A Mystery: The long interval impedes

When the Men who have no impediment

  reach the long interval,

you will see among their warriors

  a servant whose state brings

the pain of distance,

  this cutting him off from them.

He says: Since God created human beings hasty [17:11] and He created in them seeking, but they do not gain the object of their search in the first step, the interval draws out for them because of their hastiness. They halt because of the length of the interval, and they are held back from gaining benefit.

After all, God is not reached through seeking. Hence the gnostic seeks his own felicity, not God. One does not aspire for what one already has. God is greater than that He should be sought through the distance of steps, hardship of deeds, and reflective thoughts. Just as He does not become spatially confined, so also He does not become distinct. He is known to us in the sense that in each thing He is identical with each thing, but unknown in the distinction, because of the diversity of the forms that we witness.

As soon as you say concerning a form, "He is this," another form with which He is identical will veil you from that form. Concerning it you will say, "He is this," and His He-ness will absent itself from you through the form that goes. Then you will not know what you depend upon, exactly like the person who is bewildered by reflective consideration and does not know what he believes. As often as a proof shines forth to him, an obfuscation also shines forth.

No proof of Him can ever be safe from obfuscation, because He is the Greatest Proof, and we are His obfuscation.

SOURCE: 
Ibn al-`Arabi, Futuhat al-Makkiyah, VI 442.31
translated by William C. Chittick in The Self-Disclosure of God, Principles of Ibn al-`Arabi's Cosmology, pgs 14-15

In our efforts to understand wujud, either in itself or in its relation to the cosmos, at some point we become bewildered, a state, according to Ibn al-`Arabi, that can be considered one of the highest stations of knowledge. 

Shaykh al-Akbar says: "Through the knowledge which arises in contemplation, [the attainer] turns to face what is beyond each appearance: the Truth beyond appearances. For the Apparent One, though He is one in essence, is infinite in aspects. They are His traces in us."  The words echo: "There is no God but He, everything perishes except His Face. Glorious and Magnificent"

In all praise, it is only He that is worshiped.

In a relationship...with God

an excerpt from
Mystical Love
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

A relationship with God is in many ways is simpler and yet more confusing than a human relationship. It is simpler because there are not the drama and psychological dynamics that happen between two people. Human love evokes a complex mesh of projections as deep psychological patterns are activated within each person. We project onto our lover ...images, shadow-dynamics and other patterns that all become bonded together.  

Loving God has a purity and simplicity that are sadly denied in the complexity of a human relationship.

Loving God, we can give ourself entirely without the danger of being caught in projections or the drama of another's unresolved problems. We are free of the entanglements that belong to two people. And yet there is the primal difficulty of having an invisible, intangible beloved. Where are the arms to hold us, the kiss to intoxicate us? Without any physical presence, how do we know it is real, and not just a fantasy? We live in a culture that only values the tangible, external world. We are bombarded by images that associate a love affair with physical sex. Sufi poetry may use images of physical beauty...but these are metaphors, and we long to touch with our own hands, to taste with our own lips. We long to run our fingers through our lover's hair, to smell a fragrance that is not ethereal.

Yet an inner love affair has a potency that is denied any human lover. We are awakened to this love by a kiss that is on the inside of our heart. A kiss on the lips may taste like wine and draw us into our lover's arms, but He kisses us in the most intimate part of our own being, a place so secret that no human lover has access. He kisses us without the limitations of duality and with a touch that is love itself. From within our own heart He comes to us, opens us, embraces us. Here there are no barriers of protection, but a vulnerability and softness that belong to the inwardness of our own heart. With tenderness and intoxicating sweetness He is present, unexpected and yet longed for, and His kiss is more than one could believe is possible. 

Yet there are days, even months, when the Beloved withdraws and does not show His face, when you are left with the desolation of your own aloneness. It seems that there is not even a trace of this sweetest fragrance. Then it is easy to doubt this inner love affair and project our longing onto another. With a human lover there is a moment's taste of bliss, a physical knowledge of union. We want what we can hold with our own hands, feel with our body. With the heart's Beloved there is a promise of so much more, and yet it is so intangible, and we are always the victim, always the one who's waiting.

In this love affair all of our patterns of seduction, the games we play to keep our lover, are useless. We become so vulnerable. We are love's prey.

In human relationships we have been taught to look after ourself, to draw boundaries and not to be victimized. We know that we shouldn't be taken advantage of, that we shouldn't be violated. This is very important, learning to keep our human integrity and sense of self, not to sell ourself for what appears as love or the promise of security. But the ways of mystical love are very different. In the relationship with our soul's Beloved we have to give ourself without restrictions, and we are violated, abused, and loved beyond compare. We are taken by force, abducted and transformed, and we give ourself willingly to this self-destruction through love.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I 

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

~John Donne~

We are purified through love's violation, we taste our own union through love's destruction.

Love takes us by force beyond every limit, beyond what we think is possible; we are tortured and made whole by love--time and time again we lose and resdiscover ourself, only to fall deeper and deeper into love's endless abyss. Rumi, who through Shams came to know the intoxicating intensity of this real love, describes how it is given freely and yet takes us into a vastness that can seem like death:

Subtle degrees of domination and servitude

are what you know as love.

But love is different it arrives complete

just there like the moon in the window.

Desire only that of which you have no hope

seek only that of which you have no clue.

Love is the sea of not-being 

and there intellect drowns.

This is not the Oxus river

or some little creek.

This is the shoreless sea; here swimming ends always in drowning.

A million galaxies are a little scum on that shoreless sea.

 Love's ocean is real and endless, a place not for the fainthearted, not for those who like security and safety. The mystic is seduced and dragged into this love, seduced by its softness, dragged by its power. This love abuses our sense of self, destroys our patterns of control, violates our deepest beliefs, and takes us back to God. In this love there is neither form nor limit, only a completedness beyond even our dreaming, a sweetness beyond imagining, and a terror that belongs to the Absolute. Love takes us into the infinite emptiness of His Presence, into the vastness that is hidden within our own heart.

The mystic is someone who gambles on this love, who gives his/her life to love's longing. There is no safety net for disappointed lovers, no self-help group for those caught in this fire. The path of love is described by Saint Gregory of Nyssa as "a bridge of hair across a chasm of fire," and what happens when you come to the middle of this bridge? The fire burns the bridge and you fall into the depths, into the flames. This is why the Sufis call the lane of love a one-way street. Once this primal passion has been awakened the lover cannot return to the rational world, to the world of the ego. You can only give yourself, and give yourself, and give yourself.

The sensible man never goes near this fire, but remains within the safety of the known.

This love is an addiction as potent as poison. It destroys everything we once held precious; everything that seemed important is burnt in its flames; we hunger for just another taste of this love which is destructive and so sweet--nothing else matters. The values of the world fall away as this inner love affair takes hold of us, a passion a thousand times more powerful than any human love. In a human love affair there is always the safety of our self: we are separate from our lover and can withdraw. But our soul's Beloved does not belong to duality, as Rumi writes: "He is closer to you than yourself to yourself." Can we hide from our own heart, can run away from our own life's blood? We can try, but if we just turn inward He is waiting for us, offering us the sweetest torture, the softest death.

Love's death is real, and yet we remain alive, sometimes limping through the days. We are addicted to an inner lover who demands everything and yet so often leaves us devastated and alone. He awakens in us a hunger that is real, and then seemingly abandons us. The inner deserts through which lovers travel are desolate beyond belief, just as the moments of intoxication are bliss upon bliss. Once you give yourself to this poison there is no going back, because the world has lost its attraction. You are like Majnun, the madman, the lover.

Sometimes an external relationship can open our heart--maybe a hopeless love affair pierces through our defenses. But once we are gripped by the heart's true passion then the real sorrow of the soul comes to the surface, the soul's longing for its only Beloved.

Need

In Sufi literature one of the most often quoted extra-Qur'anic traditions revealed by Allah, a hadith qudsi, states the purpose of creation in a boldness rarely encountered in religious traditions. God says: "I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known; therefore I created creation." Why did God, who is utter fullness, create the world? Because of a desire, a need to be known. In the hidden unknownness of God, there was one thing missing: there was no one to know Him. Thus, the raison d'etre of creation is God's need to be known. Need is, then, the foundation upon which creation exists. 

Sara Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, pg 193

without need...God does not give anything to anyone...Need, then, is the noose for (all) things that exist: Man has instruments in proportion to his need. Therefore quickly augment thy need, O needy one, in order that the Sea of Bounty may surge you up in lovingkindness.

(Nicholson's translation of Mathnawi, II, 3274-3280)

Rumi sings the praises of the alchemical, transformative power of love. But what is love? in essence it is a state of need. The lover is in need of the beloved, since the beloved reflects something which the lover senses is missing in himself. The experience of love exposes a veiled, unconscious desire to unite with an idealized partner who will supply the bits missing in oneself. But Rumi stresses that when this need awakens, rather than fulfilled it has to be sustained. Need, he argues, creates the primary vehicle of change, evolution, and growth. Without need there is no desire; without desire there is no movement. Therefore to perpetuate the state of need is more conducive to change than to satisfy it.
Sara Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, pg 206

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They say in the end, love is the want and need for something. Hence need is the root, and the needed thing is the branch. I say: After all, when you speak, you speak out of need. Your need brings your words into existence...So need is prior, and the words came into being from it....The branch is always the goal--the tree's roots exist for the sake of the branches.

Rumi, Discourses, quoted in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, pg. 207

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In order for an evolutionary change to occur, the need has to be immense and conscious. Sometimes there is a need, but it's not strong enough; the longing for fullness has not yet reached sufficient intensity. The seeker can somehow survive, can learn to hide behind psychological defenses, so that the sense of emptiness is less painful. He suffers, but not enough; he is thirsty, but not yet dying of thirst. He is afraid of losing the relative comfort of a lukewarm, chronic state of frustration. But in this process, the Sufi teaching reiterates, only when the seeker reaches a state of despair beyond comfort or consolation will he be able to let go of his painful--yet familiar--patterns of survival. It is not easy to relinquish the familiar for a change whose consequences are unknown, unforeseeable  Therefore the need for change has to become great as the need for air of a drowning man.

In the pursuit of this creative need, Rumi...turns the logic of conventional pragmatism upside down. (I like that) We need comfort, therefore we create comfortable things; we need warmth, so we create shelters, clothes, fire, heaters, air-conditioning; we become self-sufficient in order to alleviate the pain of want. Rumi says: No, don't create anything to fill your emptiness; don't run away from the innate need of your soul.

Don't rush to find a solution to your neediness, continues Rumi; stay with it, acknowledge it, live with it, live it, become more and more needy, more and more thirsty, colder, poorer, more helpless: "I shall cry and cry until the milk of compassion will boil up on Your lips." This wisdom, according to Rumi is known to every infant:

I wonder at this tiny infant who cries, and its mother gives it milk. 

If it should think, 

"What profit is there in crying? What is it that causes the milk to come?"

--then it would not receive any milk. 

But we see that it receives milk because of its crying.

Rumi, Discourses, quoted in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, pg. 211

Growth comes out of need. When neediness becomes intolerable, then a new organ is created out of the needy one's own potentiality. This is the as-yet-unlived potentiality which the soul has planted in the heart. The inner organs of perception, the eyes and the ears of the heart, are given a new intelligence, a new outlook, a new direction, new possibilities. This is what Rumi expresses in his direct, passionate, provocative language.
Sara Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, pg 206-209

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If you wish what you need to be given to you without your having to search for it, turn away from it and concentrate on your Lord; you will receive it if God wills.  And if you gave up your needs entirely and were occupied only with God, He would give you all the good things you wish for in this world and in the other; you would walk in Heaven as well as on earth; and more than that, since the Prophet (on him be blessings and peace) has said, in the very words of his Lord : "He who by remembering Me (dhikr) is distracted from his petition will receive more than those who ask."

Hear, faqir, what I said to one of our brothers (may God be well pleased with them): every time I was lacking something, great or small, and turned away from it in turning to my Lord, I found it there in front of me, thanks to the power of Him who hears and knows. We see that the needs of ordinary people are filled by paying attention to them, whereas the the needs of the elect are filled by the very fact that they turn away from them and concentrate upon God.

An excerpt from Letters of a Sufi Master by Shaykh ad-Darqawi, translated by Titus Burckhardt

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O, Sovereign Possessor, I call out to You and entreat You, secretly confiding [in You] as a broken servant, who knows that You are listening and who firmly believes that You will respond, one who stands at Your door, constrained in utter need, finding no-one to put trust in, other than You.

Ibn 'Arabi, The Seven Days of the Heart, pg. 45