Many would say that if we are not determined by our gender, bodies, emotions, imaginative faculties, or memories, then surely we are what we think and are determined by our minds. Here we are reaching a more delicate realm. One can say with Aristotle that man is a rational animal, which means that it is in the nature of the human being to think. Even as great a Sufi figure as the thirteenth-century Persian master, Rumi, says, 0 Brother, thou art thought itself, The rest of thy being is but sinew and bone. ~Mathnawi 2:278 But by thought Rumi did not mean simply everyday discursive thought, which skips from one concept to another without the whole being of the person who holds the thought participating in the concept (even if it be true), a thought that does not go beyond the level of mental play. Moreover, conceptual knowledge can be wrong and lead to error, and excessive cerebral activity can distract our consciousness from the center of our being. That is why mystics have also spoken of unknowing, and more specifically, Sufis have stated explicitly that in order to reach the Truth one has to tear the veil of thinking. In any case, while we have a mind, our true identity resides in an even deeper level of our being. This deeper level is the heart/ intellect, the heart being the center of the human microcosm and also the organ of unitive knowledge associated with the intellect (in the medieval sense of intellectus, or the Greek nous, not in its current sense of reason). The heart is also where the Divine Reality resides in men and women, for as the sacred hadith asserts, The Heavens and the earth cannot contain Me, but the heart of my faithful servant does contain Me. Here, at the very center of the heart where the Divine resides, is found the root of the I and the final answer to the question who am I? Sufism seeks to lead adepts to the heart, where they find both their true self and their Beloved, and for that reason Sufis are sometimes called the people of the heart (ahl-i dil in Persian). Of course, the phrase both their true self and their Beloved does not mean any ultimate duality, for as Rumi also said, in the heart there is room for only one I, which is both the root of our true self and the Self as such. Who am I? I am the I that, having traversed all the stages of limited existence from the physical to the mental to the noumenal, has realized its own nonexistence and by virtue of this annihilation of the false self has returned to its roots in the Divine Reality and has become a star proximate to the Supernal Sun, which is ultimately the only I. Having passed through the door of nothingness and annihilation, I come to the realization that at the root of my consciousness, of what I call I, resides the only I that can ultimately say I and that ultimately alone is. ~Seyyed Hossein Nasr The garden of truth The vision and practice of Sufism, Islams mystical tradition https://facebook/nishmatchayim
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 09:58:38 +0000
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