96 - The Inner Journey Part II

We live in the world to which we are awakened, and to the world to which we are not awakened, we are asleep...The soul in its manifestation on earth is not at all disconnected from the higher spheres. It lives in all spheres, though it is generally  conscious only on one plane.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The key to opening up to the impressions of these sublime spheres lies here in a dramatic shift of one's identity. In addition to discovering one's cosmic outreach, now one discovers one's celestial dimension. It is sublime, sacred, an attunement of exaltation, an attitude of glorification.

...by soaring upwards to those spheres where spiritual exaltation manifests.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            And when one reaches the stage where the angelic quality manifests, then one begins to show innocence, simplicity, love for all, sympathy and God-consciousness. A symptom of this step in one's inner journey is that one surreptitiously seeks situations that trigger off the exaltation of the soul rather than the thrill of the heart. As one's sensitivity increases, one becomes more aware of the levels of emotion.

The pitch of exaltation can be determined by the different grades to which consciousness rises. 

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            There is a physical aspect of exaltation which comes as a reaction to, or result of having seen the immensity of space, having looked at the wide horizon, or having seen the clear sky, the moonlit night and nature at dawn. Looking at the rising sun, watching the setting sun, looking at the horizon from the sea, being in the midst of nature, looking at the world from the top of a mountain, all these experiences lift one up and give one a feeling which one cannot call sensation. It is exaltation.


            Here ecstasy is triggered off by the perception of nature in its most alluring expression; but it is still dependent upon perception. However, to tune oneself to the resonance of the celestial spheres, one finds exaltation when our humanness is sublimated.

A higher aspect of exaltation is a moral exaltation - when we are sorry for having said or done something unpleasant; when we have asked forgiveness, and humbled ourselves before someone towards whom we were inconsiderate. We have humbled our pride then. Or when we felt a deep gratitude to someone who had done something for us; when we have felt love, sympathy, devotion which seems endless and which seems so great that our heart cannot accommodate it; when we have felt so much pity for someone that we have forgotten ourselves; when we have found a profound happiness in rendering a humble service to someone in need; when we have said a prayer which has come from the bottom of our heart; when we have realized our own limitation and smallness in comparison with the greatness of God; all these experiences lift man up...even such an experience as watching the little smiles of an innocent infant.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Ecstasy, erupting through the very appraisal of the "elegance" of the driving intelligence of the universe, which is shattering one's commonplace mind, will reveal a meaningfulness beyond one's ken that opens totally new perspectives to one's understanding. No sooner is one able to recognize one's celestial identity than a mode of knowledge, transcending that which was acquired by experience, is revealed.

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

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            While Pir-o-Murshid says: "Wisdom is born out of the co-mingling of the knowledge of the heavens with the know-how of the earth." He does clarify that one needs to downplay experiential knowledge to grasp this higher knowledge.   However:

Intelligence confined to knowledge of phenomena becomes limited, but when it is free from all knowledge, then it experiences its own essence.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

If one goes further, there is consciousness in its aspect of pure intelligence, because it is the knowing of things that blunts the faculty of knowledge...Consciousness is covered by something which it is conscious of. The moment that cover is taken away, it is pure intelligence...it is a kind of omniscient condition.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

This tallies with Ibn 'Arabi, who says: "Knowledge is a veil upon the known."

The annihilation of knowledge in the known.

Ansari

            At this level, one has surpassed any consideration of form, or image, or conceptual teaching; therefore, rather than envisioning God as the perfect archetype, one discovers God as the Spectator, and one's consciousness as a derivation from God, as paramount intelligence. Now the known avers itself to be the knower. The emotion erupting out of one's discovery of one's celestial identity triggers off a total reversal of the commonplace assumption that one is the spectator: one shifts one's subjective focal center and identifies with God as the Spectator - a total turnabout of perspective which confers a revealed knowledge instead of an acquired knowledge.

There is a still deeper sphere to which our memory is linked, and that sphere is the universal memory; in other words, the divine mind where we do not only collect what we have seen or heard or known, but where we can even touch something we have never learned, heard, known or seen. For this the doors of memory should be laid open.

Who so draws not knowledge from the spring of knowledge, knows not the reality.

Ansari

                        Mastery in accomplishment will equally give one ecstasy.

If one can make oneself obey one's own will one will surely rise to a greater exaltation.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            At this stage in one's inner journey one will be almost compulsively drawn to any expression of glorification. One will see the forms of the ritual as simply devices to trigger off a level of exaltation that sparks a sense of deja vu of the heavenly spheres.

Religious prayers, rituals, and ceremonies were intended to produce exaltation, for it is one of the treasures of life; exaltation is as necessary, or perhaps even more so, as the cultivation of thought.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            But eventually exaltation is enigmatically self-generated. This represents an advanced stage in the inner journey.

Sometimes exaltation may be the outcome of sensation. It is possible; but at the same time exaltation which is beyond price comes of itself, as soon as we have shown an inclination towards it.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            At this stage, the role model to inspire one on the path is that element in one that Suhrawardhi calls "the witness in the heavens". This level corresponds with the level which the Sufis call Malakut, the celestial level.

6) One discovers the software transcending even one's latent potentialities:

            Now we are ready for the most magically creative stage. It is not the unfurling of latent, dormant potentialities as in the Mithal stage, but rather a totally different mode of creativity linking us with the archetypal level of which our personalities are the exemplars - a level beyond causality. The difference between our latent qualities ready to be unfurled (given favorable conditions lying within), and the unlimited all-possibilities inherent in what one might call the software of the existential reality, could be illustrated by the difference between the continual recycling of the seed through the plant as compared with its mutation. In its recycling, the seed is subject to determinism, causality; but the variables presiding over its mutation are infinite and hence, unpredictable. This could again be demonstrated by the fact that, while every cell of our body carries the code of our whole body, the cells of our immune system are open to develop unforeseeable faculties ad infinitum.

            Such is genuine creativity - it is unpredictable and hence involves levels of reality beyond the known.

It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the preconditioning of law, the chance substrate upon which law is built.

Andreas Speiser

            We find evidence the "pull of a future that is exploratory", rather than the "push of the past", insofar as it determines the present. In fact, we are referring to a state that is neither initial nor forthcoming, because it transcends the arrow of time.

            The exemplar now discovers its relationship with the archetype through the discovery of what the archetype has of itself in the exemplar. Consequently, the personality of the inner wayfarer may now exhibit qualities beyond even its latent idiosyncrasies, because the divine archetypes, predicated by all that manifests in the universe, are themselves unlimited and hence undefinable. The Sufis ascribe them to the divine intention.

            Therefore to reach this stage on the inner journey, instead of envisioning the cosmic dimension of our being in holistic fashion, as at the Arwah level, when one says that the Truth most glorious comprehends all beings, the meaning is that He comprehends them as a cause comprehends its consequences, not that He is a whole containing them as His parts...

Jami

            We need to relate our sense of identity to its archetype: imagine a rose seeing itself as the expression of "rosehood", imagine that we see our qualities as the expressions of their perfect models which we ascribe to God!

Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithal) in the higher world. The forms in the higher world preserve the existence of their likeness in the lower  worlds. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each form to its likeness. ...These are like ladders for the angels, while the meanings that descend in these tenuities are like angels.

Ibn 'Arabi

            To achieve this requires a tour de force in our thinking: instead of assessing the potentialities latent in us, we discover unlimited possibilities not yet existent. The Sufis call this Imkan and Buddha calls it the sphere of all-possibility.

            Now, having transited through the volte-face at the Jabbarut level, instead of reaching out towards the universe from our personal center, we recognize the universe forming itself as us. Moreover, the intention, even the nostalgia of the universe (what we mean by God), is to discover potentialities unknown to Him/Herself as us.

            This for the Sufis, establishes a knightly relationship between us as the vassals, and the Lord whose qualities we actualize in our personalities.

Then God makes him journey through his Names (that is, His archetypes) in order to show him His signs. Thus the server comes to know that he is designed by every name. It is through these names that God appears to the server.

Ibn 'Arabi

Each manifest being is the form of a lordly name. The Rabb, the Lord becomes a reality in relationship with a being who is designated in the passive form.

Henri Corbin

The divinity seeks for a being whose God it is. The divine sovereignty has a secret, and that is thou.

Sahl Tostari

            We might recognize two complementary states here, which may be discovered on the inner journey in two steps. 1) Thinking of one's personality as the exemplar of the diving Being;  2) Letting go of one's human identity and identifying with the archetype of which one's personality is simply the exemplar through which God, as the ultimate reality behind the existential  show, makes Himself (Itself) known.

When thou perceives, thou seest limitation openly, and thou seest Me at the back of the unseen. When thou art with me, thou seest the opposites and him whom I have caused to witness them. 

Niffari

            Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out the complementary view to our own personal one:

Therefore the ultimate aim of the eternal Consciousness in undertaking a journey to the plane of mortality is to realize its eternal being.

Akibat

God discovers His Perfection in our limitation...Therefore the soul may be considered to be a condition of God, a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time...The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man, one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            Now one's role model is one's projection of what one imagines to be the divine perfection.

Just as one's own sub-consciousness would awaken one at a certain time, if previously warned, in the same way the consciousness of God is the agency for awakening His manifestation, projecting itself through different names and forms to accomplish His desire of being known.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The Sufis call this level Lahut.

7) One awakens beyond life:

            Unless one has a strong commitment to one's responsibilities or to service in real life situations, if it were not for one's delight in wonderful people, in acts of heroism, and in the achievements of great civilizations; if it were not for one's bewonderment when enjoying the beauty and negotiating the power of nature, one could find oneself continually disappointed by the greed and cruelty of many, and the sham values pursued. One tends to turn away from "the world" and seek that which lies behind the scene and scenario of life, which powers the miracle of life. To grasp the "reality behind the here and now", it is easier to downplay the existential actuality and highlight "that which transpires from behind what appears", while it would be more difficult to extrapolate between the two perspectives. This would then represent a further stage in the journey.

            Now the existential world appears simply as a perspective, like an optical illusion evidences that one's consciousness is captured in a certain perspective. The consequence is otherwordliness, detachment, alienation - the way of the ascetic, the monk or the nun, the anchorite. On the other hand, one finds oneself awakening on the other side of a veil, into a realness that confirms one's sense of the illusoriness and the deceptive nature of one's usual representation of life.

When the unreality of life pushes against my heart, its door opens to the reality.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The consequence is a sense of freedom, emancipation, authenticity, exaltation, ecstasy and serenity.

            The criterion determining this stage on the inner journey is the degree to which one is able to shift one's personal consciousness into God consciousness without losing one's self or rather, to see one's self center as the customizing of the cosmic/transcendent reality we call God.

            There is a stage at which, by touching a particular phase of existence, one feels raised above the limitations of life, and is given that power: peace and freedom of light and life, which belong to the source of all beings. In that moment of supreme exaltation, one is not only united with the source of all beings, but dissolved in it; for the source is in one's self.

            Here it is, the Being whose attributes served as one's role model, who is revealed to one irrespective of the devices whereby one may gain a clue to His/Her nature.

There is a further stage at which one knows God by God, instead of through His signs...discovery of Himself through one.

Ibn'Arabi

This is the level that the Sufis call Hahut and the Yogis call Samadhi.

8) One grasps the unity underlying multiplicity and the multiplicity inherent in unity (Tawhid):

Exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence. 

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            As one progresses in one's realization and advances in one's inner journey, one increasingly finds oneself in a state where, although unintentional, one's perspective suddenly shifts and fluctuates. This perspective moves between grasping a basic unity underlying the multiplicity of what our minds had conceived as "discrete" objects, persons or events (an example would be emphasizing the grasp of the sea at the cost of the grasp of the waves); or on the other hand, apprehending that what appears as objects becomes manifest by dint of a plethora of ephemeral and elusive projections of the multifarious bounty inherent in the Oneness (like the minerals present within a distillate, but only apparent at the point at which they precipitate).

            According to Kalabadhi:

... tafrid is the mystical state where one sees unity in multiplicity (wahdat) and tajrid, the state in which one sees multiplicity in unity (Wahdadiyat). Titus Burckhardt defines all-Wahadiya as the way that Unity appears in its various aspects, and al-Wahid'ya as the unity hidden behind these predicates.

            This becomes, not only an ever-recurring feature during one's meditation, but even while active in everyday life situations. Eventually one catches a third perspective whereby one is able to extrapolate between these antipodal perspectives.

One becomes conscious of one's own self in God, and of God in one's self. Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

It is just like touching the Presence of God, when one's consciousness has become so light and so liberated and free that it can raise itself and dive and touch the depths of one's being.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            We reach the realization of which Ibn'Arabi speaks:

Thou art not thou, thou art He without thou; not He entering into you, nor thou entering into Him. Thou art not ceasing to be nor still existing. Then if thou know thy existence thus, then thou knowest God; and if not, then not.

Ibn'Arabi

When all idea of this external being is gone, then comes the consciousness of the unlimited Being of God.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            When asked what is the message of our time, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan said:

It is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity of man.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

            The Sufis call this level Tawhid.
