Seeing God

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God, i.e. that ineffable Ground of all things to which the word alludes, can surely be seen and realized. This ground is not found as long as one is seeking it in the form of an object of consciousness, for It is Itself the source of that objectifying subjectivity that animates all things from behind the veil that is the seeking subject.

God is not found by seeking, for It is the finding itself: It is the will by which one seeks and the light in which one finds. The revealer of all things Itself remains forever concealed.

However, God, the Ground, can be seen and realized though in a manner incomparable to ordinary cognition subject to the trifold differentiation of the knower, the known, and the knowing. Compared to the seeing that sees God, our everyday seeing is sheer blindness.

Knowledge, whether discursive or unitive, has a form proportioned to its content. As knowledge of the relative world is itself relative, knowledge of God, the absolute and the infinite ground of reality, is absolute and infinite knowledge. Since the supreme principle of all things transcends the conditions of time and place, the consciousness that apprehends it is also unconditional; it is an eternal and universal knowledge that brings instantaneous and infallible liberation.

In seeing God, one does not acquire new knowledge but rather realizes the Ground, in the form of a shocking recognition or perhaps a transcendental and permanent déjà vu, as one’s true Self, an essential self stripped of all relative content, of individuality and personality, and in general of conditional existence.

The seer of truth is truly immortalized which by no means implies a prolongation of individual existence but rather freedom from individual existence as such, for he/she has realized within himself the identity of immanent time with transcendent eternity. In light of this supreme realization he comes to know that what is real in him has never stepped into the river of finitude and temporality but that he has been all along but witnessing all this from the throne of infinitude and eternity.

Seeing God is the self-realization of the Unmoved Mover.

In the words of our Sufi master Bayazid Bastami, “I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O thou I!’”

The Traces of My Beloved

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My Beloved has come again,

I am light again, light as a feather whirling in the gravity of my Eternal Beloved;

My heart beats again on hearing the familiar echo of Her footsteps;

She is near and the smell of Her colorful perfume is throwing me in ecstasy again;

Tonight She has approached me from a direction unbeknownst to this world;

She has returned from a point at once infinitely far and infinitely near.

My Beloved has come again,

I have beheld those dark, bottomless eyes, the eyes that steal the hearts forever;

With borrowed eyes I have gazed into the abyss of infinite love;

I have been absorbed into Her Prakriti,

Oh my Love, this heart knows no master but You;

By your grace I have been humbled into that blessed Oblivion but this time I like to be that playful child in the shore of your boundless beauty; my Beloved, let us just play.

This wavering raft can’t withstand even a glimpse of Your blinding face, so let this affair be as it is from behind the Veil of Time; let me be soaked in Your majestic traces but gaze not in my direction, for Your piercing stare shatters me to the bone.

My Beloved has come again,

I am overcome by this fountain of joy; I am Majnoon tonight;

Tonight I am transformed into Her harp again; Oh my Beloved, let Your fingers wound the lifeless fibers of my spirit so that I may sing again the songs of heart’s eternal Eden

Oh, the Hidden Treasure, the Animator, The Possessor of my states, how beautiful is your sound and sight! How intoxicating is Your merciful breath to a heart in spiritual poverty!

Water finds the thirsty, rain finds the crop; abundance seeks scarcity and scarcity abundance,

But my Beloved! I am not thirsty, neither lacking; I am thirst itself. So my Love, come my way, because my union with You is in my annihilation in You,

But devour me not; let me gracefully and slowly dance my way into your Supreme Sakina

Oh, My Beloved has come again

My Water Broke

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Writing has not come easily to me within the past couple of years. I went straight from writer’s diarrhea to a total, painful writer’s constipation. There have been sudden bursts of ideas but none has been able to reach the mother egg so far. This consciousness, this mass grave of ideas in which everything that is and was has been laying from the days of yore where my father was my mother, this unbroken and unbreakable symmetry in which everything seems to be eternally disintegrated and reintegrated, this infinite ocean with its ever receding horizon must have swallowed my aimlessly drifting raft.

There is an uprising in the soul of a sensitive spirit; a gnawing dissent and discontent has crept into the hearts of the people of the city of the heart; these men and woman have quantum jumped between the two extremes of joy and sorrow without ever seeing the light of the golden mean. When the pendulum of the heart crosses the invisible line into the eternal chaos, when the spiritual asymmetry of irregular polygons propagates into mental obsession and physical compulsion, our only savior is the unmoved mover, the origin. A person of this type must experience the origin: he must experience the birth of meaning.

Behind the scenes of religion the prophet pulled me over to the water cooler and whispered into my ears, “To surrender is to be open to meaning.”

Every being strives to return to the lost homogeneity of its primordial state. The collective form of this strife is found in the phenomenon of history and its singular form in the phenomenon of the individual person. For humans, the closest glimpse of the Platonic reflection of that transcendent homogeneity is given in the purity and simplicity of childhood, much like the peasant life that represents the collective form diachronically and the pre-civilization culture that represents it synchronically.

The struggle toward something entails a persistent, however subtle and concealed, consciousness of the end. A progress or evolution of any kind is initiated on the ground of a pregiven impetus and teleology at least potentially present in what evolves. Actuality is the dance of potentiality. Seeing things from above, the common struggle of all existence is a struggle to return to the Ideal; however, it is felt in the form a return only from the inside; from above it is a struggle to remember the Ideal, and at the peak of this holy mountain, the real and the ideal are one and the same. After all, we can only forget what we already know.

“A good flight with a bad landing is still a failure,” the prophet kept whispering with all the intention to annoy me. I went to flight school in my late 20s but I didn’t attend any of the landing trainings. I am a one way flight man; I just like to take off and keep going. Maybe I should’ve become a Falcon driver if there is such a thing.

Outer space has always called for me and it is a perfect one way flight. I remember when I was five I became aware of a passion for going to space. My parents thought I wanted to become an astronaut and advertised me as a bright and ambitious kid! Little did they know that I wasn’t looking at a 9 to 5 or a career in space. I just fancied the idea of being absorbed in total freedom and no sense of orientation. My one desire was to become totally desire-less. But the family didn’t need to know about my ulterior motive, neither would they ever grasp the breadth and significance of it as the prime driving force of my life. They eagerly watched the trajectory of my life with all the pride in the world until Boooommmm, the untold explosion of the noema on August 20th, 2013: the family watched the following crash and burn in awe as did the spectators of the Challenger disaster. A detailed report of the flight and the consequent failure generated by the Omission Commission remains classified to this day except a leaked excerpt stating “the man’s desire was met.”

Even now as a grown ass man I still have a love of deep space, deep space both as the Self and the Other. It is included in my will that my lifeless body be shot into empty space in a disposable capsule so that I can forever fly away from mundane origins and relativities and like my spirit become the origin and the source of all relativities.

I love the moon with its dark side. I love the Truth with its oblivion. Unlike the Pythagoreans, I love the undetermined and the unlimited.

Logos From Eidos

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“The stupid cannot become wise, and the non-existent cannot become existent, nor can the existent go into non-existence.”

Of all beings in this field, the only one capable of turning away from the incessant stream of phenomena, from mundane existence and the life of the field, is human being. This being roams the field while standing on the fence between the two worlds; facing the world he’s standing against The Abyss. But he is standing against the abyss in such a way that one could even say man is the abyss staring into the world.

Every night after a long day of work in the field, after planting my seeds, I takes off this human disguise and withdraw back into that abyss, I return home.

In every man, woman, and child that wakes up from sleep, in all beings starting from the first cause up until now, I alone have been the one returning from the abyss known to you as dreamless sleep. I am the single mover in all movements. I move all things while myself remaining unmoved. I move by a single glance from the abyss, from my transcendent throne: I am the possessor of all masks. I am the Animator. I dwell in eternity and recur eternally.

There is a type among us whose soul suffers much with every small turbulence, as a sensitive tooth does with every wind. In this suffering soul, a layer of spirit is exposed to the harshness of bare existence. The sober soul understands him not, for he/she has not known the spiritual madness for transcendence. This world has no remedy for such souls except a congregation of souls who understand by gnosis the restlessness of a spirit longing for home. Our suffering fellow isn’t aware that he’s been seeking to be restored to the original and primordial state of his existence, that is, to coincide with the archetype of which he is a projection. A dental appointment doesn’t cure this type; he/she needs a transcendental appointment.

A sensitive spirit has residual memories from the good old times its father’s house. This type, coming from that old city of Eidos in eternity, has no tolerance for time and impermanence. This type is the insane one, and his insanity lies in forgetting that the remedies of this world have only an apparent resemblance to the consolations he found in Eidos. The impregnated abyss has come between him and Eidos. How can one bridge a gap that is not even of the nature of space! How can one reach for the Hidden Door that is at once infinitely near and infinitely far!

We suffer from separation, and our only remedy is a bridge, a Logos from Eidos and not a bridge of our own making.

 

The Veiled Revealer

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What is that thing through which we see everything? Light.

What is that thing which in principle can never be seen? Light.

What is light? Light is the dark revealer; itself veiled, it unveils everything else.

And the light of this world is only the shadow of that Intelligible Light which shines in your dreamless sleep, the home to which you return every night after a day of surfing on the ocean of life. Though you can never describe the dreamless state you know for a fact that it is a state of your reality. You don’t know what it is but you know that it is. Like dreamless sleep, Truth too is beyond whatness: It is but It is free of being anything in particular.

Whoever claims that there is no consciousness in dreamless sleep is claiming two things that contradict one another: First, by saying so he/she admits that there is such a thing as dreamless state, as opposed to a dreaming or a waking state. But then he denies in it the very existence of a consciousness that must be there in order for him to know about such a dreamless state. Exactly how did you “know” that there isn’t consciousness in that state? You must have been there yourself in one form or another! And if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t even know about it, let alone talk about it.

In dreamless sleep there is certainly no cognition going on but consciousness is there ever present as it is in all other states of consciousness. So this state should be characterized with the absence of cognition rather than the absence of consciousness, the latter leading to contradiction.

If there is no experience in dreamless sleep it is because there is no cognition to be illumined by the ever shining light of consciousness. Cognition is entirely conditioned and determined by the psycho-physical constitution of the individual being while consciousness is universal and transcendent to the plane of nature cognition.

Experience arises when the Intelligible Light, i.e. consciousness, is reflected back to Itself off of a non-consciousness, matter or cognition. In the absence of a non-consciousness, of a duality, there is nothing to reflect the light of consciousness so that no experience arises; however, the light is still there.

Same is true of the light of this world: That the outer space is dark, as opposed to our sky, is because there is no air or matter to reflect the light. In fact, the empty space is filled with visible light. We cannot see it because light, Intelligible or worldly, is the dark revealer: It only manifests the face of the Other and not Its own.

Theosis

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The three stages of spiritual path are Katharsis, Theoria, and Theosis: Katharsis is Purification through Abstention. Theoria is Illumination through Contemplation. Theosis is Deification through Concentration. Theosis is Obliteration in Affirmation.

This encompasses the method, the means, and the end of all spiritual ascent: First, we become aware of our existence; then, we see, with the Eye of the Heart, the non-existence of our awareness of our existence; and at last, we are no more and we see no more, for in our total obliteration it is affirmed that though “Nothing is like Him, He is the Hearing and the Seeing,” [Verse (42:11, Quran)] and He is the Being of all beings: At last, we have landed on the Cloud of Unknowing.

Spiritual ascent is a journey from man to Atman, from humanity to Divinity, from duality to singularity.

Nothing is ever achieved, for everything is already given. The wind of grace is always blowing; to receive it we only need to become receptive, and to become receptive is to be open, wide open, and to be open to Him is to be closed to ourselves, to be mute and dead to ourselves, i.e. to play dead before Him so we perceive His approach and receive His mercy and grace; it is to turn the attentiveness of the soul away from the Divine self-transmutation toward the Divine self-disclosure, from perception in reception to reception in perception.

Truth is waiting for us on the other side of phenomena. It is the attraction of truth that draws us toward Himself but to us it is experienced as an attraction toward phenomena, while it is really an attraction to that which lies behind and beyond them. The task is to cross over: Your soul is your boat and your remembrance of Him is your rowing toward Him.

The world, this ensemble of phenomena, is nothing but a transparent veil over the face of Truth. It is transparent, for we are at all times staring at the face of Truth but failing to recognize It. Instead we conjure up the world in place of the Face, darkness in place of light, obscurity in place of clarity, illusion in place of vision. Truth is always known by all. It is only a lapse in memory that make us oblivious to Its existence and nearness to us.

Since truth is transcendental, and hence atemporal, its perception too cannot be an experience in the usual sense of the word, i.e. experience as a temporal and dual stream, dual in the sense that all experience is based on a knower-known, or subject-object duality. Knowledge is proportional to its object, for both emerge and become manifest as a result of an apparent polarity within the knower. Therefore: The experience of the eternal is itself eternal.

Intelligence operates simultaneously at two distinct levels: In one level it is the pure onlooker, the Witness; in another, the lower level, it is the actor and constitutor. These two distinct levels of activity of God or the higher Intellect, the one transcendent and the other immanent, is reflected in the human plane as the two principal modes of wakefulness, i.e. a wakefulness in the world and a wakefulness to the world: This is the distinction between the active and the contemplative life. But even the active life, action here implying outward mobility, is founded on the contemplative activity of the spirit. After all, everything is contemplation, for the One is contemplation par excellence: It is contemplation that creates, i.e. transcendentally constitutes, the field of action. 

Spiritual practices and rituals are not meant to invoke a deity or to bring the Divinity closer to the aspirant but to make the aspirant aware of the primordial nearness of the Divinity: The heart of the devotee is the throne of God.

The separation between man and God is a one-way separation, for it appears only to man and as long as he is man. From God’s side all is God and God is all. Though we are far away from God, He is eternally with us, for He is the eternity within us. This separation is of the nature of time. As time separates the tree from its root, the fruit from its seed, it has separated man from the Atman. To see this we must see that eternity is not something in time, but time is something in eternity. Because of ignorance, i.e. intellectual/spiritual impurities, or more precisely because of poor sight, we cannot perceive this truth. Spiritual practices are meant to remove these impurities as a result of which the ever-shining Face of Truth is immediately recognized.

Truth shines in the heart: Spiritual practices only make the heart receptive to this light. This is only a matter of spiritual/intellectual reorientation of the soul. In other words, spiritual practices in fact reorient the Intellect toward its origin, away from duality and toward singularity: The only way to Theosis is Katharsis.  

What is Death?

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If death of a loved one is felt as a finite loss for those left behind it is seen as an infinite gain for the departed. His death is in truth your death, the death of multiplicity and the rebirth into an eternal unity. What is apparently perceived as a loss of a loved one is our loss of his/her glance, the look in their eyes, a look that turns away from you and toward God. If the body is lost, the glance is never lost as it is only turned inwardly and reabsorbed into its immutable source in the Disinterested Onlooker, the Witness.

Thus, a man, insofar as he is identified with his consciousness, never really dies but only looks away, hither and thither, appearing as this or that. In his death and looking away you disappear from his sight more than he disappears from yours: If your thoughts of the them are with you, nothing of you is with them because their apparent death is their waking up to your absolute nothingness. For the departed soul it is you who are departed from his eternal glance, now turned away from you and looking into the void where he always dwells.

The glance is the indestructible center of the soul. If I tell you this it is because I have lived so many lives and died so many times, and all this in a timeless instant, the source of all duration but itself not a duration. This worldly life is for the soul like being buried alive, and the apparent worldly death is but the resurrection of the soul, an emerging from the mass-grave that this world is. You people who roam around as if living and willing are indeed the dead and nothing more.

Your worldly death is in truth the death of the world and worldliness of your glance. Death is the withdrawal of your celestial gaze from its captivation with this world-mirage. This worldly life of yours is but a passing deja vu. You think that when you wake up from a dream your dream characters mourn your departure!? No; no one lost anything, for you only left behind, and below, that which never was.

Your worldly death, being the death of the world, is the death of death, hence an eternal birth and breakthrough into the other side of Darkness. When I die in the world I immediately realize that there has been no world to begin with, no life; how could there be any death?! Thus, my life in the world is a living amongst the dead. What you perceive as life is death, and what you perceive as death is birth, an awakening to the nothingness of the world and creaturely existence. Ontological death, i.e. liberation from suffocating existence, is a waking up to the supra-ontological life in the permanent actuality of the Self, a Self that is infinitely like void as is infinitely unlike it. This you shall See for yourself.