114 - Unconditional Love

Pir o Murshid cautioned his representatives:

We are being tested in our love.

There are those with whom we resonate quite naturally by the gift of affinity, or those whom we admire, those dear to us, even if we do not see eye to eye with them. But we are challenged in our capacity to love by those whom we find difficult to love, or who make themselves difficult to love, whose personality we criticize, or whose actions we condemn, those who have treated us unjustly or even abused our confidence. In fact this is precisely where dislike or simply incompatibility escalates to the point of culminating in resentment. It is resentment that constitutes the veil separating us from our celestial counterpart and will block access to our celestial home in the hereafter.

The mind is a world, a world that man makes and in which he will make his life in the hereafter as a spider lives in the web it has woven.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Should one remain encapsulated in one's ego self-image, and one's love is oriented towards the personal dimension of the loved one, one's human love is bound to be vulnerable. One is on tenterhooks as to whether one is still being loved, one may be trying to validate or prove oneself in the eyes of the loved one, or one's love may easily get tarnished by criticism, resentment - a battle of egos. This is where the wisdom of the perennial spiritual lore bespeaks another dimension and a further all-encompassing perspective, removing the impasse. It consists in including dimensions of one's being and that of the loved one which one had failed to countenance.

The false ego is that which that ego has wrongly conceived. It is not that the false ego is our ego and the true ego is the ego of God. It is that the true ego which is the ego of God has been reduced to a false ego in us.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

By the same token, one opens to a perspective whereby one sees how everything and every  being is interconnected with every other. This is traditionally called the Divine point of view -let us call it trying to see as one imagines the universe would see - everything in reciprocal context rather than in the content of one's personal grasp.

 The outlook becomes wide, as wide as the Divine eye. We occupy as much horizon as our consciousness or as much as we are conscious of. We are as great as our spirit. We are as wide as our spirit. We are as low as our spirit. We are as small as our spirit.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

According to the Sufis, the loved one becomes the mirror in which one sees oneself, in all the dimensions of one's being in which the bounty of the universe converges.

Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself.  The world is in and man is a world ... . The heart of a barley seed conceals a hundred harvests. Behold the world kneaded as dough, the angel with the fiend, the cherubim with Satan.

 Mahmood Shabistari (Octogon Press, 1969, p 15 & p 27).

 Of course, the more sensitive we are, the more idealistic, the more we entertain a nostalgia for beauty, unaware usually of the fact that this is the way in which our intuitive sense of the Divine perfection, of which we are an imperfect exemplar, is disclosed to us in form.

All faces are His face.   My heart has seen the Lord in the most beautiful of forms.

Hadith

God said to love: 'if not for Thy beauty, how should I pay attention to the mirror of existence?'

Rumi (D 26, 106)

The dervishes highlight the dichotomy: splendor (as beauty) and power (as majesty) - masculine and feminine archetypes.

When God has decided to adopt one of his servants as a companion, He opens the door to memory. When the servant exults in this recollection, God opens to him the door of proximity. Then he lifts him to the spheres of (respectful) familiarity, inviting him to sit on the throne of unity. At this stage, He frees him from the veil and invites him into the sphere of unity and from the perspective discloses to him the majesty and the magnificence.

Al Kharraz (p.13)

When God manifests His glory to a man's heart so that His majesty predominates, he feels awe (haybat), But when God's beauty predominates, he feels proximity (uns)... . There is a difference between one who is burned by His majesty in the fire of awe and one who is illuminated by His beauty in the light of contemplation.

Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, tr. Nicholson,   p 376

This is why the personal dimension of love is associated with beauty and majesty, in their more overt expression, in their physical form, but more so in their subtle mode. This is to be grasped in the splendor that transpires through that which appears, rather than in that which appears. In its more advanced mode, it is the beauty or majesty of a human personality.

There comes a time in one's evolution when every touch of beauty moves the heart to tears. It is at that time that the Beloved of Heavens is brought to earth.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

But to grasp it in another, as indeed in oneself, we need to come to terms with the fact that we are many-tiered, and that these many-faceted effigies of our being are intermeshed. Moreover they change rapidly in accordance with our thoughts and attunements. Furthermore, let us realize that the deep core of our being remains immaculate within its own defilement. Should we identify with it, we will grasp beauty transpiring across ugliness  

And if you see an ugly face, it is you and if you see Jesus or Mary, it is you. 

Rumi

Consequently one will have understanding and compassion for the desperation or compulsiveness in a person who is awkwardly and counterproductively struggling for self-esteem at our cost - or ourselves at the cost of another. Should one overcome the constraint of one's personal identity, and also that of the loved one (thinking that one is a "condition of God" as Pir o Murshid enjoins us to do will have that effect) then, instead of being the target of our judgment, the personal dimension of the loved one becomes the stepping stone leading to the One who represents one's ideal, that is the One whom one really loves.  

It is He who in each beloved being is manifested to the gaze of each lover.

Ibn 'Arabi, Ii 366, 18

When this stage is attained, love outreaches its personal dimension and, prevailing over the personal joy and pain of personal love, sparks ecstasy.

This is love: to fly heavenwards, to rend every instant a thousand veils, the first moment to renounce life, the last step to walk without feet.

Shams Tabriz, Diwan, tr Nicholson, Cambridge 1898, p.137

Actually, one is really searching for one's self in the loved one, only to find that it is the Divine Beloved disclosing Him/Herself by manifesting Him/Herself and actuating Him/Herself in the loved one that helps us to find our real selves.

I looked for God and found myself, then I looked for myself and I found God.

Abdullah Ansari

I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is me. We are two spirits in the same body.

al Hallaj

For the Sufis, our quest to know "who we are" is our response to the Divine nostalgia.

The Hadith Qudsi says: 

I was a secret treasure and I loved to be known.

It does not say: I wished to be known, therefore the motivation was not the curiosity of knowing,  but love.  

If it had not been a desire and hope of the fruit, how should the gardener have planted the root of the tree? The branch came into existence for the sake of the tree.

Rumi. III 118

The seed does not show the flower in it, yet it culminates in the flower; therefore the flower already existed in the seed. The seed out of which the trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit are made arises again at the end of the cycle. The same God so little of whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again and again trying to emerge as perfectly as possible in the midst of human imperfection.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

For the Sufis, the original impulse setting off the momentous process of existence was love, and the mystic's love for God is simply his/her response to God's love for him/her.

On the day of alast, the Beloved said something else - but in whisper: 'Do any of you remember? I have hurried to you.' I said: 'who art Thou?' He said 'the desire of all.' I said: 'who am I?' He said: 'the desire of the desire.'

Rumi, (p. 69 D 9265-67).

And God in His Perfection turned towards that which was in Him: the attribute of nostalgia, and this attribute was also a form in His Essence - which was His essence. Imagine you saw something beautiful in your essence and you were enchanted by this feature in your essence! Turning toward pre-eternity, He spirited a form - His very form and essence. 

Having thus radiated, He spirited a person "Huwa, Huwa" (Himself). He considered it for a time amongst His times. Then He saluted this effigy for a time amongst His times. Then He spoke to this human prototype, and complemented it on its good appearance. Then He rejoiced about the good tidings. reaching beyond everything that is knowable or not-knowable. Then He lauded it and glorified it and appointed it as the elect.

al Hallaj, Kitab al Ishk. Cf Massignon, The Passion of al Hallaj, Princeton, 1982.

If indeed love is the magical trigger that sets off the explosion of life as the cosmos, it remains the mysterious imperative spurring our human endeavors, evidenced by the scruple of creative minds for perfectionism, and points to our ponderings concerning the meaningfulness of our lives, our strivings, our frustrations, our disappointments, our disenchantment, and perhaps our reenchantment. Moreover, it is the power of unconditional love that gives us the resolve to uphold a person's pride while acquiescing to their flaws and follies. The great paradox is by loving one's ideal of God espied in a person, one helps that person to honor his/her real self. Therefore it is love that makes God a reality.
