86 - Arwah - Identifying with the Subtle Bodies

            This Keeping in Touch is the second in a series outlining steps aiming at awakening. The method advocated consists in first shifting one's sense of identity, for example identifying oneself with one's subtle body, or aura, or celestial body, or divine inheritance. Each shift in our sense of identity is accompanied by a new mode of thinking which we are describing and triggers off a new awakening. There are several awakenings, as we shall see.

            In the last KIT, we described how we feel when our sense of identity expands and how it affects our way of thinking, quoting the Sufis and Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan in particular. In the present KIT we are describing what we experience as we turn within. Shall we call it the introspective mode?

Arwah: The Second Level Of Identity

            When we are in the introspective mode, as we turn within and consider the environment it appears vastly different to how it appears in our normal consciousness. Our relationship with the environment is dramatically altered. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan communicates his experience:

            When I open my eyes to the outer world, I feel myself as a drop in the sea; but when I close my eyes and turn within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

            In the cosmic state we experience everything interspersed with everything else. We also see how the interspersed elements are somewhat congruently interconnected.

            The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order.

David Bohm

            This space of three dimensions is reflected in the space that is in the inner dimension. The inner dimension is different, it does not belong to the objective world; but what exists in the inner dimension is also reflected in the three dimensional space.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            To illustrate the way the universe appears in this setting of consciousness, imagine the universe as a hologram in which two or more interrelated pictures are projected so that you could toggle between highlighting one or another, or even extrapolate them. As we have seen these pictures are interspersed, not diversely located, and more important, they are features of an underlying wholeness.

            You will find yourself in a transfigured universe which appears much richer than the way the universe appears in the ordinary setting of consciousness transpiring through the apparent world that now seems illusory.

            The one who tunes oneself not only to the external but to the inner being and to the essence of all things gets an insight into the essence of the whole being, and therefore one can to the same extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty which delight one in a rose.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Furthermore, you will discover yourself as very different from what you thought you were - you yourself are transfigured. This may be reminiscent of the state of lucid dreaming in which you assume a totally unfamiliar personality contrasting with the personality you remember you had in your diurnal state.

            In the physical world, you are here and everything is without you - you are contained in space. In the dream, all that you see is contained within you.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            If you let yourself be lured deeper within, downplaying the consciousness of your physical body, you will feel as though you were made of a fine texture - like gossamer. Maybe you are sensing your life-field or electromagnetic field.

            See if you can distinguish several layers intertwined. You will find it most intriguing because behind one layer you will find another finer one: that which you discover behind one veil avers itself in turn to be another veil!

 The external life is but the shadow of the inner reality.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Sufi metaphysics (Tasawwuf) distinguishes several veils screening, and at the same time revealing by their configuration, whatever erupts behind the apparent (Zahir), the shroud (Hijab). See if you can espy behind the profile of your face, the countenance that transpires through the cells of your face.

...that which transpires behind that which appears.

Ibn 'Arabi

            It evidences a deeper reality (Batin), the etheric template, more cosmic and lasting - that which this illusive reality reveals (Tajalliat).

            Whither you turn, there is the Face of God. ... Everything is perishing except His Face.

Qur'an

            This would mean that behind all faces, the Face of God is hidden.

            God is hidden in His creation.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Pondering upon your experience now it will occur to you that, while at the jagged ends of your being you dovetail with the environment, (in fact the universe), at the center of your being you seem to be continually resorbed in a void (an undifferentiated implicate state) then recurrently reformed - reborn anew, (an Islamic view).

            At this point, turning within has lost any reference to space - you have lost your sense of space.

Where art Thou, since my space has convoluted?

al Hallaj

            As any vestige of a sense of bodiness has absconded, you lose the feel of the gravity pull of the Planet. Just as when you intone 'illa' you cease whirling, as you keep turning deeper within you reach into the void, (al 'ama) at the epicenter of your being: your solar plexus.

            The foundation of Khalwa (seclusion) is al Khala, the void.

Ibn 'Arabi

            If you hold your breath between inhaling and exhaling, concentrating on your solar plexus, (particularly if you attempt the dervish whirling or intoning 'illa' when repeating the dhikr) you will have a sense of touching upon a vulnerable state of unstable equilibrium (called Kemal by the Sufis) such that you will find yourself prone to react to the slightest nudge. This could be illustrated by an aircraft, which as it reaches the stalling point is totally subjected to the slightest breeze, or the muscles of your arm can be triggered off by the flicker of a thought. This state of delicately balanced dynamic tension is made use of by Sufis to trigger off a sudden change from one state (hal) to another.

            Divinity is like the seed that grows in the heart of the flower; it is the same seed that was the origin of the plant and it comes again in the heart of the flower.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Discovering this cosmic law in yourself allows you to recognize your ability to effect dramatic changes in your being by your realization.

            As the whole universe is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by oneself.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Concentrating on your solar plexus, you will discover that the core of your being is immaculate however much you may feel tarnished either by the spillover of the world, or of your own transgressions (I hope, no offense). It acts as a mirror simply boomeranging back impressions from the physical and psychological environment as well as inside from your psyche which, though normally envisioned as being inside, now seems external.

            The spirit is like a mirror which does not retain the impressions upon it. By turning the mirror, the impressions are effaced.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Holding your breath between inhaling and exhaling, you discover a condition of time whereby the forward march of the arrow of time is interrupted, just like the motion of a pendulum is suspended as it reaches the farthest reach of its swing. In this state of suspense a different dimension of time (imagine a vertical vector) seems to intercept the process of becoming (the horizontal vector) to which we limit time in our ordinary thinking.

            You will discover the difference between the sense of time experienced in the first awakening - (i) the moment of time where the past overlaps with the future to the extent to which it can be predetermined and therefore foreseeable in a 'here and now' whose edges remain nebulous, and (ii) the instant of time where, according to the Sufis, the arrow of time is intersected by a second dimension of time moving from transcendence to transience and vice-versa.

            Waqt (the instant of time) is like a sharp sword that cuts the guilt of the past and the expectations of the future.

Hujwiri

            The programming of the universe provides for the chance of making a fresh start, opening a new chapter starting from scratch. Take advantage of this divine gift - the divine grace (Rahman and Rahim). But we have to merit that grace by repenting and making a pledge never to repeat the mistake. The pledge marks a hiatus, an apostrophe in the process of becoming, intercepting the chain of causal conditioning - the law. In Kabala, it is Chesed rather than Din.

            Fluttering over one's consciousness is a whiff of what it would be like to be liberated from the conditioning of the past and the feed-forward of one's destiny that one's limited self built out of inadequacy.

            Referring back to the vortex model, the vortex does not simply converge the environment and boomerang it back but let us consider life as recurrently rebirthing itself and reemerging from the unsounded depths of the void, in new unpredictable ways.
