“Oh man you have been toiling to your Lord. It is a painful toil, but you shall meet Him.” (Surah Al -Inshiqaq 84:6). —Qur’an says,
THE heart can be diseased, numbed or illuminated.
A heart can be illuminated by faith or understanding or diseased because of disbelief, hypocrisy and moral corruption. It can also be numbed by an unwillingness to accept the truth leading to spiritual blindness. How do we know which state is our heart. For numbed heart, everything is an object to be manipulated and exploited. As the heart awakens, the capacity for love and relationship increases and we begin to live in a living universe. Rivers and mountains are animated and all the existence appears as a theatre of divine manifestation reflecting the attributes of God and singing His praises in one voice. Fakhruddin Iraqi says, “In those days before a trace of the two worlds, when no ‘other’ yet imprinted on the Tablet of Existence, I, the Beloved and love, lived together in the corner of an uninhabited cell.”
The Sufis cherish the time, when they were one with God. Ibn ‘Arabi the great Sufi master had this prayer, “Oh Lord nourish me not with love, but with the desire and longing for love.” With this cry in the heart that is, what it means to enter the tavern of ruin, with the passion of the soul, blood and tears. It is incredibly sweet, as much as it is incredibly painful, the most intoxicating pain, you can ever experience. It does not stay until the whole journey perhaps for the first few years and then it goes into the background. May be because you cannot live with it forever, perhaps because it takes you away from the world, which is not its purpose.
Rumi says, “Don’t look for water, be thirsty.” You do not have to look for God on this path; you just have to long for the divine love. Nothing is more potent than this, the secret, which the Sufis keep hidden even though it has been shouted at the market place by al-Hallaj and he had to die for it. This path is visible only to few and not everybody, as Allah opens the locks on people’s heart. Rumi says, “Not every fragrance brings the scent of a rose. Not every rock splits open gushing water. Not every palm gives sweet dates. Not every heart becomes a lover. Not every eye can see God.” Quran tells us, you cannot look for God,but you are given this experience of longing. You don’t have to search for God. How can a frog search an ocean?
If you think nothing matters when you are in love with another human being, wait until you are in love with God. Wait until you cry and cry and then it pulls you to God and pulls you to truth. It is a magnet even if you try to turn away you cannot. This is what is put in the heart of wayfarer, the burning passionate, crazy desire for beloved, the cry of the Reed from the Reed bed, when it says, “No one understands my pain, my sufferings. No one looks into my eyes, no one sees.” You have been left in this world, which is not your home. This is homesickness of the soul longing to go back. Abu Said said, “His absence is like a knife which cuts your throat, let no one witness the blood strains on your coat. Weep, but in weeping let no listener hear, burn but in burning, no smoke appear.”
The pain gives way to transformation. Pain is severe and awesome, but the pain softens. This is the process by which, “the locks on the hearts open up” (Surah Muhammad 47:24). With this unlocking amazing things happen. “Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us. We taste only sacredness.”–Rumi
That is the Sufi secret. The longing is the secret side of love. You wake up to the incredible pain that soul is separate from God, not a metaphysical concept, but something in your own heart. That is why Sufis say,” Keep away from the lane of love. Do not come near. Do not do it. A bit of bliss, a bit of divine intoxication, that is easy, it is given away like candies to the children in the marketplace, but love and longing is for grownups. It means undertake that journey through the stages of the path, the journey from separation back to union, the classical Sufi path, “Give me the pain of love and I will pay any price you ask.”
“The souls once they came into this world, made a promise not to forget that the world belongs to God, but then mired in the crisis of the world, they forgot. There are some souls however, who have been promised; ‘I will not let you forget.’ “In this life, there is a time to come home and we will make this journey together you and I.” It is His promise that the Beloved will not forget us. Sufis call it the fragrance of the Beloved. It does not go away and as the weeks turn into months and months into years, something lifts inside the heart and you are back home with your Beloved.
All your life you suffered the pain of separation, by longing, the mad desire for your Beloved and now your heart opens like the bud of the rose and you realize you were always with God, sitting at His feet, in His glow of presence. You thought you were alone, separated, abandoned as if something was missing in your life, but in the end it is a different experience, you were always with God enveloped in divine mercy and compassion. You had the human experience of longing, desire and crying and then you had the divine experience that says you were always with me. You know everything perishes, except that one Love, one Being and you are part of it for the rest of your life.“ —To be continued.
—The writer is author of six books including “Islamic Spirituality and Mysticism, the Path and destination’ & ‘The Philosophy of Rumi and its relevance in the Present Times.
