Have you ever reflected on the many forms that religious experience takes, the various archetypes of the spiritual life? I don't mean designations like bishop, rabbi, imam or swami, but more essential patternings that may run across traditions and cultures. There's the hierophant or high priest or priestess, the hermit, the shaman, the healer, the humble servant, the prophet, the ascetic, as well as some less complimentary types -- but let's not go there. And then there's the Way of the Lover, the person who is simply in love with God and, as a consequence, in love with people, with nature, with all of creation as an expression of God.
One extraordinary example of this archetype, is the great 13th Century Persian-speaking mystic Rumi, who is known mostly as a great poet, but who was also a monumental figure in the history of religious thought. His six-volume "Mathnawi" is a compendium of inspired reflection, entertaining and sometimes earthy stories, sublime flights of inspiration, metaphysical subtleties and occasionally vulgar jokes, all of which relentlessly, consistently and coherently reflect his perspective on reality. One way that perspective might be summed up is to say that Rumi saw everything in existence as continually revealing the Beauty, Generosity, Intelligence, Grace and Love of the Divine Being. Rumi was awestruck, gobsmacked, blissfully intoxicated with this love-drenched Oneness. Gradually, Rumi also regained a sobriety expansive enough to contain this ecstatic intoxication and in the course of his life left us a literary legacy that has earned him the title "the Shakespeare of mystics."
For Rumi, the Divine purpose behind all of creation is to reveal the true dimensions of Divine Love. A well-known saying in Islamic tradition which he often referred to is: "(The Divine says) I was a Hidden Treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the worlds visible and invisible so My treasure of generosity and loving-kindness would be known." Allah wanted to express His/Her Love and voila creation unfolded and continues to unfold through Love! It is our task to grow in appreciation, gratitude and consciousness of this Love. There's no greater reason to be alive.
For Rumi, to be a lover of God was not to make some inflated claim for oneself, but actually to admit one's vulnerability and even helplessness before this Love:
The Intellectual
The intellectual is always showing off;
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
The lover is always alone,
even surrounded with people;
like water and oil, he remains apart.
The man who goes to the trouble
of giving advice to a lover
get's nothing. He's mocked by passion.
Love is like musk. It attracts attention.
Love is a tree, and lovers are its shade.
("The Pocket Rumi" by Kabir and Camille Hleminski)
Love in some way transforms the lovers and makes them a blessing within creation. Love in its most basic expression is desire, or love of the loveable. We want to possess what we love. This can lead to possessiveness, jealousy and even violence. At another stage love is the wish to share with others in a reciprocal joy. But Rumi described the highest stage of love with these words: "There is no greater love than love with no object." When a human being matures or evolves to this level of love he or she simply radiates love because he or she is love.
Rumi reached this love through a relationship with Shams of Tabriz, an enigmatic, itinerant stranger who came into Rumi's life with all the power of a Divine Epiphany. Just as Melchizedek came to Abraham, Shams' spiritual power overwhelmed Rumi. And yet it was not a typical shaikh and student, or guru and disciple kind of relationship, nor a sexual relationship (their own words and predispositions make that clear) but a mutual adoration, an intimate mirroring in which they each recognized a reflection of the Divine in each other. This was a love that unfolded like a cosmic drama. Not everyone appreciated Shams as Rumi did and after only a few years Shams disappeared. He may have been murdered, or maybe he completed what he came to do and it was time to go. Rumi was never the same. He became a poet, an ecstatic and in the end he matured through that love. What is most significant is that Rumi and Shams modeled a form of spiritual relationship, a reciprocal love, a mirroring that is the fast-track to spiritual transformation. More on that another time, perhaps.
The people of Rumi's tradition do not see Rumi as superior to other great spiritual figures of humanity, but as someone who was able to make something that was implicit much more explicit. "What about Jesus?" you might ask. Ah, the beautiful Jesus! Jesus was not a picky moralist but another great lover. And Muhammad, too, who was utterly beloved by Rumi, demonstrated his loverhood in humility and tenderness. In the end, the Way of the Lover is not just another archetype among many but the complete fulfillment of all human possibilities. And in the end, as Rumi says, Only Love can explain itself.
Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries.
A lover may be drawn to this love or that love,
but finally he is drawn to the Sovereign of Love.
However much we describe and explain love,
when we fall in love we are ashamed of our words.
Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear,
but love unexplained is clearer.
When the pen came to the subject of love, it broke.
When the discourse reached the topic of love,
the pen split and the paper tore.
If intellect tries to explain it,
it falls helpless as a donkey on a muddy trail;
only Love itself can explain love and lovers!
The proof of the sun is the sun itself.
If you wish to see it, don't turn away from it.
(Mathnawi I: 110-116 translated by Kabir & Camille Helminski from the forthcoming "A Rumi Daybook.")
That's quite an admission from Rumi who wrote more comprehensively about love than perhaps any other human. Perhaps the difficulty of explaining love adequately is that in order to explain something you need another something more subtle and comprehensive with which to explain it. Perhaps love is the final explanation of everything...
But the words I'd like to leave us with are very simple, and yet illustrate that it is this Cosmic Love which is in fact the Creative Power behind all of existence.
The heart is your student
for love is the only way we learn.
Night has no choice but to grab the feet of daylight.
It's as if I see Your Face everywhere I turn.
It's as if Love's radiant oil
never stops searching
for a lamp in which to burn.
(Quatrains: 353 translated by Kabir & Camille Helminski from the forthcoming "A Rumi Daybook.")
Akbar Ahmed: 'Suspended Somewhere Between': Pakistan in Verse
However the article's allegation of Rumi's connection to Islamic dogma is rejected as antithetical to the global esoteric tradition.
His being a Muslim is a fact!
And so is the fact that Sufism is the heart of Islam!
This does not mean that there are no other esoteric traditions in other religions.
Far from it.
The school of Rene Genon, Frithjof Scheoun, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Martin Lings (all Muslims) believes in the Transcendent Unity of Religions in that at the esoteric level, all authentic religions meet.
‎"Sufism is training the self in slavehood, and returning it to the rules of Lordship." - Imam Abu'l Hasal al- Shadhili via Shaykh Faraz Rabbani
Esoteric simply (and literally) means "internal" (as opposed to Exoteric, meaning "external").
Mystical actually comes from, of course, the same word-rood as Mystery, and was used to refer to those traditions which work to mine the depths of the unknown (via deepest meditative experience).
The term Esoteric and the term Mystical are essentially synonymous, and both refer to paths involving the mysteries, and initiation into the (internal) mysteries.
If "esoteric" is used as you suggest, though, you can be sure that whoever says that -- *isn't* aware of esoteric truth (as, for instance, Rumi clearly was). "Esoteric pride" is specifically a vestige of ego - aka untrue ideas - which block awareness of the "internal mysteries" - and of their completion in integration back into regular life - the final wholeness/fulfillment component that many practitioners never find.
For reference:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=esoteric
You need to cool your temper, and consider what kind of energies you yourself are generating and spreading about, and why.
In all spiritual traditions, there is the teaching, and/or the means to experience, the dissolution of subject/object duality, which, as deeply embedded as it is in these body-minds, and therefore the conceptions of almost all of us ... is ultimately relative.
In the yogic traditions this experience of subject-object dissolution, in its fullest sense, is called nirvikalpa samadhi - the original wholeness that is without (nir) thought-constructs (vikalpa).
The absolute is wholeness.
All division, even the most fundamental sense of subject/object division, is relative.
The idea and experience of an object creates the idea and experience of the subject who relates to that object, and vice-versa.
Ultimately and absolutely, "Lover" and "Beloved" are One (and the One wholeness is All).
Once this reorientation to reality - that Awareness is Wholeness, and this is what we each and all ever actually are now, behind the confusion of designations with reality, occurs -- the relative is experienced as an aspect of the absolute, and not in conflict with it.
http://livingunbound.net
Hence all the confusion.
The Tao which can be spoken of is not the Tao.
~Tao Te Ching, 1.1
Living is Harmony, Knowing is Unity; Awareness is Wholeness.
~Living Unbound
http://livingunbound.net
Look how Islam is being demonized left and right in the West!
So by denying Islam its heart and soul, they wish to present Islam as a heartless religion that has nothing but laws that are not suitable for contemporary society.
I think it's a matter of keyword selection. If you look at the keywords at the top of the article, Islam is not one of them. If it was, I think it would have been published/filed under Islam.
I'm not sure who makes the keyword selection - HuffPost, or the contributing author - but, in any case, I think it's as simple as that.
You may wish to visit his website, at http://www.sufism.org/index.php
That's why the realized sages of all traditions sound so similar, and why their realized condition expresses the same general qualities - wholeness, unity, harmony, love, peace.
Traditions are like maps, leading (when the map-symbols are understood, and the map is followed) Home - and there's only one Home; wholeness.
And so, Rumi was great, wise and profound - but no more (or less) so than the realized teachers / teachings of any other tradition.
Awake is awake; wholeness is wholeness.
-`Hodja Hasreddin, you are supposed to be a man of religion. But you never talk about the verses of Koran, you never mention hadiths, you never participate in discussions of the Islamic faith. What kind of a hodja are you?'
--`Well then, I will talk to you about Islam. Do you know the Great Holy Man Ikrimah? Do you know his most important two admonitions for Muslims? Ikrimah Effendi has two very prominent admonitions that all Muslims must know by heart."
--So what are these two admonitions, Hodja Effendi?'
--One of these admonitions, the Ikrimah Effendi forgot to tell me. The other one he did tell me, but that one I can't remember.'
Couldn't help it with this one, though; didn't want to.
Faved.
In fact, the faster we get rid of these limiting terms, loaded with archaic meaning. the better off humankind would be.
Some prefer to use a nonsensical word or semantic absurdities to express this unity verbally :Zen and Ch' an and some Western mystics do this a lot.
Read the first line of Tao Te Ching. Try to get an educated Chinese to translate it for you to bring out the playful wording, which has not ( as yet) been captured in any non-Chinese translations I read. And I’ve read 20+ in the 5 languages I speak.
But of course, on would benefit far more by daily 20 minute mediation sessions than memorizing entire literature on the subject.
---
Allah is simply refers to the Reality, the Divine Essence, the Absolute, The Infinite, The All-Possibilities, which reveals itself in various forms and attributes.
You may want to read Frithjof Schoun and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
P.S. I often find those who excessive capitalize do so because they have trouble articulating their thoughts. And this applies to clerics as well.
"THE GREAT MISCONCEPTION
Existing translations of the Quran do not reflect its true essence nor its core thought process! Such translations base their premise on the fundamentals of a God beyond, and depict the Purveyor of the word of Allah as a 'messenger' mandated to spread God's message to humanity.
Oneness means there is only Allah and nothing else. It does NOT mean that Allah is the only God. To separate Allah from the cosmos, people and other beings is defined in the Quran as Polytheism.
The Quran emphasizes that all that is perceived and all that is beyond perception exists within the names of Allah. The Quran demonstrates time and time again that we cannot attain all that is referred to by the names of Allah by praying towards the skies. We must turn within, to our depth, our essence!"
Source: http://www.ahmedhulusi.org/en/
"How can feeble reason encompass the Qur'an?
Or the spider snare a phoenix in his web?"
(Persian poem)
Injustice is, ultimately, a definition; one person's justice may be another person's injustice. This variety in perception and conception is the very source of all the trouble, including injustice (from all angles).
In non-duality (wholeness), injustice is seen to be symptom of unconsciousness, and a relative reality, in any case.
None of that is to say that a given person with non-dual awareness will, or won't, address a given injustice in some manner; we can't know that -- heck, they can't know that; they operate from a spontaneity most of us can't begin to comprehend ... because we try to comprehend it.
The more awareness, the more power to uplift all.
Those living as integrated non-dual awareness (aka wholeness) don't always seem overly concerned with the world's problems -- even those non-dual awareness is, literally, the cure itself, manifesting through the lives dedicated to its realization and expression.
"The world is not my concern; it is myself."
~Adyashanti
I could make the argument that we are no different, but that's another problem. But all life has that same intentionality; not just to survive but to maintain the conditions of internal peace harmony and aliveness against the external stresses. Many people clearly experience that intentionality (which is not within our conscious choice) as an external agent out there, or at least as some kind of ground of being compelling us towards "love". The problem comes in when we want to attribute to that experience attributes which transcend not only the individual organism, but life itself. It's called a power trip.
"A king has in his realm prison and gallows, robes of honour and wealth, estates and retinue, feasting and making merry, drums and flags. In relation to the king all these things are good. Just as robes of honour are the perfect ornament of his kingdom, so too gallows and slaying and prison are the perfect ornament of his kingdom. In relation to him all these things are the perfect ornament; but in relation to his people how should robes of honour and the gallows be one and the same?"
Thank you,