=kit051.txt

KIT 51 - God : Idea or Experience?
In Sufism

"One often confuses God for one's idea of God." 
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN.

That the search for a god, or God, has lured civilizations forward
in the evolutionary process. One might imagine a cell of our body
- for example a blood cell - exploring the body, then making a
visual representation of the body of which it is a cell,
projecting its idea of beingness upon this larger reality than
itself; and more: trying to grasp the thinking of the body, and
yet, yet even more: trying to grasp the programming of the body or
even more so: the software of the thinking of the body!

We have a need to discover the nature of our relationship with
that enigmatic reality that escapes our grasp, which the Upanishad
calls "beyond the beyond" and we perceive unqualifiably as the
Totality.     

In his book THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS, PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT
KHAN alludes to the concern of religious leaders from time
immemorial, to come forward to answer the quizzical fumblings and
phantasies of ponderous minds; sometimes by clumsy ratiocinations.
At a scale tantamount to infinity, such inferences could not fail
to fall short of the mark within the scope of our finite minds.
Yet one may earmark stages in our discovery of our relationship
with the Totality.

People would like to know what that paradoxical being looks like.
Since one can only imagine something in the likeness of the known
- in nature, particularly oneself - the Hindus and the Jews
imagined that we are formed in His-Her image. Here our need to
complete our representation of ourselves by looking upon ourselves
passively, discovering ourselves in the model of ourselves. This
view entails a new philosophical equation because, our
relationship with that greater reality, rather than being of the
nature of that of a fraction to the Totality, like a cell in the
body is now seen as that of an exemplar with respect to its
template, each fraction carrying the Totality (potentially) within
its configuration - which is precisely the holistic paradigm we
now encounter in science.

"Those to whom Unity is revealed see the Absolute whole in the
parts; yet each is in despair at its particularization from the
whole...Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world
is a man and man is a world. The heart of a barley seed conceals a
hundred harvests" 
MAHMUD SHABISTARI. 


Some Sufis - for example the Egyptian DHUL NUN and BABA FARID and
the Iranian BABA KULLI express their awe at discovering the divine
splendor transpiring through the appearance of the forms of the
world. You will notice that God is recognized as that which
manifests through the forms rather than seen as actuated in the
forms. Here we recognize the impact of Islam that cautions against
the idolatry associated with form which one also finds in the
Vedantist theory of 'maya'. 

ABU YAZID BASTAMI says: 
"God deceives you in the forms of the world - mere effigies". 

But the veil of the Muslim lady paradoxically espouses the
contours of her countenance and therefore conveys inadvertently a
clue to what it conceals, as FARID-UD-DIN ATTAR says.

However our difficulty in believing that we are invested with the
inheritance of the many splendored divine qualities in their
perfection when grappling with our inadequacies or poor self-
image, may be met in the answer to the question: can the template
be surmised from a poor or distorted exemplar? The answer is that
our mind tends to correct a form to the way that tallies with an
inborn sense of orderliness: for example deformed square will be
reconstructed in our representation of it to its geometrical
integrity. Children naturally fill in the missing parts in
incomplete illustrations. Can we not imagine the missing arm of
the Venus of Milo? The voice of Caruso can be retrieved from the
distortions due to the bad technology of the time when it was
recorded, unscathed. The corrected form transpires as it were from
behind the apparent form in the likeness of the template.

The same principle applies to what the Sufis call those subtle
forms that configure our psyche: qualities. Every quality has its
shadow counterpart: we have the defects of our qualities. The
shadow of joy may well be facetiousness, of peace, indolence, of
mastery, ruthlessness, of truth, callousness, of compassion,
indulgence etc. If we know our defects, we may infer our
qualities; the qualities transpire through the shadow. One might
add: it is the inborn sense of orderliness of our ultimate
faculty: pure intelligence (proto-critic) that espies the template
or software because this faculty is of the nature of the thinking
of the universe. In fact this is where the divine mind lies latent
surreptitiously within us, if we can only discern it.

In fact one may look upon the bountiful legacy of creative
thinking on Planet Earth as the brainstorming of the collective
mind of that Total Being that is the Universe proliferating and
thereby limited, funneled in the form of what appears to be the
minds of humans that has fashioned all the beauty of our
civilizations in art, crafts, architecture, music, poetry theater,
dance, ritual etc. At this junction a new realization dawns upon
the Sufi - a total reversal of the outlook of the cell seeking to
grasp the whole body (or the thinking of the body); the Sufi now
apprehends that it is the whole body in our previous analogy that
is gaining a further outlook upon itself by seeing itself through
the vantage point of the cell, while the cell discovers itself
through the consciousness of the whole body.  

"By contemplating us, He contemplates Himself and by contemplating
Him, we contemplate ourselves". 
IBN 'ARABI. 

But there is a further stage that the Sufi reaches: he sees
himself through the eyes of God. 

"The knowledge gained by grasping in oneself the divine archetype
is only the first degree; the second is knowing oneself through
the knowledge that God has of Himself through you." "God discovers
His perfection through man's limitation" 
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN. 

Borrowing the divine glance, we discover the divine qualities
invested in us in their pristine perfection through their
imperfect actualization in our personality.

However ABU YAZID BASTAMI soon realized that to grasp the model of
which the exemplar lies dormant in his own personality, he had to
actualize in his personality the prototype of these qualities
latent within him.  

"By actualizing the divine nature which is the ground of one's
personality, one confers upon God a mode of knowing" 
(IBN 'ARABI). 

This is exactly what the Sufi practice of the wazaif is about. The
sculptor discovers his/her statue in the course of making it.

PIR-O-MURSHID says: the concept of God is the stepping-stone, but
be clear about the difference between believing in God and
experiencing God. After espying "the hand of God behind all
things", one meeds to "awaken God dormant in one's being". The
discovery of the hall-mark of that Being that is the Totality
begging to be awakened in one's psyche is awe-inspiring - can
alter one's life. Bastami was so overwhelmed when he realized this
that he said: How great is my glory! How can one say this if one
means one's personality rather than that which is trying to come
through?

The next step beyond the discovery of the relationship:
model/exemplar consists in discovering a relationship in the
nature of the covenant of allegiance or fealty of the knights of
all times and civilizations with their lord. Hence the reference
to God as the Lord. Incidentally, there must be a tacit covenant
of sorts between the DNA of our cells and the RNA of conformation
to the sovereign code governing the body, the violation of which
spells cancer.

Indeed the programing of our bodies provides for the correction of
mistakes in replication thanks to the fine-tuning operation of
enzymes. The relevance of our human status as Viceregents becomes
the more impelling the more one feels the need to dedicate oneself
to a purpose beyond one's own well-being - in other words in
service. Hence the reference to a Covenant in the Old and New
Testament and Qur'an, but particularly the Iranian Zoroastrian
tradition of Espahbad, the knighthood and that of the magi-kings
which was perpetrated by Sufism.

Our personalities are linked with the divine nature in a
relationship of suzerainty by whose observance we ensure the
divine governance on earth.  

"By recognizing God's sovereignty, I constitute him as Lord" 
SAHL TOSTARI. 

Eventually the qualities of the sovereign are passed on to the
vassal. 

"Thou playest this game of Thou and I that at the end all I's will
realize the oneness of I."  
RUMI

A few dervishes are carried in the course of their inner itinerary
by their awe at discovering themselves as being part of the one
and only Being which includes the galaxies, the angels, the divine
archetypes and the divine thinking, and their bewonderment at the
traces of the splendor transpiring at every level of reality into
a state where in the consternation of the mind, the act of
cognizance pales - in fact collapses - in the magic of ecstasy
(HAL) - the rapture of the mystic echoing the divine nostalgia
(ISHQ) which now avers itself to be the motivating springhead
behind the whole process of existence, rather than the wish of God
to discover Oneself in another oneself.
    
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