Divine Unity in Islamic Mysticism

Behind the doctrines of Sufism–the inner teaching of Islam–is a rather sophisticated metaphysic. Central to esoteric as well as exoteric Islam is the Unity of God or Unity of Being.

The condition in which humans now live is the world of multiplicity–the manifold reflections of the emanation of God. The phenomenal world is a “mirror of nothingness” which reflects the self-disclosure of Allah.

In Islamic mysticism the term Allah has similarities to the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Allah not only refers to the personal God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad; it also signifies the Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, the impersonal and unmanifest Godhead. This primordial God of the highest order exists as Beyond-Being. God as Ultimate Reality is beyond all attributes and can only be realized in the unitive state of the mystic.

The first determination of this Beyond-Being is Being itself, God as Supreme Person and Creator. This is God with attributes: the All-Merciful and All-Compassionate. The second determination is quite similar to the Word in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, for it is the Logos. Just as John says that all things were created through the Word, it is the Logos in Islamic mysticism that originates the Universal Existence, which consists of all worlds in their multiplicity.

It is essential to understand that everything from the Ultimate Reality to the Universal Existence is contained within the Unity of Being. This is not by virtue of a pantheism but by way of the mirror of nothingness in which existents are a reflection of the Divine Unity. This posits that all existent entities are non-being in that they do not exist in themselves. The only reality is God. So the Koran says that everywhere you turn their is the Face of God. Contemplation on God’s reflection leads to contemplation of the Source.

The goal of the Sufi is to journey home from multiplicity to Unity. The saint is a person who, having achieved Unity, returns to the world of multiplicity, abiding there and serving humanity.

It can be said that humans have a higher self and a lower self. Put another way, she has a face turned inward and a face turned outward. The face turned inward looks into the Face of God as reflected in the mirror of nothingness. This reflection is her true Self, the Divine Unity. This is the only sense in which the human being has a real existence.

The lower self is the face turned outward towards the world. The lower self is also called the ego. The ego represents the fallen state of humankind. The illusion of the ego is an existence apart from God. Although the lower self has a relative existence, it has no ultimate reality and as such is non-being.

The negative characteristics of the lower self–i.e. lust, greed, and anger–are veils that cause us to forget our primordial existence in the Unity of Being. One of the goals of the Sufi is the removal of each veil and its replacement with a corresponding positive quality–i.e. compassion, generosity, and patience.

The journey of the Sufi, then, involves one of the remembrance of who we were in our primordial existence. We still contain that existence beneath the veils in its potentiality here and now and in the multiplicity of our world. Our souls contain the imprint of the memory that, before our creation, God said, “Am I not your Lord?” to which the response was, “We witness it.”

The remembrance can be engendered in the practice of recollection–the repetition and undivided concentration on the statement of faith, “There is no God but God,” and in the repetition of the Names of God. Through the process of self-annihilation we experience our nothingness before God, whereby we witness to the truth of the Divine Unity, “There is nothing but God.”

God bless.

Why Evangelize?

I am a Christian. I believe in the Christian doctrine and profess the Apostle’s Creed. Yet after studying religion over a span of thirty years, I have reached the inescapable conclusion that God expresses himself or reveals his nature in various ways and at various times in every religion. If anyone has spent the time that I have investigating religion, I would be honestly amazed if they did not reach the same conclusion.

But how does one account for the different doctrines in the world religions, each within its own culture? One answer is that human beings will filter their revelations or the movings of the Spirit in terms which they can understand. A culture which does not believe in the killing of animals, for example, is not going to be able to understand a system of blood sacrifice as payment for sin. The Koran says in so many words that God reveals himself in an intelligible way to every culture.

But how do you account for the claim of Christianity that Jesus is the only way to the Father? Well, he is, and it is the same Spirit that is flowing through the world religions, the same grace, in different forms. The Upanishads say that God is the source of all the religions, all scriptures, and all the creeds. The Golden Rule occurs in one way or another in each religion.

Jesus makes this statement about the Spirit in John 3:8:

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. (NIV)

The Spirit comes from wherever it wants to come from and its destination is wherever it chooses.

Here is a mystery that we do not understand, as it does not fit into the rules of logic constructed by the mind. We say that a thing has to be either A or B exclusively, not both A and B or, worse yet, not  sometimes A and sometimes B. If our doctrine is true, the others must be false. If our doctrine is true for us, our doctrine is therefore true for all people everywhere and everywhen.

The mystery is that, while my Christian doctrine is true in every way, it is also true that the Spirit may operate independently of doctrine, because doctrine is made for man, not for God.

The church fathers discovered truth outside the Christian religion very early, even calling Aristotle and Plato Christians before Christianity, and adopting many of their ideas into Christian theology. St. Paul borrowed from pagan religion the verse, “For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) St. Ambrose said that all truth comes from the Holy Spirit regardless of what religion or philosophy it comes from. The famous early American preacher Jonathan Edwards, who served as a missionary to American Indians, concluded that God reveals himself in every culture, and salvation is not restricted to the Christian religion. To paraphrase Hans Kung, “Why don’t we just admit it?”

The inevitable question is: Then why evangelize?

Part of the answer is that I don’t think we should try to convert those people who are devout Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc. if they are at peace in their faith. Mahatma Gandhi used to tell Christian missionaries, “Instead of trying to make us into Christians, help us to become better Hindus.”

The other part of the answer is that there is a need–and it is urgent–to bring the message of the Gospel to those people who don’t have any faith at all, who are caught up in the word and searching in all the wrong places for peace of mind.

God bless.