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.
