Sufism is a taste
Contents
Sufism belongs to one of the three great Abrahamic traditions, Islam, and like each of these traditions it starts from an act of faith. But, belonging to that tradition, it is also and essentially a path of knowledge, of inner transformation.
This transformation is made possible by an inner orientation, which consists in having no other aim than to be conformed to the reality within oneself.
This inner orientation begins in thought, before progressively becoming a state of being, a reality lived spontaneously and naturally. At the same time, this orientation remains insufficient for attaining a real, living awareness of the divine presence. It is not the act of tilling and sowing the earth, say the Sufis, that makes the rain fall.
It is simply a matter of preparing oneself to receive it. Presence is therefore never the consequence of any technique, but that of a grace and a divine gift. In meditation, one encounters a living presence by which one finds oneself at once carried beyond oneself, beyond one’s usual limits. It is in this sense that we speak of inner rapture. The moment of presence is also a moment of deep awareness, of knowledge; but a knowledge by which we understand with our whole being, directly, intuitively, beyond the abstract process of reason.
The divine presence
The divine presence can manifest itself as an intense spiritual sensation, through the revelation of spiritual meanings, or again as inner illumination.
In reality, these elements, which we separate in order to be able to speak of them, often constitute diverse aspects of one and the same experience. It is this experience that manifests itself notably in the ecstatic movements of the Sufis, which are called presence, plenitude, spiritual intoxication, or inner rapture.
The movement of the body is only a reflection, a natural and spontaneous consequence of that “movement” of the soul in which it transforms itself by rising towards its divine principle. For the spiritual influx felt through the invocations of the divine names is experienced as a reality which, although not material, is a tangible, concrete and living reality.
The veils of the ego
At the start, we necessarily find ourselves within the limits of what the Sufis call the veils of the self or ego, which are made up of the whole of our mental representations. But as our consciousness grows clearer, and our mind withdraws from its involvement in the world of the senses, under the effect of concentration on the dhikr, the invocation of and call to the remembrance of God, these veils dissipate through a bursting forth of lights. These lights are sporadic at first; they are compared to sudden, ephemeral flashes of lightning in our inner night.
But afterwards, a certain state of inner illumination becomes for us a real and lasting state of consciousness, before itself becoming a veil and a limitation which we perceive as such under the pressure of our spiritual energy, driven by an inner necessity to surpass that limit.
Beauty and Majesty
The lifting of the veils reveals God to us under two essential aspects: Beauty and Majesty. The divine names or qualities (the dhikr one practises) are themselves divided into attributes of Beauty and attributes of Majesty.
For example, the attribute of the Merciful is an attribute of Beauty, while the attribute of the Almighty is an attribute of Majesty. When in meditation the divine presence reveals itself under the aspects of Majesty, it gives rise in us to a feeling of reverential awe, or of our nothingness before the vertigo of divine infinity. Under this aspect, God reveals Himself to us in His absolute transcendence. When on the contrary He reveals Himself under the aspect of Beauty, it produces in us a dilation, a joy and an intense love. The divine quality of Beauty is then perceived as the perfect essence of all things.
In poetry and song, it is often symbolised by a female figure: Layla, Maya… The experience of love and beauty discovered within oneself in inner contemplation is an essential knowledge of the qualities of the divine being, which will necessarily shed light back on your meditation of the world.
At the same time, the apparent opposition between the attributes of Beauty and those of Majesty creates in the meditator’s heart that liberating perplexity through which the spirit rises, beyond apparent duality, towards the essential unity which is that of the divine being.
The master’s role
Only an authentic master can, through his teaching, which is only very secondarily of a verbal order, bring to birth in the disciple that spiritual energy which leads him to detach himself from all his inner realisations, which he then perceives as so many veils or idols separating him from the divine reality. The spiritual master is one who has passed through the different degrees of being, or worlds, finally to arrive at the supreme opening which is knowledge of the divine reality. In meditation, self-knowledge is a look towards oneself from within that rapture, that surpassing of the usual limits of our ego which divine love arouses. Looking at ourselves from within, so to speak, we become aware of the faults of our ego, which live only on occult remnants hidden from ordinary perception.
It is also by virtue of this knowledge of self through God that the disciple’s soul acquires the qualities needed to advance on the path leading to the divine reality. For this inner look is not only the one that unveils, but also the one that transforms.
Thus humility, for example, is the result of this inner perception, and not of a mental or ethical stance. Inner detachment, likewise, is only possible because the heart finds in the contemplation of the attributes of divine Beauty a delight infinitely superior to the world and what it contains.
Delight in the world comes in its turn from this inner perception which transforms our gaze, and not from the world as perceived in the ordinary way. On this path of knowledge, the Sufis have developed an extremely precise typology of the different states or degrees of the soul on its inner journey towards the divine reality.
They speak of them as so many tastes, in reference to the transforming experience of taste. At the end of the path, love and knowledge meet and become one, for as a hadith (a saying of the Prophet) puts it: “He who knows himself knows his Lord.”
Faouzi Skali
