June 2011 Archives

Many Sufis speak of gnosis as being synonymous with love, but "love" in their vocabulary excludes the sentimental colorings usually associated with this term in current usage. The term love is employed by them because it indicates more clearly than any other word that in gnosis the whole of one's being "knows" the object and not just the mind; and because love is the most direct reflection in this world, or the truest "symbol" in the traditional sense, of the joy and beatitude of the spiritual world. Moreover, in Sufism, as in other traditions, the instrument of spiritual gnosis is the heart, the center of man's being; gnosis is "existential" rather than purely mental.

[...]

Rumi describes the spiritual transformation brought about by love as follows:

This is Love: to fly heavenwards,
To rend, every instant, a hundred veils

William C. Chittick

The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi

Before I wade out into the muck, here: I don't believe in God, or some gods, or any god. I'm not a religious person, but I'm fascinated by the human enterprise of religion. It's an enormously complex, millennia-long, collective project, the seminal goal of which is to describe the entire universe using human language. It's not the accuracy or inaccuracy of that description per se that draws me. The monumental existence of the effort is enough to sustain my interest. Thousands of very smart people over the centuries have expended considerable effort attempting to express ineffable things about reality using the comparatively clumsy tools provided by the various parts of speech. Many of them have died in defense of their particular collection of words, and others have been happy to kill them in defense of their collection, and whatever you think about the net harm or benefit of the endeavor, it seems to me to be the height of blinkered arrogance and intellectual paucity to dismiss it outright. That's like tossing out all of Aristotle because he thought that objects float by virtue of their shape. This dismissal is particularly characteristic of the newly fashionable Atheism, where too often it seems that reading a book or two by Dawkins or Hitchens is considered suitable engagement with the subject. I'm an atheist. And I earned that by studying religion, not by studying atheism. There's a difference.

Because of that difference, I continue to appreciate the creative panoply of human religious thought, and am intrigued by its complex metaphors, its manifold insights, and the poetry of its language, as well as its absurdities and its nonsense. So when I learn that the Sufis have appropriated the term "love" to describe the process of knowing the Divine, I want to see what they've said about it.

There is a Hermetic and somewhat fractal principle, which, simply stated, is "As above, so below." Less simply stated, as found on the so-called Emerald Tablet, this is rendered as, "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing." To make it even more complicated, in Theosophist circles the idea is summarized as "Everything in the Universe follows analogy. 'As above, so below;' Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual." The basic Hermetic concept--which can and has been worked absolutely to death by the sort of people who work such things to death--is that for every heavenly process, there is a corresponding earthly process; for every spiritual practice, there is a vulgar practice; and so on. It's about establishing balance and harmony, but it's also a necessary prerequisite for any sort of esoteric understanding, a way to approach the unseen by observing the world around us and the creatures that inhabit it.

The underlying metaphorical premise here is that realms and ideas can be divided into the "low," or earthly, and the "high," or spiritual. Treat that duality however you like, but at least accept for the moment that there are common and extraordinary understandings of the world around us and our place within it.¹

All of which is why I find it so very interesting that the Sufis in general, and Rumi in particular, chose the same word to describe gaining knowledge of the Divine as is used to describe the more intimate relationships shared between people. William Chittick, above, is careful to differentiate the Sufi use of the term from the "sentimental colorings" of ordinary usage, by which I take him to mean "romantic," and which can be even further reduced to "that peculiar set of behaviors that human beings often engage in as a prelude to mating."

However, there's a different way to look at this notion of love, which doesn't so readily dismiss it as unrelated to the search for the Divine. If "As above, so below" is acceptable as a premise--just go with me on this--we're presented with the possibility that the gnostic Sufi concept of love, the process of coming to know God, is mirrored in the earthly concept of love, the process of coming to know another person.

The veils that Rumi refers to, the ones that are rent as we fly heavenwards, trying to love God, are veils of illusion. They are diaphanous distractions that hide the essential, esoteric truth of Sufism: there is no separation from God. If you dig deep and long enough into the teachings, you'll eventually reach claims that this apparent dualism is in fact just that, apparent. It's all part of the same great ball of heavenly-demonic God-Devil wax: unity.

Now, I've got some thoughts about that that I'm not going to go into here, because they're long and involved and a little loopy. What I'm interested in at the moment is the process. There is an object of desire (God) which is surrounded by these illusory veils, whirling and soaring, and the only way to come to fully know the object of desire, to love God, is to find your way through those veils. It's easy, at first, to mistake that mass of flashing veils for God. A dancer obscured by a hundred veils is impressive, isn't she? All that sensual motion, all that swirling light. But a dancer is not her veils.

Similarly, when we meet someone, what we first experience is an outward shell, the body. It's easy enough--or should be, anyway--to acknowledge that a person is not their body.² But the body is not what forms the great collection of veils. It's our behavior. The way we posture that body. Our facial expressions. What we say, and how we say it. Each veil is one of a thousand subtle cues, actions, and reactions, some overt, some hidden, all fired by the complex neurological networks of our brains as they communicate with the chemistries of our sensory apparatuses and our memories. Past experience and present experience, mingling and interacting, former relationships continuing to affect current relationships. The various voices of our minds, conversing among themselves, a maelstrom of activity happening in outward silence, behind our eyes, every second of every day. When you meet someone, you don't actually meet some one: you meet a tumultuous rush, a multitude, moving so fast that it creates an illusion of solidity in the way that a rapid succession of still images creates the illusion of motion.

Whenever people meet, they dance, behind their veils.

And somewhere, in the center of all that, behind his shy glance, the laugh that she only laughs for you, that certain set of his mouth when he first sees you, the way she leans closer towards you from across the table...somewhere, hidden away behind those veils, is the dancer.

As anyone who's seen one knows, the apparent purpose of a veil dance is to drop the veils.³ But it's the dance itself, the process, that is so exquisite. When we're younger, we often mistake clothes for the veils. So when they're doffed, we think the dance is over. Sometimes, we settle for dropping just a few veils, then relate to the flashing blurs of the remaining fabric and call that love, even though the dancer remains mostly hidden. But every so often, when being naked isn't enough, when a half-dozen veils at our feet is no longer fulfilling, when there's just something about a person, something we've glimpsed ever-so-briefly through a deep and momentary gap in the spiraling, translucent shrouds: then, we grow patient. We appreciate the dance. The subtlety, the color. The skill and the finesse. The sensual give and take of movement, the flow of personality, the rhythmic expression. We enjoy the dance.

But we want the dancer.

I've been drawn to Sufism lately because it is, it seems to me, a corrective for the exoteric, fundamentalist Islam that has been the very public face of that faith for far too long. It is the partner to Christian Gnosticism and the Jewish Kaballah, sharing with them the notion that striving for direct knowledge of God is not only a worthwhile pursuit, but possible. As I said, I'm no believer. But within that desire for intimate knowledge of God I recognize the same desire that animates physicists, astronomers, biologists, chemists, and mathematicians: the desire to understand this universe in which we live.

All of the words I've written here are a clumsy first attempt at distilling a burst of what I'm choosing to call synthesis that exploded into my mind last weekend, shortly after dawn, as I sat on a hillside overlooking a valley.⁴ The root of that understanding is simply this: we're all dancers. We're not our veils. It is through the process of dancing with each other, and casting those veils aside, that we come to know each other, and it is through coming to know each other that we approach God.

Or "the universe."

Or whatever term you choose to use that indicates a greater understanding of life itself.

As above, so below: love is physics. It's astronomy. It's biology, and chemistry, and mathematics, and all of the other methods and languages that we clever, perceptive primates have devised to explain ourselves and the world.

To love is to seek meaning.

So dance! Dance with passion, with as many people as you can, for as long as you can.

Because while the dance isn't all there is, it's what matters most.



¹Well, you don't have to accept it. But all of this will make even less sense if you don't.

²Not entirely, anyway. Otherwise there'd be no difference between you and your corpse, and in general I find that people are much more interesting and easier to relate to when they're not corpses. QED.
 
³Sometimes the purpose is to get the head of a prophet lopped off, but that's comparatively rare.

⁴I know, I know. I'm embarrassed by the cliché. But that's exactly how it happened.