[Philip Quinlan]

Mark said

...interestingly, the true "clash of cultures" is not between Islam and Christianity, which have proved that they can live together in peace (with Judaism also) during many historical periods

Yes. As Jonathan Meades nicely put it - they all three worship the same God; the argument is over who owns the franchise.

Interesting thread. I have a long standing interest in Islam and Sufi and have studied (in an amateur way and obviously in translation) the Qur'an as well as works like Attar's "Conference of the Birds".

One of the key concepts which seems to have been lost in modern Islam is the holiness of the search for knowledge, or Ilm. These days it very often seems to be ignorance that is being promoted.

One of my abiding beliefs is that the search for knowledge is not necessarily a search for answers (at least of the blinding light variety). In a way this is the message of Attar and possibly Sufi - the search is a holy and difficult one, but in the end you will see the answer was before you all the time. All the journey did was open your eyes.

I shall follow the rest of this debate with interest.

Philip

So called Western Science owes a great debt to Islam. Probably moreso than to the Greeks.

[Richard Meyer]

Mark:

Your comments parallel quite closely what the Dalai Lama states:

I have noticed that many people hold an assumption that the scientific view of the world should be the basis for all knowledge and all that is knowable. This is scientific materialism. . . .

One of the principal problems with a radical scientific materialism is the narrowness of vision that results and the potential for nihilism that might ensue. Nihilism, materialism, and reductionism are above all problems from a philosophical and especially a human perspective, since they can potentially impoverish the way we see ourselves.

He writes so many other splendid thoughts, but I must stop here or I'll find myself typing out the book.

Richard

[Mark Allinson]

In a way this is the message of Attar and possibly Sufi - the search is a holy and difficult one, but in the end you will see the answer was before you all the time. All the journey did was open your eyes.

Exactly, Philip. Which is why the Buddha famously claimed that "I truly attained nothing from complete, unexcelled enlightenment."

Zen has many tricks (or upaya) to try and lure the heroic ego into acting on its assumption that it could "attain" to realization through effort and practice. Sufism does this also. But all that is really necessary is for the ego to see through itself. And when it does, there is the understanding that it gained nothing it didn't already have, but had simply failed to see. In other words, the highest religious realization is NOT an accomplishment - it is available at any moment for any person.

The esoteric/exoteric divide has long fascinated me, and it was the essence of my doctoral work.

What I discovered was that the difference between the two levels of understanding is not simply a product of doctrine alone - of choosing between a mystical reading of scriptures or a fundamentalist reading - but that the choice of doctrine expressed a difference in the individual's psychology.

The fundamentalist position involves a need to shore up and protect the ego of the believer, and so literalism (the language of the ego) prevails.

Those individuals capable of seeing through the ego-image identity are more likely to follow mystical readings of the religion, and perceive the "transcendent unity" of all religion.

Unfortunately, there seems to be something like 4-5% of any population capable of ego-transcendence, and so a popular mystical understanding seems unlikely.

The ego-needs of exoteric followers ensure the attitude that "my" religion is the "true" religion, so yours must be "wrong." And this causes all the strife.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Gail White

This may be a good place to insert a favorite medieval Arabic poem by an unknown author:

I used to shun my companion
if his religion was not like mine;
but now my heart accepts every form.
It is a pasturage for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
a temple of idols, a Ka'ba for the pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah, the holy book of the Qu'ran.
Love alone is my religion, and whichever way
its horses turn, that is my faith and creed.

Gail, I love that quote too! It comes from Ibn al-‘Arabi: "My heart has become capable of every form.". He could say this because, like Blake, he saw the world as a continual theophany, or self-revelation of God in every form.

The key for him, as for Rumi and the other great Sufis, was their view of the creative imagination, which they understood much as Blake understood it. That’s why they could “see through” religious forms, as Mark says.

The great scholar of Islamic esotericism, Henry Corbin, writes about them:

“The theophanic perception is accomplished in the ’alam al-mithal, whose organ is the theophanic Imagination. . . . Since the Imagination is the organ of theophanic perception, it is also the organ of prophetic hermeneutics, for it is the imagination which is at all times capable of transmuting sensory data into symbols and external events into symbolic histories.”

This of course has nothing to do with subjectivism or relativity in the current sense. They saw the Imagination as an organ that mediates between the intellectual and the sensory realms, so that form takes on meaning and meaning takes on form.

In order to keep Imagination from degenerating into “fantasy”—the unreal or the merely imaginary—Ibn ‘Arabi and others said that a spiritual discipline was necessary, which for them was Islam and the study of the Quran and the hadith (the oral tradition of Islam). For Blake it was Christianity. They didn't throw out tradition, but they did see through it. They understood that the great religions are basically local dialects of a universal language.

[Mark Allinson]

They didn't throw out tradition, but they did see through it. They understood that the great religions are basically local dialects of a universal language.

That's an excellent way to put it, Andrew - "local dialects of a universal language."

However, the key to this vision of the transcendent unity of religions is the capacity for what the Sufis call fana, the passing away of identification of consciousness with the personal ego.

The exoteric's resistance to this idea, since it does indeed involve THE death experience, prevents that breakthrough which allows for the perception of the universal oneness of religions.

Or as Blake would put it, one requires the capacity to throw one's spectre into the lake.

Most of humanity identifies with its spectral self, and has no desire to surrender it, along with its associated identifications. So the personal investment with "my" religion and the "one way" of fundamentalism continues as ever.

As I said earlier, many Sufis were executed (martyred) for claiming union with the Godhead, which to ego-identified exoteric orthodox believers sounds like nothing less than blasphemy.

And had Blake lived in the Middle Ages, or even the Renaissance, he would almost certainly have died for his identification of God with the Imagination. Giordano Bruno died because of his pantheism.

I was thinking about this today - the evolution of human consciousness may be seen in terms of a progression of death experiences - from the infant narcissist we die (or abandon this primal identification) into mother/family identity, from family identity we die into the social group, from the social group or tribe we die into national identity, from nation-identity we die into world-consciousness. Each of these transition points - the early ones usually well-marked by ritual in old cultures - is a type of the death experience. We "let go" of one identity and find another, wider identity. Life itself, our birth, actually begins with a death experience:

Birth’s another kind of death –
a fetus-killing rush of breath

And from exoteric religious identity we die into esoteric religious identity - the transcendent unity arrived at via the experience of fana. Or if not fana itself, at the very least we need the intuition that there is a reality of Being beyond the ego-identity. That there is something in us which is deathless, and which is the possession of ALL beings - as the Buddha says.

But no can can force anyone into a transcendence they resist. So it is not as simple as a mere acceptance of the mystical vision - acceptance of a doctrine among equal doctrines. You can't sermonize exoterics into esoterics. To break from a narrow reading of religion requires the capacity for self-surrender, or fana, which is a psychological/ontological issue.

Sorry if I am ranting again, but I find this stuff fascinating.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Well, Mark, in this case I agree with every word you say! The fana you describe would be the emotional experience of the opening up to the ’alam al-mithal, which clearly is beyond the ego's little regime.

I can't take credit for the dialect/language metaphor--that's Ananda Coomaraswamy.

[Editing back in to add: I don’t have the slightest idea if what I said would make sense to a sufi. Only that it strikes me that surrender of the ego and discovery of the imagination as Ibn ‘Arabi meant it would have to be closely related.]

[Mark Allinson]

D.H.Lawrence, a type of Sufi himself, puts the case for the necessity of fana or "extinction" of the ego throughout his work.

It really is the sine qua non of mysticism.

Phoenix

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,
immortal bird.

- D.H. Lawrence