Tag Archives: Sufism

so what is it?

Posted on by

8

Islamic architecture - Iranian mosque ceiling

 

It’s so close you can’t see it.
It’s so profound you can’t fathom it.
It’s so simple you can’t believe it.
It’s so good you can’t accept it.

 

This mind-shifting riddle comes from the Tibetan Shangpa Kagyu tradition, and the commentary is by Pir Elias Amidon.  It’s lifted with gratitude from Michel Bellegarde‘s online oasis nomindsland  – thank you Michel.

What is it?

The wonderful thing about this riddle is that it’s compounded of paradox — pure positivity (so close, so profound, so simple, so good) and pure negativity (you can’t see it, you can’t fathom it, you can’t believe it, you can’t accept it).  It’s saying that no matter how we look for, or what we call, this “it,” it escapes the looking and the telling.

In most texts these lines are not referred to as a riddle, but are given the whimsical title: “the four faults of awareness.”  But if we think “awareness” is the answer to the riddle, we’ve missed the point.  To say “awareness” is to make a conceptual conclusion, and whatever this “it” is, it’s neither bounded like a conclusion nor objective like a concept.  Yes, the lines are referring to awareness, but do we really get what that is, beyond the idea that the word “awareness” represents?  The beauty of the riddle is that it forces us to the edge of language and then pushes us off.

Although these four lines certainly cannot be improved, I’d like to offer a few thoughts here in the hopes they may help, in some small way, with that push.

It’s so close you can’t see it

One way to enter the mystery of this line is to imagine space.  Space is close and invisible too. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, that we can have a sense of space without being able to see or feel it?
Our bodies move through space and though space doesn’t separate to let us by, we feel no resistance — it goes right through us.  Whatever our riddle is referring to is that close.

The great nondual teacher Jean Klein says it’s our “nearest.”  So near it has no distance to travel to get any nearer.  Sufis prize “nearness to God” and mean the same thing.  “I am closer to thee than thy jugular vein,” it says in the Quran.  In this case the words “close” and “near” are not about location or distance — they refer to identity, being so close to it we are it.

And so it is with our awareness.  Can we find anything nearer to us than awareness?  It’s so close we can’t see it, just like the eye cannot see the eye.  Awareness is not seeable, though it is self-evident.  And though the analogy of awareness being “like space” may be helpful, unlike our sense of space, awareness cannot be measured.

It’s so profound you can’t fathom it

This line drops the bottom out.  It says we simply cannot understand what this is.  To say it’s “awareness” doesn’t take us very far, since no one has ever fathomed awareness.  Mystics have continually pointed out that awareness is the ground of all being, and now physicists are beginning to discover the same thing.  But to say this is not to fathom it — it simply provides another mysterious description.  This that we’re speaking of cannot be fathomed.  It is a mystery and will remain that way because it cannot be focused into an object that our minds can surround.  Mysterium profundum!  The Divine Unknown.

To the extent we can admit this, humility graces our being.  Our drive to understand, our insistence on possessing this profundity with our intellects… relaxes.  The mind surrenders, making way for something we might call devotion or gratitude or praise or love.

It’s so simple you can’t believe it

What it is is so simple that it can’t provide any kind of story or concept for us to believe in. Every word we use passes right through it.  Plotinus calls it “the One,” that which is uncompounded, that has no predicate, the absolutely simple first principle of all. Buddhists call it emptiness.  Sufis call it the void of pure potential.

Does its primal simplicity mean we cannot experience it?  We can, but not as an experience.  In order to open to this non-experience we must ourselves become simple.  We must become transparent to ourselves.

In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
the vivid transparence that you bring is peace.

— Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Becoming transparent is not so difficult as it sounds, since our true nature is already transparent. It is the transparence of pure presence — or as some call it, presence-awareness.  If we try to picture pure presence, we can’t.  If we try to fathom it, we can’t.  If we try to believe in it, we miss it — it’s simpler than anything we can approach through belief.

And yet it’s here, the simple pure presence of being, vividly immanent every moment in how everything appears, while at the same time transcending every appearance, every moment.

It’s so good you can’t accept it

This final line may be the most mysterious of all.  We might think that if something is really good we could easily accept it, but the goodness this line points to is beyond the capacity of our acceptance.  We cannot contain it — our “cup runneth over.”

We have come to believe that this reality we’re in is a tough place.  We’re threatened by illness, violence and death.  Everything that we have will one day be taken away.  How could the truth be something so good that it both holds and supersedes our pain and grief?  The stubbornness of that question is one reason why we can’t accept this that is “so good.”

As in the preceding lines, “accepting it” hits the same limits that seeing, believing, and fathoming run into.  As long as we think there is something we have to do — seeing, believing, fathoming, or accepting — we will miss what this is about.

This that is so good pervades all being.  It is the pure love-generosity that is so close, so profound, so simple we can’t surround it with our usual ways of knowing and feeling.  As Rumi advises, “Close these eyes to open the other. Let the center brighten your sight.”

– Pir Elias Amedon

sufiway.org

Also by Pir Elias Amedon on this blog:
how extraordinary!  how beautiful!

Image: Iranian mosque ceiling.  Avoiding the use of figurative images, the Islamic architectural tradition developed a style of geometric patterns of unbelievable richness, precision and detail.
Source:  doorofperception.com

 

how extraordinary! how beautiful!

Posted on by

7

Please tell me this: how does it profit one to be convinced that everything one takes to be true and real – beliefs, body, belongings – is so, when at the end it all “becomes transparent”? How can we heedlessly march into that Great Transparency without unshakeable awareness of the pure Clear Light? How can we deprive ourselves of the extraordinary beauty it unveils?

Pir Elias Amidon reflects on these questions in the light of his own experience. How beautiful!

The Clear Light and the beauty of the world - Pir Elias Amidon

 

At the moment of our death, when the messages of our senses cease and the contents of our mind become transparent, The Tibetan Book of the Dead offers this instruction:

Remember the Clear Light, the pure Clear Light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind….
Let go into the Clear Light, trust it, merge with it.
It is your own true nature, it is home.

When I first read that passage as a young man I was deeply moved and reassured — it assured me that the confusion and loneliness I felt as a twenty-two year-old would vanish one day in that great, final homecoming. I didn’t understand what this “Clear Light” was, but it didn’t matter — the certainty of the voice in the Book of the Dead comforted me. The Clear Light would come.

And meanwhile, I would just have to make the best of it. So in the years that followed — my twenties and thirties — I kept attempting to find or build some kind of substitute, metaphorical home in which I could belong during my exile here on earth.

I realize now that I had succumbed to the old polarity of my species: the sacred hereafter and the profane here, heaven and earth, light and dark. As far as I can understand it, this polarity has its genesis in our need to identify ourselves as individual beings separate from the other beings and objects of the world: me in here and all the rest out there. The dominance of the “me in here” sets up the added polarity of my suffering and incompleteness now versus the promise of redemption and homecoming in the future.

Of course, these kinds of polarities are understandable — we are two-legged organisms walking about, seemingly disconnected from the earth and sky, and anxious about avoiding any dangers that might be lurking on our path. It appears we are separate beings.

It took me a few decades of spiritual practice and inquiry — not to mention the normal sufferings life provides — to realize that the nature of reality only appears to be split into these dualities. As one of my teachers, Murshida Sitara Brutnell, once cryptically said, “There is no other.” This whole show is one magnificent Happening, one awesome Brilliance reflected in the infinite prisms of possibility. Which means that we — you and I right now, every humming atom of us, every thought and feeling, every movement — are inextricably part of this blossoming of spontaneous light.

Sufis call this wahdat-al-wujud, the Oneness of Existence. Nothing stands outside of its Oneness and Suchness — there is no other. The multiplicity of the phenomenal world is sometimes imaged by Sufis as a veil over the Absolute, though the veil and the Absolute are not seen as two different things, rather “the veil is the external epiphany of the Absolute.” Or, as the 14th century Persian Sufi Mahmud Shabastari wrote, “The whole world of Being is the beams of the Absolute Light. The Absolute remains hidden because it is so clearly manifest.”

Which brings us back to the Tibetan notion of the Clear Light, surely the same as Shabastari’s “Absolute Light.” The Clear Light is not, as I had first thought, something waiting out there to welcome me when I die. It is present now, right here, both as perceptible as all the apparent things and thoughts and feelings of this world, and as imperceptible, invisible, and transparent as the awareness in which these words appear to us right now. The “light” of awareness, the Clear Light, “the original nature of your own mind,” all indicate this same “light” that can’t be seen or located, though it is unmistakably, spontaneously present. “God’s Light is in the heavens and the earth,” says the Bible and the Quran. And the Quran adds, “whichever way you turn, there is its presence.”

When I die I imagine that one of my last feelings will be, “How beautiful!” I won’t be referring to the beauty of where I’m going (I have no idea about that), but how beautiful is where I’ve been, this astonishing earth, sky, and cosmos, this astonishing body and its capacity to know and love. As the mystic-philosopher Francois Cheng remarked, “The universe is not obliged to be beautiful, and yet it is beautiful.” How extraordinary!

The mystery of the Clear Light and the mystery of the beauty of the universe have become the central contemplations of my life. “Beauty” (I’m fond of repeating these words of Ibn ‘Arabi) “is the welcoming openness of the truth toward us.” Somehow the “truth” of the unchanging Clear Light is revealed by ever-changing beauty. “God is beautiful and loves beauty,” a hadith tells us. Spontaneous, ephemeral beauty — the beauty of a song, a kiss, a passing cloud, a glint of sunlight — each one a momentary revelation of the unborn Clear Light, our home.

– Pir Elias Amidon

Text and image sourced from The Open Path

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

 

the glory and the terror of it

Posted on by

11

The Path of Love is like a bridge of hair across a Chasm of Fire.

The Realization that every act, every word, every thought of ours not only influences our environment but mysteriously forms an integral part of the Universe, fits into it as if by necessity, in the very moment we do or say or think it, is an overwhelming and even shattering experience.

If we only knew deeply, absolutely, that our smallest act, our smallest thought, has such far-reaching effects; setting forces in motion; reaching out to the galaxy; how carefully we would act and speak and think. How precious life would become in its integral oneness.

It is wonderful and frightening. The responsibility is terrifying and fascinating in its depth and completeness, containing as it does the perplexing insecurity of being unique and the profound consolation of forming part of the Eternal Undivided Whole. And we all have the right to, and can achieve, the realization of this wonderful meaning of life: one is quite simply part of it all; a single vision of Wholeness.

Very acute it became after Guruji’s passing away. And I could not reconcile the torment of the heat, the mangy dogs, the filthy children, the sweat, the smells; for they were THAT too …

 

Himalayan Range from Kausani, Uttarakhand

 

But it was here, in the stillness of the mountains, that it gradually crystallized; distilled itself from a different dimension into the waking consciousness. And now I must live with the Glory and the Terror of it … It is merciless, inescapable; an intensely virile intoxicating Presence, so utterly joyous, boundless and free. It is blasphemy to attempt to put it into words.

I know that the states of Nearness will increase, will become more permanent; but also the state of separation will become more painful, more lonely, the nearer one comes to Reality.

I know that I go back to a life of fire; for you, dear Guruji, told me what to expect. I know that sometimes my health will fail, and that I shall be burned. But I know also that I can never be alone anymore, for you are with me always. I know that God is Silence, and can be reached only in silence; the Nearness to Thee will remain and give me the strength to go on.

Goodbye days of peace; and days of wrestling with myself. Days of incredible beauty with Nature at its best; days of glorious states of consciousness, wherein the divine heart within myself was the Divine Heart within the cosmos. When I knew the meaning of Oneness because I lived it. You did not deceive me, Guruji. You pointed out the Way, and now the Way has taken hold of me … fully … irrevocably.

– Irina Tweedie

These are the final paragraphs in Irina Tweedie’s book The Chasm of Fire

They are part of a letter written to her beloved teacher, who had passed away some months before, from her retreat in the Himalayas.

The Chasm of Fire is an extraordinary account of her experience of liberation through the teachings of this Sufi master, in India. It is written in journal form, as instructed by the teacher.

It is an account of the slow grinding down of personality
– a painful process for Man cannot remake himself without suffering.
I had hoped to get instruction in yoga…
but found myself forced to face the darkness within myself…
I was beaten down in every sense till I had come to terms with that in me
which I’d been rejecting all my life.

For an excellent in-depth review of this book see: The Culturium: Irina Tweedie, The Daughter of Fire

Image: The Himalayan Range from Kausani, Uttarakhand, India.
Source