Hi,
I have perhaps rekindled this discussion. A friend (University of Adelaide) and I have conducted an empirical statistical study ("I am the Truth” and “I am God”: Mystical or Psychopathological Declarations?) in which we gave about 800 Australian university students the 22-item Mystical Experience Scale. Item number 22 is “I have seriously declared ‘I am God’.” Believe it or not, 1 out of 14, or 6% of students, claim to have seriously declared this. (We think the incidence of THINKING this in one’s lifetime will be much higher, but that most people, for fear of the obvious, suppress this thought.) This is a rather high incidence of a phenomenon. Furthermore, for some reason (thoughts would be useful here), males were 4.12 times more likely to have declared “I am God” than females; this difference is statistically significant (p
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I had typed a whole lot more than is above, clicked “Go for it”, but it cut the vast majority of my comments out. Is there any way to increase the space for the Replies?

Skip

An excellent explanation of Hallaj saying Anal Haqq, or I am the Truth, which is a one of the names for God.  The Sufis know that a temporal being cannot comprehend the infinite, except...with God’s help.  This is actually the last step on the path.  There are tales of Junayd chastizing Hallaj for revealing a secret in his intoxicated (with God) state. Junayd was of the opinion that a state of sobriety was preferable exactly because of this reason. 

Did he really mean “I am with God” or “God has favored me” and it came out this way. Only God knows. 

As to the students being 4.12 times more likely to be male, adolescent males often think they are the center of the universe, and come to the remarkable conclusion that every generation comes to; The whole of creation is inside me.  It takes a while before they realize how wrong, and how right, they are.

Ya Haqq!

Merry Christmas to one and all.

The word Gurdjieff used was legomonism meaning a way of preserving objective truth for the “future” from the past. Usually associated with a work of art or a building which by its very construction would have an objective effect on the observer. It is reported that in the construction of Beelzebub he read out chapters to groups of people to observe the effects it would have on them.

A teaching story on the other hand might be more like a Zen Kaon giving one an inkling of something which they can then go on to understand. More like a road map of truth.

If one reads the life stories of Hallaj and Bayazid al Bastami one can only realise how far we are from living lives like theirs, to even begin to have an understanding of what they experienced or said.

Incidentally as someone interested in etymologies can anyone tell me how this word was derived. My first thought was that it might consist of the two words legend and monism.

Tarquin, your logic is excellent - up to a certain point. You say: “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.” Which would seem to be an accurate summary of exactly what the Sufis do say.

But then you go on to say: “If the above is true (and I could be wrong obviously) then how can the non-existent perceive the existent?”

Of course the non-existent cannot perceive the existent - because it is non-existent. But the existent can perceive the existent, and this is precisely the point of the ‘eradication’ of the false self - to reveal the True Self, which cannot (as you faultlessly argue, in the manner of Ibn al-’Arabi) be other than God.

This is the explanation of Hallaj’s “I am the Truth”, as well as of Bayazid Bistami’s “There is no God but Me” and Jesus’ “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. These statements don’t imply that the individual is identical to the totality of God (as Christians claim for Jesus), only that “that which speaks in man”, the “I am”, partakes of Divinity. (As Philo of Alexandria, contemporary of Jesus, said: “The perfect man is God (theos) but not The God (o theos).”

The realisation of the True Self is the realisation of God - unlimited Being - witnessing and acting upon ‘His’ own creation through us - a limited part of that creation. Or, to look at it another way, it is the realisation of our ‘private face’ (al wajh al khass, as Ibn al-’Arabi described it) in God.

The ‘falseness’ of the false self is not the falseness of the feeling of ‘I am’, but the false identification of this feeling with a separate identity - with thisbody, with this mind. We don’t look into the depths, towards the origin of this feeling (just as we don’t look into the origin of our thoughts), only outwards towards the things that we attach it to. In this sense, therefore, ‘The Way’ can be seen more as a re-orientation rather than a ‘death’ or ‘destruction’ of the self.

But all this is a highly theological - and rather archaic - way of talking about something that is only meaningful as experience. It’s interesting to me, from Skip Daniel’s message, that so many people have an intimation of this experience - even though the kind of formal religious education they will have received surrounds this kind of feeling with prohibitions, guilt and anxiety. (I guess more men than women because women still feel social pressures to conform and to diminish themselves).

And it’s funny to note the way in which talking about this subject echoes the way people talked about Sex in the 1950s - finding that, almost for the first time, it is possible to say things that previous generations had deeply suppressed and self-censored. And finding (a few) others who feel the same way.

http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/morris4.html

There is an extraordinarily deep article here about purification , including the need to be purified from states that many people would consider to be deeply spiritual. It may be of some interest if you have not read it.

Best Wishes

The answer to the primary school catechism question: “Why did God make you?” began: “God made me to know him”; and although Alan Watt’s piece “What to tell children about God” (see: http://seekeraftertruth.com/?p=65) is pitched at kids, the idea is also profound. How can God come to be known by anything “other” than Him when everything IS Him? Watts says that God has created something from Himself that, in a sense, has “forgotten” what it is. Thus begins His adventure of playing “hide and seek” with Himself in the “playground” of the created universe, where things evolve, progressively coming to “remember” more and more.

In a possible reworking of the “Elephant in the dark” story, one can imagine the Creator standing in front of his creations (everything from atoms to man), each one represented by a mirror (could be of many different shapes and sizes, more or less “polished”, and so on). Each has a self-conception based on what it reflects. It’s possible that even an “evil” person is reflecting God, but in a severely distorted way. Free Will seems to be the “Prime Directive”, though He offers help and inspiration which can be accepted or rejected. The idea of the Trinity is in there somewhere – God as having three aspects: creator (Father), created (Son), and inspiring (Holy Ghost).

Man’s consciousness of self seems utterly convinced it’s unique, separate (i.e. identifies with something false, as James indicates). How can Hallaj say he is God and still remain Hallaj? Isn’t Hallaj just saying that God is speaking through him? But what uttered the phrase may have been that consciousness in the entity we refer to as “Hallaj” which had lost the conviction of separation, instead perceiving its identity with God, which is totality, unity.

Wasn’t it Rumi who said that once he was mineral, then vegetable, then animal, then human, and had a hundred worlds still to pass through? If Rumi, like Hallaj, was someone at the next stage of consciousness, would he be telling us that to exist in a true sense we would first have to cease existing in a true sense? How can something that doesn’t exist continue to evolve? The state of God-awareness that Hallaj had, though far in advance of ours, quite possibly wasn’t the ultimate, but just the first step in God-realisation, one that happens to be accessible by human beings. Perhaps the mirror continues to evolve, grow, reflect a progressively clearer and clearer image of what it is.

Isn’t real love, even of the common-or-garden variety, widely recognised as a willing loss of separation from other? Who is knocking on the door to my chamber? Is it you, or is it actually me? Only I can enter, not you. We are not separate, but united. Yet still, each of us has a self – one that reflects the same Reality - and when we actually perceive that, all the conceptions that separate us dissolve.

There is unity in everything, right back to the simplest of creations, and in a way, perhaps we recapitulate everything that has preceded us. It took four billion years to produce the first human being – a feat that can now be achieved in nine months starting with atomic and molecular building blocks. That’s a staggering amount of progress!

Material aspects are just forms, not essence, but might nonetheless reflect essence. Material forms might evolve in parallel with essential Ideas, if we use Platonic terminology. Maybe, even, in accord with Sheldrake’s notion of cosmic habits, what refines essence is effort on the material plane, and once an essential Idea is generated, it makes it more easy for other selves to evolve to its level. So the mere existence of people like Hallaj makes it more possible for others to retrace their path. By striving in the right direction, whatever level one might happen to be at, is one is helping not only oneself, but everything else?

John

John, nicely made points. Picking up on a couple, Rumi says of Hallaj’s utterance: ‘People imagine that it is a presumptive claim, whereas it is really a presumptive claim to say “I am the slave of God”; and “I am God” is an expression of great humility. The man who says “I am the slave of God” affirms two existences, his own and God’s, but he that says “I am God” has made himself non-existent and has given himself up and says “I am God”, that is, “I am naught, He is all; there is no being but God’s.” This is the extreme of humility and self-abasement.’ (From the ‘Hallaj’ Wikipedia entry). And Ibn al-Arabi famously says in the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq ‘When my Beloved appears, With what eye do I see Him? With His eye, not with mine, For none sees Him except Himself.’

In the chapter on the Prophet Hud in the Fusus al-Hikam Ibn al-Arabi discusses the idea that everything conforms to its ‘Lord’ (the Divine Name that governs it) and thus that something that conforms to one name (such as Al-Mudhill, ‘The Misleader’ can be true to its nature whilst being in opposition to another name (for instance, in this case, Al-Hadi, ‘The Guide’, He then goes on to say (and I can’t remember whether it is in this chapter or the one on the Prophet Shua’ib) that this is why the ‘gnostic’ - the knower of God - does not interfere in anyone else’s religions.

The ‘God’ that ‘Arabi is describing, then, is the Being that is manifested in an unlimited variety of attributes, many of which must by necessity be contradictory - just as you illustrate with your image of the elephant being reflected in different kinds of mirrors. In contrast to the ‘God’ of the believer - a limited conception, which ‘Arabi calls ‘The God created in the faiths’ (making the subtle point that, although this is manufactured by the mind, it too cannot point to anything other than the One Being) - the ‘God’ of the gnostic embraces all possibilities and contradictions.

One of the radical implications of this position is that, if ‘man’ (meaning here the completed human being, ‘al insan al kamil’ is created in the image of God, he or she must also embrace all of these contradictory attributes. Thus this person may do one thing at one time, and something quite different some other time, may say something to one person and apparently contradict it with something said to another, may display kindness at one moment, severity the next, humour in one situation, anger in another. What is important is not the consistency (or apparent inconsistency) of his or her behaviour but where it comes from. In the completed individual, the behaviour comes from their not-otherness. For the rest of us, on the other hand, it serves mostly to assert, protect and perpetuate our sense of separation.

Hi, James. Picking up in turn on a few of your points:

I nearly included what Rumi had to say about Hallaj, but wanted to
keep things as short as I could. You also quote al-Arabi: ‘When my
Beloved appears, With what eye do I see Him? With His eye, not with
mine, For none sees Him except Himself.’

I was once at my friend’s house when his very young son referred to
a carrot as “a red potato”. There was an instant appreciation between my friend and I of how the child saw the world, and in that one small thing, we shared the same eye. He had his consciousness, and I mine, but in the matter of the red potato, we were as one. We discover such moments in certain lines of poetry no less than in prosaic events. Why do they seem quite so delicious? Why do we spend much of our lives seeking them, if often in mistaken ways?

Perhaps they are lesser reflections of an omnipresent desire to come to know God. Words - all those nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs - take on a certain life of their own and can obscure meaning. Had God created us “from the start” with a complete knowledge of Him, then what need of fallible communications? Just like the forms that have preceded us, these are manifestations; not manifestations of God, I opine, so much as creations of the human mind, whence all seeming contradictions originate. I am not sure that one needs to be a perfected individual to have at least a little ability see past such apparent contradictions.

Is there “good” and “evil”, or do we creations merely interpret Reality in more or less distorted ways which He doesn’t in any sense blame us for, but see as a natural consequence our being individuals created to “come to know” Him? How often is man “culpably evil”? How often does he willingly do what he believes with all his heart is mistaken?

God berated Moses for criticising the simple shepherd’s way of worshipping Him. What motivated the shepherd equally motivated Moses - albeit with his more sophisticated understanding - and both satisfied God. The idea of punishment and reward seems in these terms quite ridiculous, just one more mistaken human creation which nonetheless serves, at a certain stage of our development, in helping us evolve beyond its limitations. From externally imposed morality conducive to our being “saved”, maybe we can progress to a morality arising from an internal sense of what is conducive to making progress.

John

John, I agree with you that words - and word-bound thinking - is at the root of the problem. It is interesting in this respect that when we speak about ‘contradictions’ or ‘paradoxes’, we are describing exactly this limitation. Contradictions are contra diction, “against speech” (or we could say in this case “against formulation in speech") and paradox comes from the Greek para, ‘beyond’, doxa ‘thinking’ or “belief’. So, in describing the nature of God as contradictory or paradoxical - since it must, by definition, include all contradictions - we are really just echoing ‘the Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao’ (Lao Tzu) or ‘reason is powerless in the expression of Love’ (Rumi).

It’s funny how the development of what we call, in the Western world, ‘intelligence’ shows its limitations in its insistence that everything can be brought down to the level of words. I’ve been following a discussion on an American list about whether a Sufi must be a Muslim - a seemingly ‘evergreen’ debate that has, apparently, been going on for years. What it comes down to, however, is the need to be able to define these words - to create a category that says ‘a Sufi is this and this but not that and the other’ or ‘a Muslim is someone who conforms to what I think a Muslim should be’. In trying to create some purchase and ownership over the word, the meaning slips - elusively - through the grasp of the mind.

‘God’ is another of these words, of course.  Which is why the real heresy of ‘Ana al-Haqq’ was not from Hallaj - who was using words merely to point to an experience that he knew was beyond words - but from his opponents, who presumed to determine what ‘God’ could or could not be, based not on any experience but on their pedantic (verbal, intellectual) interpretations of a book. To limit God to ‘this’ - and thus exclude the possibility of His being ‘that’ - is, as Ibn al-Arabi wouid have argued, one of the worst of sins: ‘shirk’, or polytheism.

John writes:
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The idea of punishment and reward seems in these terms quite ridiculous, just one more mistaken human creation which nonetheless serves, at a certain stage of our development, in helping us evolve beyond its limitations. From externally imposed morality conducive to our being “saved”, maybe we can progress to a morality arising from an internal sense of what is conducive to making progress.

Eric, “to be the author of the law you obey”, as Arthur Deikman says at the end of The Wrong Way Home. Yes, exactly.

However this “morality arising from an internal sense of what is conducive to making progress” cannot come from the bundle of conditionings, traumas and desires we call our ‘self’. Nor can it come from the mind: that organ is incompetent for this purpose. And therein lies the difficulty of this problem. We seem to be poised at a point where many are happy to reject “externally imposed morality” but few are willing to make the sacrifices, or endure the suffering, necessary to reveal this internal sense.

Ironically what is not undertaken willingly may have to be imposed through circumstances. If enough people don’t accept the discipline that alone can show the self - or selves - to be a no-thing, and the mind to be of little use in this area, we may have to go through events and experiences that will bring humanity to this point. A rule in the Way is the more you resist the impacts, the longer and more painful you will make the process. And I fear, in this respect, that it will go hard on our societies to bring this internal sense to birth.

It may well be that many will look back, wistfully, to an era where morality was externally imposed - where there was comfort and certainty in the authority of institutions like the Church or the State. The territory between the destruction of conditioned beliefs, and beginning to develop one’s own inner light, is barren and bleak. For the individual traveller, it is a desolate passage. But for humanity as a whole? No doubt it will be replete with dissention and strife, recklessness and reaction.