cDt
anything done without love is dangerous
THE RELIGION OF LOVE OR SEEKING THE BELOVED
The Sufi mystic, poet and Islamic scholar Rumi 1207-1273 said his religion was love and every human heart was his temple. A love religion in a world and Cosmos he viewed as animated by love.
Love courses through the world’s arteries.
The heavens turn around about love.
And beyond:
Everyone in the 18,000 worlds is in love with something.
For Rumi the human heart was more than a fleshy blood-pumping organ, it was the ultimate centre of levels of consciousness. A view shared by the Ancient Egyptians who regarded it as the source of human wisdom, intelligence, thought, memory and emotions. The heart was the sole organ left in the body of a mummy. It was the key to the Afterlife for it testified to the worthiness of the deceased to enter the Otherworld, as their life was weighed against the feather of truth. Also, in Buddhism the seat of consciousness hadaya is the heart and one word, citta is used for heart-mind and its many dimensions. The seat of consciousness is a hotly debated subject in the West.
The Sufi heart was also the gateway to a greater divine Heart and it is the task of a human being to cleanse ‘polish’ their heart, so it eventually reflects the greater divine Heart, and create what Ibn-al-Arabi 1165-1240 scholar, mystic, poet, philosopher called the ‘isthmus’ – becoming a spiritual isthmus between Earth and Heaven leading to eventual God consciousness. This Sufi human heart is then the location of consciousness but also the soul (defined as the immortal spiritual or immaterial part and which Plato considered the ruler of the human entity including the body), the place where the Ancient Greeks Aristotle and Empedocles placed it.
So, for Rumi all human beings with their love/divine potential were the religious centre of the Religion of Love; and both Rumi and Ibn-al-Arabi came to worship in this temple of hearts.
For Ibn-al-Arabi it was when he encountered Nizam, beautiful, knowledgeable and pious, the daughter of a Persian scholar of Isphahan, and she became the inspiration for his sublime poetry ‘The Interpreter of Longing’, the beauties of her body as her soul, which was a garden of generosity. . . I (am) unable to express so much as a part of the emotion which my soul experienced and which the company of this young girl awakened in my heart, or of the generous love I felt . . .
When Rumi encountered Shams al-Din of Tabriz he was overcome by the sight of him by thy face, I have never seen a face like this!. . . As soon as I saw my Beloved I saw my heart in infinite heartache. Everything is perishing but his face. . . Shams al-Din of Tabriz whose permanent abode is love.
These encounters had a powerful impact on their psyches and they were never the same again; an impact no overwhelming sexual attraction could elicit and was a union at a soul level. They found in a human Beloved, intimations of the Divine Beloved.
A similar powerful encounter was experienced by Dante Alighieri c1265 – 1321 poet, writer and philosopher, aged nine, attending a May day party in Florence, fell in love (which lasted until the end of his life) at first sight with Beatrice (a few months younger) and she became his muse and ideal woman of grace and beauty. The second and last time he saw her, years later, was when he passed her on the street and she attempted to speak to him; but overpowered by her nearness he fled away from her.
A later countryman of his, the Catholic cleric, scholar and poet Petrarch 1304 – 1374 beheld Laura (she may have been Laura de Noves the wife of Count Hughes de Sade) in the year 1327 on the 6th April at the first hour in the church of Santa Clara at Avignon and was consumed by a great love and abiding passion for her, which made him abandon the Church. She refused any contact with him because of her married state, his love unrequited he would often haunt the streets searching, lady, as far as possible, in others for the true, desired form of you.
Such encounters the Theosophist Mabel Collins asserted was the reason for our existence. She wrote in ‘Story of the Year’: the entire meaning of the earthly life consists only in the mutual contact between personalities and in the efforts of growth. Those things which are called events and circumstances and which are regarded as the real contents of life – are in reality only the conditions which make those contacts and this growth possible.
Indeed, no lover seeks union without his
Beloved seeking him
Rumi
All these meetings are intimately linked to our past lives. People have merely glimpsed someone passing them on the street or in a bus or car driving by and been profoundly affected by the encounter, out of all proportion to event itself. It is recognition of someone we know without knowing them (which is what the English Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo felt when she met the man destined to be her lama), who dwelling briefly in the same space can trigger a new leap in understanding within our psyche. The same is true of the encounters between Rumi and Shams al-Din, Ibn-al-Arabi and Nizam, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch (how often he must have wished he had never caught sight of her face) and Laura. It is all part of the labyrinth of love encapsulated in many lifetimes – we are all Seekers after the Beloved (it is our innate natures to be so).
If you accept the true temple as that of the human heart (we are as Rumi said microcosm in form and macrocosm in meaning) then one can gladly kneel at one’s personal shrine dedicated to love and the journey of one’s eternal spirit through many guises and love epiphanies and despairs; ultimately leading to union with the Beloved and eventually the joyous realm of the Divine Beloved behind creation. This joy is very real, experienced by healers and mystics regardless of their religion sandosiam sundosiam eppotham joy always joy. The Tibetan monk seeks to overcome it, the Sufis, without resistance, reside in Mababau, Portuguese nuns called the blissful state muda ‘make happy’.
We all belong in the same temple with its love potential – but the Earth is not love’s paradise; this is because love by its very nature is encoded with free-will, no-one can coerce another to love them, as the nineteenth century writer Stendhal discovered in his unrequited love for the Countess Mathilde Dembowska; which resulted in his writing an exposition of love in ‘On Love’ (shades of Ibn-al-Tabari). Love by creating the unloved allows for its opposite to emerge pride, selfishness, egotism and ultimately evil; one of the reasons given for Lucifer’s fall from grace was injured vanity when he believed God loved humanity more than he himself who was infinitely more worthy. This ‘vanity’ is evident in many serial killers, ineffectual men personally and socially who kill for the power it gives them over others.
Yes, there are many dark shrines in the temple of human hearts, but because love – the moral foundation for doing right – is the ultimate fabric of who we are, we possess a moral compass, which the German philosopher Kant (who said there is a basic sense of goodness in human beings) called an ‘inner court’ by which we judge our actions, in other words a conscience; an innate element in the structure of selfhood. The word conscience derives from Latin conscientia from the Greek suneidĕsis meaning ‘to know’, a term used widely throughout the Hellenic period. Demosthenes an orator and statesman frequently referred to this attribute of human consciousness, informing one Isocrates that he may be able to conceal his shameful actions from others, but not from his own heart. The Irishman Colin Howell who got away with double murder, confessed to his crimes after the accidental death of his son, which he saw as punishment for his sins.
Yes, men do terrible things despite this moral compass, but there tends to be a terrible psychological price to pay later, even those indoctrinated into ideologies that make them believe their actions are for the greater good. The Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin stated he had seen terrible things during the revolutionary struggle but these could not compare to the ruthlessness and horrors produced by the Party’s drive to ‘socialisation’ which included a famine that ravaged Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus and Lower Volga claiming 6-7 million lives. These actions he contended were dehumanizing the Party and causing members to commit suicide or descend into insanity The same was true of SS men engaged in the Final Solution, the reason gas chambers were developed to murder Jews was because the mobile gas vans first used were slower to kill the victims, whose shouts and screams caused many psychological problems among SS personal as did those engaged in similar actions; hospitalized SS men suffering nervous breakdowns said they were haunted by terrible nightmares – it is the nighttime, that claims tormented souls, the sleep hours the other ‘waking’ state when we commune with ourselves at a soul level, the nightmares messengers from the heart of our moral compass.
Any man who love has not touched walks in darkness
Plato
cDt 