111 - Freeing Our Thinking from Restrictive Concepts

While the transmission of the past remains ever present, I strive to think and write in keeping with the language of our time. An example is Coventry Cathedral in England. Rather than reconstructing the old cathedral which was destroyed in World War II, a new modern cathedral was built adjacently, with the old very much in view, and somewhat present in the new, coming through the windows.  

For us, while going about our occupations, the Sufis are here, through the windows of our souls. Particularly Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, but also Buddha, and Christ, and Pythagoras, and Mohammed, are ever present, albeit in the perspective of our day and age. How would they speak today?  

Pir-o-Murshid says we progress as we mature from dependence to self-sufficiency. By independence is meant self-sufficiency: what we can get from our own self we must not look for outside. That is the principal motive of those who are striving for self-attainment, because it is the means of overcoming the sorrows and troubles and woes of this life. One sees a constant striving in the life of the adepts to make themselves independent of outside things as much as possible.  

Upon weaning from dependence upon the mother (or father), a plethora of addictions represent many tenuous, and spurious threads upon which we precariously hang our lives. The downside of the comforts and power we achieve by our technologies is our dependence upon them. This includes, not just circumstances-our plans, which can collapse-but people, all of which can let us down. In our despair, it may include our simplistic concepts of God as 'other,' whom we hold responsible for what we ascribe to our fate. We enrich our psyches, as indeed our bodies, with what we consider as 'outside,' little realizing that we are discovering our own potentials by their affinity or resonance with 'other ourselves.'  

Our commonplace way of thinking refers to an egocentric notion of ourselves-rather like the Ptolemaic view of Planet Earth as being the center of the cosmos. Our inadequate self-image is restricted by our old fashioned concepts of the 'otherness' of God. In contrast, the emergent thinking for the spirituality of the Millennium offers a multi-dimensional, bipolar, even a many-tiered grid in which to orient our thinking and find ourselves. These are not simply perspectives from which the universe (a new name for God) may know Him/Her/Itself, but in the holistic paradigm, we, while being fractions of the Totality, carry the totality within us virtually. We are a circle whose center is everywhere and whose periphery is nowhere. This is achieved by extrapolating between our personal vantage point and the anti-polar vantage point which is traditionally called the divine point of view. Maybe we need to account for several poles: cosmic, internal, and transcendent-beyond our understanding. 

Our inadequate self-image breeds negative thinking which proves self-obstructive and counterproductive. Should we discover ourselves as potentially co-extensive with the universe-traditionally called God-we would learn to rely upon the bountiful possibilities lying in wait within us. This way of thinking and knowing offers us an incomparably richer insight into meaningfulness than if we are confined to one pole while God is considered as 'other,' but it can only prove convincing if we have actualized our thinking into action. 

The consequences of this encompassing view in the realm of our thinking are quite dramatic. Instead of saying: "I think therefore I am", like Descartes, one would have to say: "While I think, I am thought of; while creating, I am inspired; while exulting, I am overwhelmed; while I become, the universe becomes me." This way of thinking is not new, but was articulated in the traditional language. It was coined "significatio passiva" by Martin Luther and was formulated by Ibn 'Arabi as: 

In contemplating Him, He contemplates me. He describes Himself to me through me. He discovers Himself in the same form (my form} in which He discloses Himself to me.  

And by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan: 

The purpose of life is fulfilled by God discovering His perfection in our imperfection.  

This way of thinking, liberated from the constriction of what Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false self", (our inadequate notion of our self) would relieve us of our resentment, because it is our self-image which is victimized by abuse, whereas our immaculate core can never be defiled, nor can we be deprived of the bounty we inherit from the universe, except by our failing to recognize it. There is no way of denigrating the God in us, as us. Our solace lies, then, in downplaying our faulty concept of ourselves as a discrete entity, and recognizing the boundlessness of our real being.   

The soul is a condition of God; a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time. How is higher consciousness attained? By closing our eyes to our limited self and opening our heart to the God who is all perfection within and without, visible audible, perceptible, yet beyond man's comprehension. True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come on earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Besides, denigrating ourselves-for which we sometimes pride ourselves-can affect our body, while positive thinking can cure miraculously.
