=kitc21.txt

[ CAVEAT (sa):  In this KIT, and starting with Curriculum 19
(=kitc19.txt) quotes are not italicized, nor set
off in any other distinguishing font nor color.  Now in most
previous KITs, PVK often includes quotes from HIK with neither a
notation that it from HIK, nor a notation of the book and/or
subsection from which it was taken.
So in this KIT, and henceforth , I will not put in quotes anything
which has neither notation. ]


CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER INTERNATIONAL

The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis

LESSON 21
IN SEARCH OF THE DIMENSIONS OF OUR IDENTITY
THE COSMIC OR PERI-PERSONAL DIMENSION:
COMPARISONS BETWEEN BUDDHISM AND SUFISM

INTRODUCTION

At a time when Buddhism has gained so much acquiescence in the
public eye, and Sufism increasingly intrigues the serious amateurs
in quest of the unknown, an inquiry into their differences and
similarities seems called for. Hence the following study that is,
even so, simply a cursory attempt.

Shall we contrive to consider that which at first seemed
contradictory as complementary? Moreover dare we, in the all-
encompassing trend of our day-and-age, extrapolate between these
apparently antipodal views and shape an integrated picture?

It is heartening to recognize where the Buddhist and Sufi views
corroborate each other, and, challenging our minds, to acknowledge
where they are complementary rather than contradictory.

Sitting under the banyan tree opposite the Bodhi tree at night I
tried to imagine Buddha sitting there. I tried to imagine how he
felt - his thoughts, his emotions, his very special way of
thinking and feeling. His thinking pushed beyond its limits into
the imponderable, cosmic ecstasy beyond human emotion. His
consciousness defied the gravity pull of the existential
condition, scanning sublime spheres, matched by transcendent modes
of awareness, awakening in deep sleep. Space seemed to be infinite
but empty, and time, eternal. I imagined the shattering of
Buddha's notion of himself faced with the cosmic tide of
realization daunting him further and further into unknown reaches
of awakening! The nobility of his attunement!

To understand Buddhism, we must take into account that while in
his childhood Buddha was enclosed in the luxurious environment of
his palace. His father, the king, prevented him from seeing
suffering in the real world. As a young adult he insisted on
visiting the town. Although his father had ordered that any ill
persons, old persons or funerals should be removed from his path,
it could not be prevented: this is precisely what he now saw. The
sudden discovery of suffering came upon him as a shock. He was
devastated. He resolved to find a solution to this terrible
scourge. This was the leitmotif of his whole life's quest. He saw
that most people are trapped by their desires which he considered
as intoxication. He remarked that in their ignorance they do not
see that the fulfillment of their wishes can be a cause of
suffering for themselves and others and by the same token a
frustration of their desires. He saw that this situation was due
to the fact that people are conditioned and do not realize it.
They are thus caught in a vicious circle which he likened to a
wheel aimlessly idling: the samsaric wheel. Consequently he
considered that the solution was disintoxication by an attitude of
indifference. He knew that this could be found amongst the
ascetics and therefore left his palace to live as an ascetic.
After several retreats (one which we know was in a cave in
Sarnath) he sat under the banyan tree at Bodhgaya, by day and by
night, undaunted, braving suffocating heat and shivering cold, the
threat of wild animals, the attacks of hornets, spiders and other
beasties of God. He was covered in vermin from festering wounds.
At the termination of his 40 day retreat he had to crawl on all
fours for quite a distance to get water to drink and wash.

He was determined to find a solution for suffering.

To this end he explored the steps that led to being involved in
the existential state. He tried to ascertain the force that lures
one into being inveigled in the vicious circle resulting in
suffering, desire, craving and the ignorance of the fact that it
is precisely this that traps one into the affliction of suffering.

Buddha warned that slipping into the notion of our personal
identity (which he considered as illusory) lured one into the
vicious circle of the samsaric wheel of repetitive existence and
therefore sought the non-become (the eternal) rather than the
process of becoming (the everlasting).

PRACTICE:

Can you see that one easily slips into identifying oneself as a
discrete individual, oblivious that we are part of the whole
(universe). Just as Hazrat Inayat Khan points out, a wave has no
existence on its own, it is a condition of the sea, so likewise we
are a condition of the Totality of the universe (God).

Then he proceeded in the reverse direction, reversing the causal
chain (paticca samuppada), hoisting his mind beyond its
commonplace range, embracing the existential level of reality,
exploring the no-man's land of the far reaches of the human mind.
This led to regaining the realization that had been lost by
slipping into the course of the descent into the existential
perspective which bids ignorance, avijja.

The Sufis confirm indeed that it is desire that turns our
conciousness toward perceiving and becoming involved in the
existential state. What is the point of having been born in the
realm of existence if one seeks to escape it? Our purpose is
therefore to improve conditions on earth accepting to pay the
price of suffering to build a beautiful world of beautiful people.

HAZRAT INAYAT:
"Go through the phases of life without losing yourself."

This is, to the Sufi, the divine desire, ishk Allah, God wishing
to know Himself by manifesting as us, so that we know ourselves
through our knowledge of His knowledge of Himself as us. Besides
this, beyond knowing, God descending from the state of Unity,
knowing Himself in the principles, and predicating His Being out
of love for the possibility of us (you).

IBN ARABI:
"What He created was for you." 
(xxcf. Valsan, ET 4/1952, p. 27) 

"The One who enjoys this independence and has manifested the world
did not manifest it by necessity, but He created beings so that
they may enjoy existence in order to free them from the solitude
of the void and to give them the possibility of acquiring the
divine attributes and to make them His vice-regents. All of this
was done by dint of altruism, because He chose not to remain the
only holder of those things that He gave."
 (xx cf. VALSAN, LA STATION DE LA FUTUWWAH ET DES SECRETS, CHAPTER
146 OF FUTUHAT AL-MAKKYA, P. 19)

Rather than place a blind between our consciousness and the
existential world (thereby dismissing our perception of the
physical world and representation of psychological situations as
illusory, misleading) Buddhist meditation points out that the
illusion is not in the object but in the subject. The illusion is
in ascribing our identifying with our body-ness or meaningfulness
to our notion of our personal identity. Buddha considers our
personal "I" as a notion taxed with voidness.

THE TRANSPERSONAL, COSMIC DIMENSION OF OUR IDENTITY.

In an all-encompassing outreach, faced with the bounty of one's
real being, the notion of the personal dimension of one's multi-
dimensional identity pales to the point of melting away.

BUDDHA:
"Sabbe dhamma anatta 'ti. Sunnan idam attena va attaniyena va ti."
"All things are without individuality or substance." 
DHAMAMADA, 277, 279.

This view is corroborated in Sufism:

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Is it not then drunkenness on the part of man when he claims to
be an individual standing separate from all others, thinking
himself to be a single entity when he is already many within
himself?" 
(HIK), SANGITHA II

This cosmic outreach of buddism is corrorasted by hik
[ sic, PVK here uses the abbreviation 'hik' , in lowercase ]       
     
"Dive deep within yourself that you may be able to touch the Unity
of the whole Being. One finds a kind of universe within oneself.
As God comprehends the whole universe within Himself, being one,
so man contains within himself the whole universe as His
miniature." 
(HIK), SPIRITUAL LIBERTY

Here we may indeed see some resonance between the thinking of
Sufis and of Buddha.

HONOR THE PERSONAL DIMENSION OF YOUR IDENTITY

On the other hand, while encompassing the cosmic dimension of our
being, Hazrat Inayat Khan also draws our attention to our personal
dimension. The Sufis do not discard our personality as illusory,
it has a relative validity, but always relate the personal
dimension of our being to its impersonal, cosmic ground.

PRACTICE:

(i) Identify with the cosmic, all-encompassing and transpersonal
dimension of your identity which percolates through your sense of
'me,' the personal dimension of your identity in which the
transpersonal dimension is actualized in a unique way.

(ii) Now try to grasp the interaction between your personal self-
image, the totality of the universe - with which the transpersonal
dimension of your identity is co-extensive - and your personality
as an albeit unique actuation. This is where each one of us
customizes the whole (the being of God) in a unique way.

(iii) You will find that this can be done best by envisioning your
qualities as inadequate, ephemeral exemplars of their eternal,
perfect archetypes.

(iv) Now turn within: your potentialities, and impending thoughts
and emotions are lying in wait in the subliminal underpinning of
your psyche. Though they escape your scrutiny you can become
progressively aware of them, arousing them by dint of your
personal creativity.

The whole sea surfaces as a wave. However while each wave succeeds
the previous one in the process of becoming (which is just one of
the dimensions of time that one might plot as a horizontal vector)
one needs to account for a transcendent dimension of time (which
one might plot as a vertical vector). Buddha considers it (the
wave, the personality) as ephemeral. Here Sufism differs from
Buddhism because whatever has occurred at the existential level
will continue to play its part at all levels by being transmuted
and thus fed back into the cosmic code.

PRACTICE:

Now try to envision that while the transpersonal dimension of your
being is eternal, immutable, your individuality is recurrently
changing.

JAMI:
"That which is conditioned by finitude will be everlasting."

RUMI:
"For tonight the umpteem stars give birth to the life
everlasting."

HAZRAT INAYAT:
"No knowledge or discovery that has ever been made is lost. `It
all accumulates and collects in the divine mind - an eternal
reservoir. There is a spirit that collects and accumulates all the
knowledge that every human being has had." 
(HIK), HEALING AND THE MIND WORLD

ETERNAL VERSUS EVERLASTING

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN points to the difference between eternal and
everlasting. Everlasting is that which has a beginning but
continues to live.

"That which is eternal (Ya Samad) is not subject to the procession
of time - of becoming. It therefore does not have a beginning or
an end, and exists in a trans-existential state, beyond the state
of becoming."
(HIK, presumably)

We find this distinction in THOMAS OF AQUINAS:
"God is both static [changeless] and dynamic [evolves]."

PRACTICE:

Consider that, however ephemeral therefore perishable your
personal self may seem to you, it will continue to exist. It
overpasses its ephemeral status by transmuting it.

A flower outwits the disbanding of its substance by becoming
perfume.

HAZRAT INAYAT:
"The Sufi practices that process whereby he is able to touch upon
that part of life in himself that is not subject to death by
rising above his earthly condition." 
(HIK), THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS

QUR'AN:
"Everything is perishing except his face." 
QUR'AN

IBN 'ARABI:
"Once a thing is created it is impossible to return to the
previous state. He may however replace a face by another face."
(Ibn 'Arabi),  ETUDES TRADITIONELLES

Once having occurred it will play its part by being fed back into
the cosmic code.

But this requires that it undergoes a process of transmutation.
For that which occurs at a moment in the procession of becoming,
to be preserved everlastingly, needs to be transfigured.

IBN 'ARABI
"The interpreter operates a transposition from the form perceived
by the dreamer to the real "form" of the implied reality" 
(1975, p.59). 

"The wise transpose the form into the reality it
configures...Thoughts shift from the perception of the senses to
the creative imagination. The inside face cannot be effaced.
However the external face can."
(Ibn 'Arabi, and loc. cit., presumably)

PRACTICE:

How does one transmute one's personality?

One envisions one's personality as a composition of qualities
which one possesses but which are not perfect in the least!

One envisions the transpersonal dimension of one's being as
predicating the impersonal archetypes of those qualities.

This could be illustrated thus: a rose is the exemplification of
rose-hood. There may be several roses. Imagine that a rose could
see itself as the exemplification of rose-hood by grasping its
connection with the archetype of which it is the exemplar. It
would see in rose-hood a far greater bounty of qualities than it
had hitherto actualized and therefore try to approximate more and
more its archetype.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The one who tunes himself not only to the external but to the
inner being and to the essence of all things gets an insight into
the essence of the whole being; and therefore he can to the same
extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty
that delights him in a rose. The Mysticism of Sound and Music
He so to speak touches the soul of the thought. It is just as by
seeing the plant one may get an idea of the root." 
(HIK), GITHA III

TWO MODES OF PROGRAMMING

Consequently the Sufis distinguish between (i) the level of the
programming of the Universe that is permanent and (ii) the
programming of the cosmos that is continually updated by the
feedback from the existential actuality.

Muqadem signifies the establishment of the principles eternally as
archetypes beyond the process of becoming - in the trans-
existential time, therefore permanent and not subject to change.

CORBIN:
"Man is aspiring eternally to know the Principle which eternally
initiates him and yearning once more to be beyond His revealed
being."
(Corbin),  CREATIVE IMAGINATION, P. 115

MUBDI signifies the ever-recurring resetting of the cosmic code.

CORBIN:
"There is that [aspect of God which establishes (installs)] which
is beyond being, which is the Theos Agnostos the unknowable and
unpredictable God. And there is the revealed God, dues revelatus
[that aspect of God that originates in time] His Nous who thinks
and acts, who maintains the divine attributes and is capable of
relation."
(Corbin),  CREATIVE IMAGINATION, P. 112

We find this distinction in MEISTER ECKHART:
"Gott wird und entwirt (old German: becomes and un-becomes) while
Gottheit remains unchanged."

It is in the individual arising out of the fragmentation of the
One, the Universe as a whole, that the door to diversification
opened and allowed that the bountiful virtual potentialities of
its programming could be actuated as an experiential existential
reality as us, each in our own way. This enrichment could be
illustrated in music in variations on a theme. By bringing out
latent potentials embedded in the theme, the theme is enriched.

CORBIN:
"It is these latent individualities who from all eternity have
aspired to concrete being."
(Corbin),  CREATIVE IMAGINATION, P. 115

HAZRAT INAYAT
"The soul of man is God but man has a mind of his own."

"The Creator's mind is made of His own creation."
(quote, and from HIK, I presume)

"The Divine Mind becomes completed after manifestation."
(quote, and from HIK, I presume)

"The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine
Mind."
(HIK),  THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS

IBN 'ARABI:
"When God sent Himself down to the waystations of His servants,
their properties exercised their influence over Him. Hence He only
determines their properties through them. He does not determine
our properties except through us; or rather we determine our own
properties through ourselves though through Him."
(Ibn 'Arabi),  CHITTICK, P. 299

FUTURE THINKING

In the Satipathana practices, at least until the last step, one
identifies oneself with the observer whereas the observed is
considered as impersonal and therefore not oneself. Buddha
downplays our individuality. He eschews ascribing 'I-ness' to the
observed, which is considered as an ephemeral perishable
underpinning elaborated by the whole universe irrespective of our
person, of our participation. The consequence would be that our
body, thinking, emotion and personality cannot be transformed by
our will.

The importance of the role of the personal in contrast with the
impersonal can be ascertained as follows:

For example our body is not just the matter of the planet - the
galaxies programmed by the universe (called God). It can be
modified by our personal will. Although many body functions are
conditioned (to wit our autonomic nervous system, our digestion,
our breathing, our immune system), we can move our body as we
will. We can control our breath. We can decide what we eat. There
is in us a mind/body connection. Our personal will can act upon
our adrenal glands (for example by our frustration or enthusiasm.)

The consequence is that (imagine) the cosmic code is mutated by
our personal incentive.

It is dynamic.

THOMAS OF AQUINAS:
"God is both static and dynamic."

(i) This way of looking at things has far reaching implications.
The personal decision involves conscience. Whereas, for example,
with regard to matter, the impersonal involves the awakening of
consciousness in our body which is applied in Buddhism in
highlighting 'mindfulness.'

Moreover it has its implications in the realm of the
institutionalization of spirituality exemplified in the
traditional guru-disciple relationship. As we progress we are more
and more of the opinion that the disciple must not follow the
teacher's instructions if they violate what he or she can in
his/her conscience totally agree with. The notion of 'obedience'
that governs in traditional religious groups, which makes for the
spiritual dictatorship of many religious authorities, is at stake.

However, we need to acquiesce that the disciple may not be up to
comprehending the teacher's realization. This is illustrated by
the Sufis in the story of Khidr who explains to Moses why a
certain man must die. This is the 'reason behind reason' to which
Hazrat Inayat refers.

This was not the case where Saint John of the Cross was condemned
and imprisoned for refusing to conform to the prescriptions of the
authorities of the Order to which he belonged.

Islam does not formally impose an institutionalized authority
whose decisions are to be considered as infallible failing with
which one is excommunicated. It does not have a Council
legislating dogma as the Vatican - although some people considered
as authoritative in the teaching of Islam profess to legislate
what one is supposed to believe.

This comes clearly in a Surat of the QU'RAN which might even be an
injunction for the Prophet himself and certainly for an
authoritative person or a group of authoritative persons doing
just that

"You are not assigned to intervene in human affairs."
(presumably this is the Surat of the Qu'ran referred to -- sa)

The Fatwas represent simply the opinion of a person or group of
persons considered an authority on Islam. That is why al Hallaj
required of Junaid to change his Sufi robe to that of a judge in
order to condemn him.

(ii) The self-same principle has its implications in politics.
Dictatorship is founded upon unquestionable obedience of the
military personnel to the autocratic arrogance of a despot with
its trail of disastrous consequences of cruelty and misery.
Obedience results in concentration camps. Anyone challenging
obedience to the dictator is tortured.

(iii) It is digression from current patterns that enlists
innovations in music, art, architecture, design and style. These
deviations from past patterns foster new modes of thought and
emotional attunement. Contemporary composers cannot compose in the
gentle style of Mozart reflecting the posh salons of his time. We
are living in a harder world. Contemporary music, architecture,
theater reflect the increased challenge upon our emotions and
sense of meaningfulness and is reflected in the compositions of
Stravinsky, Arvo Part and Takamitzu.

One is conditioned by one's habituation to custom. Therefore to be
creative one needs to be open to the unfamiliar.

The software of the cosmos is, of necessity, updated, actually
upgraded, by this evolutionary mutation. If it were not for the
innovative vision of the individual that sets the new trend, the
world would be locked into the constraint of the past.
The risk is that by prospecting new patterns, one may find that
some of them are less excellent than past ones. (It is difficult
to surpass Bach or Beethoven.) In fact portents of decadence and
degeneration are afflicting our creativity in our day and age.

To be creative, one anticipates the future, which is not there, by
exploring unknown patterns through trial and error. Likewise does
the Universe proceed. One inevitable consequence is the experience
of blind alleys. The advantage is that one is inventing the future
by coming upon perspectives that open new dimensions of
meaningfulness.

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