CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis

LESSON 16
RELATIONSHIP VERSUS IDENTITY
our relationship with God as not 'other' than our higher self

What we have basically learned from the previous lesson is this: our ability to become a beautiful person by unfurling the legacy of our bountiful potentials and resourcefulness from the whole universe (which we call God), and thus make sense of the purpose of our lives, gravitates upon our relationship with that totality. That is what spirituality is about.

It is crucial here to spot the reason why it works so rarely. It is because we are so used to thinking of God (let us consider the universe as the existential dimension of what we mean by God) as 'other.' In one's ordinary logic one envisions that relationship is a connection between two different entities. It is difficult for our minds to reconcile our relationship with the totality of the universe with the realization that the totality is the transcendent dimension of ourselves because in our commonplace thinking relationship means the rapport between two things or ideas - that is relationship is based upon a sense of 'otherness.' Our sense of personal identity is mostly stronger than our sense of the totality of which we are an intrinsic part, which gets relegated into a belief rather than a realization.

Our simplistic minds are stymied by paradox. When we observe what painful consequences this simplistic thinking has had in causing religious conflicts, not only between different religions, but also within the same religion where mystics have overcome dogmatic thinking of the fundamentalists, we see the urgency of unmasking the hoax of this dilemma.

What stands in the way of so doing is our commonplace way of thinking. Ordinarily our thinking is based upon what Martin Buber calls the I-It relationship; we assume that we are the spectator perceiving and cognizing the environment, events, circumstances, reality, the cosmos, the universe, God as 'other' than ourselves, as the object. But actually we, our bodies, our psyche, our thoughts, conceptions and emotions are those of that totality we call the universe or ascribe to God - not like the portions of an orange, but as a fragment of a crystal which behaves (but less well) like the whole of which it is a fragment, not simply as a truncated portion thereof. This basic way of envisioning reality, the holisitic paradigm of science, applies to us and alters dramatically how we think ofourselves in our relationship to God or the universe. 

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

People wish to know something that they cannot understand; they are very pleased to be told something that their reason cannot understand. (Alchemy of Happiness; The Intoxication of Life)

GOD AS CREATOR

It is an easily foregone conclusion to infer that the world was created by a being other than itself. It is the consecrated theological view.

Psalm 192:

The sky proclaims God's handiwork.

Gustav Flaubert, the French romantic, ventures:

What is this hand that propels them? (Cf. The Hand of God, Templeton Press, p. 48)

 Dr. Sleus:

There must be someone on top of that small speck of dust. (Ibid. p. 31)

John Glenn, astronaut:

I don't think you can be up here and look out of the window and see the earth from this vantage point, to look at this kind of creation, and not believe in God. (Ibid. p. 123)

Surprisingly we find it amongst scientists!

What with scientists poised at the frontier between science and spirituality, contemporary physicists are encroaching upon the realm that used to be reserved for spirituality.

Werner van Braun:

As science explains more of the intriguing mysteries of life and the universe, its realms expand into those areas which previously were either unknown or accepted solelyby faith. (Cf. The Hand of God)

Robert Jastrow:

He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Ibid.)

Scientists past, and some even now, and, of course, the majority of the human population of the world think that it was created by a transcendent Being 'up there' who sometimes discloses to us His/Her intention, intervenes in our destiny, and might even reveal some clues as to His/Her being.

Paul Davies:

It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming. (The Cosmic Blue-Print)

Hazrat Inayat Khan retorts:

Man is not created by God as wood is carved by the carpenter, for the carpenter is different from the wood, but man is created out of the self of God. (Philosophy, Psychology, Mysticism)

Wary of anthropomorphism, since physicists discovered such meticulous planning, some refer to an impersonal principle.

Sir Fred Hoyle sees this impersonal force as a "super intellect."
Hazrat Inayat Khan points out that by reducing God to a principle, we are depriving God of manifesting in the existential realm as the human, which is the very marvel of creation. 

People ask: "If all is God, then God is not a person." The answer: though the seed does not show the flower in it, yet the seed culminates in the flower, and therefore the flower already existed in the seed. No doubt itwould be a great mistake to call God a personality, but it is a still greater mistake when man denies the personality of God.... (Vol. 9, The Unity of Religious Ideals, The God Ideal)

Hazrat Inayat Khan concedes that one needs to start with a conceptualization:

It is necessary first to have a conception of God in order to reach that stage at which one realizes Him. (Vol. 12, Vision of God and Man.) The limitless God cannot be made more intelligible to our limited self unless He was first made limited. That limited ideal becomes as an instrument, as a medium of God Who is perfect and Who is limitless. (Unity of Religious Ideals.) It is owing to our limitation that we cannot see the whole being. (The Mysticism of Sound)

Jane Goodall calls this limitation a "tiny peephole."  (Ibid., p. 146)
Conceptualizing tends to gel into a sclerosed world-view unless one keeps questioning it, reappraising it and updating it.

Einstein:

The important thing is to not stop questioning.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Belief is like a staircase. Each step takes one higher, but when one remains standing on a certain step of the staircase one does not progress. Belief may nail the feet to the ground and keep one there...they only know how to remain standing on a certain spot on a staircase. (Vol. 12, The Vision of God and Man)

The same reality can look different according to the vantage point from which you look at  it....There are two awakenings: man awakening in the divine perspective and God awakening into human perspective.

Niffari distinguishes two perspectives, above the veil and below:

When thou perceivest, thou seest limitation openly, and thou seest me at the back of the unseen; when thou art with me thou seest the opposites. (Mawakif 15, p. 50)

Ibn 'Arabi:

If you witness creation, you will not see the Real and if you witness the Real you will not witness creation. (Cf. Chittick)

Ibn 'Arabi testifies to how things look differently according to one's state of consciousness.

Looking at things as viewed from above (as it were) the threshold between transcendence and immanence he says:

Thou art not thou; thou art He, without thou, not He entering into thee, nor thou entering into Him (1976, p. 4)

Then when looking from the other side of the threshold, acquiescing that one needs to account for the personal vantage point:

However know by what you are God and by what you are other than God. (1975, p. 64)

Hazrat Inayat Khan reconciles the two antinomic points of view in a single statement:

We are a condition of God.

Here we encounter the criterion upon which the realization proposed by Sufism is based: strive to see things from the antipodal point of view to your personal vantage point which the Sufis call the divine point of view while acquiescing to the relative validity of the contribution of your personal point of view to the transpersonal one.

If we do not do this, we are trapped in a biased vantage point. Here precisely lies the stumbling block in the full compass of our creativity!

It is this crucial issue which was at stake in the drama that erupted at the very heart of Sufism, God as 'other.' The difficulty of the finite mode of thinking is to see duality in unity, wahdaniat, versus the experiential realization of the mystic who is able to free his/her mind from the constraint of commonplace logic.

Al Hallaj:

Ana'l-Haqq. I am the Truth! I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I. (Cf. Massignon, Passion)

Junaid:

Unification is the separation of the eternal from that which is from that which originated in time. (Cf. Kalabadhi p. 91)

Al Hallaj:

The first step in unification tawhid is the abandonment of separation [isolation] tafrid.

In unity, wahdaniat, it is not possible to affirm other than God.

Kalabadhi makes a difference between renunciation of the world tajrid and self-abnegation tafrid. Hallaj says the first step towards tawhid (unification) is to give up isolation so that it is God who elects you to be incorporated infirad and ifrad in his unity. 

Junaid:

Nothing of his attributes is mingled with you.

Ibn 'Arabi says the opposite:
Thou seest thy attributes to be His attributes, and thine essence to be His essence without thou becoming Him or Him becoming thee.

Junaid:
Return to the state in which you were before you were engaged in the process of becoming.
Al Hallaj:
Oh God why didst Thou create this body if it does not have a purpose?

It is this same dualistic view held by Junaid that spurred Yogis to deport their consciousness beyond the existential realm, parat param, 'beyond the beyond,' in asamprajnata samadhi and prompted Buddha to declare "this become does not lead to the non-become." It leads to an unbridgeable hiatus demanding the contemplative to make a quantum leap.

Shankaracharya saw this, and highlighted Advaita, the monistic view which was already announced in the Vedic adage formulated in the Chandoya Upanishad: 'Tat twam asi' (Thou art That) as opposed to the dualism of Yoga, differentiating between prakriti, that which is transient, from purusha, that which transcendental. 

The two horns of this dilemma are articulated in the two terms transcendent and transcendental. By transcending the transient existential state, one reaches out in infinite regress towards that 'unattainable' coined as transcendent; whereas one cannot reach the transcendental except by losing one's self in the blackout, the 'dark cloud of unknowing,' al ama, so that one is not there to reach it. That is why Hallaj said: "it is enough if God alone testifies to His Oneness and the contemplative is no more there." (Cf. Massignon)

Mystics, touched by a genuine ineffable experience are hard pressed to convey it within the constraint of commonplace logic.

Ibn 'Arabi:

How can I know Thee since Thou art the 'hidden.' And how could I not know Thee, since Thou art the 'apparent!' (Cf. Etudes Traditionelles, Editions Chacornac, 1949, p. 257)

And those unaware of the progress of the information theories distort their experience in the process of trying to explain it in the accepted idiom.

Edgar Mitchell, the astronaut who walked on the moon, concedes that the experience cannot be one that fits into our rational mode of thinking:

Instead of a rational search, suddenly there was a non-rational way of understanding. (Cf. 67)

As in Vedanta, we learn of the efforts of Sufis to clarify this antinomy: God versus man. Hazrat Inayat Khan dispels thinking in terms of duality by taking the next step in logic: 'and' instead of 'or.' He calls it 'the reason of reason.'

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

The mystic does not stop at the first reason, the mystic sees that behind that reason there is another but he wishes to see the reason behind them all. (Vol. 10, The Path of Initiation, Sufi Mysticism)

The mathematician Ouspensky had already foreseen this:

There is no reason...for hoping that in the world of causes, relations can be logical from our point of view. Everything logical is only phenomenal...we cannot orient ourselves there with our logic...the axioms of logic and mathematics are deduced by us from the observation of phenomena and represent a certain incorrectness necessary for the recognition of the unreal subjective world. (Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, First Vintage Books, March 1982, pp. 214 & 209)       

Scientists are beginning to see this:

One needs to surpass familiar concepts because one cannot account for the world or for our rapport with the old by relying upon them. (D'Espagnat, La physique Quantique, Cf. L'homme face a la Science)

Instead of picturing God as a medieval monarch on a marble throne, imagine God as the living awareness in the space between the atoms, empty space that makes up 99% of the universe. Thinking of God that way gets us past some of the great divides of the past. Is God immanent or transcendent, internal or external, composed or compassionate? Like the question of whether the atom is wave or particle, the answer is yes. (Tom Mahon, The Spirit in Technology, Cf. Hand of God, p. 139)

Indeed in view of the fundamental maxim: La ilaha illa 'llah, the Sufis always espy the unity behind the appearance of duality: Wahdat or the multiplicity inherent in unity and Wahdaniat the unity overarching multiplicity.  

To summarize again: The crux of the whole issue at stake here is in including the divine pole of our being God as 'other.'

At an advanced stage our concept of God is not determined by our knowledge of ourselves but by reaching into the antipodal dimension; therefore envisioning that God discovers aspects of Him/Herself in us who are extensions of Him/Herself, and what is more by including our knowledge of Him/Her in the clues in ourselves  to His/Her knowledge of Him/Herself through us.

Ibn'Arabi:

You know yourself with another knowledge, different from that which you had when you knew your Lord by the knowledge you had of yourself. (Corbin, 1970, p. 133)

Challenging realizations announcing the spirituality of the future come through Murshid's bold announcements:

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of humanity.

The divine mind becomes completed after manifestation. The creator's mind is made of His own creation. The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind. (Unity of Religious Ideals)

While forms and names multiply upon earth, their manifold impressions are retained and absorbed by the spiritual spheres, as the souls return and pass through them. Semitic tradition has sometimes explained this by teaching that first was the world, and after the world the heavens were created. (Sangatha I)

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

The soul manifests in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of manifestation, and yet not lose its way by regaining its original freedom, in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world. (Vol. 1, The Way of Illumination) 

Hazrat Inayat Khan sees the need to eschew dismissing or devalidating the personal point of view. It is relative, but when paired with the transpersonal point of view, the apparent irreconciliables aver themselves to be complementary.

Wisdom is born out of the meeting of the knowledge of the heavens and the knowledge of the earth. When the light from within is thrown upon this knowledge, then the knowledge from outer life and the light coming from within make a perfect wisdom. The guidance from the outer knowledge and the guidance from the inner intelligence are both necessary. If the inner light were enough, then man would never have been created; he would have been an angel. (Hazrat Inayat Khan, Class for Murids)

 
