TO
ALL
THATTHATTHAT
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
AND
LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I LOVE YOU
ARISESTHATSUNSETSTHATSUNSETSTHATSUNARISESTHATSUN
OSIRISTHATSONSETSTHATSONSETSTHATSONOSIRISTHATSON
ADDED TO ALL MINUS NONE SHARED
BY EVERYTHING MULTIPLIED IN ABUNDANCE
Today is the 9th of November 2003, the day of days
a holy and blessed time. It is the day when Tantalus reaches the summit
of the Magic Mountain. The Harmonic Concordance brings to fruition the
public presentation of
THE
GREAT WORK
upon the Neters net wherein the creators have on behalf
of the one and only occasioned its rebirth and from where even as we speak,
it is transmitting in constant pulse that born again energy of the one
great truth. The revelation of
LIVING
MIND
MINS MIND MINS
DREAMING
MIND
Imperfect the site is perfect as it should be within
this particular juxtoposition of instants that constitute therein the
stillness of realities living forever.
SISTERS AND BROTHERS OF MINE
Please scatter the seeds of this wonderfully creative
time without fear or favour upon the
MINDS
I
of the all and sundry that is
the energised everything of a living reality.
"DOORWAY TO HEAVEN"
THIS
IS
"make no mistake, the greatest shift of consciousness
ever.
The period between Novem-ber 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 Novem-ber 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 upa 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-ness 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?
Quoted from the
DAILY MIRROR
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Veena Minocha
Page
33
The above article by Veena Minocha Astrologer of The Hindustan
Times is submitted to your cyclopian minds
I
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
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
I
THE
NINTH
HIEROGLYPHIC
A
MAZE
IN
ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ
THE
MAGIKALALPHABET
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 |
25 |
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 |
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
8 + 9 + 5 + 6 + 1 + 6 + 8
I
I AM THAT THAT AM I
ZAZAZAAZAZAZ
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 |
WITH EPISODIC SENSE OF DE JAVU THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE
AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED
SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE
THE
ZED ALIZ ZED
IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER THE SACRED NUMBERS AMONGST
THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS
AT THE THOUGHT OF THE NINTH RAM WHEN IN CONJUNCTION
SET THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE MADE
RECORD OF THE FALL
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
THAT LOVE THAT
THAT DIVINE LOVE LIGHT THAT
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
9 |
- |
5 |
- |
6 |
1 |
9 |
- |
9 |
1 |
- |
9 |
1 |
9 |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
15 |
- |
9 |
15 |
14 |
- |
15 |
9 |
9 |
- |
9 |
19 |
- |
9 |
19 |
9 |
19 |
+ |
= |
180 |
1+8+0 |
= |
9 |
- |
- |
15 |
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 |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
9 |
9 |
6 |
5 |
- |
6 |
1 |
9 |
9 |
9 |
1 |
- |
9 |
1 |
9 |
1 |
+ |
= |
90 |
9+0 |
= |
9 |
NINE |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
1 |
+ |
= |
4 |
- |
- |
4 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
5 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
= |
5 |
- |
- |
5 |
- |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
6 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
+ |
= |
18 |
1+8 |
= |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
+ |
= |
63 |
6+3 |
= |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
- |
- |
9 |
- |
9 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
O |
R |
I |
O |
N |
- |
O |
S |
I |
R |
I |
S |
- |
I |
S |
I |
S |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
7 |
ORIONIS |
99 |
45 |
9 |
6 |
OSIRIS |
89 |
35 |
8 |
4 |
ISIS |
56 |
20 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
- |
First Total |
244 |
100 |
19 |
- |
- |
2+4+4 |
1+0+0 |
1+9 |
- |
- |
10 |
- |
10 |
- |
- |
1+0 |
- |
1+0 |
- |
- |
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
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 Marti:lns "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: mes- / Page 53 / 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..."
- |
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 |
- |
Second Total |
18 |
- |
- |
- |
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 |
- |
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 |
- |
9+9 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
- |
- |
18 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1+8 |
- |
- |
1 |
Final Total |
9 |
9 |
9 |
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
"God is given ninety-nine names"
Page 176
"The Names of God"
- |
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 |
- |
1+9+8 |
6+3 |
2+7 |
- |
- |
18 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
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 |
- |
9+9 |
4+5 |
1+8 |
- |
- |
18 |
- |
- |
- |
- |
1+8 |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
9 |
9 |
9 |
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 ithe 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
ADD TO REDUCE REDUCE
TO DEDUCE
ISHRAQ = (9 + 19 + 8 + 18 + 1 + 17)
= 72 (7 + 2) = 9
ISHRAQ = (9 + 1 + 8 + 9 + 1 + 8) = 36
3 + 6 = 9
ISHRAQ = (9 + 19 + 8) = 36 (3 + 6) = 9
ISHRAQ = (9 + 1 + 8) = 18 (3 + 6) = 9
ISHRAQ = (18 + 1 + 17 = 36 (3 + 6) = 9
ISHRAQ = 9 + 1 + 8 = 18 (3 + 6) = 9
I
+
MAM
+ DAD
IMAM
= (9 + 13 + 1 + 13) = 36
IMAM
= (9 + 4 + 1 + 4) = 18
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.
It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable yet
was also the most obvious fact of life in dIe 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:
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 his epiphanies. 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.
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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."
IN
THE
BEGINNING
WAS THE WORD AND
THE WORD WAS
WITH
GOD
THERE
WAS
A
LIGHT AND THE LIGHT
SHINETH
IN
THE
DARKNESS AND THE
DARKNESS
COMPREHENDED
IT
NOT
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