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Subject: [agathiyar] Mysticism is...
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>From the Times of India Opinion Pages


The love of God

By E M ABRAHAMS

Mysticism is that point of view which claims as its basis
an intimate knowledge of the one source and substratum
of all existence, a knowledge which is obtained through a
revelatory experience during a rare moment of clarity in
contemplation. There are two mystical classics that reward
reading: one Christian, the Cloud of Unknowing (author
unknown, 14th century), and the other Sufi, Gulshan-i-Raz
by Mohmud Shabistari (13th century).

Both these have been recognised as masterpieces of
mediaeval mysticism. They state in a forthright manner
how to contemplate, how to unify and concentrate the
mind, how to discipline the self and bring it to perfection
and to God.

The Cloud of Unknowing was written by the author with
the purpose of providing advice to those who follow the
activities of outward life, but who are drawn nevertheless
by an inward stirring toward ``the secret of God whose
judgements are hidden''.

The author writes that God is to be approached through
feeling rather than intellectuality. He may well be loved
but not thought. He adds that love and humility, which
together include every aspect of the awakened self to God
and to the world of other men, are the sum of virtue. It is
of these twin qualities that the author of the Cloud
remarks that ``who hath them hath all'', for they represent
knowledge of self and knowledge of God, the perfect
adjustment of the individual to the universal life.

Spiritual pride is a hindrance to contemplation. The fly
that touches honey cannot use its wings. The stirrings of
love must be blind, because if God is to be experienced as
he is in Himself, he must be loved with a pure act of the
will unmitigated by discursive reasoning. What seekers
after God must not do, he insists, is strain as if to see or
hear spiritually or to smell and taste and feel and so on
inwardly in the same vein.

The intention to love God is sufficient. The only aid is to
use a short word like `God' or `Love' to help to suppress all
thoughts. The Indian would call this a mantra. It may
happen that, if the word is simply repeated, whole and not
broken up or undone by discursive analysis, the fact for
which the words stand will end by presenting itself to the
soul in the form of an integral intuition. Then, to use a
Sufi phrase, ``the doors of the letters of the word are
opened'' and the soul passes through into reality.

The Sufi text, Gulshan-i-Raz, is a compendium of Sufi
terminology in the form of questions and answers. The
poem opens with the question: ``First is my soul in its own
thought perplexed, What is it that is contemplation true?''
The poet answers: ``Reflection's dawn within the mind of
man/ Is to the learned contemplation true./ In solitude
reflection's worth is found,/ When bursts thereon the
flash of aid divine,/ He from whose eyes God still the path
conceals/ By key of logic may no door unclose.''

Shabistari emphasises the absolute necessity of freeing our
conceptions of God, as occasioned by the discursive
intellect; this is preparatory to the acquisition of that
`passivity' of soul which alone enables God to
communicate Himself to us in the perfection which
constitutes contemplation properly so called.

Contemplation could be called the act where God
communes with Himself across our intellectual centre,
traditionally identified with the heart -- the junction
between the ray of the spirit and the individual
consciousness. It is not we who contemplate God, but it is
God who contemplates Himself in his Universal Qualities,
for which we are supports of manifestation.

God does not become the `object' of the relative `subject'.
The soul, too weak for the metaphysical flight from the
many to the one, might reach that vision through a mystic
absorption of the separate self in the soul of the world.
And so the Crossing can be made -- not impatiently, but
through hard work.

Before we learn to run, we must learn to walk, and before
we climb Everest we must climb the nearest hill. So the
poet sings: ``The fruit is spoiled; but when the fruit is
ripe,/ 'Tis good without the husk; so when the sage/
Certain assurance gains, the husk is burst,/ And the ripe
fruit laid bare, and thus his soul/ Remaineth not in this
world, but departs/ And ne'er returns;"

However, despite the best intentions of the poet, there
remains a residue of what can no further be explained,
and beyond this point the soul must go alone. But its
solitary way will be illumined by a steady development
within it, in terms of its ever growing experience of the
mystical life which the poet has laboured so hard to
describe.


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