I am God….
well...not me personally (any more or less than we all are anyway) as will be painfully obvious even to the most comatose peruser of these wiseacrings, but I was recently asked by a reader what I thought of this statement as it has been traditionally attributed to Mansur al-Hallaj so, being in desperate need of material and as no-one wants to be a guest-blogger, I thought I’d post the answer here.
Is it indicative of a psychological imbalance or is it emblematic of a state that most people experience at some point or other in their lives?
My take is the following...I throw some brief points out for consideration then I’m off for Cava and oysters:
1) Did Hallaj really say this? There are several variants...."I am the Truth” and I see/know the truth have been posited.
The jury is out but in any event it seems clear that this was not the main reason for his arrest which owes more suspected Shi’i allegiance. It is however a moot point and the interesting aspect is that later thinkers did accept the statement on face-value but argued - successfully (ie to the point where it was accepted by traditional jurists) - that the statement was a product of mystical intoxication and as such could not be judge as being made by someone in full control of their faculties.
2) Personally I would subscribe to the above view - that in certain states one feels at one with a higher force and that this force might be described as God. I would say that this state can be achieved by certain spiritual exercises but also (though this may not be the same state) by certain drugs: Slavia Divinorum is particularly interesting in this regard in my experience but in either case I would argue that the state is not ‘real’ but illusory: ie, one is not and cannot be, God.
3) I also would say that mysticism in general and Sufism in particular does not in any way aim to ‘unite the aspirant with God’ or enable them to partake of God’s being. Imo, this is impossible.
Rather, the method is one of eradicating that which stands in the way of perception of God: the false self or nafs. As these do not really exist - as nothing really exists in the final analysis (except God) - then we do ourselves do not really exist. Sufism is the means of realizing this in actuality.
If the above is true (and I could be wrong obviously) then how can the non-existent perceive the existent? Or, put another way, how can Hallaj say “I am God” ? Hallaj is non-existent. God could say it THROUGH the form of Hallaj perhaps....certainly He is rumoured to have once said something similar through a burning bush but is that really what we are talking about in this case?
4) Following on from the point above I would argue that there are mystical states where one loses one’s reason however I do not believe Hallaj’s case was one of them.
Rather, I think that certain realized people - teachers, for want of a better term though I am learning to view this term with extreme distaste - say specific things with a view to their being considered deeply by a specific audience, perhaps even one generations after their time.
This is the category into which I suspect Hallaj’s saying might be placed - alongside Bayazid’s earlier near-identical utterances and Jesus’s famous “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life”.
In a way they are Legominisms in Gurdjieff’s phrase or ‘teaching phrases’ in Shah’s sense. Meant to be pondered for deeper understanding....they are also invitations to literalism if one is so inclined.
One sees in them a reflection of what one believes based on what one IS at the time - this can be used for change or for justification or for more or less anything. They are magic: you get what you put in - but you also get exactly what you want to take out.
