Hardened Hearts vs the True Life

frozen “water of life” like the hardened heart

“Your True Life,” Rumi’s poem for the day, begins: “As you start to walk out on the way,/ the way appears” (Dec 26 in Coleman Barks’ A Year with Rumi).

     A big step for me (and I suppose for most everyone) involves personal embodiment of “career,” a term whose etymology appropriately points toward “road,” “racecourse,” or “wheeled vehicle.” Today’s “true life,” for better and worse, comes not just in walking, but in riding and racing. 

     My teaching career culminated in a course, Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace & Justice. I loved teaching it, the class limit of 60 persons always filled, and it usually had a wait list of over a hundred. After teaching the course about fifteen times over the past six years, I’m still pondering the essence, the primary aim, and the secret.

     As 2017 wanes down to its close, while in my first year of retirement, I’m walking my way into more understanding and appreciation of Good Stories and True Life. This week, “the way appears,” in part, through a Christmas gift book from the top of my wish list, Hafiz and the Religion of Love. Leonard Lewisohn (who edited the book) articulates “the language of the invisible” and the almost impossible, although crucially vital, task of integrating “mythopoesis” into the “mental furniture of modern man.” His explanation of this aim resonates so tellingly with my experience of Good Stories.

“Albeit immanent in popular consciousness, most of Hafiz’s mythopoesis—his language of analogy and capacity for thinking in symbols—is no longer part of the mental furniture of modern man. The aesthetic premises of his poetry are incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of modern anti-art movements such as surealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism or ‘pop’ art, for the principles of his spiritual vision, being heart-based and focused on presential knowledge (‘ilm-i hudhuri), are completely alien to the presuppositions of the modern materialist society of the West. . . The central aim of the chapters in this volume is to enable contemporary Western students of classical Persian poetry to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis of Hafiz and the entire galaxy of Persian poets who spoke his ‘language of the invisible’. . . In modern literary studies and critical theory, especially in the contemporary West, the vertical purport and spiritual import of his symbolic imagery by and large are deliberately neglected, and the esoteric doctrines and metaphysical teachings inspiring his verse are treated as irrelevancies.” pp. xxi-xxiii

     About the same time (around 2007) when Lewisohn and colleagues were drafting and presenting their conference papers that turned into Hafiz and the Religion of Love, I was developing the Good Stories course. If I had been able to articulate it, my central aim could have been worded as Lewisohn powerfully phrases it: “to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis.” Perhaps it’s just as well, because if I had included those words on my course proposal the chances are pretty good that it would have been rejected by the university’s course approval process, “treated as irrelevancies.”

     Recent political events prove to me the consequence of our failure to nurture spiritual vision, heart-based knowing and caring. The sober intellectual lacks the capacity to counteract the ego-centered dystopia because cold rationalism fails to offer sufficient attraction against sensual materialism. In a strange way, the tavern and the house of love (primary images in Hafiz and other classical Persian poets) show closer affinity for the path to God than the strict legalistic rigidity cut by fundamentalist religions. Because approaching God surpasses human mind and body, the metaphysical stretch found in symbolic expression has to be called forth.

     Without this nurturing, the imaginal world disappears. Without mundus imaginalis* we lose the courage, vision, and strength to engage in social justice; these qualities are essential if we are to repel the self-centered tyrannies from within ourselves and from others. In language carried by the scriptures and prophets of our major religions, this loss can be related to the “hardening of the heart.” Teachings on this topic are abundant and a few samples follow:

* In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, statements about God hardening the heart occur at least fourteen times. The prime case involves Pharaoh dealing with the plagues. 

     If it’s God who hardens the heart, we wonder: Are humans absolved of moral responsibility? What if we do not wake up and “walk out on the way”? Are we freed from responsibility to teach the discernment between good and evil?

* Persons who are exploring the “hardened heart” explain the human part:

“When it says that the Lord made Pharaoh’s heart hard, the meaning in the internal sense is that Pharaoh himself made his heart hard. . . The evil that is attributed in the Bible to the Lord actually has its origin in human beings.”

* From an Islamic perspective, we find the responsibility to “soften our hearts.”

     In my view, the hardened heart relates to the failure to compose and engage the mundus imaginalis.* A person with a hardened heart has limited or no access to the eye of the heart and sees instead through the rational mind with a consciousness dominated by ego, the power drive, and materialism. The capacity for imagination (for a person having the hardened heart) has been corroded by sensationalism featured in media that are driven by gratuitous sex and violence. Imagination has been polluted. The higher calling demands that we continue to purify, resurrect, and re-create.

     Spiritual teachings have hardly been remiss in stating clearly that humans are wrong to place too much value on material possessions. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” How could it be put more plainly?

     When persons have hardened hearts and do not feel the problem in accumulating money in order to buy bigger houses, faster cars and phones, and other forms of instant gratification, a wake-up call may be in order. If “love” has deteriorated to getting applause, being admired for display of wealth, and feeling better than others (sexism, racism, superior-religionism, etc.), perhaps God has to harden the heart so that it can break before death ends the opportunity to bow before the Divine. If persons cannot see discrimination, hate, and ego-centered acts as opposed to God’s will, then the mirror of their heart might be shown in a ruler dominated by ungodliness. That seems to be the classic Pharaoh story, timeless, acted out once more.

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* For elaboration on mundus imaginalis, see Henry Corbin. 

For example, he says: 

"At the beginning of each narrative, the visionary finds himself in the presence of a supernatural being of great beauty, whom he asks who he is and whence he comes. Essentially, these tales illustrate the Gnostic's experience, lived as the personal history of the Stranger, the captive aspiring to return home. (from p. 2)

As a result of internalization, one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth, spiritual reality envelops, surrounds, contains so-called material reality (from p. 4)

We realize immediately that we are no longer confined to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology restricted to the empirical world and the world of abstract intellect. Between them there is a world that is both intermediary and intermediate, described by our authors as the 'alam al-mithal, the world of the image, the mundus imaginalis: a world that is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect. This world requires its own faculty of perception, namely, imaginative power, a faculty with a cognitive function, a noetic value which is as real as that of sense perception or intellectual intuition. We must be careful not to confuse it with the imagination identified by so-called modern man with "fantasy", and which, according to him, is nothing but an outpour of "imaginings". " (from p. 5)

Looking out

 looking out the window with gratitude, facing west on Dec 18

Love God and keep the commandments (e.g., Deut 7:9*). Note the “and.” 

     Sometimes a vital doorway into life-more-abundant opens through re-reading; this requires letting go of previous interpretation/s and allowing a reincarnation to come into being, sometimes in a flash and other times much more slowly. To read “love” especially deserves frequent re-reading because it’s “many-splendored,” mercurial, sometimes shape-shifting with great speed and other times so slowly. In order to progress in living love, Paul suggests we advance beyond talking and thinking like a child (I Cor 13).

     I’m wondering if my spiritual life gets closeted, cutting off breath, by a semi-conscious belief that love for God enacts by (that is, “equals”) keeping commandments. While the linking term (“and”) might rarely mean “equals,” it usually points to something else. Of course keeping commandments is right and good, but I think that’s not enough when love is getting minimized. And I’m pretty sure that commandments can be followed without love. Responding to the voice, “Do it because I said to!” comes to mind.

     This blunt version (Love God by keeping the commandments) may be needed for childlike understanding; but, importantly, a more mature statement adds: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your [mind and] heart and with your entire being and with all your might" (Deut 6:5); re-stated in the gospels, "And He [Jesus] replied to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (intellect)." (Matt 22:37, Amplified Bible Classic Ed.). 

     These scriptures stand out because they capsulize an essence. Ecclesiastes 12 expresses the heart of the matter similarly: 

All has been heard; the end of the matter is: Fear God [revere and worship Him, knowing that He is] and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man [the full, original purpose of his creation, the object of God’s providence, the root of character, the foundation of all happiness, the adjustment to all inharmonious circumstances and conditions under the sun] and the whole [duty] for every man. (Amplified Bible Classic Edition).

     These pondering have been prompted in part because I’ve been wondering about the “eye of the heart.” Once again, Rumi (Mathnawi, Book V, line 1103, Nicholson’s translation**)

هست آن پیدا به پیش چشم دل  ** جهد کن سوی دل آ جهد المقل (But) that (difference) is manifest to the eye of the heart (spirit): exert thyself, advance towards the heart (spirit) with the exertion of one whose means are small.

     I’m surprised by the results shown on my computer screen when I enter “eye of the heart” because it immediately shows a book title by Frithjof Schuon: The Eye of the Heart. As mentioned in previous blogs, I’ve been reading in his book The Transcendent Unity of Religions but didn’t know of the one titled “The Eye of the Heart.” In searching another of his books on my shelf (Gnosis: Divine Wisdom), I find:

When Christ—in renewing the Law of Sinai, which he came to “fulfill” and not to “destroy”—teaches the love of God, he distinguishes between “heart”, “soul”, “strength” (Torah: “might”), and “mind”; this “love” thus excludes no faculty that unites with God, and it cannot be merely one term of an opposition, as when love and knowledge confront each other. If by the word “love” the Torah and the Gospel express above all the idea of “union” or “desire for union”, they make it clear by the adjectives that follow that this tendency includes diverse modes in keeping with the diversity of man’s nature; hence it is necessary to say, not that love alone draws toward God, but rather that only what draws toward God is love. (p. 83)

     Coleman Barks chose for today, December 18, from Rumi one he titles “What Is Love? Gratitude.” The poem concludes: “Don’t ask what love can make or do./ Look at the colors of the world./ The riverwater moving in all rivers at once” (A Year with Rumi). 

 looking out the window facing east a few days ago, with gratitude

* Deut 7:9 ISV “Know that the LORD your God is God, the trusted God who faithfully keeps his covenant to the thousandth generation of those who love him and obey his commands.”

Eccl 12:12-13 ISV: “There is no end to the crafting of many books, and too much study wearies the body.  Let the conclusion of all of these thoughts be heard: Fear God and obey his commandments, for this is what it means to be human.”

Qur’an 2:165 “But those who believe are more ardent in their love of God” and see the commentary in The Study Qur’an. See also Q 3:31 and commentary.

** Line 1103 can can be seen online: http://www.masnavi.net/1/10/eng/5/1100/ . For expansion of the “heart,” see also the preceding section, especially around line 1065. 

“and He is with you”

Perhaps a particular book falls open anywhere

to strike the perfect match for the intended person

igniting the moment of illumination, perhaps.

But would Book Five of Rumi’s Mathnawi pour

the “illimitable fountain”* without the preparing four,

flowing within; as if all books burn, the truth return?

Else the rider, already seated on the horse,

asks, “Where is the horse?” A person thirsts

though knee deep in the stream. An oceaned pearl 

in search of the sea. Bewildered of God,

the only direction remains wonderment.

* In Nicholson’s translation, about line 1072 of Book V. 

When desire burns too low, the fire goes out. Tending the spirit depends, essentially and finally, on that variant of desire called love, ineffable, beyond-words, breath-stopping, a consuming fire that burns off all the external inauthenticities because to know oneself is to know one’s Lord. [See, for example, Chapter 1 in Al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness (Claud Field’s translation, pp. 17-23).] 

     When motivated by external forces (such as the condition often characterizing graduate school’s assigned readings), it’s easy to develop the habit of skimming a “Preface” or just skipping ahead entirely to get to the real chapters in a book. While that’s the way I used to read twenty years ago (truth be told, grad school was closer to fifty years ago), now I’m drawn to giving close attention to the introductory material, especially when a book is being revised after a span of time. A good preface reveals contextual particulars needed if an individual is to absorb and appropriate the teaching across the external to the internal. 

     For example, Carl Ernst gives a Preface to the 2011 Edition in his book Sufism (published in 1997 as The Shambhala Guide to Sufism). He says the book has found a home among diverse readers and speculates it might be because it “illustrates the tension between the outsider and insider approaches to understanding religion” and adds “What is offered here does not pretend to be an esoteric revelation” (p. xii).

     Maybe I was in the next sentence or paragraph when I realized that something had clicked. Except it wasn’t a “click” or any other sound but more like a scent or a slight breeze easily missed or a sense of resolution. It’s a subtle sensation that I’ve come to hold in high regard. Maybe it’s a visitation or a knowing in the heart instead of added head-knowledge that’s isolated from the more integrated knowing in head/body/spirit. Anyway, I paused to reflect, to look back, and to wonder. 

     Perhaps the offering involves a more articulate discernment. I’m a person who thrives on the fusion of not-yet-connected, almost smoldering, bits of meaning; my work/play space looks littered with books on spirituality, horsemanship, folklore, mysteries, poetry, and more. Any additional clue that guides to the treasure is more than welcome. 

     That’s what came in. If I were to put the gift into words, it would say something like, “Listen, bud, you should be able to recognize which of these books is dedicated to the inner journey. Don’t waste time with ones that focus on the outer stuff. Pay attention because some are tricky and use esoteric terms, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about.” 

     Sometimes words fail the test of personal experience. Remember the three levels of certainty (hear about, witness, and live it). Push for that fire-tested truth. Thresh out the non-GMO grain from the fake and the chaff. And remember the risk of drowning in books. Always be on alert for a sign to put all books aside and fall into wonder.

     Certainly the languaging that the mind brings to experience can advance understanding and can sometimes power future action, but thinking can also be imperious and can shut down other knowing, especially from within, from the "eye of the heart" (also in the passage from Book V). Having been humbled many times in the riding arena where “feel” for “true unity” knows far faster, more sure than thinking, my mind’s tendency to presume to dominate has been corralled a bit. Rather than attempt to force closure or containment, bewilderment, in a special tone, may be the homing signal.

While in Hafez’ Tavern

sunrise Nov 30, 2017

 

While in Hafez' Tavern

When I have an argument with God,

I go to my horse, to the ocean edge,

to leaping poetry of Hafez.

I won’t ride in a rage

but must settle the wild current

before risking the broken leg.

I won’t dive in the riptide

but listen for the turn, in fire,

making the red stain disappear,

The hot wine of stolen kisses

washing away desire, and I

am right into nothingness.

To read Hafez is to be drawn into the wonder of love’s abandonment, the paradoxical simultaneous double of passion: going beyond the rules of safe office chairs into the literalist lie, the fundamentalist sin while also drinking the blood-red love of that which surpasses human mind, out beyond “ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing.” It helps to read “Hafez’s Theology of Sin” and “The Way of Blame” (Lewisohn in The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez, p. 78). It’s to launch into “leaping poetry” where stanzas break free from being in control and thus allow one to taste divine intoxication without wetting the lips.  

This mystic wine helps me live simultaneously in and out of “Pray without ceasing” in my personal land of broken promises and the between world of a diivine power both All-Powerful and All-Loving, when the material world reeks of injustice, loveless power, and apparently indiscriminate death-dealling suffering. How else but to “sin boldly” and trust in mercy.

Notes:

1. Leaping Poetry of Hafez. Robert Bly opens his book Leaping Poetry with a section called “Dragon Smoke” that begins “In ancient times, in the ‘time of inspiration,’ the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons,’ as the Chinese said. Isaiah rode on those dragons so did Li Po and Pindar. . . a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” In The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez, Bly and Leonard Lewisohn describe how the ghazals of Hafez work this way with the jumps that prompt our movement from one world to the other. It’s a style that invites controversy and the confusion that sometimes marks the tidal edge of a surge in consciousness. One of the ghazals they translate ends “The grace of the teacher is often stained with rebukes” (p. 21). James R. Newell shows the diversity and even disagreement in translation of Hafez in the comparison of 8 versions of the same ghazal and samples from twelve publications: http://www.thesongsofhafiz.com/hafizpoetry.htm

     My interest in Hafez and Rumi and in leaping poetry builds especially from the potential to dispel barriers to peace that often show up in ideas connected to differences in religion and that are used to justify war, oppression, and superiority. Daniel Ladinsky (The Gift, p. 32) translates Hafez:

I have learned so much from God

That I can no longer call myself

a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

Those lines echo Rumi who lived about a hundred years before Hafez. Coleman Barks in A Year with Rumi includes his version of a poem from Rumi’s Divan. It begins

Ah, true believers, what can I say?

I no longer know who I am

Not Christian or Jew or Moslem

Not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen

(p. 371)

2. out beyond ideas. Coleman Barks uses this phrasing in his version of Rumi. (See p. 36 in Essential Rumi. Also shown in  https://poemfortoday.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/out-beyond-ideas-by-rumi/ ).

The complexity and perplexity of the beyond-mind space is elaborated by Ibrahim Gamard & Rawan Farhardi (The Quatrains of Rumi) and translated as “‘place’ beyond the world of belief and unbelief” (p. 407. No.1314 & 1315). They further discuss the complex notion in a reference note (#154 on p. 665) where they describe this space as “a state in the mystical journey where the presence of God’s Reality is so evident that mental concepts about belief or unbelief can seem irrelevant.” Gamard and Farhardi also note that “A dervish who realizes the limitations of outward religious forms is not supposed to stop required religious practices, such as daily prayers…” 

3. Surpasses human mind. See Ephesians 3, especially verses 17-19:

^17 aso that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being ^brooted and ^cgrounded in love, ¹⁸ may have strength to ^dcomprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and ^eheight and depth, ¹⁹ and to know the love of Christ ^fthat surpasses knowledge, that ^gyou may be filled with all ^hthe fullness of God.

4. Pray without ceasing. I Thessalonians 5:17.

4. sin boldly. Martin Luther. “Let Your Sins Be Strong: A Letter From Luther to Melanchthon.” Letter no. 99, 1 August 1521, From the Wartburg (Segment) Translated by Erika Bullmann Flores from: _Dr. Martin Luther's Saemmtliche Schriften_ Dr, Johannes Georg Walch, Ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, N.D.), Vol. 15,cols. 2585-2590.

13."If you are a preacher of Grace, then preach a true, not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. For he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. This life in not the dwelling place of righteousness but, as Peter says, we look for a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. . . . Pray boldly--you too are a mighty sinner.” (Weimar ed. vol. 2, p. 371; Letters I, "Luther's Works," American Ed., Vol 48. p. 281- 282)  http://www.scrollpublishing.com/store/Luther-Sin-Boldly.html