One

Perhaps the biggest find

of the hundred or so purchased

over about a decade

from books on the porch 

of the local library sale

was yesterday in the Billy Collin’s

one dollar buy

No better must have been

the $1 translation 

of Ibn al-Arabi's Fusus

although I haven’t finished reading it

in the two three years since

But Billy Collins makes little 

of finishing

A poem is not for finding one final

meaning

I did finish a book earlier today

about Life and Love and Truth

And I’m reassured by all three

that no one here

tells my L/life 

so I’m about releasing

my unique one heart

broken/restored inside outside

whole in One

Transcendent Power

The transformation—caterpillar to butterfly—happening inside the dark of the cocoon calls to our sense of wonder, inviting us to join with our destiny in moving toward the great mystery. In similar manner, spiritual transformations also surpass the vision of human eyes, stretch the boundaries of language, and test the edge of faith. Perhaps we gain reassurance about life after life as we witness the metamorphoses of butterflies; since ancient times they’ve symbolized the soul. Transformational growth of the soul happens in this world as we advance in our experiencing the awe and bewilderment of transcendence. 

A primary place for spiritual transformation comes in a kind of death and rebirth of language. In Mystical Languages of Unsaying, Michael Sells asserts: “The transcendent must be beyond names, ineffable” (p. 2). One response to this challenge, modeled by many mystics, is the practice of silence, surrendering speech in the acknowledgment of a far superior knowing. The book of Job teaches the hard lessons of this pathway.

In addition to silence, engaging aporia (“irresolvable internal contradiction”) can bring us into the experience of awe, almost as if a rebirth of language into another power. This endeavor best proceeds through “himma” (intense spiritual resolve) toward the God who is both immanent (e.g., Psalm 139, “in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me”) and transcendent (beyond our thinking and imagining; e.g., Eph 3:20). 

Sells calls such discourse “the mystical languages of unsaying” and says it “begins with the aporia—the unresolvable dilemma—of transcendence” (p. 2). He explicates texts from Plotinus, John the Scot Eriugena, Ibn ‘Arabi, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart.

“At the high end of the scale of performative intensity are passages …in which the mystical discourse turns back relentlessly upon its own propositions and generates distinctive paradoxes that include within themselves a large number of radical transformations, particularly in the area of temporal and spatial relationships” (p. 3).

Sells shows how the “unsayings” provide a kind of experience in the field of transformation; they don’t just talk about it—we have opportunity to feel it.

“apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union” (p. 10)“At the heart of that unsaying is a radical dialectic of transcendence and immanence. That which is utterly ‘beyond’ is revealed or reveals itself as most intimately ‘within’: within the ‘just act,’ however humble (Eckhart), within the basic acts of perception (Ibn ‘Arabi), within the act of interpreting torah or fulfilling the mitzvot (Moses de Leon), or within the act of love (Marguerite Porete). When the transcendent realizes itself as the immanent, the subject of the act is neither divine nor human, neither self nor other… The moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, melt away is commonly called mystical union.” (p. 7)

Even proximity to this mystical discourse takes my breath away, and I don’t seem to be able to stay there for very long. So I’m glad that additional spaces for spiritual transformation come through the arts and through play with language such as storytelling (e.g., tales involving metamorphosis such as Psyche, Beauty and Beast) and parables. John Dominic Crossan says

“When comedy ensures that language, rendered strange by literature, is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, the narrow gate to transcendence has been opened” (p. 49, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges).

The “arts” extend beyond visual art. In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag includes in the arts “the activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer” as stages for “the formal dramas besetting consciousness, each individual work of art being a more or less astute paradigm for regulating or reconciling these contradictions.” Like the paradoxes attended in Sells’ unsayings, Sontag situates contradictions in the “project of spirituality”: “plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at resolving the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.” (Her essay is included at the beginning of Styles of Radical Will, cited from p. 3-4.) 

Persons who know me will not be surprised when I add horsemanship to the arts listed by Sontag, especially because it participates in the spiritual project that involves the resolving of contradiction.  For me, the breath-taking-away event happens again and again when I experience the sweetest engagement with the massive power of the horse in the moment we meet on the most subtle level. For example, when we best transition from the trot to canter, it isn’t communicated through physical cues or even through verbal command but instead as if  in an imagination or wish or spirit.

This paradox of power in which the light rather than the heavy brings forth the transcendent is also (and probably more frequently) evidenced in its negative form when force is attempted and things turn ugly. Greatness (e.g., “Make America …”) is often viewed in terms of Power; tragically when the transcendent goes missing, results are ugly.  Jesus said, “The greatest among you will be your servant” (Matt 23:11). We teeter at a crucial time when being great depends on transforming the enactment of power and greatness into this transcendent level.

It’s not easy, and yet it is. It’s like reaching for the beauty and art of riding and how it comes in when letting go more than by using force. Similarly, approaching the mystics doesn’t happen by force. For example, it just doesn’t work if I force myself to read Michael Sells or Chittick, Corbin, etc. Instead, it moves by gradual immersion and absorption; and somewhat surprisingly, for me, “getting it” works when accompanied by easier reading, particularly mysteries (e.g., Ellis Peters) and novels (e.g., Iris Murdoch) whose narratives probe the paradoxical nature of truth, love, and power. 

This discussion opened with the butterfly as symbol for transformation. We might also do well to consider the plight of the butterfly as warning for the endangerment of spiritual transformation. The monarch butterfly merits special attention as it is under consideration to qualify as an endangered species; the eastern monarch has declined 90% in two decades. In a similar way, I believe the quality of tending the human soul has diminished severely; the transformational butterfly of our being has been sorely neglected. Signs are everywhere, but who sees? Who cares?

In his introduction to the biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi focuses the forces that shook apart the foundation that (in my view) had supported a faith-field where spiritual transformation made enough sense to live by. Condradi set Murdoch’s “work in the context of the cultural/intellectual life of the mid-twentieth century, of the generation who struggled to come to terms philosophically and emotionally and artistically with Stalin and Hitler, with existentialism, and with the slow collapse of organized religion” (p. xxv, Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch; see also, Diane Butler Bass' work). Today, especially in the U.S.A., I believe we’re still struggling to come to terms with all this as well as with the Vietnam War and subsequent exercises of power. If we cannot transform and transcend, we appear condemned to living with lies. As with any time of crisis, spiritual transformation is vitally needed in order to invoke the transcendent.

Beauty of Great Questions

Sunday here flows in subtle tones, like love on the edge off remembering.

“…troubled by the ultimate questions. No-one else’s answer can satisfy the hunger in your heart.” John O’Donohue concludes the meditations with the “beauty of the great questions”: 

[it’s] “how they dwell differently in each mind. How they root deeper than all the surface chatter and image, how they continually disturb. Your deep questions grow quickly restless in the artificial clay of received opinion or stagnant thought. . . The presence of the contemplative and the artist in a culture is ultimately an invitation to awaken and engage one’s neglected gifts, to enter more fully into the dream of the eternal that has brought us here to earth.” p. 247

         The passage referencing the Big Questions takes me back to the final years of teaching, especially in the I-Series program and the capstone course of my career, “Good Stories: Teaching Narratives for Peace and Justice.” If I had absorbed and articulated more of the understanding of Beauty that O’Donohue lays out, the title might have included “for Beauty” or perhaps “Stories on Beauty.” We did explore the frontiers of beauty as well as goodness and truth. The terrain of narrative offers spaces to mine into personal identity and the connection with the divine.

   When the youngest sister leaves home and enters the darkest center of the forest, she meets with the threshold question each of is invited to open, to circle around, to listen into: "Who are you?" And, of course, the companion questions: "Where do you come from and where are you going?" "What are you doing here?" Her answer allows us to reflect on our divine heritage: “I am the child of the ruler and I’m searching for my brothers as long as the sun may rise…”

          William Stafford asked it this way: “Who are you really, wanderer?” And the response as I remember it, allowing myself to reconstruct, as each of us might do, instead of looking up “the artificial clay”: “And the answer you have to give/ no matter how dark and lonely,/ I am the child of the king.”

Using the Sacred Imagination

     As Facebook friends know, we get flashbacks: “x years ago…” For today, March 2, Facebook reminds me that I posted two years ago “The Treasure in Good Stories.” So in looking back, I’m reminded of the gift of culminating a career with a sense of purpose, of feeling a fit that comes with accepting limitations, letting go of external expectations, and living into closer harmony with destiny. The treasure in Good Stories, at least one focusing, comes in the first sentence of that post: “Good Stories entertain and engage Big Questions such as: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

     Big questions like these don’t accept final answers. Instead, they offer direction and vitality for going farther, going further on. Good stories provide a schoolroom with always open doors for recess so that humans have room to continue growing up, even into retirement. They’re not so much for dispensing information as they are for opening imagination. Our imaginal capacities need developing as much, if not more, as do our ability to reason and to learn the scientific method.

     Having left the university, those years spent in Good Stories have opened now into more intense journey with imagination and further travels with the big questions. Just yesterday, I completed reading William Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. The one before was James Morris’ Orientations and before that Morris’ The Reflective Heart: Discovering Spiritual Intelligence in Ibn ‘Arabi’s Meccan Illuminations. In it, Morris offers a connection with the bigger purpose of Good Stories:

one might say that his [Ibn ‘Arabi’s] method is one of using the sacred Imagination—in the sense of the archetypal images and stories provided by his own religious tradition—to awaken each reader’s individual spiritual imagination, to illuminate and reveal the recurrent ‘reflections’ of those scriptural likenesses in the ‘ever-renewed creation’ of his readers’ own unique spiritual experiences. (p. 161)

     I scarcely presume to select one passage from Chittick’s Imaginal Worlds to illustrate the illumination about imagination because the entire text wants to be included. The chapter “Death and the Afterlife” still draws my gratitude for better understanding God’s mercy, and the final section on the nature of belief adds hope for peace, both inner and in the USA.

     The world around us looks a mess. Our education system hasn’t proven to develop citizens who are capable of democratic governance. Of special concern are the failure to discern truth, bad judgment about character, and little evidence of love for self, others and the environment. In my view, part of the problem with our schooling comes from too much faith in reason and too much denial of imagination. Chittick explains how Ibn ‘Arabi asserts the importance and place of both reason and imagination:

imagination erases differences and unites, while reason discerns and separates. When people are left to their rational faculties, they tend to separate the Real from the cosmos and themselves. This leads to a loss of the vision of the divine presence in all things…[capacity with] imagination allows them to establish links and overcome difference. (p. 168)

There—I did finally select one passage, but doing so leaves a need to go back and re-read the many other pages with markers.  Let’s keep moving further into the imaginal worlds…

Tracking on the Path of Attraction

In the account of his forest mandala for early February, David George Haskell focuses on the tracks of deer and their browsing on the emerging tips of winter vegetation. 

This week, the tracks in our woodlands have been quite visible due to the snowfall that has been covering the ground. In addition to the cloven marks of deer, padded footprints run alongside. In recent days, I sighted a coyote and possibly a bobcat. A grey house cat has also been prowling by, maybe from the barn or from neighbors, and bird prints abound. 

        My reading this week gains meaning when viewed in terms of tracking. In first passage through the books, some spot on almost every page or three attracted a marker. After reading, those fluorescent sticky notes made the tracks by which I returned to copy passages and to classify them into categories. Here’s the working set from James Winston Morris’ The Reflective Heart:

• Bewilderment
• Discernment
• Face as symbol  Face of God    veil  cleaning   suffering
• Friend of God
• Heart   Tajalli
• Imagination
• Journey Voyage -ing
• Meaning-Making  Self-Recognition   Spiritual Ascension of the Word
• Secret
• Spiritual Intelligence  Mahdi
• Steward    Stewardship
• Taste   Tasting
• Tales   Story   Storytellling   Hagiography     Imagination
• Teaching

  How is it that certain passages and terms emerge from the sea of words, like the young growth that attracts the browsing of deer? Haskell explains in length how a deer takes in the crucial parts that the body, the rumen, is especially receptive to and capable of absorbing. The deer discerns within the environment that which has life-giving power. Perhaps, again, it’s discernment, a term for the title of a key chapter in Morris’ book, that forges or finds a person’s unique pathway.

   As I wondered around this metaphor of tracks and tracking, the term himma came to mind. In attempting to follow the “path of attraction,” some markers or tracks would certainly be helpful because the world has many wolves, gingerbread houses, and givers of toxic apples. So many attractions distract or veil a person from the True Way; these tests range from ascetic to sensational. A tracker has to discern the fit for his or her particular fingerprint marking the Way, the track provided by the Source. In The Reflective Heart, Morris indexes only three pages specifically for himma, but one of them may be sufficient at this point. Translating Ibn ‘Arabi:

We empty our hearts of reflective thinking, and we sit together with the Real (al-Haqq) on the carpet of adab [appropriate courtesy] and spiritual attentiveness (muraqaba) and presence and readiness to receive whatever comes to us from Him—so that it is God who takes care of teaching us by means of unveiling and spiritual realization. So when they have focused their hearts and their spiritual aspirations (himam) on God and have truly taken refuge with Him—giving up any reliance on the claims of reflection and investigation and intellectual results—then their hearts are purified and open. Once they have this inner receptivity, God manifests Himself to them, teaching them and informing them through the direct vision of the inner meanings of those (obscure scriptural) words and reports, in a single instant…They limit (the meanings of these scriptural or prophetic expressions) to what (God) actually intended by them—even if that very same expression occurs in another report (with an entirely different intended meaning). (p. 61)

In her book on Hafiz, Elizabeth Green clarifies the meaning of himma: “‘high spiritual energy or ambition,’ spiritual power that enables an adept to attain higher planes of experience and understanding, and that enables the pir [spiritual guide] to protect his disciples” (p. 148, The Green Sea of Heaven). I’ve sometimes connected himma with an increased heartbeat or a sense of close attunement with purpose, the raison d’être. In Music of the Soul, Shaykh Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal connects himma with a personal favorite:

“… you could say himma is like a horse and when the ‘arif (the knower of the truth) puts himself on this himma, he flies, travelling. Without himma, no one can walk. . . The knowing is himma.” (p. 285, note 11).

This tracking, this connection with himma, or with whatever mark one calls the trace of the True Way, cannot be underestimated. Rumi reminds us:

The Master said: There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever. (p. 26, Discourses of Rumi, Trans. A.J. Arberry; See also, Coleman Barks for Feb 9, “The One Thing You Must Do” in A Year With Rumi and p. 21 in Say I Am You).

Winter’s Invisibility Cloak

Our woods on January 30, 2018

For January 30, David George Haskell in The Forest Unseen, writes, “plant resurrection after a full surrender is so far removed from human experience…” (p. 22). And yet the Path of Attraction* calls to us humans, urging the full surrender of the ego-self. Instead of a contrast, I find that Haskell’s elaboration of the winter woods offers a helpful model for our development through wintry conditions.

   Haskell describes how most plants survive through freezing winter by moving the essential to the center: “Plants start their preparations several weeks ahead of the first freezes. They move DNA and other delicate structures to the centers of their cells” (p. 22). In similar fashion, in order to survive the freezing times that worldly life brings toward the soul, humans need to follow the example of the plants’ preparation. 

   Importantly, the testing times of winter demand the development of discernment. Purification of the human heart means discerning the individual’s spiritual DNA. Coleman Barks places a Rumi poem here in the midst of winter where it teaches us about the ability to discern true ecstacy: “There are thousands of wines/ that can take over our minds.// Don’t think all ecstasies are the same./ Jesus was lost in his love for God./ His donkey was drunk with barley.”** Yes, humans need the “fire” from wine in order to make our way through winters, but we have to choose the wine of spiritual ecstacy over the intoxications of pride, ambition, domination, as well as alcoholic drunkeness.

   If a human surrenders the ego, surviving the winter of life might be possible. Haskell’s elaboration of his woods in Shakerag Hollow offers helpful models for us. In addition to the way taken by perennials, he notes “a different path”: 

Leafcup herbs completed their short eighteen-month lives last fall and now stand dead, surrendered entirely to winter. They have sublimated into a new physical form, like snow passing into vapor. Like vapor, these new forms are invisible, but they surround me…seeds, waiting out winter…When spring sparks the mandela, the energy released will carry the whole forest, birds included, through another year. [p. 24]

   Haskell’s account stirs several themes worthy of meditation. For one, consider the value of going invisible. Of course we saw the power of the Invisibility Cloak for Harry Potter. Perhaps less apparent is the value of the quiet life somewhat protected from the storms of status, wealth, and winning. When we realize this, we have gratitude for not being seen, for not receiving the “merit” bonus, even for losing the world’s prestige. The authentic life of the individual soul has to be known in secret. 

        Or perhaps there are sightings or scents but only accessible to those prepared to receive them. The pathway toward God moves into the invisible, the inarticulate, the ineffable. I believe that human capacity for such movement develops, for example, when engaging Good Stories through increasing discernment of “resonance,” by discriminating the authentic, the holy. Although I’ve just discovered the book, I’m excited to open John Renard’s Friends of God where his Preface notes “when an author appears to have slipped off the straight path of ‘fact’ onto the mucky byways and quick sands of credulity” and going forward as “travelers in the realms of the religious imagination” guided as “smaller stories communicate the ineffable” (xiii-xiv). God’s light breaks through every instant but catching the rainbow spectrum takes special vision. These new forms wait out winter preparing to spark into spring.

==================

* Path of Attraction is “code” for following God’s light, for the “Religion of Love,” perhaps even signaled by the code-word  “resonance” that I use in Good Stories [clink on the resonance “label” at bottom of blog], and for continuing purification needed to track or to be drawn by the Source, the Truth… 

** From p. 40 for January 28 in A Year with Rumi, taken from Mathnawi IV, 2683ff. In the passage, Rumi warns us that these two “wines” (infidelity vs. true religion, line 2716; carnal soul vs. reason, line 2718) are “at war: take heed, take heed, and strive that the spiritual realities may prevail over the (sensual) forms” (line 2719, Nicholson’s translation).

In her notes for Hafiz’s ghazal 5, Elizabeth Gray comments on the symbol: “Wine has a rich array of meanings and resonances in Persian poetry, and is associated with light, illumination, and truth… The surface of the wine in the wine cup reveals the face of the Beloved, the reflection of one’s own face (which is a mirror of God as His creation, and therefore is Him)” (p. 147, The Green Sea of Heaven.)

Faces of the Beloved

photo from when Joseph & Leg’cy first partnered up,
circa 2007. Taken & framed by beloved Belqis.

The Religion of Love pretty much says it all, and at the same time leaves one free-falling, ecstatic, as if intoxicated, calling for imagery of taverns, love-making, and (especially for me) horses.* The Persian mystic poets leave me breathless that way. From a random page of Hafiz:

“…From the demonic rival, I take refuge in my own God;/ For the sake of God, that gleaming star might grant some help.//  If your black eye-lash has our blood in its sights,…/ When you set your cheek alight, you burn up the heart of a world…” **

Avery’s footnote to “cheek” states: 

“The “cheek”, izar (also rukh ): Shabistari defines the cheek as the stage on which the Divine Beauty is revealed. The cheek is the jamal, the beauty of God, the vestibule to God’s jallal, His Glory and Power. The cheek is the Divine Essence manifested in its names and qualities.” **

         This wonder-full especially happens when life-experience throbs deep in the heart and calls up in its inimitable, undeniable way: “Truth!” Within each individual, a feeling that eludes the meaning-making of the schooled-mind waits to be owned and known through the heart. It may have to wait a long time, to the end of time? Searching out, forging a good connection with passion deserves high priority. 

         Natural horsemanship requires collection. While driven by passion, my horsemanship demanded many years of riding and groundwork before I could claim to be true the subtle vibrations that my body had long known but could not get through to my conscious knowing because the schooled mind refused to yield. I say “schooled-mind” because Reason must not be devalued. The mind, when cleaned, plays a crucial role in discerning the path. It’s when a person’s thinking (or any other function) presumes to know more than God that it has to be dethroned by surrender. David George Haskell gives a marvelous example of this: “Lichens master the cold months through the paradox of surrender” (The Forest Unseen, p. 4; for elaboration, see These Frosty Woods). ***

         Usually, perhaps optimally, in order to feel heart-resonance fully, the surround space stands still, silent, as if bowed, waiting to be witnessed. Yet in a rushed, distracted world, this deep-bass-voiced “Amen” from a Hallelujah chorus risks never being heard. That’s why I look long into the winter woods, the patient leaves, gold-toned, drawing me further and farther in. 

It’s remembering dreams, both kinds. For me (as in Good Stories), it’s also returning to traditional tales, allowing old ones to come true again, at any moment, as they tell the meaning of otherwise inarticulate experience.

"All the tales of great lovers and the fables of the heroic champions of yore thus become part of the soul’s psychohistory. They pertain to the inner journey of the poet…These are not legends, but living facts of the heart that appear constantly in their verse; they are, as Emily Dickinson says, ‘Bulletins all Day from Immortality’. . . in the Religion of Love such circumstances fill the mystic’s presential awareness. These legends are tangible issues of the present moment that facilitate the lover’s pursuit of Eros, food for his soul that he consumes hoc tempore in the pursuit of knowledge, goodness and beauty, which incite him to excel in the only serious sport: Amor. "  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 100-2.****

         When passion marks the pathway, the meaning of “God is love” continues to unfold. Even heartbreaks trace the mystery, perhaps more than the good times. Jesus is alive in any religion that has Hafiz.

"Likewise, the Sufi poets consider the appearance of Jesus as an ever reoccurring event sustaining them in the present, using in this context the metaphor of the Messiah’s breath of inspiration’ (dam-i masih). Hafiz alludes to this in two verses: ‘Love’s physician is compassionate and endowed/ With the breath of Jesus,/ But whom should he assuage/ If you are without pain?’  and ‘To whom may I relate such a subtlety?/ She killed me—my stony-hearted mistress,/ Yet possessed the life-giving breath of Jesus.’ "Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, pp. 101-102. ****

         When I trace passion’s pathway, I re-see my falling in love with horsemanship as it revealed the delicacies of power, more through the body than the mind. Another touch comes in the tender yet ecstatic touch of Beauty that clicks any second in the shutter release of a camera open to the master artist’s palette. The Beloved appears in the faces of whatever lines have been pre-formed in each human’s origin. From Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s section “The Primordial Disposition of Man and the Religion of Love”:

"According to the Qur’an, man was created with an ‘original disposition that God instilled within him’ (fitrat Allah ) and formed with a ‘fundamentally immutable God-given nature’ (la-tabdil li-khalqi’illahi , Q30:30). Basing themselves on this evidence from their holy scripture, Persian poets drove this classical theolgical doctrine up several theosophical notches higher, maintaining that man’s nature had been already moulded and framed to develop according to the nature of the divine attributes of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and inclined to follow the ‘Straight Path of Love and Mercy’ (‘ishq, mahabbat, rahmat ) long before birth."  Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 87 ****

         In last night’s dream, I set a herd of horses free but with insufficient preparation for their safe passage to the intended pasture. Perhaps the dream meant to guide me toward providing context around the metaphors of intoxication: the tavern, the love-making, fast horses. My first taste of riding came in cantering narrow woodland trails and ducking branches. It was intoxicating and served to hook me. Without the wild taste it’s unlikely I’d have dedicated myself to a ten-year discipline of riding slow circles in arenas that was necessary for me to develop and to trust “feel.” I don’t recommend riding wild, and I no longer drink alcoholic beverages. Such experiences and images are meant to be contained and translated into the Religion of Love.

"If we approach the transcendental significance of some of these symbols, how the process leading to the sublimation of these metaphors occurred—and thus the raison d’etre sustaining them—is easy to discern. The phrase ‘it is delightful to be mad’, for example, poetically speaking conveys a self-evident sense. Understood spiritually, however, the phrase makes no sense whatsoever unless we understand it to imply a madness above and beyond reason, rather than below reason: the lower, irrational—psychotic—insanity. Likewise, the expression ‘the joys of intoxication’ makes perfect sense to every secular sensibility attuned to wine’s bacchanalian pleasures. But to the philosophical temperament focused on progress in the spiritual life, it makes sense only when it refers to the drunkenness that contemplation of the Beautiful inspires—or, as the Sufis say, the ecstatic rapture that the sight of the beauteous visage of the Cup-bearer (saqi ) rouses in the beholder—stimulating intoxication without any hangover. In the same vein, the joys of freedom extollled by the Sufi poets involve their liberation from the vices of greed, anger, pride and emancipation from the vanity of ambition for honours and high rank…That wanton witness-of-beauty (shahid-i harja’i ) celebrated in Sufi mystical poetry is that icon of supreme loveliness, whose ravishingly attractive countenance is everywhere reflected, both in man and nature alike." Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, p. 92 ****

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* Although I’m not finding it as evident in Lewisohn’s volume on Hafiz, references to horses and riding are abundant in the Persian mystic poets. For example, see Riding from Passion to Compassion.  Also, as I progress into the next chapter in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, “The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Hafiz’s Poetry” by Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, pp. 107-121, I find reference to Ahmad Ghazali: “Love exists first in an unadulterated form which flows to existence from God. Lingering on the border of existence, love waits for the human Spirit so that it can come down to the world. In Ghazali’s metaphor, the Spirit is depicted as the steed of love, which transports love to the earth. Here on earth, love assumes many faces—sometimes it is a sensual love, sometimes love between parent and child, and so on—but ultimately love seeks to return back to its place of origin. In its return journey, love is the steed and spirit is the rider, bringing love to its original abode” (p. 110). 

** Peter Avery, “Poem VI,” p. 27 in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, Archetype, 2007. For a more accessible sampling of Avery’s translations, see Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery & John Heath Stubbs, 1957/2003. Also, Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez. Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn. HarperCollins, 2008.

*** David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen, 2012.

**** Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei’s chapter “The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry,” translated by Lewishohn in Hafiz and the Religion of Love, pp. 77-106. The ghazals that are quoted come from Hafiz, Khanlari’s ed., #182 and #59. These ghazals, in complete form, can be found in The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, translated by Peter Avery, #182 on p. 242 and #59 on p. 96.

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)

Social Media, Spinning Lies, & Whirling Dervishes

droplets of light

“Stories move like whirling dervishes,” Elif Shafak concludes her magnificent TED Global 2010 talk*, “drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity.” Shafak credits her grandmother (clearly the model for her powerful character, Auntie Banu, in The Bastard of Istanbul) for impressing on her the power of circles: “If you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish, or the human soul, all you have to do is surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside.”  In the novel, Shafak compellingly moves us into compassion for persons who are caught in the walls of lies with their layers of distortions and destructions. 

The stories we tell, to others as well as to ourselves, believing them or not, must be clean if we are to avail ourselves of their healing properties instead of abandoning them to act as destructive forces. Our best stories tell the truth; their circles draw our imagination toward advancing consciousness and civilization.  But, of course, stories can also spread lies; and then, as Shafak warns, we risk damage to the soul. Lying separates oneself from the inner essence and, since they are so interconnected, also from one’s life-affirming work outside in the world. Participating in lies takes so many forms: fake news, denials, avoidances, screens, cover-ups, escapes, absorption in past or future, addictions, on and on.

Participating in social media presents perhaps the latest battleground involving this manipulation of reality. According to recent reports, in the 2016 presidential campaign, a third of the U.S. population likely received Russian-backed fake news through Facebook.

“Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”

Although more guarded in use, I continue actively viewing and posting on Facebook and to a lesser extent in Twitter. As anything that is powerful, social media can be used negatively as well as positively.  Rather than increasing isolation, I want to work toward global citizenship and to sustain world-wide friendships. My status updates on FB usually feature photos that witness beauty in the natural world; my camera’s on alert for views that glimpse, that invite wondering about other worlds, possibly that even guide us in composing our lives with more harmony and balance. Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. . . Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” (p. 52)

With or without social media, we are individually at high risk for closeting ourselves in mindsets vulnerable to diseased thinking and feeling. As with physical health, early detection of infection is crucial. I believe that a vital step comes in sharpening the sense of the inauthentic. The most precious early-warning system lives in the soul, not in any news media, not even in friendship nor family nor religion. All those are very important; but because each individual has unique wiring to/from the Source, the ultimate test for truth comes within. To know oneself is to know one’s Lord.  And to do that we have to polish the mirror of the heart. Rumi teaches this over and over. I’m now reading in Book 4 of the Mathnawi, around lines 2881-2914. Here are some selections from Nicholson’s translation:

Does any painter paint [the beauty of the picture] for the sake of the picture itself, without hope of conferring benefits… from his picture (arises) the joy of children and the remembering of departed friends of their friends///the external form is for the sake of the unseen form; and that took shape for the sake of another unseen (form)./// even so (proceed), having perceived reasons within reasons, one after the other, in order thaty you may arrive… step by step…///those insights that are not frozen (dense and dull) are nothing if not piercing and veil-rending. He (such a one) sees with his own eye at the present moment that which will come to pass in ten years. /// Every one, according to the measure of his spiritual enlightenment, sees the things unseen in proportion to the polishing (of the heart’s mirror).///God alone is the giver of aspiration…God’s assignment of a particular lot to any one does not hinder (him from exercising) consent and will and choice. 

I believe we find much value in making our own versions of such texts. Here’s my work/play with the above:

When enthused by the beauty of the source, does any true artist intentionally compose primarily for the sake of the superficial layer while discarding the everflowing transcendent rays of light? The higher aim sights toward the joy of children and remembrance of love’s departures. Vision and memory track and trail the Unseen, reason unto Reason, living with abandon step by step. Each movement in trust rends another veil, dependent on dedicated polishing of the heart’s mirror.

*Note: Shafak is also featured in TED Global 2017.