The Dabistán, or School of manners, Volume 1 (of 3): translated from the original Persian, with notes and illustrations
Religion
The Dabistán, or School of manners, Volume 1 (of 3): translated from the original Persian, with notes and illustrations
Iran -- Religion; Religions
In short, God is all, and all is God. This appeared not more
incomprehensible, but less complicated than any other system to the
_pantheistical Súfis_.
4. After excessive efforts to transcend the limits of his nature, the
philosophic inquirer re-enters into himself, and coerces his futile
attempts by the precept: “Know thyself.” Having, as it were, recovered
himself, and feeling that every thing proceeds from the depth of his
mind, he sees himself in every thing; heaven and earth are his own;
“he demands from himself whatever he wishes;” for he is every thing;
he finds the God whom he sought in himself, in his own heart, and
says, “Who knows himself, knows God.” This is religious psychology,
the creed of the _egotist class of Súfis_.
It is a fact which appears incredible, but is too well attested for
the admission of a doubt, that Súfis believed themselves to be gods,
and adhered to their belief, amid torments, until death.[188] This
psychological fact may be explained by considering that, according to
Súfism, God is nothing else but an idea of the highest perfection;
_he_, says our author, _from whose sight both worlds vanished, who in
the steps of right faith arrived at the rank of perfect purity, from
truth to truth, became God_; that is, he became one with his own idea
of perfection, which cannot be disputed to him; his divinity is an
illusion, but nothing else to him is the world; it is all and nothing,
dependent upon his own creation and annihilation.
V. Transacting as it were directly with the Divine Being, the Súfis
throw off the shackles of the positive religion; pious rebels, they
neither fast nor make pilgrimages to the temple of Mecca, nay, they
forget their prayers; for with God there is no other but the soundless
language of the heart. From excess of religion they have no religion
at all. Thus is confirmed the trite saying that “extremes meet.” “_The
perfection of a man’s state_,” says Jami, “_and the utmost degree to
which saints may attain, is to be without an attribute, and without a
mark_.” The most fervent zeal sinks into the coldest indifference
about religion. The author of the Dabistán declares positively,[189]
that “whoever says that the Muselmans are above the Christians, does
not know the true Being.” But the whole creed of an _emancipated_
(this is the name I give to one belonging to the fifth order of Súfis)
uniting in himself the egotist, pantheistic, and mystical Súfi will be
found in the following verses of Jelal-eddin Rúmi, before mentioned:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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