—Al-Ghazali on perception and dream divination, from The Alchemy of Happiness

Random notes on my Hallaj printout

I’m immensely enjoying my Sufi literature class but it fills me with such grief. There is so much literature that has not been translated from Persian and Arabic into English. Even Ibn ‘Arabi’s magnum opus The Meccan Revelations has not been translated (well, it is like a trillion pages long). I could not even find a full translation of chapter 178 on love!

Attar has an untranslated text called The Book of Affliction. The professor of my class says, “It’s REALLY good.” It pains me that I can’t read it, but I’ve been hunting for snippets in the Anglophone scholarship on Attar. O how my heart burns to read this book!!

Satyanarayana Pooja is quite popular in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka,Bengal and Maharashtra,though it is practiced in other parts of India as well. It is different from the other Poojas  performed in Hinduism. Satyanarayana Pooja, a significant ritual in Hinduism, has its roots in the ancient texts and practices associated with Lord Vishnu. It is especially prominent in regions like Andhra…

Note on the text: I used Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi Martyr as translated by Carl W Ernst and published in 2018 by Northwestern University Press

I saw the Lord with the eye of my heart,/ and he said ‘who are you?’ I said, ‘You’ (54).

I am the one that I desire, the one that I desire is I./ We are two spirits dwelling in a single body./ So when you have seen me you have seen him,/ and when you have seen him you have seen us (176).

Imagine having a God that loves you so much that he cannot bear to be separated from you. A God who loves you so much that he is constantly seeking to become one with you. A God whose love for his creation is so overwhelming he cannot permit himself to be separated from it in any way. That is the type of God that we have, at least according to the 10th century Sufi mystic and poet Hallaj.

Love is the greatest unifying force that the world has ever known. Love binds people together in ways that nothing else can. It says in the Bible that when two people fall in love and get married that the “two shall become one” (Genesis 2:24). The deeper one’s love is for another person, the truer that statement becomes. In Arabic there’s a saying which (roughly) translates to “our kids are our hearts walking around”. Again there’s that theme of unity, that there are people that you can lovely so intensely that they become part of you. According to Hallaj, God’s love for his creation, and for us in particular, is also that intense. He loves his creation so much that he, in some sense, wants us to become one with him.

If I sought the East, in the East you would be its East,/ and if I sought the west you would be right in front of me./ And if I sought above, then above it you would be above,/ and if I sought below, you are [in] every place. . . . You are where all is [and] you are in all without ever fading,/in my heart, my spirit, my mind, my thought (82).

There is no place where God is not. God is everywhere. He’s not just in church. He’s everywhere. He is in the trees, in the sunlight, in every drop of rain. He is in you. He’s in me. Those who go looking for God only need to look around them because “reality has already manifested” his presence (112). We cannot escape him anymore than the fish can escape the ocean: “you truly are my companion by day/and after dark you are my everlasting friend” (69). He’s there all around us all the time: nourishing us, loving us, waiting patiently for us to love him back. And he doesn’t just know us in a general sense but in a very specific one. He knows our innermost being. As Hallaj says: “he is nearer to my conscience than my thought”. That’s a beautiful way of saying that he is as near to me as I am to myself.

Now the question is, why does he want to be that close to us? Why does he want to get to know us so intimately? Why should he care so much about us?. And the answer is because God loves us just that much. As Hallaj says at one point about God: “I have a lover whose love is inside of me” (54). So the question then becomes, what are we to do in the face of such overwhelming love?

Give ourselves over to it, surrender to it. Take the leap and jump. Jump into the most loving relationship with God that you can. Really commit yourself and give yourself over to it. Any reason to love God is a good reason, and anything you do because of that love is a good thing:

critic, don’t blame my longing for him,/ for if you saw him as I do, you would not blame./ There are some who circle the Ka’ba without the use of limbs;/ If they circled God they’d no longer need a shrine. . . . The people have their pilgrimage, but I have a pilgrimage to my rest./ They’re offering are animals, while my heart and blood are offered (101).

Those who give themselves completely over in this loving relationship with God don’t need to seek him elsewhere because they know that he is in their heart. Some people have to go outside of themselves to find God, but for others their love of God burns so strongly that they don’t need to go anywhere else. They give themselves over to that love and let that love be their guide through life. They fuse themselves so thoroughly to God by giving themselves over to him in love that they, in some sense, become one with him: “You’ve turned my limbs from every other purpose,/ so that all of me is with you” (162) in doing so they become something more than what they were before. They become one with the Divine.

The  seeker  moves  progressively from one ‘station’ to the other. Each station is a halting place in which the wayfarer has to ‘work’ on a certain  aspect  of  himself  in  order  to  be  able  to  move  on  to  the  next.  In  fact,  each  station  designates  a certain ethical obstacle, or a psychological bloc, related to blind spots and unresolved needs. These have to  be  overcomed in order  to  achieve  the  ethical  stature  and  the  psychological  maturity  which  is prerequisite  for  genuine  spiritual life.  The Sufi  masters  have  recognized,  of  course,  that  within  the structured outline  of  the journey,  the room  should  be  allowed  for  flexibility  and  variations in order  to accommodate different types and individualities –after all, this is a journey ‘of the alone to the alone’, and it varies from onewayfarer to another. Hence the well-known saying, attributed to al-Ḥallāj, a Sufimartyr of the ninth-tenth  centuries: “The  Paths  are  as  many  as  the  souls of men  and women  on  the surface of the earth.” And yet,  from  the early compilations  of  the  tenth  century to later poetic  illustrations  such  as The Conference  of  the Birds, Sufi  authors deemed  it  necessary  to  include  in  their works a  detailed,  albeit variegated, mapping of the journey's stations, to be used as a guideline and as a means for orientation. Observing the nature of these ‘stations’, an eleventh-century Persian compiler writes: ‘Station’ (maqām)  denotes  anyone’s  ‘standing’  in  the  Way  of  God,  and his fulfilment of the obligations appertaining to that ‘station’ and his keeping it until he comprehends its perfection as far as lies in a man’s power. Thus, the first ‘station’ is repentance (tawba), then comes conversion [of the heart] (ināba), then renunciation (zuhd), then trust in God (tawakkul) and so on as to reach a trust between an entity that neither don’t recognize any god as true in a sense that they do not exist and Yahuda people’s god Jehova is an alien consciousness, and the view that the god in christians sense is only conceptual, and Allah is the ”all and nothing“ that so pantheism reflects both ontologically as a route to theological Islam that al-Hallaj proposes to notice in a second that with the method of his gates of understanding that has appeal to pharoah and the devil as teachers can reflect pantheism also in a matter that you can cope not-religiously by fighting these dogmas and tabus of that age, with sharping your mind clear to a degree that all your notices should give you better understanding and practice capabilities on the circumstances of your own life. The book Tavasin of al-Hallaj, Journos Intimes by Baudelaire, Serseri Standardları Sempozyumu of Vecdi Çıracıoğlu should be read in order to better understand and re-capture the information needed for a good tavakkul in yourself that you can basicly re-understand your own thoughts and doxa. These books are written with that mechanism to contain the information relative to redefine things that you have been forgotten, i say again, forgotten and from your past, needed to be remembered by you to have a clear mind.

Bayezid’s divine ecstasy:

That magnificent dervish, Bayezid Bestami, came to his disciples and said, I am God. Pure Spirit spoke through him. Bayezid was not there. The ‘he’ of his personality dissolved. Like the Turk who spoke fluent Arabic, then came to, and didn’t know a word.The Light of God poured into the empty Bayezid and became words. A selfless one disappears into Existence and is safe there.He becomes a mirror. If you spit at it, you spit at your own face. Bayezid became nothing, that clear and that empty.