90 - Jabarut - Identifying with the Perennial Level:  Realization

             Perfect realization can only be gained by passing through all the stages between man - the manifestation - and God - the only Being, knowing and realizing ourselves from the lowest to the highest point of existence, and so accomplishing the heavenly journey.                  

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            By identifying with a more perennial level of your being: your angelic counterpart which is not subject to perishing or decay, you will venture into the more advanced modes of thinking. As you shift your identity from your physical body, and then your etheric shroud to your celestial body of uncreated light, concomitantly you will shift your notion of being the spectator from the I that is body-conscious, through the I that flowers in creative imaginings to your celestial I: 'the spectator in the heavens'. This step will eventually lead to the next state of awakening (to be studied in future KITs) in which, by dint of a radical reversal from one's personal perspective, one sees things from the divine (transcendent) perspective.

            The key to this is eschewing or downplaying any knowledge gained by experience and highlighting a kind of inborn, inherent knowledge reminisced from prenatal memory (or access from peri-natal levels of awareness). This is where both ascetic detachment and the lover's yearning for the sublime prove crucial.

            The one who lives in one's mind is conscious of the mind; the one who lives in one's soul is conscious of the soul.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            You thought that you were the spectator, the witness of what you experience, but the real witness in you is your angelic counterpart - the witness in the heavens.

Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi

            We are skirting here the transit from individuality to the Oneness.

            To know one's own archetypal essence is to know one's angel, that is to see one's eternal individuality as it results from the revelation of the Divine Being revealing Himself through Himself.

Henri Corbin

            Let us now summarize the stages we have gone through in the current series of KITs.

            1) When we identified ourselves with our physical body, we were programmed in our commonplace thinking (Khayal) and took for granted that our personal subjective I was the spectator of what we perceived and experienced. All that we could grasp of what we ascribe to God were the clues, the signs in the physical scene and scenario of our lives of what was trying to transpire through that which appeared. If we permutate the terms of this perspective, then it is God revealing Him/Herself through that projection of Him/Herself that is this magnificent bountiful universe.

            2) When turning within, feeling like gossamer, (the Arwah level) we reconnoitered thoughts emerging from within, impromptu, bespeaking of the way the universe unfurls as our personal idiosyncrasies. We were picking up those clues or signs within our own selves (the mode of cognizance called Mithal).

            You noticed that your notion of being the spectator had changed. For one thing: you saw yourself as both the spectator and the object experienced. ('taijasa' in the Mandukya Upanishad). Furthermore you may have envisioned your eyes as being the 'eyes through which God sees'.

            Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God; not by thyself.

Ibn 'Arabi

            Therefore if once more we reverse the perspective, then it now appears to us that God is discovering Him/Herself through our discovering His\Her nature exemplified as our idiosyncrasies.

 The second degree of the Sufi is knowing yourself through the knowledge that God has of Himself through you.

Ibn 'Arabi

            3) Now to hoist your notion of yourself from the physical or etheric levels to the celestial level: (i) Offset your body and also etheric consciousness. (ii) Shift the field of your thinking from the physical world and your emergent thoughts which translate emotions into images, into grasping God irrespective of the clues whereby He discloses Him\Herself.

            Wipe away the phantasmagoria of images, then Haqq (reality) will emerge from inside.

Jami

            Absorb yourself in the dhikr until the imaginary world escapes you and the abstract thoughts manifest to view. Eventually the one who is invoked will disclose Himself beyond the signs. ...Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God; not by thyself.

Ibn 'Arabi

(iii) Bridge the gap between your being the experiencing subject and the object (which may be a thought or emotion) further than in the Mithal mode. Instead of thinking 'I am the eyes through which God sees', think 'my glance is the divine glance that has gotten funneled down and therefore limited, maybe distorted'.

(iv) It must have been your experience that when you meditate, you are assailed with random thoughts. These are constituted by the regurgitation of experiences of the physical and social environment in the process of digestion of the psyche. They are remnants of the past. You may also be pondering your future projects, taking into account both the advantage and the fear of failure. At the Malakut level, your being seems perennial and therefore not inveigled in the process of becoming. To identify with your celestial being, let go of the memory of the past and prefiguration of the future which are both of a finite nature; you will have a sense of having transcended the passage of time which now revolves in the twilight of your consciousness but cannot reach you unless you turn the headlamp of your consciousness towards it, thus slipping back into the commonplace perspective.

            While awaiting the next steps, (in the next KITs), let us however compare the modes of cognizance encountered so far:

I) You will recognize the first, (elementary) mode - ordinarily taken for granted: (i) one assumes that one is the subject and the world or the circumstances the object, (ii) the world seems to be composed of 'discrete' entities, occupying different locations in space, (iii) one infers an effect from a cause in a time sequence, (iv) one interprets situations as assessed from the vantage point of what one assumes is one's consciousness which is the focalization of an overall universal consciousness which we may call God's consciousness. It is clear that this perfunctory way of thinking is limited and therefore could not possibly give an exhaustive opinion about your problems.

II) As we readily wallow in ponderous thoughts about ourselves revolving around a fictitious self-image with which we identify, we are touching upon the personal dimension which we project upon the outer world. It eschews logic. Avoid confining your thinking to the commonplace mode we described earlier. As seen in the KIT on Mithal, we can 'reconcile the irreconcilable', 'gauge complementarity'. We can see both sides of a problem, we can envision ourselves as a continuity in change. We can grasp the connectivity between situations that do not seem to be related in time and space or in a causal sequence, what would seem ordinarily like unpredictable coincidences. Everything seems to be intermeshed in a way that defies our ordinary sense of space:

            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.

Dr. David Bohm

             This mode of cognizance could be described through the holistic paradigm illustrated by the holograph:

            Each part of the holograph is an image of the whole object. It is a kind of knowledge which is not point to point correspondence...Therefore every part contains information about the whole object... information about the whole is enfolded in each part of the image.

Dr. David Bohm

            We call this intuitive thinking as opposed to commonsense. Our intentions actualizing in our motivations hail from this nebulous mind-field which Polanyi calls 'tacit knowledge'.

            We cannot possibly describe in detail more than a very small part of the significance that we sense at a given moment. ..Deeper intentions generally arise out of the total significance in ways of which one is not aware, and over which one has little or no control ('I didn't mean to do that').

Dr. David Bohm

III) In the mode which we are now exploring, we can detect the limitations of ordinary logic. Even in our subjective way of projecting how we feel into irrational ways of thinking that may prove creative, we can see how easily we may be caught in a perspective that locked us into a logical framework.

            As you hoist yourself into transcendent levels in your meditations, you will discover that at each level there is an underpinning (subtle body, body of uncreated light), getting subtler and more elusive as you rise, and you will notice that your sense of being the spectator becomes less and less personal - and therefore one ascribes it to divine consciousness). Also you will discern a different mode of cognizance - a more transcendent logic.

            In a New Model for the Universe and Tertium Organum (1982), Ouspenski had announced a super-logic:

            Our ordinary logic helps us to gauge only the relations existing in the phenomenal world.

            While it is often taken for granted that body consciousness stands in the way of the realization of the soul, if you shift your sense of bodiness into the subtler non-substantial textures, you will not find that your sense of being a celestial body stands in the way of the sublime understanding encountered at this level. In fact, you will find that your bodiness and consciousness are mutual expressions of each other.

            The soma and significance are two aspects of one overall reality... If you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind.                                          

Dr. David Bohm

            Mind and body are two poles of the same reality. Both poles are to be found, no matter how you fragment the totality.

            ...every part sustains a superposition of north and south poles.

Dr. David Bohm

            This holds good for the finer counterparts of our being. If you identify with subtler levels of your being, you will have the impression of awakening from the mind-bind encountered at the grosser levels into the free outlook of realization.

            What is manifest on one level may be subtler on another. Therefore the relatively subtle somatic form of thought may have a meaning that can be grasped in still higher and more subtle somatic processes. And this may lead on further to a grasp of a vast totality of meanings in a flash of insight. . . This sort of action may be described as the apprehension of the meaning of meanings which may in principle go on in indefinitely deep and subtle levels of significance.                                                                                                                                    

Dr.  David Bohm

            Let us see how the insight gained at this level of meditation applies to our assessment of our problems. (i) At first, we were projecting our own personal psychological bias upon the situations, judging our problems and people generally within the limits of this perspective. (ii) Then we were seeing how everything is interconnected and the extent to which our own idiosyncrasies and free incentives are involved. By discovering our own potentials, enhancing our own creativity, we could apply our realization upon the situations. (iii) Now we can envision how the situation looks from a transcendental point of view, what the cosmic issues are that are enacted here, customized as it were in our particular 'storm in our teacup'.

            To summarize: we saw a reason, then a reason behind that reason encompassing it. Now, freeing ourselves from the mind-bind confining us to the reasons we had previously entertained, we grasp reasons beyond reasons or significances beyond significances in infinite regress.

            Ecstasy comes from touching the reason of reasons and by realizing the essence of wisdom.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
