Spiritual Perception and the Root of the Root of Religion
Kabir Helminski
O you who study the
world, you’re just a hired worker.
And you who desire
paradise, you’re far from the Truth.
And you who are
satisfied with the two world, but unaware
Because you have not
tasted the happiness of His sorrow,
You’re simply excused
During
these celebrations honoring the 800th anniversary of his birth it is
appropriate to reflect on what Mevlana offers humanity at this time. Humanity
is navigating through a perilous passage between shallow materialism and
one-dimensional religion. Both are destructive to our humanness itself. On the
one side we have the commercialization of life, the privatization of natural
resources, the tyranny of transnational corporate economic power. On the other
hand we have the authoritarian manifestations of religious belief divorced from
any real spiritual perception. Fundamentalism thrives in a spiritual vacuum.
Without the spiritual perception of a spiritual reality, religion degenerates
into mere intellectualism, formalism, legalism, and finally authoritarian,
puritanical extremism.
Mevlana’s
madhabi ashq, or school of love, is a corrective to both the
authoritarian concept of religion lacking in Mercy, and a materialist ethic
that indulges the human ego. We do not need a political regime based on a
distorted and one-dimensional apprehension of religion that claims to be the
only Truth. We do not need a piety forced upon us by a religious power elite.
Nor do we need a world ruled merely by commercial and corporate forces,
especially when those forces result in the concentration of wealth and power in
the hands of a few. We do not need a society that serves the lowest
common-denominator and that allows a race to the bottom. We cannot afford the
kind of society where true human spiritual values are buried by an avalanche of
popular culture of transient, ugly, and vulgar attractions. And if we are to
fulfill our human destiny we need a spiritual knowledge that can bring our
spiritual nature to maturity within the conditions of contemporary life.
The
wisdom we love in Mevlana’s teaching has its application and effect both for
the wider humanity and for the individual who seeks a path of spiritual
development, or sayri suluuk.
At
the level of the individual seeker, the theme of “spiritual perception” is one
of the most productive and enlightening perspectives from which to view the
work of Our Master, Mevlana. Spiritual perception is a theme that constantly
appears in his work, perhaps even more than the theme of “Love”. Yet spiritual
perception is inextricably united with the theme of Love for two reasons: one
is that without spiritual perception love alone is futile and incomplete; If
love is not informed by spiritual perception it remains at the level of mere
ego, producing only desire and sentimentality.
Perhaps
more importantly the process of developing spiritual perception leads to Love
itself. Love is the Truth. Love created everything. The revealing of the
Merciful and Divine Love is the purpose of existence. “No ignorant soul ever
sat on the Throne of Love.”
To
say it another way: the fulfillment of our human destiny is ultimately through
the development of spiritual perception. Our science is called irfan, signifying the realization
through knowing. Nothing less can satisfy the human heart. The human being is
essentially a knowing substance, able to know the essential truth and mystery
of existence. The eternal light exists here in this world of suffering, pain,
and conflict, but we fail to see it. Pure milk flows beside the rivers of
blood, but the child of the heart fails to receive its nourishment.
As
Mevlana reminds us, the human being is essentially an “eye.” But the eye of the
heart can be veiled by the physical senses. The human being is potentially much
more than a biochemical creature seeking its own satisfactions. But a spiritual
education is needed to raise us to the truly human level.
The
bio-chemical sensory organs of the human being can blind us to spiritual realities,
but when the spiritual senses are awakened even the physical senses become
illumined. And so our science is also called tassawuf, signifying the
purification of perception.
Mevlana
was the nightingale who became a falcon, a hunter of spiritual truths. Mevlana
and his heirs are the lights we should join with, for if a spiritual intellect
is paired with another spiritual intellect, light increases and the way becomes
plain.
Mevlana,
being one of the foremost educators of the heart, can and does offer us a
systematic knowledge, a science of the human soul. As he says in an introductory section to one
of the books of his Mathnawi. What he offers is the root of the root of the
religion. Mevlana is a reliable guide to the straight path at the heart of the
Prophetic tradition. In other words his wisdom can guide us to the fulfillment
of our human possibility and destiny. Only a knowledge based in spiritual
wisdom can lead the individual and humanity, as a whole, to fulfillment.
Otherwise humanity remains lost in the labyrinth of its own shallow
distractions or ends up tyrannized by the idealogues of a false utopia.
Mevlana’s
gift to us is that he presents us with a spirituality that has all the nuance
of art, rather than the clichés and dogmas we too often find in the name of
religion. He speaks to us in the language of the soul, a poetry of image, metaphor,
and music. If the Divine is the ultimate Creative Power, that has brought us on
the merely physical level: delicious fruits, fragrant roses, the spectacle of
nature, and the beauties of the human relationship, that same Creative Power
has also brought us an inner life of even vaster dimensions, more subtle
beauties, inestimable spiritual virtues, and experiences both subtle and
profound. If on the one hand the birth from the physical womb leads us into the
beauties of the sensory world, a second birth from the spiritual womb brings us
into a spiritual universe of awesome beauty and meaning.
Mevlana
was in love with this Creative Power; sometimes he was drunk with it and
sometimes in a wise sobriety only attained after such drunkenness.
The
root of the root of the religion, the core of the
The
first, the remembrance of God, is the ability of the heart to recognize and
appreciate the Divine Presence. To keep the Divine at the center of our
consciousness is to quiet the busy, talking mind, to still the reactive,
ego-based emotions, and to learn to be—to be with the Divine Presence.
The Sun of Divine Knowledge travels in no orbit, but it rises in the inner
spirit of the human being. Its illumination is from the timeless, spaceless
dimension. When the human being has attained to that experience, the sunrise of
Divine Illumination is with you wherever you go, whatever circumstances you may
be in.
The
second aspect, the undoing of the false self is a very subtle work requiring a
finely honed knowledge—a knowledge which Mevlana offers to us in a profoundly
comprehensive way. The undoing of the self is not a self-created program, it is
the final kilo that sinks the ship.
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Unless
the seeker is absolutely erased,
In
truth, he will not come into union.
Union
is not penetrable. It is your destruction.
Otherwise
anyone could become the Truth.
It
usually requires a teaching, a teacher, and a community within which to
practice the teaching. The undoing of the self is sometimes described as a
transformation through seven levels of the nafs, each more subtle and pure. It
is this thinning of the veil of one level of the self that allows another subtler
level to be experienced and expressed. In this process what is false,
conditioned, and unreal is gradually lessened and a new quality of self
emerges—a higher self. That higher self is realized when we are stripped of our
superficial identifications and stand naked before the Divine. And Mevlana is
our higher self:
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This
is what I am: sometimes hidden, sometimes seen.
Sometimes
a mumeen, sometimes Jew or Christian,
Able
to fit into any heart,
Taking
on a new face every day.
Perhaps
we have been fortunate enough to know some living examples of this
transformation. If we have been that fortunate, we have also been transformed
by knowing even one such being. Our path led from Mevlana and Sufism to
Muhammad, peace be upon him, and Islam. We were brought into “the garden within
the flames,” as Ibn Arabi has called it.
Only
after years in that garden did circumstances bring me to the Masjid. To say it
was a disheartening experience would be an understatement. It challenged my
Iman. I wondered if we had created an imaginary Islam, because what I saw and
heard in the mosque was so different from the beautiful state we experienced
among the lovers and the drunkards. I questioned whether what I had experienced
was the same religion I was finding in the mosque.
Mevlana
must have known something about this discrepancy between the Madhabi Ashq, and
the one-dimensinal religion that oppresses the soul with its rigid commands and
external preoccupations. Some people are very anxious to appropriate Mevlana to
their own concepts of orthodoxy. But just as the Prophet and the Qur’an offered
a challenge to man-invented religion, power-structures and superstition, so,
too, does Mevlana challenge the manifestations of religion that have become
contaminated with human egoism, I will let Mevlana issue his own warning:
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If you don’t like the fragrance, don’t
come to our neighborhood.
And
if you can’t tear off your clothes, don’t jump in the stream.
This
is the direction from which all directions are directed,
Unless
this is what you want, stay away from the center.
At
times I have had my own doubts, but I have come to trust that the Madhabi Ashq
is the Dini Qayyim, the authentic religion, and the Din al Haqq, the religion
of Truth, which is destined to shine upon all religion though the kafirs detest
it.
I
want to share with you, however, part of a text I discovered in Aflaki, which
finally brought comfort to my heart.
Weled
and the Sayyids Condensed from Aflaki
375. A distinguished young man, from the Sayyids
of Medina, the son of the custodian of the Prophet’s, peace and blessings upon
him, tomb, came to visit Sultan Weled one day.
He was
wearing an extraordinary turban which he had wound around his head with one of
the ends falling to a point just above his navel, while the other end was
rolled in that way that the Mevlevis call ‘shekker-awiz’. Sultan Weled showed
him great respect and discussed various ideas and mysteries of the Path, ‘in
the clear Arabic tongue’... (Qur’an: 26: l95) The young man showed great
enthusiasm and good will and asked in all sincerity to become a disciple. He
asked for a written proof (diploma) and
someone gave him this in Arabic.
After that,
Sultan Weled asked him the following question: “Other shaikhs have not adopted
this fashion of ‘shekker-awiz’, which is used uniquely by our Master and the
Mevlevis; where does this custom come
from?”
“From
great antiquity,” replied the young Sayyid, “We are descended from Abraham, and
belong to the Qoreish tribe. We have had
the keys of the holy Kaaba and that of the Prophet’s tomb in our possession
since the time of Abraham; and we also have the keys to the house where our
Prophet’s two blessed shoes and other objects are kept.
The way in which our Prophet was honored is
described in the Qur’an: He was allowed
to approach our Lord and was looked upon with a favorable eye; he was shown
through signs what he needed to see, and he heard the mysteries of the
revelation directly without an intermediary. He saw a beautiful figure above
the Heavenly Throne, a figure such had never been seen, in the highest rank of
the angels or among any of the other denizens of Heaven.
The
Prophet was overcome with love and drunk with this grace and beauty of this
figure. He saw that he was wearing a turban twisted in the Chekker-dwiz style
and ‘a borda’ from Yeman. Deeply troubled, the Prophet asked Gabriel
this: “I saw many marvelous and unusual forms in each celestial sphere. However
none delighted me as much as this figure does.
Is he an archangel, a perfect saint or a prophet on a mission? Who is he
and what is his secret?”
Gabriel
answered: “This beautiful vision, is of
a person descended from Abu-Bekr, the Truthful, who will appear among your
people at the end of time, and will fill the world with the lights of your
mysteries and truths. And our Lord will give him feet, a pen and a voice such
that the generations of people will love him and become his disciples; he will
be the mystery and the light of the manifest world and will bring purity to
your religion.
In
every way, in conduct and appearance, he will be like you! And his name will also be Muhammad and his
other name, Jalaluddin. In his teachings he will explain the mysteries of your
traditions, and will illuminate the profound ideas of our glorious Qur’an.”
Gabriel concluded.
And
the Prophet, peace and blessings upon him, was overcome with a great joy. When
he had returned to his blessed home, he began to wear his turban in the same
way that he had seen in the vision.
This is
the story that the pilgrims from
In
essence Mevlana offers us the knowledge leading to spiritual perception. He
reminds us of the transformative power of the Divine Reality. It is inevitable
that the human substance when it comes into contact with the Divine will be
transformed. Isn’t this the essence of a true understanding of Divine Revelation.
Do not the Holy Books and the Prophets call us to be transformed by this
spiritual power? In Mevlana we have the remedy for every spiritual pathology as
well as the elixir to transform the, crude substance of our own selves, to turn
our stony natures into rubies.
The story
in Aflaki convinced me that the Islam we had found in the
.