85 - Steps Toward Awakening

            There comes a time in one's evolution when a passion is awakened in the soul that gives the soul a longing for the unattainable. And if the soul does not take that direction, then it certainly misses something in life for which it has an innate longing and in which lies its ultimate satisfaction...Every atom, every object, every condition and every living being has a moment of awakening. Sometimes this is a gradual awakening and sometimes it is sudden.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The forthcoming series of Keeping in Touch's constitute a study in the steps earmarked in the teachings of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan and the Sufi mystics of the past, including sometimes the teachings of various traditional esoteric schools leading to awakening in life. Each step however represents a degree of awakening.

            One's grade of evolution depends upon the pitch one has attained. It is a certain pitch that makes one conscious of a certain phase of life. Every belief and every experience for a wise person is a step of a staircase; when one has taken this step, there is another step for one to take.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            In the description of the Sufis, the steps towards awakening are layered in tandem: for each level with which we identify, corresponds a mode of thinking or realization. As one shifts one's sense of identity from one level to the next, one awakens from one perspective to a further realization. Following, a synopsis:

NAZUT:          Identifying with body. If extended, dovetails with physical cosmos.

KHAYAL:       The mode of thinking when identifying with the body.

ARWAH:         Identifying with subtle bodies, aura, life-field - holistically interconnected with implicate network of the universe.

MITHAL:         Metaphor: creative imagination.

MALAKUT:    Identifying with celestial counterpart.

JABARUT:      The human mind accessing the divine mind.

LAHUT:           The archetypal level - divine inheritance - the seedbed of personality.

HAHUT:          Identifying with divine intelligence beyond consciousness.

TAWHID:        Awakening in life. The divine spectator - stereoscopic consciousness.

            We do not wish to force live experience into a theoretical system. However, if you consider a change in one's sense of identity as an awakening, then you could hold that there are nine awakenings; if you wish to consider the realization clinched at each shift of identity, then one could list five awakenings.

I. FIRST AWAKENING: THE COSMIC OUTREACH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

            In the art of meditation, one trains one's mind in the skill of extending the range of one's vantage point beyond the usual setting of one's consciousness focalized in a focal point. This is illustrated by the Wazifa "Ya Basit". By shifting the focus of your consciousness, you can free yourself from the constraint of your restrictive vantage point. Just as you can modulate your glance between encompassing a wide panorama or pinpointing a letter on a book which you are reading, you can modulate your consciousness between envisioning the universe as a global reality while losing your sense of the details or highlighting an event while failing to grasp all its implications or ramifications.

            If you achieve the likeness of this by offsetting your consciousness, you will experience awakening beyond the middle range. The breakthrough of freedom from any manner of constraint, in this case freedom from the tyranny of the confinement in the notion of the personal dimension of the "I", will spark a breakthrough of bliss.

            We occupy only as much horizon as we are conscious of, as far as we can expand. Every individual has their own world. The world of one individual is as tiny as a grain of lentil, and that of another as large as the whole world.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            As you exhale, envision your consciousness expanding, encompassing increasingly wider fields of perception and mentation. Now if you think that your body was confectioned out of the stardust - that the outburst of radiance at the instant of the big bang continues to live now as your body, your sense of identity - your notion of yourself extends. The cosmic dimension is evidenced by our sense of participation in the entire cosmos.

 A million galaxies are a little foam on that shoreless sea...We came whirling out of nothing, scattering stars like dust. The stars made a circle and in the middle we dance, Turning and turning is sunder all attachment...Every atom turns bewildered and it is only God circling Himself.

Rumi

            Take advantage of your exhaling to merge with the environment. Inasmuch as we identify ourselves at this first stage with our body, the very thought that the fabric of the galaxies has culminated in the cells of our body has an impact on our identity. But this acts more powerfully still when we feel our body magnetism - rather like the field of a magnet, which, just as with the magnet extends beyond its boundaries, our skin - but also intersperses it. At this stage let us simply try and feel the zone of magnetic force around our shoulders, arms, and chest. Realize that it does not have a definite boundary and remind ourselves that it does intersperse with that of all the beings that constitute our physical environment.

            Try to experiment. If you stretch the notion of yourself as you exhale, you run the risk of either losing your sense of individual identity or identifying with the cosmos. You will discover yourself as a vortex without boundary. This is illustrated by the Wazifa Ya Basit. However, as you inhale, you will notice that the cosmos gets converged as you (Wazifa: Ya Qabid) . If you do not recover your personal identity, a flood of impressions will overcome you obsessively which is precisely what happens in pathological mental states. This is where you will discover that it is your sense of your uniqueness (reflecting the incomparable divine uniqueness "Ya Wahid") as an individual that confers upon you the ability to select those impressions which you can handle and those which you need to protect yourself from.

            You will realize the danger of eschewing your individual identity. Our programming provides us with a complex defense mechanism made up of thresholds which screen and filter the environment (Ya Muhaimin). This is to be found in the Sufi idea of "containment, encompassing" illustrated by the Wazifa Wasi. This is what Buddha meant by the sentinels. Besides it is our individuality that makes for the rich variety of existence (Ya Mughni). But its is difficult for our ordinary minds to reconcile these two aspects of ourselves: the vortex as opposed to the cell albeit endowed with a permeable membrane unless you think of yourself as an eddy that intersperses other eddies in infinite regress without losing its idiosyncratic features.

            Incidentally, this is further illustrated in the dhikr where one says or thinks "La ilaha". Describing an arc of a circle with one's head, one expands while the "La" warns one against assuming that the environment is what we may believe it to be. As one says or thinks "illa" as one's head turns towards the solar plexus, one is reminded that this warning applies also to one's psyche and self-image. These then are the conditions for hoisting one's consciousness into the higher spheres as one says or thinks "llah", then awakening to God consciousness in existence: "Hu". Take advantage of your inhaling to observe that, thanks to your memory, the physical scene or scenario continues to live in your psyche while you downplay your perception of it.

            Under careful scrutiny you will notice that you recollect the physical scene such as it appeared to you from your vantage point: for example Notre Dame of Paris. If you had seen it only from another angle, your recollection of it would be different. Remember, the "here and now" is only a cross-section of reality squeezed into the framework of our commonplace mind's incapacity of encompassing the "everywhere and always". Therefore Yoga draws our attention to the fact that we are carrying a personally biased picture of the world in our psyche. And this is the more pertinent in our assessment of our problems. If we wish to awaken from the middle-range, we need to question our representation of the physical world, of our body and particularly of our personal, social situations. Therefore we need to do some work with our psyche. For example we need to learn to consider our situations from several view points instead of just asking what they mean to us in our commonplace self-image. To achieve this, we need to learn to turn within in meditation. This will bring us over to the next step: it is not the physical world that is 'maya', but our misassessment of it.

            To hold that the world is maya is a false claim unless you can prove it.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            For the Sufis, the physical world is an assemblage of traces (ayat) of an invisible and unknowable reality (haqq) devised to give us some clues as to the nature of that reality. Consequently one needs to reconnoiter "that which transpires behind that which appears" (Ya Batin).

            Follow the hint rather than cleaving to your personal perspective or alternately dismissing it as "maya". This requires the most utter detachment from one's personal bias. Suddenly everything assumes great clarity; it is as though one had awakened from an illusion (Ya Khabir). One's psyche had masked reality and one had taken one's assessment for granted. Now one has shaken off the hoax. If you apply this to your appraisal of the physical world, you will enjoy a sudden breakthrough of awakening, so that your relationship with the physical world will no more be an I-It relationship but one of deep communion and resonance. The consequence will be that you simply plunge into the reality of the universe or the realness of physical phenomena. You will envision the physical universe as the body of a being and the cosmos as being that being:

            The world is a man.

 Mahmood Shabistari

            Now for our self-image. Since the richness latent in our personality is constrained by our self-image, the consequence of extending our notion of ourselves beyond our skin triggers off an remarkable unfurling of our potentials (Ya Wahhabo) and enrichment of our idiosyncrasies (Ya Mughni).

            The spirit of limitation is always a hindrance to realizing the spirit of mastery and practicing it. The experience of being powerless is one's ignorance of the power within one... It is the situation where we are in that makes us believe we are this or that. Whatever the soul experiences, that it believes itself to be. If the soul sees the external self as a baby, it believes I am a baby. If it sees the external self as old, it believes I am old. If it sees the external self in a palace, it believes I am rich, If it sees itself in a hut, it believes I am poor. But in reality it is only I am. When one lives this limitation, one does not know that another part of oneself exists which is much higher, more wonderful, more living and more exalted.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The consequence of this realization is felt right away in your impact upon the prevailing circumstances with the result of increasing your sphere of influence (Ya Malik ul Mulk).

            Every soul has its domain in life consisting of all it possesses and of all who belong to it. This domain is as wide as the width of the soul's influence; it is so to speak an mechanism which works by the thought power of each individual soul.


KHAYAL

            For each notion of identity we entertain, there is a corresponding mode of thinking. In our ordinary thinking, our minds think in terms of categories: this tree/that tree, subject/object, I/it, spirit/matter, immortality/transiency, transcendence/immanence - "either", not "and". In our  ordinary thinking it would be considered folly to question that we are the spectator or subject experiencing the objective world, or our body or thoughts objectively. This is reflected in the simple faith which represents God as "other".

            If we expand our consciousness, freeing ourselves from our personal bias, we will still entertain a conceptualization of God as "other", but our concept will reflect our sense of immensity, of grandeur (Ya Mutakabbir).

            To make God intelligible, you must make a God of your own... It is, however, impossible to make God intelligible, really. The God ideal is so enormous that man can never comprehend it fully, therefore the best method which the wise have adopted is to allow every man to make his own God. By this he only makes a conception of God according to what he is capable of making. He makes Him the King of heaven... in fact he ascribes all perfection to Him

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The God who is in a faith is the God whose form the heart contains - who discloses Himself to the heart in such a way that the heart recognizes Him. Thus the heart only sees the God of the faith.

Ibn' Arabi, Fusus al Hikam

            Since the form in which He discloses Himself in a faith is the form of that faith, the theophany takes the dimension of the receptacle that receives it, the receptacle in which He discloses Himself. That is why there are many different faiths. To each believer, the Divine Being is He who is disclosed to him in the form of his faith. If God manifests Himself in a different form, the believer rejects Him, and that is why the dogmatic faiths combat one another.

H. Corbin

            On the day of resurrection, God will show Himself to His servants in a form that they have not known. It will not be the form of their faith, but some form from among the divine determinations in which the believers have known their God. The servants will deny and reject Him and take refuge in God against this false god, until at last He discloses Himself to them in the form of their faith. Then they recognize Him.

H. Corbin
