it values so highly. These values were originally
enshrined in a personal God who does everything that a human being
does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys
as we do. Yahweh began
as a highly personalised deity with passionate human likes and dislikes.
Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not
our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower
above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious
insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism
has been an important and - for many - an indispensible stage of religious
and moral development. The prophets of Israel
attributed their own emotions and passions to God; Buddhists and Hindus
had to include a personal devotion to avatars-
of the supreme reality.
Christianity made a human person the centre of the religious
life in a way that was unique in the history of religion: it took
the personalism inherent in Judaism to an extreme. It may be that
without some degree of this kind of identification and empathy, religion
cannot take root.
Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere
idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears
and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what
/ Page 243 / we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling
us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe
or even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile
belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things
that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person,
God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of
half the human race is sacralised at the expense of the female and
can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores.
A personal God can be dangerous,
therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, 'he' can
encourage us to remain complacently within them; 'he' can make us
as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as 'he' seems to be.
Instead of inspiring the compassion
that should characterise all advanced religion, 'he'
can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalise. It seems, therefore,
that the idea of a personal God can
only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions
all seem to have recognised this danger and have sought to transcend
the personal conception of supreme reality.
It is possible to read the Jewish scriptures as the story of the refinement
and, later, of the abandoment of the tribal and personalised Yahweh
who became YHWH. Christianity,
arguably the most per-sonalised religion of the three monotheistic
faiths, tried to qualify the cult of God incarnate by introducing
the doctrine of the transpersonal Trinity. Muslims very soon had problems
with those passages in the Koran which implied that God 'sees', 'hears'
and 'judges' like human beings. All three of the monotheistic religions
developed a mystical tradition, which made their God transcend the
personal category and become more similar to the impersonal realities
of nirvana and Brahman-Atman.
Only a few people are capable of true mysticism, but in all three
faiths (with the exception of Western Christianity) it was the God
experienced by the mystics which eventually became normative among
the faithful, until relatively recently.
Historical monotheism was not originally mystical. We have noted the
difference between the experience of a contemplative such as the Buddha
and the prophets. Judaism, Christianity
and Islam are all essentially active faiths, devoted to ensuring that
God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The
central motif of these prophetic religions is / Page 244 / confrontation
or a personal meeting between God and humanity. This
God is experienced as an imperative to action; he calls us to himself;
gives us the choice of rejecting or accepting his love and concern.
This God relates to human beings by means of a dialogue rather than
silent contemplation. He utters a Word, which becomes the chief focus
of devotion and which has to be painfully incarnated in the flawed
and tragic conditions of earthly life. In Christianity,
the most personalised of the three, the relationship with God is characterised
by love. But the point of love is that the ego has, in some sense,
to be annihilated. In either dialogue or love, egotism is a perpetual
possibility. Language itself can be a limiting faculty since it embeds
us in the concepts of our mundane experience.
The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in
history :md in current political events rather than in the primordial,
sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however,
mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience.
There is a linguistic connection between the three words 'myth', 'mysticism'
and 'mystery'. All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close
the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an
experience of darkness and silence.' They are not popular words in
the West today. The word 'myth', for example, is often used as a synonym
for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is somedting that is not true.
A politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their
activities by saying that they are 'myths' and scholars will refer
to mistaken views of the past as 'mythical'. Since the Enlightenment,
a 'mystery' has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up.
It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States,
a detective story is called a 'mystery' and it is of the essence of
this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see
that even religious people came to regard 'mystery' as a bad word
during the Enlightenment. Similarly 'mysticism' is frequently associated
with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never
been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in
other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence
and discipline that is essential to this type of spirituality.
Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning. Since the 1960s
/ Page 245 / Western people have been discovering the benefits of
certain types of Yoga and religions such as Buddhism, which have the
advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism, have enjoyed
a great flowering in Europe and the United States. The work of the
late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent
vogue. The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be
seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting
similarities between the two disciplines. Mythology has often been
an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche and both Freud
and Jung turned instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek
story of Oedipus, to explain their new science. It may be that people
in the West are feeling the need for an alternative to a purely scientific
view of the world.
Mystical religion is more immediate and tends to be more help in time
of trouble than a predominantly cerebral faith. The disciplines of
mysticism help the adept to return to the One, the primordial beginning,
and to cultivate a constant sense of presence. Yet the early Jewish
mysticism that developed during the second and third centuries, which
was very difficult for Jews, seemed to emphasise the gulf between
God and man. Jews wanted to turn away from a world in which they were
persecuted and marginalised to a more powerful divine realm. They
imagined God as a mighty king who could only be approached in a perilous
journey through the seven heavens. Instead of expressing
themselves in the simple direct style of the Rabbis, the mystics used
sonorous, grandiloquent language. The Rabbis hated this spirituality
and the mystics were anxious not to antagonise them. Yet this 'Throne
Mysticism', as it was called, must have fulfilled an important need
since it continued to flourish alongside the great rabbinic academies
until it was finally incorporated into Kabbalah, the new Jewish mysticism,
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The classic texts of
Throne Mysticism, which were edited in Babylon in the fifth and sixth
centuries, suggest that the mystics, who were reticent about their
experiences, felt a strong affinity with rabbinic tradition, since
they make such great tannaim as Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Ishmael
and Rabbi Yohannan the heroes of this spirituality. They revealed
a new extremity in the Jewish spirit, as they blazed a new trail to
God on behalf of their people. / Page 246 / The Rabbis had had some
remarkable religious experiences, as we have seen. On the occasion
when the Holy Spirit
descended upon Rabbi Yohannan and his disciples in the form of fire
from heaven, they had apparently been discussing the meaning of Ezekiel's
strange vision of God's chariot. The chariot and the mysterious figure
that Ezekiel had glimpsed sitting upon its throne seem to have been
the subject of early esoteric speculation. The Study of the Chariot
(Ma'aseh Merkavah) was often linked to speculation about
the meaning of the creation story (Ma'aseh Bereshit). The earliest
account we have of the mystical ascent to God's throne in the highest
heavens emphasised the immense perils of this spiritual journey:
Our Rabbis taught:
Four entered an orchard and these are they: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher
and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them: 'When you reach the stones
of pure marble, do not say "Water! water!" For it is
said: "He that speaketh falsehood shall not be established before
mine eyes" , Ben- Azzai gazed and died. Of him, Scripture says:
'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.' Ben
Zoma gazed and was stricken. Of him Scripture says:
'Hast thou found honey? Eat as much as is sufficient for thee, lest
thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.' Aher cut the roots [that
is,
became a heretic]. Rabbi Akiva departed in peace.'
Only Rabbi Akiva
was mature enough to survive the mystical way unscathed. A
journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks because
we may not be able to endure what we find there. That is
why all religions have insisted that the mystical journey can only
be undertaken under the guidance of an expert, who can monitor the
experience, guide the novice past the perilous places and make sure
that he is not exceeding his strength, like poor Ben Azzai who died
and Ben Zoma, who went mad. All mystics stress the need for intelligence
and mental stability. Zen
masters say that it is useless for a neurotic person to seek a cure
in meditation for that will only make him sicker. The strange and
outlandish behaviour of some European Catholic saints who were revered
as mystics must be regarded as aberrations. This cryptic story of
the Talmudic sages shows that Jews had been aware of the dangers from
the very beginning: later, they would not let / Page 247 / young people
become initiated into the disciplines of Kabbalah until they were
fully mature. A mystic also had to be married, to ensure that he was
in good sexual health.
The mystic had to journey to the Throne of God through the mythological
realm of the seven heavens. Yet
this was only an imaginary flight. It was never taken literally but
always seen as a symbolic ascent through the mysterious regions of
the mind. Rabbi Akiva's strange warning about the 'stones of pure
marble' may refer to the password that the mystic had to utter at
various crucial points in his imaginary journey. These images were
visualised as part of an elaborate discipline. Today we know that
the unconscious is a teeming mass of imagery that surfaces in dreams,
in hallucinations and in aberrant psychic or neurological conditions
such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Jewish mystics did not imagine
that they were 'really' flying through the sky or entering God's palace
but were marshalling the religious images that filled their minds
in a controlled and ordered way. This demanded great skill and a certain
disposition and training. It required
the same kind of concentration as the disciplines of Zen or Yoga,
which also help the adept to find his way through the labyrinthine
paths of the psyche. The Babylonian sage Hai Gaon
(939-1038) explained the story of the four sages by means of contemporary
mystical practice. The 'orchard' refers
to the mystical ascent of the soul to the 'Heavenly Halls' (hekhalot)
of God's palace. A man who wishes to make this imaginary, interior
journey must be 'worthy' and 'blessed with certain qualities' if he
wishes 'to gaze at the heavenly chariot and the halls of the angels
on high'. It will not happen spontaneously. He has to perform certain
exercises that are similar to those practised by Yogis and contemplatives
all the world over:
He must fast for a specified number of days, he must place
his head between his knees whispering softly to himself the while
certain
praises of God with his face towards the ground. As a
result he will gaze in the innermost recesses of his heart and it
will seem as if he saw the seven halls with his own eyes, moving from
hall to hall to observe that which is therein to be found.3
Although the earliest texts of this Throne Mysticism only date / Page
248 / back to the second or third
centuries, this kind of contemplation was probably older. Thus St
Paul refers to a friend 'who belonged to the Messiah'
who had been caught up to the third heaven some fourteen years earlier.
Paul was not sure how to interpret this vision but believed that the
man 'was caught up into paradise and heard things which must not and
cannot be put into human language'.4
The visions are not ends in themselves but means to an ineffable religious
experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned
by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary
will see visions of the seven heavens
because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular
symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas
and bodhisattvas; Christians visualise the Virgin
Mary. It is a mistake
for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or
as anything more than a symbol of transcendence. Since
hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and
mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that
emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.
One of the strangest and most controversial of these early Jewish
visions is found in the Shiur Qomah
(The Measurement of the Height), a
fifth-century text which describes the figure that Ezekiel
had seen on God's throne.
The Shiur Qomah calls this being Yozrenu, the Creator.
Its peculiar description of this vision of God is probably based on
a passage from the Song of Songs,
which was Rabbi Akiva's favourite biblical text. The
Bride describes her Lover:
My
beloved is fresh and ruddy,
to be known among ten thousand.
His head is golden, purest gold,
his locks are palm fronds
and black as the raven.
His eyes are doves
at a pool of water,
bathed in milk,
at rest on a pool;
his cheeks are beds of spices,
banks sweetly scented.
His lips are lilies, / distilling
pure myrrh,
His hands are golden,
rounded,
set with jewels of Tarshish.
His belly a block of ivory
covered with sapphires.
His legs are alabaster columns.5
Page 249 / Some saw this as a description of God: to the consternation
of generations of Jews, the Shiur Qomah proceeded to measure
each one of God's limbs listed here. In this strange text, the measurements
of God are baffling. The mind cannot cope. The 'parasang'
- the basic unit - is equivalent to 180
billion 'fmgers' and each finger' stretches from one end of the earth
to the other. These massive dimensions boggle the mind, which gives
up trying to follow them or even to conceive a figure of such size.
That is the point. The Shiur is trying to tell us that it
is impossible to measure God or contain him in human terms. The mere
attempt to do so demonstrates the impossibility of the project and
gives us a new experience of God's transcendence. Not surprisingly
many Jews have found this odd attempt to measure the wholly spiritual
God blasphemous. That is why an esoteric text such as the Shiur
was kept hidden from the unwary. Seen in context, the Shiur
Qomah would give to those adepts who were prepared to approach
it in the right way, under the guidance of their spiritual director,
a new insight into the transcendence of a God which exceeds all human
categories. It is certainly not meant to be taken literally; it certainly
conveys no secret information. It is a deliberate evocation of a mood
that created a sense of wonder and awe.
The Shiur introduces us to two essential ingredients in the
mystical portrait of God, which are common in all three faiths. First,
it is essentially imaginative; secondly, it is ineffable. The figure
described in the Shiur is the image of God whom the mystics
see sitting enthroned at the end of their ascent. There is absolutely
nothing tender, long or personal about this God; indeed his holiness
seems alienating. When they see him, however, the mystical heroes
burst into songs which give very little information about God but
which leave an immense impression:
Page 250
A quality of holiness, a quality of power,
a fearful quality, a dreaded quality, a quality of awe, a quality
of dismay, a quality of terror -
Such is the quality of the garment of the Creator, Adonai, God of
Israel, who, crowned, comes to the thone of his glory;
His garment is engraved inside and outside and entirely covered with
YHWH,YHWH.
No eyes are able to behold it, neither the eyes of flesh and blood,
nor the eyes of his servants.6
If we cannot imagine what Yahweh's cloak is like, how can we think
to behold God himself?
Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the
fifth-century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is
no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account
is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means
of language as though he were writing a book. But
language has been entirely transformed
and the message of creation is
no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew
alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with
the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the
mystic weaned his mind away from
the normal connotations of words. The purpose was to bypass the intellect
and remind Jews that no words or concepts could represent the reality
to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience of pushing language
to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic signficance, created
a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics did not want a
straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming
holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.
Throne Mysticism was not unique. The
Prophet Muhammad is said to have had a very similar experience when
he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse.
On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a crowd of
other prophets who confirmed Muhammad in his own prophetic mission.
Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent up a ladder
(miraj) through the seven heavens, each one of which was presided
over by a prophet. Finally he reached the divine sphere.
The early sources / Page
251/ reverently keep silent about the final
vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to refer.
-
And indeed he saw him a second time.
by the lote-tree of the furthest limit, near unto the garden of promise,
With the lote-tree veiled In a veil of nameless splendour . . . .
,
[And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did
he see some of the most profound of his Sustainer's symbols.7
Muhammad did not see God himself but
only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree
marks the limit of rational thought. There is no way in which the
vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language.
The ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human
spirit, which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning.
The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent
to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language
of Plotinus:
Our minds were lifted up by an ardent
affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond
all corporate objects
and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the
earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue
and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds.8
Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain
of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens.
This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God 'out there'
but a mental ascent to a reality within. This rapturous flight seenu
something given, from without, when he says 'our minds were lifted
up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but
there is a deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal being'.
Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences
of Shamans 'from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego', as Joseph Campbell
puts it.9
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been
left far behind. The experience of God that
is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language
no longer applies. The Jewish
mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his
cloak. / Page 252 / his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that
shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes.
Muslims who specu-lated about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the
paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did
not see the divine presence.10 Once
the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he
reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take
him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about
the climax of their flight, stressing its transcend-ence of space,
time and ordinary knowledge. They 'talked and panted' for God, and
'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration
of heart'. " Then they had to return to normal speech, where
a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:
Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult
of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and
air are quiescent, if the
heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making
no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself,
if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all
language and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone could
hear then this is what all of them would be saying, 'We did not make
ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5)
. . . That is how it was when at that moment
we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the
eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things.12
This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so
to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the normal methods of naturalistic
communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through
nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they, had 'touched'
the Reality which lay beyond all these things.13
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent'
seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret
it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had
this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the
climactic insight a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it
was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation
of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings
who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The
mystical / Page 253 / experience of God has certain characteristics
that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective
experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of
an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making
part of the mind - often called the imagination - rather than through
the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that
the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical
or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come
upon them unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were
sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St Paul
as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), who was an acknowledged
master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff,
disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had
a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud,
fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of
the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable
darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced
by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God
was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was
difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about
him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing
at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behaviour
on the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only
is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible
that we cannot fully know anything about him.". Frequently Gregory
dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy
and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments
after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God's sweetness, the soul
has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element:
It cannot fix its
mind's eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself,
because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile
pants and struggles and endeavours to go above itself but sinks back,
overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.'s15"
SOUL
SO YOU LIVE SO YOU LOVE LOVE
YOU SO LIVE YOU SO
Page 254
"God could only be reached
after 'a great effort of the mind', which had to wrestle with him
as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with
guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him,
'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for
God, it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'.16
Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth
century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain. , In the
East, the Christian experience of God was characterised by light rather
than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which
is also found world-wide. This did not depend on imagery and vision
but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys
the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions
of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on
the Song of Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes
an obstacle in the quest to those who search.' The
aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all
images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he
would acquire 'a certain sense of presence' that was indefinable and
certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with
another person.17 This attitude was called hesychia,
'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since words, ideas and images
can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the
mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration,
so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope
to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive.
How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The
Greeks loved that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned
to the old distinction between God's essence (ousia) and his
'energies' (energeia,) or activities in the world, which enabled
us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know
God as he is in himself, it was the 'energies' not the 'essence' that
we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the 'rays' of
divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the
divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct
from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable.
As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies that we know our God;
we do not assent that we come near to / Page 255 / the
essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence remains
unapproachable."s In the Old Testament, this divine 'energy'
had been called God's 'glory' (kavod). In the New Testament,
it had shone forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor, when his
humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays. Now they penetrated
the whole created universe and deified those who had been saved. As
the word 'energeia," implied, this was an active and dynamic
conception of God. Where the West would see God making himself known
by means of his eternal atributes - his goodness, justice, love and
omnipotence - the Greeks saw God making himself accessible in a ceaseless
activity in which he was somehow present.
When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in
some sense communing with God directly, even though the unknow-able
reality itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast
Evagrius Pontus (d.399) insisted that the 'knowledge' that
we had of God in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or
images but was an immediate experience of the divine which transcended
these. It was important, therefore, for hesychasts to strip
their souls naked: 'When you are praying,' he told his monks, 'do
not shape within yourself any image of the deity and do not let your
mind be shaped by the impress of any form.' Instead, they should 'approach
the Immaterial in an immaterial manner'.19 Evagrius was
proposing a sort of Christian Yoga. This was not a process of reflection;
indeed, 'prayer means the shedding of thought'.20
It was rather an intuitive apprehension of
God. It will result in a sense of the unity of all things, a freedom
from distraction and multiplicity, and the loss of ego - an experience
that is
clearly akin to that produced by contemplatives in non-theistic religions
like Buddhism. By systematically weaning their minds away from their
'passions' - such as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them
to the ego - hesychasts would transcend themselves and become
deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured by the divine
'energies'.
Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this
deification was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced
consciously here below. He taught a method of concen-tration that
involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray:
Page 256
"Jesus Christ, Son of God'; they
should exhale to the words: 'have mercy upon us'. Later hesychasts
refined this exercise: contemplates should sit with head and shoulders
bowed, looking towards their heart or navel. They should breathe ever
more slowly in order to direct their attention inwards, to certain
psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that
must be used carefully; it could only be safely practised under an
expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast
would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one
side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and they
would feel totally one with their prayer. Greek Christians had discovered
for themselves techniques that had been practised for centuries in
the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity,
whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer
should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had
insisted: 'The whole man should
become God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man,
becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole
God, soul and body, by grace.'21
The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and
clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be
divine. As we have seen, the Greeks
saw this 'deification' as an enlightenment that was natural to man.
They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor,
just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had
attained the fullest realisation of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration
is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an
'epiphany', a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren,
the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were
an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply
disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of
the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and
Calvary.
Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but
other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience
in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly
representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus
or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to re-present
anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable
/ Page 257 / mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual
form to inspire the non-mystics. As the British historian Peter Brown
explains, 'Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision
validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal
point of the collective imagination. . . ensured that by the sixth
century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in
dreams and in each person's imagination, in which it was commonly
portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realised dream.'22
Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information,
ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria) which
provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.
They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however,
that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a passionate
doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask
what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was
impossible to depict his divinity but if the artist claimed that he
was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism,
the heretical belief that Jesus's human and divine natures were quite
distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether but icons
were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656-747) of
the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759-826),
of the monastery of Studios near Constantinople. They argued that
the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since
the Incarnation, the material world and the human body had both
been given a divine dimension and an artist could paint this new type
of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ
the Logos was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained
in words or summed up in human concepts but he could be 'described'
by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.
The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the
iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that
God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment
of Denys's apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology
for the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were
'expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the /
Page 258 / ineffability of a mystery
that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech,
they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice-illumined
melody of theology'.23 Instead of
instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them
to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense
of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings,
Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most
ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience
are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In
the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired
to the condition of music; in ninth-century Byzantium, Greek Christians
saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found
that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic
discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the
fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that
depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians.
This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the
small monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as
the 'New Theologian'. This new type of theology
made no attempt to define God. This, Symeon insisted, would
be presump-tuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied
that 'that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible'.24
Instead of arguing rationally about God's nature, the 'new' theology
relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible
to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just an-other being
about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian
was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed
himselfi n the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself
been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience
that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At
first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became
aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into
a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it,
of course; it was beyond 'form, image or representation and could
only be experienced intuitively, through prayer'.25
But this was not an
experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom
announced by Christ in the Gospels was a / Page 259 / union
with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having
to wait until the next life.
For Symeon, therefore, God was
known and unknown, near and far.
Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing 'ineffable
matters by words alone',26 he urged
his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring
reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of
his visions: 'Yes, I am God, the one
who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you
see, and I shall make you God.'27
God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective
and personal enlighten-ment. Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about God
did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past.
The 'new' theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers
of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine
Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the
deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:
O Light that
none can name, for it is altogether nameless.
O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things. . .
How do you mingle yourself with grass?
How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible,
do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?28
It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation,
since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that
fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity,
'God' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed
ideas about God - such as the Trinity and the Incarnation - that separated
them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics
had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.
Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily con-cerned
with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest
companions had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly
developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth
and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside
the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and
the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment
of the austerity of the early ummah. They / Page 260 / attempted
to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing
in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were
supposed to have been favoured by the Prophet. Consequently, they
were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety,
as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:
The mystic call is as a rule the result of
an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not
only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's
own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find
God at any price.29
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great
Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of
Hasan aI-Basri (d.728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered
as one of the fathers of Sufism.
The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions,
seeing it as the one, true faith but Sufis
by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all
rightly-guided religion. Jesus,
for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior
life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to
say: 'There is no god but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger', which
was technically correct but intentionally provoca-tive. Where the
Koran speaks of a God of justice
who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d.801)
spoke of love,
in a way that Christians would have found familiar:
\
Two ways I love Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought.
'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, wis.3O
This is close to her famous prayer:
'O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if
I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but
if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, / Page 261 / withhold not Thine
Everlasting Beauty!'31 The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism.
Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the
Near East but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to
have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when
he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were also inspired
by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their
own experience of God.
They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped
mystics allover the world to achieve an alternative state of conscious-
ness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting
the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of
Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behaviour
which seemed bizarre and unrestrained and such mystics were known
as 'drunken' Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d.874)
who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should
strive to please al Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair,
sacrificing his
own needs
and desires so as to become one with the Beloved.
Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him
beyond this personalised conception of God. As he approached the
core of his identity,
he felt that nothing stood between God and
himself; indeed, everything
that he understood as 'self
seemed to have melted away:
I gazed upon [a-Lah] with the eye of
truth and said to Him: 'Who is this?' He said, 'This is neither I
nor other than I. There is no God
but I.' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood
. . .
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying: 'How
fares it with me with Thee?' He said, 'I am through Thee;
there is no god but Thou.'32
Yet again, this
was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered
to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic
destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable
reality. This state of annihilation ('fana) became
central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the
Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, /
Page 262 / had it not been recognised by so many other Muslims as
an authentic experience of that islam commanded by the Koran.
Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant
spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d.9IO), who mapped out the groundplan
of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al- Bistami's extremism
could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must
be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self.
Union with God should not destroy our natural
capabilities but fulfil them: a Sufi who had ripped away
obscuring egotism to discover the divine
presence at the heart of his own being
would experience greater self-realisation
and self-control. He would become
more fully human. When they experienced 'fana and
baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian
would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a
return to man's primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning
to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning
to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation
was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience;
it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which Freudians
and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this
to a non-theistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under
the expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself,
al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited
with his Creator
and achieve that original sense of God's immediate presence that
he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from
Adam's loins. It would be the end of separation
and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he
or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality and
judge but somehow one with the ground of each person's being:
Now I have known,
O Lord, What lies within my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored.
So in a manner we
United are, and One; / Page
263 /
Yet otherwise disunion
is our estate eternally.
Though from my gaze profound
Deep awe hath hid Thy Face,
In wondrous and ecstatic Grace
I feel Thee touch my inmost ground.33
The
emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid:
by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience
the divine presence in personal integration.
Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would
be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the
advice of a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand
the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he
meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like
those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment.
At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement and
the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation.
Junayd's famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj,
the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became
a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow
of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was
imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus.
In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: 'I
am the Truth!' According to the Gospels,Jesus had made
the same claim, when he had said that he was the
Way, the Truth and the Life. The
Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God's incarnation
in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were
horrified by al- Hallaj's ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq
(the Truth) was one of the
names of God and it was idolatry for any mere mortal
to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing
his sense of a union
with God that was so close that it felt like identity.
As he said in one of his poems:
I am He whom
I love, and He whom I love is I:
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.34
Page 264
It was a daring expression of that
annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd
had called 'fana. Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused
of blasphemy and died a saintly death.
When he was brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails,
he turned to the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the
words: . And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in
zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favours, forgive them,
O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed
to them that which Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done
what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou
hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation.
Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever
Thou willest.35
AI-Hallaj's cry ana al-Haqq: 'I am the Truth!' shows
that the God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly
subjective. Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous
but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading
to the uninitiated. Because there is no reality but al-Lah
- as the Shahadah maintains - all men are essentially divine. The
Koran taught that God had created Adam in his own image so that he
cbuld contemplate himself as in a mirror .36
That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship the first
man. The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that one man
had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would argue.
A mystic who had regained his original vision of God had rediscovered
the divine image within himself, as it had appeared on the day
of creation. The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by
the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely that he
seems to have become incarnate in each one of his servants: 'When
I love him, I become his Ear through which he heard his Eye with which
he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he
walks.' The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that
can exist between the mystic and the religious establishment who have
different notions of God and revelation.For the mystic the revelation
is an event that happens within his own soul, while for more conventional
people like some of the ulema it is an event / Page 265 /
that is firmly fixed in the past. We have seen, however, that during
the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al-
Ghazzali himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory
and had turned towards mysticism. AI-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable
to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic
form of Muslim spirituality. During the twelfth century the Iranian
philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn
al-Arabi linked Islamic Falsafah indissolubly with mysticism and made
the God experienced by the Sufis normative in many parts of the Islamic
empire. Like al-Hallaj, however, Suhrawardi was also put to death
by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain
obscure. He had made it his life's work to link what he called
the original 'Oriental' religion with Islam, thus completing the project
that Ibn Sina had proposed. He claimed that all the sages of the ancient
world had preached a single doctrine.
Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified
with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible);
in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras
and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi. Since Aristotle,
however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and
cerebral philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage
to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via
al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical
and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason.
Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi
but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the
approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God
and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found
in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition.
Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes,
mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people.
Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the
faith of others.
Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master
of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms
of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first
light of dawn that issues from the / Page 266 / East
as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical
location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi's Oriental
faith, therefore, human beings dimly remem-ber their Origin, feeling
uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first
abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to
find their true orientation, to purify the eternal wisdom within
them by means of the imagination.
Suhrawardi's immensely complex system was an attempt to link all
me religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth
must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequendy his philosophy
linked the pre- Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary
system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf
had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology,
Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical
origins of the universe. In his masterwork TheWisdom of Illumination
(Hiqmat al-lshraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems
of physics and natural science but this was only a prelude to the
mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied
with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though
he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had
their place in the perception of total reality. The
true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism.
There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that
was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual
leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose
presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he
remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi's Ishraqi mysticism
is still practised in Iran. It is an esoteric system
not because it is exclusive but because it
requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort
undergone by Ismailis and Sufis.
The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi's system was
dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting
to discover the imaginative core that lay
at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted
that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the
deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism
as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be
educated and informed by the critical intelligence.
IMAGINATION IN MAGIC
INITIATION
I
=
MAM + DAD
ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE
TO DEDUCE
I
IMAM
IMAM = (9 + 13 + 1 + 13) = 36 = IMAM
IMAM = (9 + 4 + 1 + 4) = 18 = IMAM
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- |
- |
9 |
13 |
1 |
13 |
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3+6 |
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= |
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- |
9 |
4 |
1 |
4 |
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1+8 |
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= |
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4 |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
1 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
8 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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1+4 |
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1+8 |
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5 |
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- |
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- |
9 |
1 |
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1+0 |
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= |
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- |
9 |
19 |
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2+8 |
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1+0 |
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5 |
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- |
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3 |
1 |
4 |
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= |
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12 |
1 |
13 |
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2+6 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
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- |
9 |
19 |
12 |
1 |
13 |
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5+4 |
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= |
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- |
9 |
1 |
3 |
1 |
4 |
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1+8 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
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- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
2 |
2 |
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2 |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
4 |
5 |
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5 |
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6 |
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6 |
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7 |
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7 |
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8 |
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- |
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8 |
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9 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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9 |
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1+7 |
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1+8 |
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5 |
I |
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- |
- |
9 |
1 |
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1+0 |
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= |
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- |
9 |
19 |
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2+8 |
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1+0 |
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5 |
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- |
- |
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3 |
1 |
4 |
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= |
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- |
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12 |
1 |
13 |
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2+6 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
- |
9 |
19 |
12 |
1 |
13 |
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5+4 |
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= |
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- |
9 |
1 |
3 |
1 |
4 |
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1+8 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
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2 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
4 |
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9 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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9 |
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1+7 |
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1+8 |
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- |
- |
- |
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8 |
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= |
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- |
- |
- |
1 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
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= |
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- |
- |
1 |
12 |
12 |
1 |
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2+6 |
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= |
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- |
- |
- |
1 |
12 |
12 |
1 |
8 |
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3+4 |
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= |
|
- |
- |
1 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
8 |
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1+6 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
|
= |
6 |
|
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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3+3 |
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1+2 |
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1+6 |
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- |
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8 |
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= |
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- |
- |
1 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
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= |
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- |
1 |
12 |
12 |
1 |
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2+6 |
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= |
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- |
- |
1 |
12 |
12 |
1 |
8 |
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3+4 |
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= |
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- |
1 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
8 |
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1+6 |
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= |
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5 |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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- |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
6 |
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occurs |
x |
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= |
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1+2 |
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1+6 |
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ALLAH |
- |
- |
- |
|
A+L+L |
25 |
7 |
|
|
A+H |
9 |
9 |
|
5 |
ALLAH |
34 |
16 |
16 |
- |
- |
3+4 |
1+6 |
1+6 |
5 |
ALLAH |
7 |
7 |
7 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
ALLAH |
7 |
7 |
7 |
I
ISHRAQI
ISHRAQ = (9 + 19 + 8 + 18 + 1 +
17) = 72 (7 + 2) = 9 = ISHRAQ
ISHRAQ = (9 + 1 + 8 + 9 + 1 + 8)
= 36 3 + 6 = 9 ISHRAQ
ISHRAQ = (9 + 19 + 8) = 36 (3 + 6)
= 9 ISHRAQ
ISHRAQ = (9 + 1 + 8) = 18 (3 + 6)
= 9 ISHRAQ
ISH RAQ = (18 + 1 + 17 = 36 (3 + 6)
= 9 = ISH RAQ
ISHRAQ = 9 + 1 + 8 = 18 (3 + 6) =
9 = ISHRAQ
A HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong 1993
The God of the Mystics
Page 267
As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God.
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
9 |
2 |
SH |
27 |
18 |
9 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
1 |
AQ |
18 |
9 |
|
2 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
"THE CORE OF ISHRAQI PHILOSOPHY WAS THE SYMBOL OF LIGHT"
|
|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
9 |
1 |
8 |
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9 |
+ |
= |
|
2+7 |
= |
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- |
- |
9 |
19 |
8 |
|
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|
9 |
+ |
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4+5 |
= |
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- |
|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
1 |
8 |
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+ |
= |
|
|
= |
|
= |
|
= |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
18 |
1 |
17 |
- |
+ |
= |
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3+6 |
= |
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= |
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= |
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|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
9 |
19 |
8 |
18 |
1 |
17 |
9 |
+ |
= |
|
8+1 |
= |
|
= |
|
|
|
- |
|
9 |
1 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
8 |
9 |
+ |
= |
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4+5 |
= |
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= |
|
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- |
7 |
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H |
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A |
Q |
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- |
- |
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- |
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- |
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- |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
1 |
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|
1 |
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|
1 |
occurs |
x |
2 |
= |
2 |
= |
2 |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
2 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
3 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
4 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
|
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
8 |
|
|
8 |
- |
- |
- |
8 |
occurs |
x |
2 |
= |
16 |
1+6 |
7 |
- |
|
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
occurs |
x |
3 |
= |
27 |
2+7 |
9 |
|
7 |
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
2+7 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
1+8 |
- |
- |
|
- |
4+5 |
- |
1+8 |
9 |
7 |
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
7 |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
9 |
1 |
8 |
|
|
|
9 |
+ |
= |
|
2+7 |
= |
|
|
|
|
|
- |
9 |
19 |
8 |
|
|
|
9 |
+ |
= |
|
4+5 |
= |
|
|
|
|
|
|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
1 |
8 |
- |
+ |
= |
|
|
= |
|
= |
|
= |
|
- |
- |
- |
- |
18 |
1 |
17 |
- |
+ |
= |
|
3+6 |
= |
|
= |
|
= |
|
|
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
9 |
19 |
8 |
18 |
1 |
17 |
9 |
+ |
= |
|
8+1 |
= |
|
= |
|
|
|
|
9 |
1 |
8 |
9 |
1 |
8 |
9 |
+ |
= |
|
4+5 |
= |
|
= |
|
|
|
7 |
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
|
1 |
|
|
1 |
|
|
|
|
1 |
occurs |
x |
2 |
= |
2 |
= |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
8 |
|
|
8 |
- |
- |
- |
8 |
occurs |
x |
2 |
= |
16 |
1+6 |
7 |
|
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
occurs |
x |
3 |
= |
27 |
2+7 |
9 |
7 |
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
1+8 |
- |
- |
|
- |
4+5 |
- |
1+8 |
7 |
I |
S |
H |
R |
A |
Q |
I |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
7 |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
|
|
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
19 |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
H |
|
|
3 |
1 |
H |
8 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
4 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A |
|
|
5 |
1 |
A |
19 |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Q |
|
|
6 |
1 |
Q |
17 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I |
|
|
7 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+6 |
|
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+6 |
2+7 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1 |
1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
1 |
|
19 |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
H |
|
|
3 |
1 |
H |
8 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
R |
|
|
4 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A |
|
|
5 |
1 |
A |
19 |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Q |
|
|
6 |
1 |
Q |
17 |
8 |
|
|
|
|
|
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|
|
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|
|
I |
|
|
7 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+6 |
|
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+6 |
2+7 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
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|
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|
19 |
10 |
|
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5 |
1 |
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19 |
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|
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H |
|
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3 |
1 |
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8 |
8 |
|
|
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Q |
|
|
6 |
1 |
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17 |
8 |
|
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1 |
|
9 |
9 |
|
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4 |
1 |
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18 |
9 |
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|
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7 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+6 |
|
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1+6 |
2+7 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
|
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2 |
1 |
|
19 |
10 |
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A |
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5 |
1 |
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19 |
10 |
|
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3 |
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8 |
8 |
|
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6 |
1 |
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17 |
8 |
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9 |
9 |
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|
|
7 |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
3+6 |
|
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
|
|
1+6 |
2+7 |
|
|
|
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
|
7 |
9 |
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
9 |
2 |
SH |
27 |
18 |
9 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
1 |
AQ |
18 |
9 |
|
2 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
7 |
ISHRAQI |
81 |
54 |
36 |
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
7 |
ISHRAQI |
9 |
9 |
9 |
|
7 |
|
A |
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2 |
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|
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- |
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1 |
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|
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12 |
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- |
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|
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1 |
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9 |
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3 |
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2+7 |
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- |
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3+6 |
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B |
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A |
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2 |
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2+7 |
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A
HISTORY OF GOD
Karen Armstrong
1993
The God of the
Mystics
Page 267
As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God.
As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect
synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial
and indefinable yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the
world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived
by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive:
whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from
light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi's emanationist cosmology,
the Light of Lights corres-ponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs,
which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights
in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognising its dependency
on the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source
of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres.
This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar
combina-tion of light and darkness within each one of us: the light
or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known,
as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as the Angel Gabriel,
the light of our world).
The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if
it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or
by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below.
Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He
had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but
could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him.
Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:
"Gabriel, the light of our world
- |
|
- |
- |
- |
1 |
G |
7 |
7 |
7 |
2 |
AB |
3 |
3 |
3 |
1 |
R |
18 |
9 |
|
1 |
I |
9 |
9 |
|
2 |
EL |
17 |
8 |
|
7 |
GABRIEL |
54 |
36 |
36 |
- |
- |
5+4 |
3+6 |
3+6 |
7 |
GABRIEL |
9 |
9 |
9 |
Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding
flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I
watched attentively and there he was . . . He came towards me, greeting
me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a
feeling of familiarity. And then I began to complain to him of the
trouble I had with this problem of knowledge.
'Awaken to yourself,'
he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved.
The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different
from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in
common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha:
Page 268
mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into
the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without,
illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was
no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination
would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam
al-mithal, the world of pure images.
Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world
by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane,
physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the
heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the
God- religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in
Suhra- wardi's scheme became the alam a/-mithal, was now an
intermediate realm that existed between our world and God's. 'This
could not be perceived by means of reason nor by the senses, It was
the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to dis-cover
the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation
of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal
was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of
Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina's
angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial
to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences
and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly
similar, whether they are seen by shamans! mystics or ecstatics, in
many different cultures. There has recendy been much interest in this
phenomenon. Jung's conception of the collective unconscious is a more
scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of
humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian- American philosopher
of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of
ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic
journeys and mystical flights.38
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of
Scripture-such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real
as the phenomena we experience in this world but not in the same way.
They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by
the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see
the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was
/ Page 269 / nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite
training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced
when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken.
All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded
to realities in the alam a/-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad, for
example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night
Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world.
Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish
Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam
al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The
path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the
Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm
of the mystic.
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian
suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination.
Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious
faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability
to think of what is not.39 Human beings are
the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that
is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely
possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements
in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea
of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an
absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued
to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can
conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical
proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the
imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative
explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on
human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive.
A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive
with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something
other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the
special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object.
That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like
artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious
symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding
of the human / Page 270 /condition. Suhrawardi, who
wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled
metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic.Yoking apparently
unrelated things together - science with mysticism, pagan philosophy
with monotheistic religion - he was able to help Muslims create their
own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life.
Even more influential than Suhrawardi was Muid ad-Din ibn al- Arabi
(1165-1240), whose life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting
of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of
Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on
the one occasion that they met. During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi
was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left
Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two
years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at
Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great
Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God but his
thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy
had ended with Thn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd's
Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently,
for the imaginative God of the Mystics.
In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn
al- Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon
him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly
aura and he realised that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine
Wisdom. This epiphany made him realise that it would be impossible
for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of
philosophy. Falsafah emphasised the utter transcend-ence of al-Lah
and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love
such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures:
'If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God,
for he is the Beautiful Being,' he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah
(The Meccan Revelations). 'Thus in all its aspects, the object of
love is God alone.'40 The Shahadah
reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah.
Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God
himself but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such
creatures as / Page 271 / Nizam, who inspire love in our
hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies
for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love
was essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that
is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had
become 'the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure'.
As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of
love poems:
In the verses I have composed for the present book,
I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual
visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of
Angelic Intelligences. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking
in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract
me more than those of actual life and because this young girl knew
exactly what I was referring to.41
The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of
God.
Some eighty years later, the young Dante Alighieri had a similar experience
in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari. As soon as he caught sight
of her, he felt his spirit tremble violendy and seemed to hear it
cry: 'Behold a god more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.'
From that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired
a mastery 'owing to the power which my imagination gave him'.42
Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante and in The
Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary
journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, to a vision of God. Dante's
poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad's ascent to
heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar
to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginativa
simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane
world, as Aristode had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from
God:
O fantasy (imaginativa),
that reav'st us oft away So from ourselves that we remain distraught,
Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray. / What
moves thee when the senses show thee naught?
Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe Of Him who sends
it down, or else self-wrought.43
/ Page 272
Throughout the poem, Dante gradually
purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical
descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up
Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him
for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should
have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away
from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions
in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that
no human personality can become the final object of human yearning.
Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence
of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting
a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso but the abstraction
reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him.
Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given
faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany
for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed
more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine
in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the
true reality: 'God made the creatures like veils,' he explained, 'He
who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as
real is barred from His
presence.'" Thus - as
seemed to be the way of Sufism - what started as a highly personalised
spirituality, centring on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal
conception of God. The image of the
female remained important to him: he believed that women were the
most potent incarnations of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, because they
inspired a love in men that was ultimately directed towards God. Admittedly,
this is a very male view, but
it was an attempt to bring a female dimension to the religion of a
God who was often conceived as wholly masculine.
Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the God he knew had an objective
existence. Even though he was a skilled metaphysician, he did not
believe that God's existence could be proved by logic. He liked to
call himself a disciple of Khidr, a name given to the mysterious
figure who / Page 273 / appears in the
Koran as the spiritual director of Moses, who brought the external
Law to the Israelites. God had given Khidr a special knowledge
of himself so Moses begs him for instruction, but Khidr tell
him that he will not be able to put up with this, since it lies outside
his own religious experience.45 It
was no good trying to understand religious 'information' that we had
not experienced ourselves. The name Khidr seems to have meant
'the Green One', indicating that his wisdom
was ever fresh and eternally renewable. Even a prophet
of Moses's stature cannot necessarily comprehend esoteric forms of
religion, for, in the Koran, he finds that indeed he cannot put up
with Khidr's method of instruction. The meaning of this strange
episode seems to suggest that the external trappings of a religion
do not always correspond to its spiritual or mystical element. People,
such as the ulema, might be unable to understand the Islam
of a Sufi like Ibn al-Arabi. Muslim tradition makes Khidr
the master of all who seek a mystic truth, which is inherendy superior
to and quite different from the literal, external forms. He does not
lead his disciple to a perception of a God which is the same as everybody
else's but to a God who is in the deepest sense of the word subjective.
Khidr was also important to the Ismailis. Despite the
fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close
to Ismailism and were subsequendy incorporated into their
theology - yet another instance of mystical religion being able to
transcend sectarian divisions. Like the Ismailis, Ibn al-Arabi
stressed the pathos of God, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia
of the God of the philosophers. The God of the mystics yearned to
be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the
noun ilah (god) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad,
to sigh for.46 As the Sacred Hadith
had made God say: 'I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known.
Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.' There is no
rational proof of God's sadness; we know it only by our own longing
for something to fulfil our deepest desires and to explain the tragedy
and pain of life. Since we are created in God's image, we must reflect
God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call
'God' must, therefore, mirror a sym-pathy with the pathos of God.
Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing but this
sigh / Page 274 / (nafas rahman,) was not an expression of
maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought
the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings,
who became logoi words that express God to himself. It follows
that each human being is a unique epiphany of
the Hidden God, manifesting him in
a particular and unrepeatable manner.
Each one of these divine logoi are the names
that God has called himself,
making himself totally present in each one of hislepiphanies. God cannot be summed up in
one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It
also follows that the revelation that God has made in each
one of us is unique, different from the
God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his
logoi We will only know our own 'God'
since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know
him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi says: 'Each being
has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the
whole.' He liked to quote the hadith: 'Meditate upon God's
blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat).' 47
The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on
the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked
to call God al-Ama, 'the Cloud' or 'The Blindness'48
to emphasise his inaccessibility. But these
human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself.
It
is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is
delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself.
The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in
each human being who makes him known to himself;
it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns
to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our
own longing.
Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life
that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar
to the Greek understanding of the incarnation of God in Jesus but
Ibn al- Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being,
however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he
believed that each human person
was a unique avatar of the divine.
Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man (insan i kamil)
who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation
for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course,
incarnate the whole / Page 275 / reality
of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect
Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine.
This introspective, imaginative mysticism
was a search for the ground of being in the depths of the self. It
deprived the mystic of the certainties that characterise the more
dogmatic forms of religion. Since each man and woman had had a unique
experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express
the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about
God to which all must subscribe; since this God transcended the category
of personality, predictions about his behaviour and inclinations were
impossible. Any consequent chauvinism about one's own faith at the
expense of other people's was obviously unacceptable, since no One
religion had the whole truth about God. Ibn
al-Arabi developed the positive attitude towards other religions which
could be found in the Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance:
My heart is
capable of every form.
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Kabah
The tables of the Torah, the Koran.
Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn
His camels, still the one true faith is mine.49
The man of God was
equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all
provided a valid apprehension of God. He often used the
phrase 'the God created by the faiths' (Khalq al-haqq ft'l-itiqall);
it could be pejorative if it referred to the 'god' that men and
women created in a particular religion and considered identical with
God himself. This only bred intolerance and fanaticism. Instead of
such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
Do not attach yourself to any particular
creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise
you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognise the real
truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited
by anyone creed, for, he says,
'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of
al-Lah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes;
his god is his own / Page 276 / creature,
and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the
beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his
dislike is based on ignorance.50
We never see any god but the personal
Name that has been revealed
and given concrete existence in each one
of us; inevitably our understanding
of our personal Lord is coloured by the religious tradition into
which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows
that this
'God' of ours is simply
an 'angel' or a particular symbol of the
divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality
itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid
theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides
humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying
force.
It is true that Ibn al-Arabi's teachings were too abstruse for the
vast majority of Muslims but they did percolate down to the more ordinary
people. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased
to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in
many parts of the Muslim empire. This was the period when the various
Sufi orders or tariqas were founded, each with its particular
interpretation of the mystical faith. The Sufi sheikh had a great
influence on the populace and was often revered as a saint in rather
the same way as the Shii Imams. It was a period of political upheaval:
the Baghdad caliphate was disintegrating and the Mongol hordes were
devastating one Muslim city after another. People wanted a God who
was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the Faylasufs
and the legalistic God of the ulema. The Sufi practices of
dhikr, the recitation of the Divine Names as a mantra to induce
ecstasy, spread beyond the tanqas. The Sufi disciplines of
concentra-tion, with their carefully prescribed techniques of breathing
and posture, helped people to experience a sense of transcendent presence
within. Not everybody was capable of the higher mystical states, but
these spiritual exercises did help people to abandon
simplistic and anthropomorphic notions of God
and to experience him as a presence within the self.
Some orders used music and dancing to enhance concentration and their
pir became heroes to the people.
The most famous of the Sufi orders was the Mawlawiyyah,
whose members are known in the West as the 'whirling dervishes'. Their
/ Page 277 / stately and dignified dance was a method of concentration.
As he spun round and round, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood
dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of
the annihilation of 'fana. The founder of the order was Jalal
ad-Din Rumi (12�7-73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master.
He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya
in modem Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism
can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have
caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi's ideas are similar to those
of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem - the Masnawi -
known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate
the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis.
In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams
ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed,
Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and
insisted upon being addressed as 'Muhammad'. He had a dubious reputation
and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking
himself above such trivialities. Rumi's disciples were understandably
worried by their Master's evident infatuation. When Shams was killed
in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical
music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively
into a symbol of the love of God - of God's yeaming for humanity and
humanity's longing for al-Lah. Whether they
realised it or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely
aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being.
Listen to the reed,
how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness.
Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused
men and women to moan. I want a bosom torn by severance, that I
may unfold [to such a person] the power of love-desire:
everyone
who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was
united to it.51
The Perfect Man was believed to inspire
more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi
the poetry of the
Masnawi which recounted the agonies of this separation / Page
278 / Like other Sufis, Rumi
saw the universe
as a theophany of God's myriad Names. Some of these revealed
God's wrath or severity, while others expressed those qualities of
mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature. The mystic was
engaged in a ceaseless struggle (jihad) to distinguish the
compassion, love and beauty of God in all things and to strip away
everything else. The Masnawi challenged the Muslim to find
the transcendent dimension in human life and to see through appearances
to the hidden reality within. It is the ego which blinds us to the
inner mystery of all things but once we have got beyond that we are
not isolated, separate beings but one with the Ground of all existence.
Again, Rumi emphasised that God could only be a subjective experience.
He tells the humorous tale of Moses and the Shepherd to illustrate
the respect we must show to other people's conception of the divine.
One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to God: he wanted
to help God, wherever he was - to wash his clothes, pick the lice
off, kiss his hands and feet at bedtime. 'All I can say, remembering
You', the prayer concluded, 'is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh.'
Moses was horrified. Who on earth did the shepherd imagine he
was talking to? The Creator of heaven and earth? It sounded as though
he were talking to his uncle! The shepherd repented and wandered disconsolately
off into the desert but God rebuked Moses. He did not want orthodox
words but burning love and humility. There were no
correct ways of talking about God:
What seems
wrong to you is right for him
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
These mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not Me that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility. / Page 279
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be Friends
with your burning. Bum up your thinking
and your forms of expression!52
Any speech
about God was as absurd as the shepherd's but when a believer looked
through the veils to how things really were, he would find that it
belied all his human preconceptions.
By this time tragedy had also helped the Jews of Europe to form a
new conception of God. The crusading anti-Semitism of the West was
making life intolerable for the Jewish communities and many wanted
a more immediate, personal God than the remote deity experienced by
the Throne Mystics. During the ninth century, the Kalonymos family
had emigrated from southern Italy to Germany and had brought some
mystical literature with them. But by the twelfth century, persecution
had introduced a new pessimism into Ashkenazi piety and this was expressed
in the writings of three members of the Kalonymos clan: Rabbi Samuel
the Elder, who wrote the short treatise Sefer ha- Yirah (The
Book of the Fear of God) in about 1150; Rabbi Judah the Pietist, author
of Sefer Hasidim (fhe Book of the Pietists), and his cousin
Rabbi Eliezar ben Judah of Worms (d. I 230) who edited a number of
treatises and mystical texts. They were not philosophers or systematic
thinkers and their work shows that they had borrowed their ideas from
a number of sources that might seem to have been incompatible. They
had been greatly impressed by the dry Faylasuf Saadia ibn Joseph,
whose books had been translated into Hebrew, and by such Christian
mystics as Francis of Assisi. From this strange amalgam of sources,
they managed to create a spirituality which remained important to
the Jews of France and Germany until the seventeenth century.
The Rabbis, it will be recalled, had declared it sinful to deny oneself
pleasure created by God. But the German Pietists preached a renunciation
that resembled Christian asceticism. A Jew would only see the Shekinah
in the next world if he turned his back on pleasure and gave up such
pastimes as keeping pets or playing with children.
Page 280
Jews should cultivate an apatheia
like God's, remaining impervious to scorn and insults. But God could
be addressed as Friend. No Throne Mystic would have dreamt of calling
God 'Thou', as Eliezar did. This familiarity crept into the liturgy,
depicting a God who was immanent and intimately present at the same
time as he was transcendent:
Everything is in Thee and Thou art in everything;
Thou fillest everything and dost encompass it; when everything was
created, Thou was in everything; before everything was created, Thou
wast everything.53
They qualified this immanence
by showing that nobody could approach God himself but only God as
he manifested himself to mankind in his 'glory' (kavod) or
in 'the great radiance called Shekinah',
The Pietists were not worried by the apparent incon- sistency, They
concentrated on practical matters rather than theo-logical niceties,
teaching their fellow-Jews methods of concentration (kawwanah)
and gestures that would enhance their sense of God's presence. Silence
was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his
head with a prayer shawl to avoid distraction, pull in his stomach
and grind his teeth. They devised special ways of'drawing out prayer'
which was found to encourage this sense of Presence. Instead
of simply repeating the words of the liturgy, the Pietist should count
the letters of each word, calculating their numerical value and getting
beyond the literal meaning of the language. He must direct his attention
upwards, to encourage his sense of a higher reality.
The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no
anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier and they had no need of
this Ashkenazi pietism. They were evolving a new type of Judaism,
however, as a response to Muslim developments. Just as the Jewish
Faylasufs had attempted to explain the God
of the Bible philosophic-lly, other Jews tried to
give their God a mystical, symbolic interpreta-tion. At first these
mystics constituted only a tiny minority. Theirs was an esoteric discipline,
handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah or inherited
tradition. Eventually, however, the God
of Kabbalah would appeal to the majority and take
hold of the Jewish imagination in a way that the God of the philosophers
never did."
LIGHT AND LIFE
Lars Olof Bjorn 1976
Page 197
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY
MESSAGE"
YOU ASK WHO IS TO BE
CRUCIFIED
O
NAMUH
YOU ASK WHOSE
CRUCIFIXION
IS
THIS
Y
IT IS YOURS OF COURSE YOU CRUCIFY YOURSELVES IN
YOUR HEART OF HEARTS YOU KNOW
THAT
IT IS THE LAW OF
MAAT
THE LAW OF INTELLIGENT CREATIVE RAINBOW LIGHT
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1+8 |
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FOR
I
HAVE
KNOWN THEM ALL ALREADY KNOWN THEM ALL HAVE KNOWN
THE
EVENINGS MORNINGS AFTERNOONS
I
HAVE
MEASURED OUT THY LIVES IN COFFIN SWOONS
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann 1875-1955
Page 466
"Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement."
THE
TRUE
DEATH ON THE CROSS
THE
TRUE
AT
ONE
MENT
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AND IT WAS ABOUT
THE
SIXTH HOUR
AND THEIR WAS A DARKNESS OVER ALL THE LAND UNTIL
THE
NINTH HOUR
AND THE SUN WAS DARENED AND THE VEIL OF THE TEMPLE WAS RENT IN THE MIDST
AND WHEN JESUS HAD CRIED WITH A LOUD VOICE HE SAID FATHER INTO THY HANDS
I
COMMEND MY SPIRIT
AND HAVING SAID THUS GAVE UP THE GHOST
HOLY BIBLE
Scofield References
Page 1117 A.D. 30.
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily,
I say unto thee, Except a man be born again,
He cannot see the kingdom of God.
St John Chapter 3 verse 3
3 + 3 3 x 3
6 x 9
54
5 + 4
9
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
Fragments of an Unknown Teachingp P.D.Oupensky 1878-1947
Page 217
'A man may be born ,but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.'
" 'When a man awakes he can die; when he dies he can be born' "
THE ANARCHISTS KITCHEN 1977
IN
THE
BEGINNING
WAS THE WORD
AND THE WORD WAS
WITH
GOD AND
THE WORD WAS GOD
THERE
WAS
A
LIGHT AND THE
LIGHT
SHINETH
IN
THE
DARKNESS AND
THE DARKNESS
COMPREHENDED
IT
NOT
?????????