16 - The Other Side of Life

When one realizes to what extent one has allowed oneself to be conditioned by the way things look and how one has let oneself be confined by one's self-image, and when one nurtures a hunch that there must be dimensions of the universe that one fails to countenance, one is moved by an impelling need to know something about the other side of life.

One imagines that perhaps it is in dreams that one might snatch an ephemerous peep beyond the curtain into other spheres concealed behind the phantasmagoria of confused impressions in the sorting-house of the mind.

Curiously enough, the more one tries to do this in one's day consciousness, the less one achieves even the slightest haul.  At those moments when one awaits it least, a fleeting landscape of the soul transpires - just as one may catch a furtive overview of the land from a plane or a hang-glider in the instant of break in the clouds.  "It has passed before one has noticed it", says the Upanishad.

Why is our most cherished nostalgia so difficult to attain?  It is because, as the Sufi al Hallaj said,

"It is our wish of God that stands in the way of the experience of God?"

Perhaps we might understand this better by calling upon a double metaphor.  Suppose that we converge the physical world like a whirlpool converges a lake.  It follows that we are coextensive with it and, by the same token, with the fabric of the higher spheres and, what is more, with the consciousness and will of the universe that is, the knowing subject.

The paradox is really that behind the commonplace subject-object relationship we entertain with the physical aspect of the universe.  there is a deeper form of cognizance whereby one realizes that what one experiences is actually one's self.

"That which is experienced is that which experiences", says St.  Francis.  In this mode, experience is self-discovery.

The key to grasping this paradox is to realize that it is because we think of ourselves as a fraction of the universe that we fail to experience the higher dimensions of the physical universe that we ourselves are.  If we are indeed the convergence of the universe at all levels, we are those spheres which we think are out of our reach.  It is in ourselves that they are to be found.  This would explain the words of the Sufi Abdullah Ansari, who said,

"I searched for God and only found myself and then I searched for myself and found God."

This is where the second metaphor comes in.  Supposing the vortex were three-dimensional.  As we get closer to the apex, the bounty present in the base would be badly squeezed and impoverished.  just as the details of a landscape are reduced on a photograph to fit it all into a small confined space.  This is why, deceptively, the splendor we ascribe to these panes or spheres gets so badly limited, distorted, spoliated and desecrated in what we think is ourselves.  We have 'converged' all that wonder that is behind our trite beings so that it is most times difficult to detect whatever splendor has been pressed into it.

The Sufi Ibn 'Arabi says,

"Grasp what transpires behind that which appears."

To see what beauty lurks behind a wounded and disenchanted face, or what modicum of intuition still looms behind a conditioned mind, one has to have the eyes of Majinun the lover, say the Sufis.  Consider (as Prentice Milford has said) "...infinity in finite act and eternity in a transient act." I would add that behind the beauty of snow-covered landscapes is hidden a still greater beauty; the snow crystals.

If one could see the flickering and sparkling of light or hear the incredible melodies produced in the molecules and cells of even the hair that we shed at the hair dressers as they reproduce in mitosis or.  more so, the shrewdness of the enzymes that unlock the transcription of the DNA by the RNA, one's spirit would be sparkled with ecstasy.  And what of the light display of the galaxies and the symphony of the spheres!   It beats even the most ravishing sunrise.  And what do we know of the splendor of the heavenly spheres, since whatever transpires in us, even in the eyes of some children, can only be a dull replica thereof!  "In comparison with the beauty of God, the beauty of the creature is 'nada,'" says St.  John of the Cross.  From our limited personal vantage points, we cannot countenance it.  One would have to discover and identify with the heavenly counterpart in oneself.

Yet see what richness our civilized life offers us in amenities and sheer beauty of art and music and architecture and theater and dance and poetry and technology through the incentives of pleiades of creative beings since the early stirrings of life on the planet.  The beauty that comes through the inspired mind aroused by ecstasy is inestimable, monumental and unending.

Thus, the other side of life avers itself not to be like the opposite side of a coin, but the all-encompassing reality of that apex of a cone and which in our ignorance, we confine our notion of ourselves.
