Living with Unknowing

     Last night’s dream must’ve figured from recent readings (especially Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani, translated by Jan Van Bragt) and doings (particularly planting maple trees whose roots were wound far too tightly inside far too small containers, much too restrictive for the continuous development essential for ascension). The dream featured folks playing a sort of game where individuals attempted to articulate words that yearned toward but not quite able to reach into sufficient meaningfulness. Perhaps the divine purpose within the activity meant to enjoy the spirit of the attempt without getting trapped by the demands of clarity and rational thought. Nishitani seems to lean into such notions, including the attempt to “prehend,” the attempt to grasp or lay hold of:

“But when the concept of substance, which was supposed to express the selfness of things, and the concept of subject which was supposed to express the selfness of the self, strike against nihility at their very ground and are there negated, they make a leap forward onto a field where the things and the self they were out to prehend manifest their selfness. This means that, on the field of nihility, neither things nor the self are objects of cognition and, hence, can no longer be prehended or expressed conceptually (as logos). They are no longer determined either as substance or as subject. We seem no longer to be able to say ‘what’ they are. . .   With that, the existence of things and of the self are both transformed into something utterly incomprehensible, of which we can no longer say ‘what’ it is.” (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p. 136)

     Looking out into the tree (whose colors transition between matter and air, my reflections wander into the poem that’s held a favorite position for over a decade. Antonio Machado in “Llamo a mi corazon” penetrates into the garden with the “viento” which I consider as holy spirit that wafts along dreams and visions, that whispers its blessings and demands upon the responsive heart and soul. 

     The full poem with Robert Bly’s translation has been treated in previous posts including Distilling Distraction: Contain the Longing (Oct 4, 2014); Mining the Resonant Field with Mantras & Story Moments (Nov 4 2016, including a link to a video in which I recite the poem and give brief commentary); and Winter Containment (Feb 3, 2022).

     My experience today with Machado’s marvelous poem owes much to the remarkable writings of Mark C. Taylor (see previous blogs, most recently Planting a Tree Oneself ), Nishitani (just cited above), and works noted in other recent blogs. Especially, I have gratitude for a responsive shift to the closing of this poem. Usually the emptying of the garden feels almost heart-breakingly poignant (“Mi corazón sangraba”) as the wind takes away the waters of the fountain, the yellowed leaves, and the withered petals: 

          Me llevaré los llantos de las fuentes,

          las hojas amarillas y los mustios pétalos.

          Y el viento huyó... Mi corazón sangraba…

          Alma, ¿qué has hecho de tu pobre huerto?

Now I’m thankful that a somewhat lighter possibility flits through. Perhaps as Nishitani indicates, the field of emptiness promises a marvelous transformation beyond the too-tightly contained self. The emptied garden makes a space brimming with the hope of movement into “the field of ecstatic transcendence…” (p. 151).

Longing and Certitude

“... and there’s not a trace of doubt…” Even a monkey-mind acknowledges the longing for certitude. Such longing itself testifies to the presence of God, but how easily this affirmation, the longing instead gets misconstrued as abandonment and taken as an elevator down to despair. 

     Mystics and other seekers of God have tried for ages to tell us that our conception, the picture we hold of “reality,” determines what we know and how it’s revealed.  A person’s construction depends on whether he or she is committed (a) to things of this world or (A+) to God’s World. It takes a special faith to discern Truth in a culture shadowed for centuries by the legacy of “cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am), a world entrenched in the “scientific method.” How demanding it is to live in reliance upon the Word Who speaks in a whispered stillness that’s often heard only by the individual in his or her unique aloneness, often inarticulate and unconfirmed by anyone else. And yet, how thrilling! How awesome the inner temple of God!

“… the answer [to the more superficial aspects of human’s condition], as Ghazali had discovered for himself, lay only in internalizing the formalities of religion through ‘tasting’ (dhawq): personal religious experience… the only way to certitude” (p. xviii, Introduction by T.J. Winter to Al-Ghazali: The Remembrance of Death and the Afterllife)

     Neither the furthest reaches of human thought nor one’s hardest effort can reach the Divine; for the assurance of God’s presence rests upon God’s grace. When left to the human mind, doubt is certain. The great Divine cannot be known through human resources alone.

“How far apart is the one who seeks proof through God from the one who seeks proof for God! The one who seeks proof through God acknowledges the due that he owes, and affirms the matter by reference to its original existence. One seeks proof for Him only because one has not reached Him. Otherwise, when was it that He became absent, such that one would need to seek proof for Him? And when was it that He became distant, such that one would need to follow the tracks of created things to find him?” (p. 240,  Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari, Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Sufi Treatise on the Secrets of the Divine Name).

     When I enter the wholeness of the ephemeral blossom of life/death, when nested into the beauty of early sunlight igniting the yellow and red poppies, the inner light reflects God’s Majesty. This conjoining of the Immanent and the Transcendent, the yielding to paradox, breaks open the false self, the prison of human arrogance, the pride of self-sufficient intellect. That which is true can only be found in the One, in God; for Truth is one of God’s names. In surrendering completely to God’s Sovereignty, we may be admitted, by God’s Grace, to the Unity, to the full mystery of Love, Peace, Justice, Mercy, Beauty, and the full spectrum of Life/Death.

“Thus, dear disciple, if you wish to be among the people of union, you must gather the beautiful names within your true self. For the secret of the names lies in their gathered totality. God says: ‘He taught Adam all the names” [Qur’an 2:31], and the totality of the names is the secret of union of the everlasting presence.” (p. 230,  Shaykh Mohamed Faouzi al-Karkari, Introduction to Islamic Metaphysics)

     Richard Rohr’s meditation this week elaborates the textures of longing drawing especially on Teilhard de Chardin and Saint John of the Cross. Quoting from Teilhard:

“God does not offer Himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us God is eternal discovery and eternal growth. The more we think we understand God, the more God reveals Himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold God, the further God withdraws, drawing us into the depths of Himself.” (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 119. Note: some changes made for inclusive language.)

“John of the Cross describes the doubt that disrupts a soul in the dark night, when all sense of knowing God is absent. Mirabai Starr translates from John’s classic work Dark Night of the Soul:

‘The deep suffering of the soul in the night of sense comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the tricks [prayer practices] that used to yield results. . . The best thing for the soul to do is to pay no attention to the fact that the actions of her faculties are slipping away. . . . She needs to get out of the way. In peaceful plentitude, let her now say “yes” to the infused contemplation God is bestowing upon her. . . . Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful, loving inflow of God. If given room, it will fire the soul in the spirit of love. [John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr. Riverhead Books, 2002), 67, 68–69, 70.]

Nature’s Path of Beauty

      The Iris Season this year displayed an abundance beyond any we’ve seen in our sixteen years amid these gardens. The fragile blooms lasted long due to unusually gentle breezes instead of occasional strong winds and to a generous space of soft sunlight without heavy rain. Yet after this pleasant interlude, their well-being called for rains and then they came. This life-sustaining gift we welcomed even knowing the blooming side of beauty sooner slips back inside.

      Is it not the very transience that compels us into Presence—shearing us from attachments to a precious side of beauty, a momentary joy, or another attachment? Too easily a manifestation may be frozen into an idol that swears time can be stayed. The false self lies. 

In Raids on the Unspeakable, Thomas Merton contrasts two views of Prometheus leading us to consider our choices of how to live: A) the presumption of the false self that builds up sand-castle idols as if the lies could approach the all-surpassing God or B) ) the surrender before the image of God that’s sowed in one’s heart.

I wonder if contemplating Beauty guides one in becoming able to apprehend beyond the surface, and if this love of the divine form also then aids in discernment of the ugly, of the presumptions, the lies. Might a person thus tell, perhaps by visceral reaction to a countenance that tries to hide lies? Remember the emperor's new clothing made naked to sight untarnished. Truth is evident to clean vision like that of a child, giving discernment not yet compromised by toxic exposures to power, greed, and other distortions that spoil our divine inheritance. 

The Unity that calls to seekers flows in the holy gifts: As when Love comes through into intimate life, like wonderment at the birth of a child, like when Beauty awes us through transcendent lines lifting off iris petals on rays of light, in pearls of raindrop—these moments of being taken into the divine quality. Presence of the One, always here, now. 

The liminal edge shimmers in the prism in the raindrop on the lip of the perfect iris. The numinous shines in the mirror of the heart’s eye reflecting the true self. This grace, this great Compassion feeds the manna of certainty beyond words, known beyond the reach of reason, felt in awe in the wonder of the Presence. It’s sensed in he shimmering passage, the edge of luminosity on the precipice of nothing…

Related readings: 

William Chittick. Self-Disclosure of God . For example, p. 332- on imagination and barzakh.

James Finley. Merton’s Palace of Nowhere. “To use the imagery of Saint John of the Cross, there is a path to walk with ‘no light except the one that burns in your heart’” (p. 12).

Richard Rohr. For example on the Love that removes separation between one person and another as well as from “any other creature.” He continues: “This is something that we can embrace originally at a primal and then deeper levels of consciousness. Children already enjoy this unity at a pre-rational level, and mystics later enjoy it consciously at a trans-rational and universal level.” [ https://cac.org/we-turn-around-one-thing-2021-05-23/ ]

Paradox, Certainty, Suffering, and the All-Surpassing Omniscience (That is, Love)

August 24, 2020

     The year 2020 must go down as a great humbler. Perhaps this period of time, if viewed in the long landscape, reveals possibilities, particularly opportunities to inspire radical remakings. Reflecting off the craziness of the current political arena, we might channel this turbulence to transform meanings of crucial standpoints. Could the time be ripe for radical change in the prime movers among the complex of Power to Love? How might we engage creative chaos? What if we’ve been tangled in the old, old but failed, mythos of the hero? And what if this heroic sense of self (which necessarily generates blame as well as hubris) is incommensurate with our divine guidance? Can we risk surrender to the divine? How can a person let go of the struggle without falling into darkness?

     Perhaps the sense of what to do and what not to do requires a revolution in the feeling of certainty. The Good Books tell us that Knowing belongs to the Omniscient and thus reaches beyond our cognitive grasp (cf. Philippians 4:7, Peace surpasses understanding; Ephesians 3:19, Love surpasses knowledge). So why be surprised when the best we can reach of certainty comes in a sacred texture of bewilderment, being awed, surrendered.* 

The mark that someone knows that the Real’s knowledge encompasses his acts, states, and words is that quaking and dread becomes his watchword, and awe holds up the banner of rulership from his head to his toes. . . Adam was biting the fingers of wonder with the teeth of bewilderment: ‘What’s this? What happened?’” (William Chittick translating Sam’ani, The Repose of the Spirits, pp. 90,103 on al-‘Alim: the Knower)

October 8, 2020

Teachings of Sufism often return into the theme of mystical annihilation (fana) as one approaches the One (see, for example, Stoddard, Sufism, p. 64; Lings, What is Sufism? p. 78; Ernst, Shambhala Guide to Sufism, pp. 61, 115). An outgrown, dysfunctional sense of knowing needs release in order to birth wonder. Why bother about a feeling of ineptitude if we are swept into the ocean? 

      Richard Rohr’s meditation this week comforts me in the reminder that being heroic (my term, not his) is not the only way of acting responsibly in the presence of suffering. He uses the metaphor of a swollen river, sweeping folks off into its flow. The responsible action to today’s crisis comes not just in heroic activism that works toward systemic reform, but also and equally valuable are works of education/healing and those of hands-on help for persons in distress. In Mark Wallace’s writings, the caring attention extends to all of creation, trees to butterflies. 

“As the breath of God who animates all life, the Spirit becomes present in the spaces opened up between persons who risk themselves for the other. . . The Spirit is not a static entity but a potential modality of divine presence that becomes actual in the co-partnerships of persons with one another and other life forms” (pp. 10-11, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation).

August 1, 2020

     Even so and always, the work zone flows from the interior and, of course, the Source. Blame and anger transform into constructive fire for healing and loving. The only effective agent, God.

*Previous blogs elaborating the theme of Bewilderment include:

August 18, 2019 When Bewilderment Tracks the Mystery

May 13, 2020 Recognition on the Pathway

September 7, 2018 Living with Bewilderment

August 24, 2019 Bewildered by God

November 16, 2019 Longing into Certainty

March 23, 2019 Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A) 

August 18, 2018 Transcendent Power

February 10, 2018 Tracking on the Path of Attraction

December 16, 2017 “and He is with you”

November 14, 2017 Sure Good?

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.

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.

Certainty of a Higher Power

A recent dream played with finding the Way more by following a scent, like a dog tracking, rather than by logical planning, in the usual travel mode involving maps and guidebooks. The dream seemed to affirm the importance of going into the field of experience and trusting to revelation of the next step that’s taken expectantly with a nose sniffing the immediate moment. I believe the dream’s direction doesn’t say to discard the marvels of the mind, but instead it reminds that guidance for the individual pathway comes in attending to the edge of knowing, open to emergent consciousness, to liberated sense, to beauty and wonder. 

While still treasuring the written and spoken word, much of my journey has led into (re)sanctification of the body and into knowings that elude literacy. Early years were entrenched in fundamentalism, guarded against indulgence of the body (especially sex outside marriage); scripture was selectively forced to desacralize knowing through the body. Absolute priority was given to legalistic reading of biblical text as pronounced by persons asserting scholarly superiority. The decree was mind over body. 

         For many of us, this patriarchal model collapsed of its own bent when we pursued intellectual activity. Bart Ehrman’s account of his passage out of fundamentalism offers a clear example as he describes going from Moody Bible Institute to Princeton Theological Seminary (see “Commitment to Truth,” pp. 2-6 in Forged: Writing in the Name of God). As we advanced in academic degrees we found that sacred text yields a multiplicity of interpretation and not the prescriptive conclusions evident in fundamentalism. In a way, this emphasis on the mind leads back to the scripture in Philippians concerning the unique workings out of each individual’s prayerful accountability. (For more on this, see previous blogs: Oct 4, 2017, One God; many faiths and Mar 12, 2017, Going Where… )

                   The charge to work out one’s salvation with fear and trembling properly brings a person to one’s knees which can also occasion a feeling of need to reclaim the authority of the body, not as indulgence but as grounded knowing, true to one’s own fingertips. As noted in other blogs, my personal attempts to recover authentic voice of body have featured natural horsemanship (e.g., Mar 27, 2017 To Tell the Truth and Jan 4 2018 Faces of the Beloved  ) and plant ecology (e.g., Jan 3, 2018 These Frosty Woods). Special gifts from these engagements include increased sense of and appreciation for harmony, for beauty, and for the interconnection of power/love.

     It’s far too simplistic to discuss the pathway to God in only two dimensions: body and mind. A more complete and more provocative notion of the Pathway for “spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God” is given in the commentary on Quran 2:189 in The Study Quran:

“Ibn ‘Ajibah, for example, notes in his commentary on this verse that spiritual wayfarers on their journey to God have three houses whose gates they must pass through: the Law (sharīʿah), the Spiritual Path (ṭarīqah), and the Truth (ḥaqīqah), each of which has three gates. The three gates of the Law are repentance, obedience, and reverence; those of the Path are sincerity, the purification from faults, and the realization of virtue; and the three gates of the Truth (also translated as the Reality) are concentration, contemplation, and gnosis (spiritual knowledge). That is to say, human beings should approach God through the means He accepts, the means He has given them.” Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (p. 83). HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

It may be presumptuous to hope for the ninth gate, but it is a fascinating possibility: gnosis! The term and concept refuse to be nailed down and, in that way, require a light touch, open to surprise and insight. In general, gnosis involves “intuitive apprehension of spiritual truths.” The doorway seems to demand appreciation for the mind, the body, and still more.

     A special treasure of retirement comes in the space to immerse in varied readings with less disruption from other external demands. It also provides space for playing the readings into experience, including solitude and meditation. Probably these are prerequisites for entering the doorway of gnosis. Feeling the expanse of time for slow reading and the bodily awareness sharpened in solitude, I’m trying again to find my way into the density of Frithjof Schuon’s Gnosis: Divine Wisdom. Perhaps the best, maybe the only way to approach gnosis is as a “bhakta.” In his glossary to this edition, James S. Cutsinger says a bhakta is a “person whose relationship with God is based primarily on adoration and love” (p.182). Schuon affirms the necessity of letting go the dominance of literacy and single-mindedness:

“It is easy to understand the slight respect shown by bhaktas, or by some of them, for ‘word for word’ exactness in belief or worship… there exists a de facto supremacy of the magic of the soul over the correctness of the symbol and that account must be taken of this supremacy if one wishes to grasp every aspect of the eternal interchange between man and God” (p. 15).

        This “eternal interchange” is what I take the gateway of gnosis to offer. It’s what takes my breath away with opportunity to let it return, more golden in wonder. The throne of intellect is smashed so that, by grace, admission to God’s Intellect may be accessed.

“… sacred Scriptures remain the necessary and unchanging basis, the source of inspiration and the criterion of all gnosis. Direct and supra-mental intellection is in reality a ‘remembering’ and not an ‘acquisition’: intelligence in this realm does not take cognizance of something located in principle outside itself, but all possible knowledge is on the contrary contained in the luminous substance of the Intellect—which is identified with the Logos by ‘filiation of essence’—so that the ‘remembering’ is nothing other than an actualization, thanks to an occasional external cause or an internal inspiration, of an eternal potentiality of the intellective substance. Discernment exists only in relation to the relative even if this relative lies beyond creation and at the very level of Being, and this explains why the Intellect coincides in its innermost nature with the very Being of things; and this is why gnosis underscores the profound continuity between the diverse forms of consciousness of the absolute.     And why this consciousness, some will ask? Because the truth alone makes free; or, better still, because there is no ‘why’ with regard to the truth, which is our intelligence, our freedom, and our very being; if it is not, we are not.” (p. 16)

Wandering in the house of gnosis, I’m humbled, well aware I’m not getting it clearly. And yet, the scent I pick up tracks the Way, best I can tell. I sense the significance of going back out to the trees, to tending the raspberry patch that’s just beginning to yield ripe berries, and to return to the arena with our horse where our mutual training readies the discernment by “filiation of essence.”

Also, in another way, readiness for Schuon probably follows from feeling reassurance through reading Susan Wittig Albert’s memoir, Together, Alone: A Memoir of Marriage and Place. Albert paints the hill country near Austin, Texas, land to which I owe early wandering from the literalist one-right-way. Her tribute to time spent tending plant life as a medium for growing the soul reassures me about the faint sense of importance I have around loving our woods and gardens. Is the sweat, the time, and money we dedicate to this labor well spent? Although I know the answer is “Yes!” and that the beauty of images found by the camera resonates powerfully, the kind of certainty still wavers before institutional “truth.” 

Perhaps I’d find further support in Philip Sherrard’s Human Image World Image: The Death And Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Duane Johnson’s review of the book says: 

“His [Sherrard’s] plea is simply that we need to restore the ancient and more unabashedly 'metaphysical' outlook if we are to stand any chance of averting the political, social, and moral disasters waiting for us by virtue of our having collectively embraced an unalloyed scientific 'world image’.”

 While I’ll probably check out Sherrard, I suspect the certainty I’m longing to trust comes not in the word-world but in another texture more like light, known by warmth and inner vision, more like the sense that the air has turned a golden color and some beauty is calling, longing to be loved. This kind of knowing senses and feels the higher power found by tending the inner garden, the one yearned for by Antonio Machado: “llamo un claro dia con un perfume de jasmin el viento”—the wind one brilliant day called to my soul with the aroma of jasmine… 

Rumi, Radical Love, & I/You (part A)

Garrison Institute grounds and building, March 15

     Last weekend, my beloved wife Belqis and I, along with twenty others, participated in an event at the Garrison Institute, north of NYC, on the topic of Rumi and Radical Love, led by Seemi Ghazi and Omid Safi. Omid recently published a book titled Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. Of the 219 passages translated by Safi, 55 (about a fourth) are from Rumi. Attar has the second most with 26 poems, and then another 41 authors/sources contribute also to this wonderful collection on the mysterious theme of radical love. The volume and diversity suggest we may be in pursuit of something elusive, not surprising in the spiritual journey. I believe that while this path is perplexing, humbling, even overwhelming at times, this apparent multiplicity is One and is designed to guide each to integrity with his or her fit (fitra, see p. 29, Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul). Remember: “my beloved…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). 

     The multitude of texts appears even more puzzling when almost all of these writers tell that love can never be contained in words. And yet our reach toward, our tremendous thirst for the elixir of life yearns into the beyond, looking for any help we can get. We need the teachings and models to guide us, to break the spell cast by all the fake stuff masquerading under the label love. We long to be thrust forward into the transformational living of passionate engagement with beloveds, with our world, and even, especially, with the Divine. In Omid’s introduction to Radical Love, he tells us:

“In a metaphor that changes how we think about love and spirit, [Ahmad] Ghazali talks about the Spirit crossing over from the realm of nonexistence toward the realm of existence. When it gets to the very threshold of existence, love is already there awaiting the Spirit. In other words, love is preexisting, pre-eternal. This is consistent with the teachings of many mystics who see love not as merely another divine quality, but the divine quality par excellence, even perhaps equal to the being of God.” (p. xxx)

That’s radical. Love. I went to the weekend workshop hoping to move past the printed word, wanting to move closer to the embodied word, longing to track with greater certainty into the mystic.

     The most powerful feature emerging for me from the weekend comes in what Coleman Barks calls “glance” (The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting, 1999). Fittingly, my mind muddles here and I can’t remember whether Seemi and Omid used that word or another—maybe “glimpse” or “gaze.” My mental blur is apropos because when we wander after love, especially in search of radical love, we’re moved into fields of wonder where bewilderment clues proximity. 

     Since we’re moving out beyond words, getting the right one doesn’t matter much; what we want is experience of the phenomena, the phenomenal. While I don’t recall which word Seemi used that Friday night, my being knows the feeling that came with her voice, even when she spoke or sang in an unfamiliar language. The body joins these vibrations honing in on relationship felt in our ritual ceremony. With Seemi’s voice and being, we were held in sacred space where we may connect horizontally and vertically. 

     When we’re in the eye-to-eye connection of the glance/gaze, we’re also in a unity of vibration; of course, unfortunately, most daily eye contact fails to attain this level. And then, strangely or not, if we really want more of the glance, of the access to radical love, guess what we need! Words—but ones like Rumi’s. Rich in poetry, story, and revelation. Not ones turned plastic and manipulative as even can be done to the word love. To build our capacity to engage significantly with radical love we’ll almost certainly have to construct “realized knowledge” on top of “transmitted knowledge.” (For elaboration on this, see William Chittick, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul.) The transmitted knowledge that we need comes from revelation and authentic models; the realized kind is earned through experience and polishing of the heart to discern and know the True.

     While all this may sound daunting, and it should and it is, we are given loving opportunities, like the glance. Omid talked of three exemplary moments in life: 1) the birth of a firstborn (repeatable with some variation in subsequent childbirth, each extraordinary as is the unique gift of the one born), 2) the (first) falling-in-love, and 3) the eye to eye electric connection with one’s guide. I know each of those three+ with the differential coloring as fits with each individual’s journey.

     My personal experience of the first model named by Omid flooded with mercy. I was mostly unprepared, as first-time expectant fathers often are, having missed out on the nine-month inner mystery given to mothers-to-be. The miracle of birth of our child transformed the integrity of love. The previous meaning of this un-name-able center of life was stripped and replaced by the awesome. The second child brought in darker shades of love, qualities I’d likely been unable to bear without the grace of the first.

     Experiences with the falling-in-love model (repeatable with considerable variation) have offered another kind of mystery. The phenomena now seems to me suspect, mysteriously luring a person into deep waters, perhaps a set-up for heart-break and thereby an opportunity to surrender selfish illusion (“luv”) for self-giving-up care-for-another, “love.” Perhaps it’s a hint of the annihilation that goes with divine-love. The term “radical love” might be the care-taker that moves us along this pathway. Omid says in his introduction to Radical Love (“fiery, fierce, and alchemical”): “… it is by merging with the cosmic current of love that we are led back Home” (p. xxi, xxiii).

Dome of our meeting room for Radical Love