The Still Point

 

Very interesting illuminations burst across from the fusion coming out of initial readings in two texts. Titus Burckhardt, in Sacred Art in East and West, details how the essential form of a holy structure composes the symbolic themes connected with line, square, circle, and center point. Each of us in our daily work and play, especially in our craft and art, engage with and are mediated by these inevitable structures.

        Burckhardt explains how these elements lead to two- and three-dimensional crosses, mandalas, icons, and on into altars, temples, and other spaces that support contemplation of the divine. Themes include the centrality of sacrifice, transformation, even the containment and resolution of “all cosmic antinomies” (p. 25). Temples extend from altars, the significance evident in this footnote 

“Union with the Divine Essence always comprises, as phases or aspects of a single spiritual act, the reintegration of all the positive aspects of the world—or of their interior equivalents—in a symbolized ‘hearth,’ the sacrifice of the soul in its limited aspect and its transformation by the fire of the Spirit.” (p. 28)

   The physical structures express the fully human along with the cosmos: 

“the temple has a spirit, a soul and a body, like the man and like the universe…the architect of the temple identifies himself with the building and with that which it represents; thus each phase of the architectural task is equally a phase of spiritual realization. The artist confers upon his work something of his own vital force; in exchange he participates in the transformation which that force undergoes by virtue of the sacramental and implicitly universal nature of the work” (p. 47).

   Huston Smith in Forgotten Truth elaborates the multiple dimensions of the cross, including: “a horizontal cross is a mandala, a sacred enclosure, round or square, with typically four approaches to a ‘hidden treasure’ that lies at its center” (p. 23)

“For the point at the center of the three-dimensional cross that gives rise to the order of nature concomitantly creates the souls that inhabit that order, not just in the moment of their conception but continuously, instant by instant as they pursue their trajectories. . . If it strikes the reader as presumptuous to equate his personal center with the center of the cosmos, he must be reminded that physics requires him to do just that because space is relative and curved, the center of the physical universe is for each observer the point from which his observations proceed…The Hermetic formulation is exact: ‘God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.’” (pp. 29-30)

   Smith elaborates in a footnote at the bottom of the page with a quotation from Meister Eckhart:

 “‘The soul that enters into God owns neither time nor space…But it stands to reason, if you consider it, that the space occupied by any soul that enters is vastly greater than heaven and earth and God’s entire creation. I say more: God might make heavens and earths galore yet these…would be of less extent than a single needle-tip compared with the standpoint of a soul atoned in God’” (p. 30).

   Reflections on these texts along with “meditation of everyday life” (referenced on p. 31 by Smith) lead to a sense of being directed to release all reactions, such as those spinning off the political miasma that tumults about us, to let these go into the "black hole.” 

“Passage through the ‘gateless gate’ (Mu Mon Kan) that guards the holy center can be disorienting. If it takes the form of a powerful satori it can feel as if one has been sucked into a ‘black hole’ where physical laws are destroyed. When eyes have accustomed themselves to the new, ethereal light, however, one sees that no movement has occurred. Length and breadth had already withdrawn into the cross’s horizontal center; now the vertical axis too collapses. Renouncing the space it had embodied to make an important but provisional point, that axis now withdraws the ontic, value distinctions that once it metered. . . Superfluous and ego-aggrandizing activity must be stilled, but the stilling of such activity clears the way for pure effectiveness—action that is powered by force that is concentrated and energy assembled” (p. 31; Smith follows with quotations from the Tao Te Ching, the Chuang Tzu, Pascal, and Eliot’s “still point” “where there is only the dance”).

        Let’s release all the worries for dear ones, let every trouble of the world be taken into this still point. This the only way to love. The way to the Only Love.

Finding Pearls

Nov 23, 7:31AM

From Huston Smith’s Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, I came away with the importance of escaping the spell of postmodernism in order to affirm the possibility of the development of higher capacity in human spirituality. While acknowledging the benefits from the scientific age, Smith asserts that scientism veils humans from understanding our divine inheritance because foundational to the domineering mindset imposed by science/postmodernism is the pervasive premise that humans advance from lesser forms rather than from greater. When in the spell of postmodernism, humans are blocked from realizing ourselves as created in the image of God. In postmodernism, we may say the words while denied the infusion of spirit. And in the thrall of material mindset following religious prescriptions risks separation from divine guidance. Postmodernism gives highest values to quantification as evident in the materialism that ever seeks more money, status, sex, and other things. Postmodernism leaves us bereft of the sense of quality.

     A resource for breaking this spell of postmodernism, then, may be found through investing in quality rather than quantity. One view of qualities comes in the Names of God, as expressed in the Islamic tradition. Perhaps the most compelling of these qualities that calls to me is Beauty. As a follow-up to Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (in addition to beginning Smith’s earlier Forgotten Truth), I’m finding myself drawn to Titus Burckhardt’s Sacred Art in East and West. An antidote to the toxicity of materialism comes in the unveiling of the divine in everyday living. Burckhardt explores an aspect or quality of this in the sacred art of “the five great traditions”: “Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism.” For example:

“That which the Christian view of things grasps by means of a sort of loving concentration on the Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, is transposed in the Islamic view into the universal and the impersonal. In Islam the Divine Art—and according to the Koran God is ‘artist’ (musawwir)—is in the first place the manifestation of the Divine Unity in the beauty and regularity of the Cosmos. Unity is reflected in the harmony of the multiple, in order and equilibrium; beauty has all these aspects within itself. To start from the beauty of the world and arrive at Unity—that is wisdom. For this reason Islamic thought necessarily attaches art to wisdom; in the eyes of a Muslim, art is essentially founded on wisdom, or on science, the function of science being the formulation of wisdom in temporal terms. The purpose of art is to enable the human environment, the world so far as it is moulded by man, to participate in the order that manifests most directly the Divine Unity. Art clarifies the world; it helps the spirit to detach itself from the disturbing multitude of things so that it may climb again towards the Infinite Unity.” (pp.16-17)

Most everyday, my spirit finds refreshment by expecting to see beauty in nature. 

Nov 19, 7:11AM

Sometimes the harmony of color and line is increasingly revealed by editing photographs. For example, by adding contrast or by moving the center point, the otherwise hidden beauty emerges more clearly. Looking expectantly, loving the variation of light over shadow, and playing with images all guide the discovery into subtle manifestations of the quality of beauty.

Nov 19, 8:46A harvesting the fallen tree

Nov 21, 4:45P river birch planted this year

     It’s interesting that the same day I’m drafting the above a Facebook friend posted from the fiftieth discourse of Rumi’s Fihi ma fihi:

“The sciences and crafts are like measuring the sea in cupfuls; the way to finding pearls is something else. Many a person is adorned with every accomplishment and possessed of wealth and beauty but has nothing of this intrinsic meaning in him; and many a person is a wreck on the outside, with no fairness of feature, elegance or eloquence, but within is found the intrinsic meaning that abides forever. It is that which enables and distinguishes humanity.” (p. 195, Signs of the Unseen, translation by Thackston)

A year ago today, Nov 24, 2018

Longing into Certainty

Photo taken today 7:34:12 AM attempting to represent
“this moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent”

Three wonderful readings are converging, or perhaps they spiral, about. The “what” that they are mediating goes into the nameless and might be called “the mystery” as long as the nature of the inarticulate unknowable is respected. Huston Smith says that this “what” holds the certainty that summons the truth-searcher and carries one past the destabilizing turbulence permeating the current age. This transport, mediated with mystery, validates longing that otherwise risks being demeaned as escape or fantasy or even madness.

     Iris Murdoch, in the first page of her sixteenth book, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, opens with a character having “A sensation which he felt almost all the time now, a sort of mild aching disgust and lassitude, [that] made him unable to concentrate his mind.” Her portrayal, reminiscent of postmodernism’s miasma, with its devilish variations so evocatively portrayed here and through her fifteen previous novels, concentrates again so that we might loosen, and perhaps even gain release from the toxic illusion.

     Huston Smith’s book, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, very helpfully describes this “worldview that science introduced,” and more importantly, for me at least, points the way beyond, toward “apophatic theology, the via negativa” (p. 59), toward where mystics focus. And that’s the link to the third reading: Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.

     These three readings are working together so that the attraction I’ve long felt to Rumi and Hafez makes more sense, and the increased understanding offers to bridge from the sacred into the profane and back again, and again as the indwelling flows without cease. Murdoch’s stories are especially valuable as the richness of story surpassing the intellectual gold of exposition allows compassion to develop so that the otherwise unloveable might be approached. But finding the way takes more than is humanly possible. The divine needs to come through. 

     For this to happen, I believe we need at least these three: the ground of understanding, the sweet waters of compassion, and the warm light from the spirit. In short, the mystical union. That’s what Rumi, Hafez, and all the charmers of radical love tantalize us toward. Michael Sells concentrates the teachings from the entire book in the final pages when he says this is “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent.”

“The affirmation of transcendence—when taken with full apophatic seriousness—then turns back upon itself. The paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, the coincidences of opposites, the displacement of the grammatical object—all are in violation of the conventional logic that functions for delimited entities…”     “This moment in which the transcendent reveals itself as the immanent is the moment of mystical union. [emphasis added] At this moment, the standard referential structures of language are transformed: the breakdown of the reflexive/nonreflexive grammatical distinction in the antecedence of a pronoun [It sees it(self) through it(self) in it(self)]; the breakdown of the perfect/imperfect distinction (it always has been occurred and always is occurring). At the moment of mystical union, the divine attributes are not known to a nondivine subject, the distinction of deity and creation and the duality of lover and beloved are undone. The attributes appear in the mirror, and the image in the mirror is divine in human and human in divine. As soon as the attributes are ‘known’ (perceived as objects by a subject other than them) they harden into idols. They can be realized only through union and self-manifestation. . . This realization is both timeless and utterly ephemeral.” (p. 212)

Michael Sells continues so that the language and the effect of the spiritual poets may translate more easily into the daily offerings pregnant with the grace of mystical union.

“The moment in which the ego-self passes away entails a ‘bewilderment,’ ‘love-madness,’ a ‘being driven out of one’s wits.’ Conventional rationality is built upon the very structures that are momentarily superseded in mystical union.” (p. 212)

     Terrible thing about a worldview is that when it’s the only view known there’s a significant risk that no other world can be believed nor born. Like if a Jonah were in the whale’s belly his entire life, could he have conceived any other possible world? Persons who only experience the narrow oppressive texture of the postmodern world may be so depressed in spirit and vision that they are condemned to be swallowed their entire lifetime. Thank God for sending prophets, poets, and other teachers throughout created forms to display the divine and to invite the mystical union.

Leafless Prophecy

   Most days the camera lens wants to avoid telephone lines, poles, and yellow stripes on the road. It tries to exclude ugly concrete forms and hunting stands. Warnings caution about glare on closed windows. Watch out for unwanted shade from screens. Question including any unraked fallen leaves. 

      But for this moment, grey skies invite forgiving. Maybe paradise says so. Widen beauty enough for the shadowed lands. Know connections demand accepting imperfection. Windows look out even when the glass isn’t polished. And reflections matter much. 

      In mid-life years, leafless limbs of winter whispered forebodingly; old, now bare, trees prophesy life eternal. 

Prophesy: (transitive verb) to predict with assurance or on the basis of mystic knowledge; (intransitive verb): to speak as if divinely inspired.

Rain Does Alchemy

In the softly falling, at least this time of year, almost within the mirroring eyes of the camera, and more so in the further process of editing the image, the green-yellow turns to gold. Then looking through the window and rain-blurring across time, see and look into the fall of these dampened leaves as by spring slowly the soil turns rich, golden yielding new life. And this window opens into the hidden great mystery: 

“. . . the deep meaning . . . [unseen by] men who have made themselves incapable of seeing him [Christ] and have hidden him from themselves . . . and he is never there when one interprets events by historical materialism, under the guise of theology, instead of grasping the spiritual history ‘in Hurqalya’” (p. 319, note 11 for page 173, Corbin's Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth). 

 As we must surely realize by now, we are engaged in “the battle for the soul of the world” and could certainly avail the resources of “the world of Hurqalya, into the Angelic World” (p. xvii), a place described in the previous blog, where we might

“come face to face with the Earth not as a conglomeration of physical facts but in the person of its Angel . . .  essentially psychic event which can ‘take place’ neither in the world of impersonal abstract concepts nor on the plane of mere sensory data. The Earth has to be perceived not by the senses, but through a primordial Image and, inasmuch as this Image carries the features of a personal figure, it will prove to ‘symbolize with’ the very Image of itself which the soul carries in its innermost depths. The perception of the Earth Angel will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype-Images, experienced as so many personal presences.” (p. 4)

The note cited above elaborates a selection from ‘Abd al-Razzaq Lahiji where Corbin translates and comments on our alchemical opportunity to participate in the magical mystery bridging/blending Heaven/Earth:

“Every being of the two universes, the intelligible and the sensory, has its archetypal Image in this intermediate universe a self-subsistent Image with autonomous existence. . . It may happen that a being of this autonomous world of Images makes himself visible, makes his appearance in our material world, and can be perceived in it by the outer senses. Bodies which are perfectly polished and transparent bodies, such as mirrors, still water the atmosphere, are the places of the epiphany in our material world of the beings of the world of archetypal Images. In the same way, man’s Imagination is also the place of their epiphany.” (p. 172-3)

Like this

Photos taken Sunday morning, October 20, 2019

Leaves Yellow, Fall, and Light

Perhaps the most distinctive mark of good reading, particularly in relation to its value in guiding the spiritual pathway, comes in the manner in which, well before the final pages close, a breeze has already freshened into and has begun returning from other works. Usually, but not always, the flow moves toward authors referenced in footnotes, sometimes and not too often a link goes to additional texts by the original author. And best happens when the spirit takes oneself outside language and into inspiring life experience itself. In any case, the flow carries one deeper, further into richer meaningfulness and awe: in brief, “Ahh” and “Wow!” echoing with “Amen.”

Before “finishing” The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (and already well aware that I’m properly advised to circle back to pages marked, back to the extensive footnotes, and better yet to return for another full reading), Chittick’s references to Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth had led to my taking it from the shelf and to doing so with almost-readiness to engage/absorb bits of the mystical text. I had been prepped by Chittick to be a bit more open about “angel-language” and to take a chance in terrain that I’ve usually detoured around because it smacked of “new-age” superficiality. 

Reflecting on this hostile avoidance to angels, I find it’s strange. How can it be that angel-talk has tended to be a turn-off? Have I disconnected from the prominent presence of angels in the sacred Books? Immediately leaping to mind: The angels with Daniel & friends in the fiery furnace and the lion’s den (Daniel 3 & 6); The awesome that meets Mary and Mary at the tomb and transforms grief and despair into abiding faith (Matthew 28); and Muhammed’s guides for the Night Journey (including al-Buraq), as well as attendants in the Night of Power: “The angels and the Spirit descend therein, by the leave of their Lord, with every command” (Q 97:4, p. 1540 in The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary). Similarly, I’m asking how can I be so close-minded about angels while finding myself fascinated with Khidr, particularly the account of Khidr and Moses that involves the resurrected fish (cf. the Water of Life motif) and the highly significant theme around the surrender of legalism in favor of mind-bending re-creations, suggesting the possibility of direct transmission of personal truth.

Several possible, inter-related, reasons for resistance to angels spring to mind: 

• Science rules the Academy crowning empirical proof and dismissing (even ridiculing) other forms of knowledge, especially anything mystical.
• Proliferation of stuff claiming to be spiritual (sometimes called “New Age”) makes difficult the discernment of material actually qualifying for the prophetic tradition.
• Fear of falling out of control makes a person wary of trusting anything outside rational knowledge.
• What about the devil!

I don’t listen much to music other than wind chimes, bird songs, and soft raindrops on fallen leaves; but the other day, while driving as these mysteries of angelic visitation were blurring about in my being, I tapped on the car CD and Carrie Newcomer sang: “…there’s bound to be some trembling, some risk and some mistakes, something lost and something gained, and Little Earthquakes. . .” (from album Gathering of Spirits). So perhaps it’s Little Earthquakes that happen when Angels enter the liminal edge. Of course, it’s safer to stay with scientific, factual certainty and to toss all angelology indiscriminately into a new-age bin. 

But, then, doesn’t this resistance carry a whiff of noxious pride of intellect? Having spent forty-plus years in the academic complex proved to me that there are deadly limits in the narrow scientific worldview and convinced me something’s missing of vital importance. Retirement might be given especially in order to dedicate priority to what’s been squeezed to the margins, particularly that which concerns life beyond. Of course, the shenanigans of spiritualists persist and walking where angels tread is fearful; but time grows short and we have promises to meet. 

While the connection slowly articulates, I’m drawn to explore the possibilities involving the degree of our relationship with the natural world (including love of animals and plant life) and the way this correlates directly with our access to the spirit world (including angels or other presences). In other words, our closeness to the voice of animals and plants corresponds to some degree with our capacity to hear God’s messengers. About a thousand years ago, a work by the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’, “a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad”) forecast the cost of human insensitivity; but “folktales” (especially those having talking animals) too often go unheeded, and so the environmental crisis resulting from human arrogance now threatens our existence because our “civilization” has burned so brutally. S.H. Nasr provides an introduction to a recent retelling of the Brethren’s Epistle recalling his engagement with the text when writing his doctoral thesis at Harvard in the mid 1950’s:

“The message of the story appeared to me to be particularly timely because even then there was a keen intuition in my mind concerning the impending crisis in man’s relation with nature, a subject to which I turned a decade later in my Man and Nature, written at the dawn of general awareness of what came to be known as the ecological and later environmental crisis” (p. xii, The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity, Fons Vitae, 2005).

This text by the Brethren of Purity offers a place for me to continue to contemplate and to allow the voices of animals to open. A helpful, although dense, complement comes in the flow mentioned earlier, particularly Henry Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth. For example:

“To come face to face with the Earth not as a conglomeration of physical facts but in the person of its Angel is an essentially psychic event which can ‘take place’ neither in the world of impersonal abstract concepts nor on the plane of mere sensory data. The Earth has to be perceived not by the senses, but through a primordial Image and, inasmuch as this Image carries the features of a personal figure, it will prove to ‘symbolize with’ the very Image of itself which the soul carries in its innermost depths. The perception of the Earth Angel will come about in an intermediate universe which is neither that of the Essences of philosophy nor that of the sensory data on which the work of positive science is based, but which is a universe of archetype-Images, experienced as so many personal presences. In recapturing the intentions on which the constitution of this universe depend, in which the Earth is represented, meditated, and encountered in the person of its Angel, we discover that it is much less a matter of answering questions concerning essences (‘what is it?’) than questions concerning persons (‘who is it?’ or ‘to whom does it correspond?’), for example, who is the Earth? who are the waters, the plants, the mountains? or, to whom do they correspond? The answer to these questions causes an Image to appear and this Image invariably corresponds to the presence of a certain state. This is why we have to recapture here the phenomenon of the Earth as an angelophany or mental apparition of its Angel in the fundamental angelology of Mazadaism as a whole, in that which gives its cosmology and its physics a structure such that they include an answer to the question, ‘who?’” (pp. 4-5).

Good readings, as noted above, best inspire life experience. A couple of places I’m attentive to find this include:

* When I’m with Leg’cy (riding or just alongside her), feel the form of Harmony coming through, often involving a sense of Power that carries light (lightness) and a thrill of joy. Notice how this contrasts with the perverted exercises of power evident in the material world.

* When I work/play/imagine with photographic images, attend to the “form” of Beauty that comes through. Engaging with and listening to different representations of the same view seems to open my being more present to the voice coming through the natural world from the Source. Perhaps the Earth Angel that Corbin notes is here somewhere.

photos taken this morning, Sunday, October 13

Light Enough

Sunrise, Sept 24, looking east.

Leaves, just turning autumnal, manifest their inner nature, each unique, mirroring the human body-soul where pure water poured into each glass takes its individual colors of the personal container. William Chittick summarizes Ibn al-‘Arabi: 

“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344.

Imaginal World

Presence spreads time and space

breaking past habit-daze, 

pointillizing same-old illusion.

Instead of sleep walk where the foot

sets down insecure half over the stair step,

anticipate the fall, wake up before.

See into the mist the shade shift;

hear the bear huff over the leaf crunch.

Trust the vision of dream worlds

more than desire and rank, rank.

Listen to the word and smell it.

In the smoke of furious wordstreams

sense the burned edge of intimacy,

the ashy loss, and love silence long.

Enough.

Sunrise, Sept 24, looking west.

The Law of Love

I suppose we know (don’t we?) that following the law with resentment isn’t right or good. It’s really not keeping the Law at all. Because in the final rule, the Law is Love. And, at some point, it seems good and right to realize that we’re most unlikely to find our love for God through clenched teeth, pouting like a two-year-old as if we’re having to follow laws that keep us from having fun. Even trying to believe (like adults do) that we know the constraints are for our own good won’t work. This, too, separates us from Love. And it won’t work to play hermeneutical word-games so that a law gets to be whatever we want it to be. It’s not the Law that has to change—it’s the world we live in that spins. “Imaginal,” not imaginary, is a possible name for this, transmuting “idols into icons.”

     Sometimes a bit of fog brings appreciation for light, the subtle beauty of it; it’s more than perfect clarity. The opening pages of Tom Cheetham’s Imaginal Love: The Meanings of Imagination in Henry Corbin and James Hillman point into this phoenix, this shifting spectrum that moves us through construction/deconstruction/(re-)creation of reality, cosmos, earth, and heaven.

“It is perhaps the chief merit of Corbin that he can help us, in his own words, to ‘transmute idols into icons’ and so defuse the destructive power of literalism and fundamentalism at the heart, in the imagination. To anticipate: Corbin was a master of the visionary recital, the dramatic narrative, and if we understand what this truly means then we will come to see that Fiction in this great sense is the repository of all knowledge, and all truth. Literal truth is always false…In reality, fiction is the only possible means of expressing the truth…” (pp. 14-15).

     As I’m reading into this work of Cheetham, I feel my grounding become a bit tenuous; and while excited in perceiving from his writing a better bridge between Jung and Sufism, I sense more certain positioning as I reach back toward Chittick’s explication and translation of Ibn al-’Arabi (Sufi Path of Knowledge). It seems I’m venturing into remaking my “lived experience” and re-mapping the “real world” with textures of soul and spirit so that the imaginal world revolutionizes the feeling of certainty. Strangely (or not, as I see a similar reporting in Cheetham’s narrative of his journey from secular rationalism to spiritual pragmatism), while reading Chittick (as the current engine in a long train including Corbin’s Creative Imagination and many other challenging texts as well as life experiences and simply getting older) slowly in order to allow it to absorb into dreams and reflections, something redemptive is happening with the Law. 

     Instead of succumbing to and indulging in the typical defensiveness that accompanies being confronted with religious laws, I’m taking a few deep breaths, relaxing shoulders, neck, and stomach. With guidance from the masters, let’s imagine the Law not as a burden but instead as a ladder for the spiritual pathway. 

“Again we are brought back to the fundamental human imperative: Man is bound by the reality of his own essence to strive after God, who is Good, Light, Knowledge, Being—everything to which he must conform in order to reach his own happiness and felicity. But God is unknown and unknowable, so the only way to reach Him is to follow the Law as He makes it known to us” (p. 291, Chittick).

     Instead of fearing the loss of each person’s individual fingerprint identity and destiny, let’s hold in remembrance it’s all given by God, of course. The same Source provides this gift of uniqueness as well as the Law capable of providing unique guidance to the Unity. To us, it may often feel paradoxical: the many and the One. Thus the need for the truth of an imaginal world.

From the time man begins to climb the ladder of ascent (mi’raj), he receives divine self-disclosure in accordance with the ladder of his ascent. Each individual among the Folk of Allah has a ladder specific to him which no one else climbs…However, all the steps of the meanings for the prophets, the friends, the faithful, and the messengers are the same… (pp. 218-219, Ibn al-’Arabi translated by Chittick)

Let’s not expect cheap grace. Stepping on this ladder demands all:

“When man renounces his own individual desire, shrinks from his own ego, and prefers his Lord over all else, then God sets up before him in place of the form of his own soul the form of a divine guidance, a real form from the Real, so that he may walk proudly in diaphanous capes of light. This form is the Law of his prophet and the messengerhood of his messenger. It casts to him from his Lord that within which lies his felicity. (p. 252, Ibn al-’Arabi translated by Chittick)

     The call of the spiritual pathway is freedom from imprisonment in idol-worship, both lawlessness as well as false conceptions of the Law. God’s Law is not a one-size-fits-all straitjacket. Failure to grow beyond the literalism of limited conceptions may enforce dogmas that fit the ego-mind but feel cold and harsh. To grow isn’t to become free from the Law but to become free from the ego, to move from a fear-based narrowness, from violent exclusiveness, from joyless rigidity as well as reckless indulgence and addiction, and instead to flow into the imaginal world, the Love.

Bewildered by God

Morning, Aug 24, 2019

“…we come to know that God has bewildered the faithful, which is His testing of them . . . There only remains which of the two correct views is better for the servant, though both are good. And this is a place of bewilderment (hayra).” Chittick translating Ibn al’Arabi, p. 211, Sufi Path of Knowledge.

     While this explanation and attribution of bewilderment is not entirely comforting, it does offer a possible alternative to feeling bothered about being wishy-washy. Chittick places this quotation from Ibn al’Arabi in the context of dealing with the paradox of human freedom/responsibility alongside predestination. Two particular considerations support our ability to find peace in this perplexity.

     First, the attitude we take toward God is of utmost importance. Even when bewildered, it’s important we address the Divine with courtesy. My previous blog concluded with a brief explanation on courtesy: “The revealed religions (al-shara i) are God’s rules of courtesy (adab Allah) which He set up for His servants. He who gives God’s Law its full due (haqq) has gained the courtesy of the Real (al-haqq) and come to know the friends of the Real,” (Chittick translating Ibn al-‘Arabi, p. 175). One of the tests of faith seems to be in dealing with good and bad acts. While realizing that everything belongs to and comes from God, we are best to enter the Presence with courtesy.  

“. . . only good and beautiful acts be ascribed to God, while evil and ugly acts must be ascribed to the servants. Man must see all good as belonging to God and all evil as belonging to himself, thereby putting everything in its proper place and becoming qualified by justice, wisdom, and courtesy” (pp. 209-210).

     The second crucial matter concerns the nature of knowing and involves a contrast set up between the mind and the heart. While we are gifted with our ability to think and to construct rational understanding, the pathway is distinguished by surrendering our presumption of such knowing, at least at certain moments, in favor of the heart. 

“God has a faculty in some of his servants which bestows a judgment different from what the rational faculty bestows in certain affairs, while it agrees with reason in others. This is a station which is outside the stage of reason, so reason cannot perceive it on its own. No one has faith in [what reason holds to be impossible] except him who has this faculty in his person. He knows reason’s incapacity and the truth of what it denies.” Chittick translating Ibn al’Arabi, p. 203.

     As we know within our bodies, the healthy heart is continually beating and thus offers embodied knowing to believe in persistent change, for continual creation, for holding a rhythm of contrast, even opposition. 

“Knowledge can be acquired through reflection, unveiling, or scripture. The human subtle reality (al-latifat al-insaniyya), also called the ‘soul’ (nafs), knows in a variety of modes. When it knows through reflection, the mode of its knowing is called ‘reason’ (‘aql). When it knows directly from God, the mode of knowing is called the ‘heart’ (qalb), which is contrasted with reason. Whatever the means whereby the soul acquires knowledge, the knowing subject is one. There are not two different entities known as ‘reason’ and ‘heart,’ though there is a real difference between the modalities of knowing. As we have already seen, reason knows through delimitation and binding, while the heart knows through letting go of all restrictions. ‘Aql, as shown by its root meaning, is that which limits the free and ties down the unconstricted. Qalb means fluctuation, for the heart undergoes constant change and transmutation in keeping with the never-repeating self-disclosures of God.” Chittick translating Ibn al’Arabi, p. 159.

     And, of course, perhaps most importantly, the heart stands for love, and in that power it offers the highway to God. Chittick summarizes:

“. . . we love God in everything that we love. The love of God that is made possible through revelation and the divine reports has a salvific function, leading to felicity. But even without revelation, love of God is a fact of existence, though it cannot lead to our felicity unless we are aware of Him whom we love. God reveals Himself in every form, thus making it necessary that we love Him in any form which we love.” (Chittick, pp. 180-181)

Then Chittick translates Ibn al’Arabi:

“Though no one loves any but his own Creator, he is veiled from Him by the love for Zaynab, Su’ad, Hind, Layla, this world, money, position, and everything loved in the world. Poets exhaust their words writing about all these existent things without knowing, but the gnostics never hear a verse, a riddle, a panegyric, or a love poem that is not about Him, hidden beyond the veil of forms.”

When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

of God. Knowledge of God effervesces into the greatest mystery. And yet life plummets into meaninglessness without tracking this impossibility. One thread to sustain the pursuit comes in the embrace of bewilderment, a gift from and perhaps a tasting of the Divine.

From the first to the final pages of Sufi Path of Knowledge, William Chittick offers nurturance involving the taste and understanding of bewilderment as it comes through the teachings of Ibn  al-‘Arabi.

“To find God is to fall into bewilderment (hayra), not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one’s way, but the bewilderment of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and not-knowing Him at the same time. Every existent thing other than God dwells in a never-never land of affirmation and negation, finding and losing, knowing and not-knowing . . . The bewilderment of the Verifiers in respect to God as He is in Himself never prevents them from finding Him as Light and Wisdom and from employing the fruits of those divine attributes to illuminate the nature of things and put each thing in its proper place” (pp. 3-4).

The “Verifiers” are described as those who “have verified the truth of their vision of God on every level of existence and finding, not least on the level of intelligence and speech, the specific marks of being human” (p. 4).

I’m only midway through this volume of Chittick’s and won’t quote from the final pages yet, but I did consult his index which notes nineteen occurrences of “bewilderment” extending through to the end of the book. Of course, the notion of bewilderment builds meaningfulness through the development of a web of terms. A few of the critical notions include the “relative absolute,” the “coincidence of opposites,” the “He/not He,” and “imaginal faculty.” [* See notes at end for further elaboration on these terms.]

When we try to approach the Truth, we’re onto the slippery slopes of essentials and absolutes. “The Absolute allows for no absolutizing of anything other than Itself, which is to say that everything other than God is imagination” (p. 29). “The Essence alone is absolutely Real” (p. 29). 

“the spiritual ‘stations’ (maqamat) themselves,. . . go back, in Ibn al’Arabi’s way of seeing things, to unique perceptions of reality, delimited and defined by certain relationships and constraints. But none of these is absolute, so each can be contradicted by other points of view. The human response to these constant shifts in perspective may well be ‘bewilderment,’ which, Ibn al-‘Arabi tells us, is the station of the great friends of God” (p. 29). 

Most, if not all of us, place premium on certainty, and this undergirds the appeal of fundamentalism as well as racism, sexism, and other exclusive dogmatisms. The constructs that prioritize tolerance for ambiguity serve as alternatives to such oppressive absolutes. For example, the scheme developed by William Perry for intellectual and ethical development offers progression from dogmatic thinking toward the advanced levels which involve making commitments even within relativism. But my experience of such schemes leaves the longing for Truth, for the Absolute, insufficiently tended.

The pressures of relativism and multiplicity eventually push for the reconciliation of opposites. How can God be both Transcendent and Immanent—totally beyond and simultaneously close as heartbeat? How can a loving, all-powerful God allow good persons to suffer? Reminding me of C.G. Jung’s linking the union of opposites with psychological wholeness, Chittick emphasizes the “coincidence of opposites” (jam’ al-addad): “God is the coincidence of all contrary attributes. In knowing God, we must be able to put opposites together. . . The rational faculty can grasp God’s Unity and transcendence, while imagination is needed to perceive the multiplicity of His self-disclosures and His immanence” (pp. 59, 70). 

“It is impossible for sense perception or the rational faculty to bring together opposites, but it is not impossible for imagination.Hence the authority and strength of the Strong only became manifest in the creation of the imaginal faculty (al-quwwat al-mutakhayyhila) and the World of Imagination, which is the closest thing to a denotation (dalala) of the Real. For the Real is ‘the First and the Last, the Manifest and the Nonmanifest’ (Koran 57:3).” Page 115, Chittick translating Ibn al-‘Arabi.

Bewilderment, perhaps by definition, results in separation from the normal world, as the person is tossed to “be wild,” to be separated from standard thought, meaning, and relationships. One way of coping is acceptance of silence. Professor Alan Godlas translates a poem from Rumi and adds end lines with transliteration which adds feeling of the language:

          Go into contemplation
          of God's wonders, andar ravid
         Struck by awesomeness
         and bewilderment, become lost, gom shavid

         Stunned by God's creative brilliance
         one's loses ones proud beard and moustache, gom konad
         one recognizes one's limits,
         and about the creator, becomes silent, tan zanad

         He can only say, like the Prophet,
         "I cannot praise You as You deserve,"
         from deep in his soul, u ze jan;
         since a truly worthy elucidation
         is beyond articulation and expression, an bayan.

In addition to claiming the value of silence, the world beyond words, persons may look to the World of Imagination and to dreams. As discussed in previous blogs, Michael Sells offers very helpful development of “unsayings” as tastings of the divine. Concerning dreams, Chittick summarizes from Ibn al-‘Arabi: “Dreams are in fact a God-given key to unlock the mystery of cosmic ambiguity and the constant transmutation of existence. The new creation is never more clearly witnessed than in the world of dreams” (p. 119).

As noted in the first quotation, the bewilderment Chittick/Ibn al’Arabi talk about is “not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one’s way.” So it’s important that persons hold bewilderment without slipping into lethargic trance, self-indulgent delusions, and/or despondency. Supportive relationships with a guide and with “friends of God” are called for. In relation to holding bewilderment, Chittick elaborates on Ibn al-‘Arabi’s emphasis on Wisdom and Courtesy:

“The revealed religions (al-shara i) are God’s rules of courtesy (adab Allah) which He set up for His servants. He who gives God’s Law its full due (haqq) has gained the courtesy of the Real (al-haqq) and come to know the friends of the Real.” Page 175, Chittick translating Ibn al-‘Arabi.

* More on these terms can be seen in previous blogs including these:

For coincidence of opposites, see

Parables Guard Wonder November 20, 2016 (includes  Jung’s  Mysterium Coniunctionis)   

Majesty & Beauty  December 9, 2018   (includes Michael Sells & Sachito Murata)

For “imaginal world,” see 

Winter Solstice & the Imaginal World   December 21, 2018

Pictures Revealing Reality July 14, 2019  

Pictures Revealing Reality

        A picture or photograph is not “reality,” of course. We know that. And yet some “pictures,” especially when it’s all we’re seeing, are more revelatory than others. Windows into reality we may glimpse—if we take for real what is true, the essence, even the mystery at the heart of life. 

“When we look into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds, there could be no rain, and there would be no flower. Without time, the flower could not bloom. In fact, the flower is made entirely of non-flower elements; it has no independent, individual existence. It ‘inter-is’ with everything else in the universe… When we see the nature of inter-being, barriers between ourselves and others are dissolved, and peace, love, and understanding are possible. Whenever there is understanding, compassion is born. (Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ, p. 11)

        When I’m attentive, scouting through our window panes for certain slants of light, then when taken outside, and bending for a different framing, for a composition that recognizes an image planted inside by the great Mystery, then Truth takes my hand along the pathway, teaching, loving.

        Playing with the raw image also offers further windows. Searching shadows may realize a hidden, finer beauty. Adding contrast leads into the dynamic of opposites, increasing appreciation for each dimension, and more for the inevitable connection, like a vortex swirling sorrow and joy into beyond-words texture of the Divine.

“Background” holds and highlights.

The center of attraction deserves special focus and still its value depends on caring for the context, always shifting, adjusting to the light of that moment. The mystics try to guide us into special, moveable meanings as we move from station to station. Even love has a panoply of shadings.

“Moses’ searching refers to ‘rising to perfection (taraqqiy ila al-kamal). . . through the pursuit of the sacred intellect (al-‘aql al-qudsi).’ Al-Qashani’s idiom here evokes, but extends beyond al-Qushayri’s and Ruzbihan’s articulations of ‘divine inspiration’ and ‘perfect gnosis.’ ‘Retracing their steps,’ refers for Al-Qashani to two realities: (1) ‘rising to the station of the original nature’ (maqam al-fitra al-ula); and (2) rising to perfection until finding the sacred intellect. . . The sacred intellect. . . has been ‘specially selected with the virtue of caring (‘inaya) and mercy (rahma).’ That mercy is spiritual perfection: immaterial, indivisibly sacred and pure light. These qualities are all signs (athar) that the sacred intellect, personified by al-Khidr, is close and intimate. Al-Qashani, following al-Qushayri and Ruzbihan, interprets, ‘And We taught him knowledge from Our presence’ (18:65) to mean a sacred, inner knowledge given without the mediation of a human teacher (ta-lim bashari). Al-Qashani suggests, but does not stress, that this knowledge is unteachable.” (Hugh Talat Halman, Where the Two Seas Meet, p. 183)