Interestingly, in a relatively recent [2005] research ...



“As Above, So Below”

The Enneagram

(Final Paper)

(Paper 6)

The anonymous author of ‘The Book of Aquarius’ gives the following translation in their commentary on the ‘Emerald Tablet of Hermes Tristmagistus’:

1. A fundamental truth, without error, perfect and complete.

2. As above, so below; the lesser and greater; microcosm and macrocosm: they are the same. Following this principle, all things were made from the One.

3. And as all things arose from a thought by the One; thus all things were formed as an adaption of the One. This is the fundamental principle.

4. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon, it is carried by the wind, it is nursed by the earth.

5. Its power is complete if it can be turned into earth.

6. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the dense, the light from the heavy, with care and wisdom.

7. It repeatedly ascends from earth to heaven, and then descends from heaven to earth, thus receiving power from both the high and the low.

8. Then you will have the glory of the whole world. All ignorance will flee from you.

9. It is true force and the most powerful, for it conquers all subtle things and penetrates all solid things.

10. This is how the world was made.

Hermeneutics and Hermes Tristmegistus (The Thrice Greatest)

To properly open Hermes’ ‘Emerald Tablet’ requires knowledge that few possess and even fewer value. We know from his writings and from reports of those that knew him and the work he engaged others in that George Gurdjieff, acknowledged by many as the one individual above all others responsible for bringing the Enneagram to the attention of many in the West, was one of these ‘few’. But, as Paul Beekman Taylor, Professor of Medieval English Languages and Literature at the University of Geneva informed us, Gurdjieff was also:

‘…wont to say that truth is best served by lies, and by lies he meant stories that objectify meanings unperceived by those who think they can grasp fact.’ (Taylor, 2004).

It is apparent whenever one approaches the work of Gurdjieff exactly how he dealt with the potentially transformative (and therefore potentially dangerous) knowledge he styled his ‘dogs’ – he buried them deeper through yet more ‘obfuscation’.

This is an ancient story.

Wikipedia tells us that:

Folk etymology places the origin…[of hermeneutics] with Hermes, the mythological Greek deity whose role is that of messenger of the Gods. Besides being mediator between the gods themselves, and between the gods and humanity, he leads souls to the underworld upon death. He is also considered the inventor of language and speech, an interpreter, a liar, a thief and a trickster... As Socrates notes, words have the power to reveal or conceal, thus promoting the message in an ambiguous way. The Greek view of language as consisting of signs that could lead to truth or falsehood is the very essence of Hermes, who is said to relish the uneasiness of the messaged.

Early use of the word hermeneutics places it within the boundaries of the sacred. The divine message can only be understood on its own terms, received with implicit uncertainty regarding its truth or falsehood. This ambiguity of message is an irrationality, a sort of madness inflicted upon the receiver. Only one who possesses a rational method of interpretation—an early hermeneutic—could divine the truth or falsehood (thus the sanity) of a statement.

Ref:Wikipedia

Kwaja Mo’inoddin Chisthti Sanjari Ajmeri (known as Gharib Nawaz; died 633/1236) in a poem entitled “Bewilderment” said something similar:

…if creatures were made to reveal Him, why are they veiled?

But then, of course, veils themselves are very revealing…

well then, if I’m His veil I’ll make my exit

and let Him become “I”, the seer of what is seen.

He’ll see Himself in my mirror. He Himself

will become both the seeker and the Sought.

Stop…! All I get out of this is a maze of riddles!

Words, words…If it was difficult before, what a

headache now! ...

from: “Bewilderment” from The Drunken Universe: an anthology of Persian Sufi poetry (1987), Tran. & commentary by Wilson, P. L. & Pourjavady, N, p99

In Shi ‘i Islam we find the same story. The sixth imam (Ja’far al ‘Sadiq, died 148/765) used a similar approach to throw off the dogs of Orthodoxy when he urged his followers (those of the Shi ‘i who likewise understood the danger of right knowledge in the wrong hands) to ‘disimulate’ [taqiyya] in relation to such matters of inner meaning.

The first Imam, ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (assassinated 40/661) makes it clear why this was a necessary precaution when he took his close disciple Kamayl b. Ziyad al-Nakha’l aside (some say he took him outside the city walls to a cemetary), before imparting the following to him:

Kumayl! Remember well what I tell you. There are three types of people: the divine spiritual initiator (‘alim rabbani), the initiated disciple [proceeding] along the way of deliverance (muta ‘allim ‘ala sabil najat), and the stupid beings (hamaj ra ‘ a’) who obey any appeal and are carried off by every wind. These latter are not illuminated by the light of knowledge (‘ilm) and do not lean on any firm pillar. Kumayl! Knowledge has greater value than material things (mal). It is knowledge that watches over you just as you watch over your material possesions. Wealth diminishes as it is spent, but knowledge increases as it is spent… The treasure of material goods perishes whilst the sages live lives that will last as long as time shall endure (hum ahya’ wa’ l- ‘ulama’ baqun ma baqiya’l-dahr). Their physical bodies disappear, but others, who resemble them in their hearts, take their place (a ‘yanuhum mafquda wa amthaluhum fi’l-qulub mawjuda).

And the imam, gesturing with his hand towards his chest, continued:

There is superabundant knowledge here. If only I found men [strong enough] to carry it! Certainly, on occasion I meet someone who is perceptive enough, but I cannot confide in him because he turns religion into a means of serving worldly interests, utilising the proofs of God [hujaj Allah, that is the imams] and the favours of God to dominate the weak. On occasion I meet someone who obeys the sages but who, lacking interior vision (basira), cannot perceive the immensity of the knowledge and falls into doubt at the first difficulty that presents itself. Thus, neither the one not the other [are worthy either of my trust or my knowledge]… Must initiated knowledge thus die with the death of its carriers? No! The world will never lack a Qa’im who, speaking for God, guarantees the safeguarding of His testimony, whether he is manifest and unveiled, or hidden. It is thanks to men such as these that the divine testimony and [the understanding of] its meaning have not been destroyed. How many are there? Where are they? Their number is small, but their rank is lofty. It is through them that God safeguards His witnesses until they transmit it to their peers and implant the seed in the heart of those who resemble them. For them, knowledge appears all at once (hajama behim al-‘ilm) to show them the true nature of things. They set in motion the joy of certitude and find easy what the indulgent consider to be arduous. They are familiar with matters that frighten the ignorant. They go through this world in bodies of which the souls [that animate them] are suspended in the highest abode (mul ‘allaqa bi’l-mahall al-a ‘la). Kumayl! They are the vicegerents of God, those who summon to His religion. Oh! How I yearn to see them!

(translation H. Corbin in Amir-Moezzi, M. A.; The Spitituality of Shi ‘I Islam)

However, if the age of ‘disimulation’ is not completely past, at least in relation to the deeper mysteries of life, much of the fear associated with revealing too much of what may better remain hidden - at least in much of the world today - is. It is enough to know that the philosophers stone – that sought by the alchemists of old – the ‘dhat (essence) exists ever and still and has sufficient power to protect itself. Those that wish to know cannot wrest this knowledge cheaply, even were it to present itself to them in a form that they could recognise. We have to give of our substance if we wish to see the path unfold before us, and few enough desire truth that much.

So it is then that to properly open Hermes’ ‘Emerald Tablet’ requires knowledge that few possess and even fewer value. Yet, it is claimed that:

As a divine source of wisdom, Hermes Trismegistus was credited with tens of thousands of writings of high standing, reputed to be of immense antiquity. Plato's Timaeus and Critias state that in the temple of Neith at Sais, there were secret halls containing historical records which had been kept for 9,000 years. Clement of Alexandria was under the impression that the Egyptians had forty-two sacred writings by Hermes, encapsulating all the training of Egyptian priests (ref as above).

And yet there are some few who do still (and will always) possess and value this ‘hidden’ knowledge.

--*--

Professor Harold Bloom (Yale) has been called ‘the preeminent literary critic in the world’ (see at ). In his own way he is another one of those few (at least in-so-far-as the literature of the world is concerned). Although Bloom - by his own acknowledgement - never met Henry Corbin, he had, he said, ‘…re-read many times all [he] could discover of [his] writings…’, and regarded himself ‘as being much under his influence’.

In his preface to Corbin’s ‘Alone with the Alone’: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Bloom (in discussing a creation myth in another of Ibn ‘Arabi’s works) says:

It is one of the most extraordinary creation myths that I have ever encountered: God, fashioning Adam out of the adamah, or moist red clay, had a remnant, and from it he made the palm tree, “Adam’s sister”. And even from the palm tree’s formation there was a remainder, the size of a sesame seed. In this tiny fragment, God “laid out an immense Earth,” called the Celestial Earth of Hurqalya by Suhrawardi [early Sufi mystic]. This alternative Earth, Ibn ‘Arabi affirms, is the world “where theophanies and theophanic visions take place.” Suhrawardi tells us that Hurqalya, the alternative Earth, is an Imaginative universe of the Angels. Another great Iranian Sufi, shaikh Ahmad Ahsa’I calls Hurqalya the Interworld, and a later sage says that “it is the world through which spirits are embodied, and bodies spiritualised.” Of Hurqalya, as “Earth of Visions,” Corbin remarks that this is where Hermes dwells, Hermes being the tutelary spirit of all gnosis, from the Hermetic Corpus through Christian Gnosticism, the Sufis, and the Jewish Kabbalah. Because Hermes is at home there, Hurqalya is the “Earth of Resurrection”. (Preface pxiii)

In case anyone should misunderstand the use of the word ‘Imaginative’ here, Henry Corbin, according to Bloom, lamented ‘the degradation of the Imagination into fantasy’, noting that “there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple” (Alone with the Alone, p181). Corbin (died 1978) himself was a Professor of Islamic Religion at the Sorbonne and a leading authority on Iranian Islamic thought.

It does not require me to point out connections between this creation myth and the (translated) contents of the tablet of Hermes quoted from above. Such connections as may exist between them are intended to pique the interest of those who would step outside any purely ‘rationalist’ prejudices.

For the Enneagram to become ‘a path of return’ and not merely a handy tool for ‘typing’ clients, requires that we invest time and energy aquiring the knowledge to open its complexity. It requires a mind that is prepared to suspend doubt, at least for the initial period of inquiry. In fact it requires of us a similar degree of interest in those same ‘hermeneutics’ that underpin it and all other wisdom traditions.

I never promised an ‘evidence-based’ approach to understanding onself and others when I started to write these papers. What I did offer was a possible glimpse of a path with heart that might just lead one beyond the everyday ‘reality’ that we are all so familiar with, and that we often take for granted as the ultimate, the only reality there is. It is at this same modern ‘orthodoxy’ that Corbin – in all his works – aims.

What I promised was to outline a bridge to span the gulf that exists between ‘those few’ and the rest of us that have lost the key to unlock the deeper mysteries that are always potentially available to us but seem, none-the-less, to remain forever shrouded in mystique and mystery.

Words

The ‘bridge’ spoken of in the initial paper is described (tangentially) in Islamic Sufi terms by Laleh Bhaktier, ‘Sufi: Expressions of the Mystic Quest’. She says:

The literal making of sensible forms is important because without the expression of the potentiality, the preparedness (isti ‘dad), within ‘that which is to be known’, nature would lie passive and dormant. By acting on this preparedness the artisan brings forth the Spirit within, whether it be in the creation of a carpet, a brass tray or a miniature.

The universe in sufi terminology is often referred to as the shadow of the Absolute: something which has relative existence by virtue of being a sensible determination of an Archetype.

The relation between a shadow and that which casts it is like the relation of the phenomenon to the cause of its noumenon… [ibid, p14]

Bakhtiar’s work on the Enneagram (see her trilogy ‘God’s will be done’), like the work of A H Almaas (the Diamond Approach) and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Sandra Maitri, (The spiritual dimension of the enneagram: nine faces of the soul) focus on this underpinning of the Enneagram, this hermeneutic of transformation.

To date we have briefly explored the Enneagram as it emerged through the work of George Gurdjieff, and the later contributions of Narajo, Palmer, Risso, and others. We have briefly looked at examples via (a composite of) clients and how a knowledge of the types helps in some therapeautic contexts (work issues, relationship work etc). We looked at how a relatively recent [2005] research study conducted by a leading personnel management firm (SHL) headed by Professor David Bartram was conducted to measure the efficacy of the Enneagram’s 9 types against the OPQ [trait based personality test], and we heard from the Enneagram Institute’s Don Risso, his claim that the results of this research strongly support the view that a synthesis of the two approaches is not only possible, but would greatly strengthen both.

Though this is all in the realm of ‘Enneagram as typing tool’, implicit from the very beginning of these papers was the intention to trace the presence of the Real from that of the shadow (sometimes referred to as ‘moon in the water’).

Of course, the Enneagram does not need ‘strengthening’ – unless you happen to be a psychologist who is concerned that any therapeutic tool must be of the ‘evidence based’ type - in which case it is unlikely that you will ever use something as ‘ambiguous’ as the Enneagram in the first place.

However, ambiguity, like ‘Imagination’, is not necessarily a negative mark against its employment. Much depends on the context. Many of the problems we face in the world today stem in part from the need to know the outcome of the journey prior to setting out on the journey itself.

With the notable exception of Gurdjieff, Bakhtiar, Almaas, and Maatri, other writers and researchers have primarily focused on the ‘personality’ aspects of the Enneagram. Few have given much effort to examining the deeper layers that it potentiates. Of the former, in my view, Almaas is the more comprehensible, offering a potential pathway to self-understanding and perhaps even awakening. None of those who focus on the transformatory path of the Enneagram suggest it is an easy road to take. The others see it as more of a tool for a little more understanding of self and others, and so it is. For those who are a little more serious about following this particular path to human wholeness it is a good time to remind ourselves once again of what Gurdjieff had to say to us at the beginning of this journey:

“…It often happens that exact knowledge concerning details, communicated to a [person] before he has aquired an understanding of the essential nature of a thing, makes it difficult for him to understand this essential nature. This does not mean that exact definitions do not exist on the way of true knowledge, on the contrary, only there do they exist; but they differ very greatly from what we usually think them to be. And if anyone supposes that he can go along the way of self-knowledge guided by an exact knowledge of all details, and if he expects to have such knowledge without first having given himself the trouble to assimulate the indications he has received concerning his own work, then he should first of all understand that he will not attain knowledge until he makes the necessary efforts and that only of himself and only by his own efforts can he attain what he seeks. No one can ever give him what he did not possess before; no one can do for him the work he should do for himself…” (Gurdjieff 1949, p. 285).

---*---

It may be obvious to some of you by now that the ‘bridge’ spoken of again and again in these papers is in fact none other than ourselves (which is represented by the Enneagram type that we – at one level - are). We have been walking on it, bouncing up and down on it, testing it from the very beginning. We don’t have to go somewhere else to find the path. It emerges from within ourselves. Indeed it could well be said, that we are it.

---*---

What we have here - in symbolic form - is the journey of return. What is also present here, inherent in the symbolism, is the echo of that thing, which – once activated – calls us ever onward, drawing us forward to that which existed before time itself began.

Like the ‘Emerald Tablet’ spoken of above it is part of the tradition known as the ‘Perenial Philosophy’, kept alive and developed by ‘knowers of the way’ always at great personal cost and often in spite of terrible threats and dangers presented by and through Orthodoxies over the generations for the benefit of all future generations because humanity cannot survive without it and through it may learn to recover that which was lost in the ‘descent’.

---*---

We began this journey with a story and a question both.

The story, told to the young boy (Laurens Van der Post) by an old shepherd concerned a vision of a great white bird seen by a hunter of the first peoples. It went like this:

“Once upon a time…a hunter of the first people went to a place of reeds and flowers and birds singing by deep water. He knelt down to fill his calabash with drinking water, and as he did so was startled to see, in the still glass of the shining surface before him, the reflection of an enormous white bird that he had never seen before. Astonished, he looked up, but the bird had already vanished over the black tops of a dense forest – ‘the forest of the night’. From that moment his heart was filled with a restless longing to capture the bird.

Leaving his cattle, his wife, his children and his people, he went deep into the forest looking for the bird, and out into the great world beyond. Yet everywhere he found nothing but rumour of the bird. At last, when he was a very old man and near his end, he was told that he would find the bird on a great white mountain in the heart of Africa, far north of his own home. He found the mountain and started climbing it. He climbed for days until, one nightfall, he found himself on the edge of the white cap of the mountain. And still there was no sign of the bird. He realised his end was near. Feeling he had failed, he threw himself down like a little child, crying: ‘Oh! My mother! Oh!’ Then a voice answered him and said: ‘Look! Oh! Look!’ He looked up and saw, in the red sky of a dying African day, a white feather falling slowly down towards him. He held out his hand and grasped it. With the feather in his hand, he died content as night fell.’

When the child asked the old shepherd who narrated the story to him the name of that ‘great white bird’, he would shake his head sadly and say,

‘I do not know its name; no-one knows its name. It was a great white bird, and one feather of it in the hand of a man was enough; one feather of it on the head of a chief brought happiness to all his people.’…”

That vision, that feather, were clue and consolation both. Enough to drive a man to leave his family, his friends, his community, everything that tied him to his place here in this world, on a journey to the ends of the earth and (symbolically) beyond.

The question, posed to us through the writings of the great 20th century Sufi, Hazrat Inayat Khan, tells us why we too are prepared to follow this symbolic knowledge to the ends of the earth:

‘…you may ask, “What has man lost?” And the answer is God Himself.’

---*---

An Hadith of the Prophet (pbuh) say’s that God was a hidden treasure yearning to be known, and that He created the world just for this purpose.

In order to know Himself He created Adam, the first man, to be His eyes, His ears, His tongue, His hands, His feet. But He also provided him with free-will. It is this will that man must surrender if he is to take this journey and complete the purpose of life. It is said that God is subject and object both; the Lover and the Beloved. For this to be true the heart must be turned away from all that is not God to discover that which is God. It is in this divine ‘conspiracy’ that man comes back to a knowledge of God, and through that knowledge completes the journey of return. It is in this flowering of love through a unio sympathetica that man may finally and completely rest; this bi-unity, [as Corbin puts it]: ‘…of the lord of love (rabb) and his vassal of love (marbub)’[‘Alone with the Alone’].

What then of the Path?

The path is manifested at every moment. It does not exist as something outside of one’s self, but is in fact the very ground of that ‘self’. One may say that it is a journey from love, through love, to love.

Symbolic knowledge ultimately is that which draws the intellect (not in the sense that most understand this word in the present world) into a ‘sympathy’ with that which it symbolises with. These are not separate processes, but different levels of the same thing. If one attempts to stand back, to remain separate, as it were, from this process, in the manner of say the researcher who attempts to be objective in that which he researches, the subject material simply does not open up in a manner that will be transformative for us.

Jacob Needleman, in his introduction to another (posthumously) published work by Henry Corbin [‘The Voyage and the Messenger’] points to this. He says:

‘….It is not uncommon to find scholars of religion who on principle refuse to allow the possibility of the truth of religion to enter into their discipline. Understandably wary of confusing the scientific study of religion with religious persuasion of any kind, they may systematically refuse to respect on its own terms the meaning that religion actually has for individuals and whole cultures. Concentrating only on the aspects of religion that can be approached by disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, which often operate outside the philosophical bases of the world’s religions – that is, operating sometimes from positivistic or even “atheistic” assumptions – they offer interpretations of religion that are irrelevant to the beliefs and practices of the religions they are seeking to understand. In so doing, they often manifest a quality of thinking and an approach to the world that are among the very elements of the inner human condition from whose thrall the great religions and spiritual teachings of the world seek to liberate us. …..’

(The Voyage and the Messenger: Iran and philosophy by Henry Corbin, trans. Joseph Rowe, California, North Atlantic Books, 1998, pX).

The same point, in a different context (Ebden Alexander, 2012) is addressed by a US neurosurgeon who’s near-death experience transformed him from sceptic to believer in the survival of consciousness beyond the physical death of the body. Regaining consciousness after a week in deep coma following a severe brain infection that nearly killed him and should have left him as a permanent invalid, Dr Alexander, with his faculties intact, was totally convinced that his ‘experience’ of the survival of consciousness beyond brain ‘death’ would be amazingly beneficial news for his professional colleagues! However, when he tried to communicate his ‘discovery’ to them, he put his dilemma this way:

I was wildly – and naively – eager to share these [ND] experiences, especially with my fellow doctors. After all, what I’d undergone altered my long-held beliefs of what the brain is, what consciousness is, even what life itself means – and doesn’t mean. Who wouldn’t be anxious to hear my discoveries?

Quite a few people, as it turned out. Most especially, people with medical degrees.

Make no mistake, my doctors were very happy for me. “That’s wonderful Ebden,” they would say, echoing my own response to countless patients of my own who, in the past, had tried to tell me about otherworldly experiences they’d undergone during surgery. “You were very sick. Your brain was soaking in pus. We can’t believe you’re even here to talk about it. You know yourself what the brain can come up with when it’s that far gone”.

In short, they couldn’t wrap their minds around what I was so desperately trying to share….(ibid, p125).

This is our dilemma too. As Psychologists, attempting to effect some healing or understanding for clients that come to us in search of the same. Even more so on a personal level. We cannot stand back from ourselves on this ‘path of return’. As Needleman shows, and Alexander poignantly states, such an approach leads to an undermining of the very thing we wish to open.

The whole point of this journey is the understanding that subject and object are one, part of the same underlying whole. But it is important to realise that such ‘understanding’, to be transformative must take place holistically. It is not simply a matter of an intellectual understanding alone. Indeed, much of the material we are likely to come across, simply cannot be opened by the mind alone. Unless the heart is involved, nothing changes. This is part of what has been lost. The Word that was lost was not simply something one could find in a dictionary, no matter how good (not even the Internet!). Neither is it one of good scholarship, no matter how sincere the endevour. Rather it is part of a coming together after the manner of the story of the hunter, the great white bird, the journeying in the world, and, through acts of divine grace, being ultimately possessed of the feather . In giving all of ourselves to this undertaking the journey, insh ‘Allah, brings us to fulfillment. Hold back and the journey must forever remain merely mythological in character.

---*---

Corbin says

‘…once it is recognised that everything man sees during his earthly life is of the same order (manzilla) as visions in a dream, then all things seen in this world, so elevated to the rank of Active Imaginations, call for a hermeneutics, a ta ‘bir; invested with their theophanic function, they demand to be carried back from their apparent form (zahir) to their real and hidden form (batin), in order that the appearance of this Hidden form may manifest it in truth…’ (Alone with the Alone, p242)

At another point he says:

…the symbol announces a plane of consciousness distinct from that of rational evidence; it is a “cipher” of a mystery, the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way; a symbol is never “explained” once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again, just as a musical score is never deciphered once and for all, but calls for ever new execution… (ibid, p14)

This is part of the role of using the Enneagram as both an outer symbol of ourselves and an inner pathway to rediscovering just what it is that we really are.

Corbin continues:

‘The symbolic exegesis that establishes typifications is thus creative in the sense that it transmutes things into symbols, into typical Images, and causes them to exist on another plane of being [archetypes?]. To ignore this typology is to destroy the meaning of vision as such and purely and simply to accept data as they present themselves in the raw…’. (Ibid, p243)

It is somewhat ironic then, if – to finish the last quote – we see that this is precisely what we do when we take the Enneagram (as typology) as real, and analyse it for its consistency with other – equally unreal - data.

There is a relationship (as Plato’s “Dobbin” showed us), between the shadow and the Real. We just need to discern which is which so as to not continually conflate them.

---*---

Travelling on ‘the Path of Return’

To draw this series of papers on the Enneagram and the Path of Return to a close , I will end with a gift from my own teacher’s teacher, Hazrat Inayat Khan (died 1927) himself an initiate of the Chisthti Order, before finishing with a final quote from the Qur’an.

First, Inayat Khan:

“Towards the One, the perfection of love, harmony, and beauty, the only being, united with all the illuminated souls, the Spirit of Guidance”

The great obstacle to be overcome in Meditation is the false ego or Nafs. What is it that prevents us from concentrating our thoughts and feelings on God? It is the nafs. In the Hebrew religion there is the Shema or cry, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our Lord, the Lord is One.” And there is the answer to the Cry, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy Heart and with all thy Soul and with all thy Mind.” And these directions should be considered as a unity, for the light of the soul shines in the heart and is reflected in the mind.

Plato wrote that we lived in a shadow world, where we confused the shadow of ourselves with reality. This is the nafs, the false ego, which stands in the light before God, causing, so-to-speak, a spiritual eclipse. In Meditation, one does not have to hold such a thought for this false self is overcome through meditating on the true Self, which in reality is God. The modern devotee may repeat the Invocation, “Towards the One, etc instead of the schema and it will produce the same effect. There is no difference between them in the language of heart and soul; the forms in words may be different, but the acts, thoughts, feelings and results are the same.

Whenever the nafs seem to hold us in their sway, it is through meditation we may find freedom. To the Sufi, pure meditation includes more than going into one’s room only; any act of life which is done with dependence upon Allah or which makes us aware of Him, whether in reading or studying or working or contemplation or prayer or meditation or any duty of everyday life, all may become part of a universal meditation which marks every breath and every heartbeat of life. Then we observe more plainly the true purpose of life, the momentary obstacle which may have appeared like a great cliff, becomes as a tiny step through our growth and understanding, and by taking this step, what was once a hindrance becomes an aid to our development.

The nafs turn us from the One to the many, enticing us with the things of the world. Then man attaches himself to one thing after another which brings at best momentary satisfaction; through his spiritual practices the Sufi learns to chain the nafs, to perceive it as only a shadow of reality, and finding the sun of truth within his being, looking upon it, one is no longer aware of the shadow.

Then the nafs are not destroyed but harnessed. The whole of man’s being is attuned to God and everything within him serves God. This is the work of all on the path of illumination, of whatever school they may be. There is no other obstacle than this false self and there is no better means of controlling it than by meditation and by practising the Presence of Allah.

(from the original texts: Lectures on Sufism, 1923 1: January – June Series 11 Githa No 2[A] Dhyana [Meditation] pp269/70).

And finally, from the Qur’an we read:

(S5:48)

…Unto every one of you have we appointed a [different] law1 and way of life. And if God had so willed, He could surely have made you all one single community: but [He willed it otherwise] in order to test you by means of what He has vouchsafed unto you. Vie, then, with one another in doing good works! Unto God you must all return; and then He will make you truly understand all that on which you were wont to differ.

Note 1: (In Islam the term shari ‘ah [law] literally means the well trodden path men and animals take to the water hole [where they access the element indispensable to their life]. In the Qur’an it is used to denote a system of law necessary for a community’s social and spiritual welfare [from S5:48 note 66 in ‘The Message of the Qur’an’, translated and explained by Muhammad Assad]. Just as, by inference here, there are many paths that may lead to the water hole, so there are different laws that have descended upon humanity in the form of revelations that make a community people of the Book, or not, as the case may be. The laws may vary, however, the destination does not).

May God bless you all and treat you with kindness on your own journey of return.

Robert/Karim Parkhurst

1/3/13

References

Asad, M. (1980). The Message of the Qur’an translated and explained by Muhammad

Asad. Gibraltar. Dar Al-Andalus.

Alexander, E. (2012). Proof of heaven: a neurosurgeon’s journey into the afterlife. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Aust.

Almaas, H.A. (1998). Facets of Unity: the enneagram of holy ideas. Berkley: Diamond Books.

Amir-Moezzi, M. A. (2011); The spirituality of Shi ‘I Islam. New York: Pub. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.

Bakhtiar, L. (1994). God’s will be done: Vol 11, Moral healer’s handbook:The psychology of spiritual chivalry. Chicago: The Institute of Traditional Psychoethics and Guidance

Bakhtiar, L. (1994). God’s will be done: Vol 11, Moral healer’s handbook: The psychology of spiritual chivalry. Chicago: The Institute of Traditional Psychoethics and Guidance

Corbin, H. (1998). Alone with the alone: Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Corbin, H. (1998). The voyage and the messenger: Iran and philosophy. Trans. Rowe, J., California: North Atlantic Books.

Gurdjieff, G. I. (N.D.). Sufism and the fourth way. Retrieved from

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A final note:

It was C S Lewis who said: ‘In my scheme of thought it is not blasphemous to compare the error which I was making with that error which the angel at the Sepulchre rebuked when he said to the women, “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, He is risen.” The comparison is of course between something of infinite moment and something very small; like comparison between the Sun and the Sun’s reflection in a dewdrop. Indeed, in my view, very like it, for I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. “Reflect” is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of a step towards, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image. In me, at any rate, it contained no element either of belief or of ethics; …But it still had, at however many removes, the shape of the reality it reflected…’. (pp135/6)

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