=kit074.txt

KIT 74 - God as Archetype, the Human Being as Exemplar

To the question: 'how can one know God?', Ibn 'Arabi answers: "all
that one knows of the archetype is what is exemplified in the
exemplar". Roundness is only knowable through round tables,
wheels, etc. This elicits a totally different relationship with
what we think we mean be God. In our practices, we shall learn to
recognize in the idiosyncrasies of our personality the divine
qualities that they exemplify. Rather than being like a cell of
the body, we could see ourselves as exemplars carrying potentially
the bounty present in the template or archetype which we
exemplify. This elicits a totally different relationship with the
totality we project as God.

"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 person and each person is a world...The heart of a barley
seed conceals a hundred harvests."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

However, there is a more profound way of looking at this: What
then in this view could the archetype of our personality be if we
refuse to ascribe a personality to God?

"It would be a great mistake to call God a personality, but it is
a still greater mistake to deny God a personality. Each being is
the flowering of the personality of God...the seed does not show
the flower in it, yet it culminates in the flower: therefore the
flower already existed in the seed."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN.

But the breakthrough is in awakening the God within:

"Believing is just a process. By this process, the God within is
awakened and made living."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

Our notion of ourselves as the observer can be shunted backwards
in infinite regress as one identifies more and more with that
aspect of God which we represent as the Spectator.

To illustrate this, our consciousness endowed with the ability to
imagine how planet Earth would look from outer space, or in some
cases, how we are perceived by another person. Moreover, our minds
are able to outreach any limits we may have assigned to its
compass. As the French mathematician Henri Poincarr showed: "the
concept of infinity evidences the mind's ability to always imagine
a larger number than the one enunciated so far". In fact, our
minds are coextensive with the mind of the universe. Albeit that
just as in the holistic paradigm: insofar as one can fraction the
totality, every fraction of the totality does not simply act as a
section (like a section of an orange, for example,) yet the
smaller the fragment, the less well it manifests the totality.

One needs to make a clear distinction between belief and faith.
Belief is opinion based upon authority, or custom, routine,
conditioning. Faith is reinforced by opinion based upon
experience.

The mind gets easily caught in a bind. A bind is a situation in
which thoughts follow one another in a circular fashion -
popularly called a vicious circle. The pending catastrophe is
routed in the storms in human thinking. Thoughts thus caught just
as in a whirlwind become compulsory, and gain great emotional
support by their very addictive nature until they explode in
violence. Imagine: it is this very flaw in the functioning of the
mind that begets conflicts, disasters, ordeals of terrible human
suffering and terror!

As seen from the serenity of a spiritual retreat, the disastrous
effect of an ideology upon the destinies of masses of people
stands out clearly. The excesses of cruelty that people will wreak
upon others in the name of sheer opinion not based upon real life
experience is appalling!

The mystics of the various religious denominations seek after real
experience, whereas the thinking of the followers is governed by
belief. The originating revelation gets gradually distorted by
what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls "the followers of the
followers". Therefore the Sufis hold that one needs to base one's
concept of God upon one's discovery of the traces (ayat) of God in
real life. That is why the Prophet Mohammed said, "for each person
his religion." Because if that belief were to fail; if at some
point doubts should arise as to why the mind finds difficulty in
relating the belief to actual real life experience, then the mind
becomes plunged in the dark night of understanding.

St. John of the Cross who escaped his prison thanks to the
darkness of the night sees in this crisis in our thinking the way
out of the bind. Now the mind revolts against its conditioning,
against those who have held it trammeled. Once more there is
revolution. When there is a paradigm shift in belief there is a
revolution in values, in paradigms, and likewise when that shift
is reversed. It is a great tour de force. But this requires some
degree of consensus and marks a stage in people's evolutionary
advance.

However if the dark night serves to free oneself from the prison
in the mind, it does not show the way. Therefore St. John cleaves
to a tenuous spark of light in his understanding: the dawning of
meaningfulness. Trust yourself to this fragile light as you
advance towards it. It will grow as the effulgence of dawn. It
represents a level of thinking beyond the kind of thinking that
spins inexorable in a vicious circle. It dawns upon one's
understanding as the horizon of one's understanding expands.
Therefore the Sufis consider that it is revealed to one when one
has found freedom from opinion.

From the moment that we realize to what extent our assessment of
reality is distorted by referring everything to our notion of
ourselves, we appreciate our ability to look at things in reverse.
For example, "I am seen" rather than "I see", or "I am thought of"
instead of "I think", or "I am the convergence of an infinite and
eternal reality", instead of "I experience reality".

What is the criterion distinguishing this intuitive mode of
cognizance and opinion based upon belief? One would need to
investigate the levels of thinking of the human mind.

At the bottom line: experience of the physical environment imputed
through the senses and hearsay, opinion, psychological data are
interpreted from the limited vantage point of our commonplace
consciousness. At a higher level, our minds project their grasp of
reality which our consciousness cannot encompass into metaphors.
This is why mystics express their conviction in the splendor
behind real-life in terms of poetry. To value what comes through
in the experience of the world, one needs to tap one's inborn
sense of beauty and meaningfulness.

This virtual sense is 'revealed' if one does not limit one's
opinion to the way things look from the vantage point of
consciousness focalized by our commonplace notion of 'I-ness" nor
to opinions borrowed from others. According to the Sufi Niffari,
one is suspended on the threshold until one is ready for that
revelation which he calls the divine revelation. For how could the
mind transcend the concept of divine transcendence by striving to
carry experience to the edge of the unknowable while still
confined to his/her sense of I-ness? Rather it can only be
revealed thanks to the significatio passiva (being passive to the
divine operation). By trying to define God, one confines God to
the narrowness of one's mind, however expanded. Therefore let us
not limit God by seeing in this a proof of God's reality.

This is revelation: the meaningfulness of the universe as a total
being erupts in each fraction of that being when that fraction
reaches out beyond its horizon and plugs into the thinking of the
universe. Here lies the next phase in human evolution. Evolution
advances by dint of the revolution in our minds and a harmonious
resolution.
    
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