Abdul Mutaal

A boy not quite nine years of age met a girl a year younger than he and fell in love instantly. The boy was Dante Alighieri[1]. The girl was Beatrice. Twenty years later Dante wrote as his inner being still cried out recalling that first sight of Beatrice, “Now is your bliss made manifest” “Now has a God stronger than I come to rule over me.”

Beatrice did not even speak to Dante for another nine years, and by then she had married another man. But that moment of impact, that crash of absolute beauty, surging through the human senses into mind and intellect converted the incident into amazement and wonder and stayed with Dante for life. It first prompted him to write his Vita Nuova (Life Renewed) and later his supreme poem of the vision of God The Divine Comedy.

In his “Divine Comedy” passing through hell and purgatory, where he is guided by different people, Dante is led to the edge of Paradise by Virgil[2], the Roman poet “who represents the best that humans can achieve on their own in wisdom, art, and poetry.” But Virgil can guide him no further. For the further journey he is replaced by Beatrice; for she had been to Dante the first manifestation of the grace of God made visible in her beauty representing all “God-bearers” – those who carry the Divine into our midst.

Dante knew and wrote that such a vision could not be put into words. But he nevertheless succeeded to open a brilliant glimpse at all those hints of love gathered within the Divine Essence.

The above account by John Bowker[3] about Dante’s encounter with the mystical aspect of reality illustrates the central underlying notion that runs through my paper. It shows that to truly understand mysticism we must have a keen appreciation of matters of the heart and a patient realization that these same matters of the heart do not easily lend themselves to logical and rational scrutiny. The limitations of rational scrutiny are no more evident than at the postmodern frontier of quantum physics. Therefore, to understand the true nature of mysticism we must acquaint ourselves with modern physics because the point of departure for any understanding of mysticism is our outlook about the nature of reality.

But first, as Socrates[4] once said, “if you want to debate with me describe your terms”. Let us begin with a definition of mysticism:

“In the stricter sense,” says Olaf Stapleton[5], “the word ‘mystical’ applies to a special kind of non-rational experience, in which, it is claimed, the individual attains some degree of illumination or insight into the essential and normally hidden nature of reality. This insight is reported to be not merely a kind of knowing; it is the supreme achievement of knowing-feeling-striving in one all-fulfilling act. The ‘knowing’ aspect of it is said to be not abstract, like intellectual knowing, but concrete, like sense-experience. In fact, in so far as it is knowledge, it is an immediate acquaintance with the hidden essence of a ‘reality’ which is said to lie behind all ordinary and illusory experience.”

As can be seen this definition excludes any connotation, which even touches on pseudo-mystic, superstitious, magical, or psychic phenomena or even on holiness and piety. True mysticism in its essence is a dimension of consciousness, seeking the truth behind the apparent, and experiencing the reality at its core. Reality as a phenomenon of material manifestation is experienced through our sensory apparatus; however, it is experienced in a relationship of “I and Thou” as a manifestation of love. The latter is the realm of the heart, the former the realm of the mind. In the realm of mind, the accepted tool to know the manifest reality is the scientific method; so let us briefly dwell on that.

According to the Gale Encyclopedia of Science, the scientific method postulates a model consistent with existing experimental observations, checks its predictions and adjusts or discards the model accordingly. The corner stone of the scientific method is the collection of observable and measurable data, which are collected through our senses. Commenting on the scientific method the philosopher George Berkeley[6] has observed that each person experiences only the signals of his or her five senses. An individual can infer that a natural world exists as the source of a person’s sensations, but he or she can never know the natural world directly.

The scientific method gave us the Newtonian picture of the mechanistic world and we lived in that world comfortably until Einstein’s theory of relativity[7] brought about a revolution in our understanding of time, space, matter and energy. Its e = mc² equation showed us equality or convertibility of matter into energy and vice versa; and its mathematical logic revealed the curvature of space and non-linearity of time. While these percepts were still hard to grasp for many and, as if it were not enough to wake us up from our slumber, there came the big bang of quantum physics. Until that time the accepted building block of the universe was the atom. But then came the new discoveries of particle physics’ forever increasing number of sub-atomic particles. Today more than 400 “sub-atomic” particles have been discovered and still the search for ultimate matter continues. All these particles behave so strangely that all the earlier theories of physics failed to describe their behavior. The quantum theory postulated a wave function, which describes quantum facts in terms of probability of existence called uncertainty principle of Heisenberg[8]. This has proved to be the only theory of physics that successfully describes the behavior of sub-atomic particles. At the same time it postulates that nothing is sure in this world - only probabilities exist and those probabilities depend upon how they are looked at. There is talk about quantum nothingness, randomness and inseparability. Let us listen to some of this talk so that we can feel our brains rattle.

According to Neils Bohr[9], one of the founders of modern physics, “the conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure, or not yet understood reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a new mathematics.” Von Neumann[10], the great mathematician, who developed the quantum theory into an elegant mathematical structure of Hilbert’s space of many dimensions[11], grappled with the conceptual difficulties of interpreting the quantum facts in ordinary language. Neumann concluded that to collapse the probability wave, something new must be added and that this something new cannot be a physical process since the entire physical world has already been postulated as only a wave of probability. Something outside physics, capable of turning fuzzy quantum probabilities into definite actualities has to enter into the equation. With reluctance, von Neumann concluded that the only known entity fit for this task was the consciousness.

We see that when science zooms into the heart of the matter it is touching the boundaries of mysticism. Ironically, the above assertion by Neumann that by itself the physical world is not fully real, but takes shape only as a result of the acts of numerous centers of consciousness parallels theologian George Berkeley’s assertion that nothing in this world is real unless it is being perceived by some mind. I cannot help but recall Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy”.[12]

From the times of antiquity it has been recognized by philosophers that there are two realms of human consciousness. One is the realm of knowledge, of mind, of reason and of cognition and the other is the realm of the heart, of love, of intuition. As the great synthesizer of philosophy Immanuel Kant[13] said, “Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” These two dimensions of being human viz., knowing and loving, are beautifully expressed by the great spiritual thinker Martin Buber[14] in terms of “I and It” and “I and Thou”. The world of I and It is the world of utility, of using, of means and ends. It is a world of measurement and of comparison. The world of I and Thou is the world of “encounter.” Here in a direct relationship we encounter the “Other”. The lines of relationships when extended intersect in the eternal “You.” Modern times are seeing the dusk of uncertainty of quantum physics descending over the world of I and It. However, the human spirit is not rendered handicapped by the inaccessibility of all dimensions of reality by our normal modes of consciousness. Human spirit transcends - and gets entangled in the direct embrace with the Reality, in a mystical “encounter”. In that encounter of love, one is taken to the cross and one, in a blink of an eye, to the end of seven heavens in the presence of Divine.

Echoing words of Evylin Underhill[15], “why, after all, take as our standard a material world whose existence is affirmed by nothing more trustworthy than the sense-impressions; the mystics have always declared their distrust in these channels of communications They have never been deceived by phenomena, nor by the careful logic of the industrious intellect. One after another, with extraordinary unanimity, they have rejected that appeal to the unreal world of appearance. In their grasp of experience are those spiritual messages, which are mediated by religion, by beauty, by pain and by love. More reasonable than the rationalists, they find in that very hunger for reality that there is something else, some final satisfaction, beyond the ceaseless stream of sensation, which besieges our consciousness.”

“In that thou has sought me, thou has already found me, “says the voice of Absolute Truth in their ears. This is the first doctrine of mysticism. Its next doctrine is that only in so far as the self is real can it hope to know the Reality: LIKE TO LIKE. Upon the propositions implicit in these two laws the whole claim and practice of the mystic life depends. And implicit in these two doctrines is the fundamental doctrine of life and of mysticism; the doctrine of love. “

To understand mysticism’s doctrine of love it is better to examine and ponder over the life and events of the great mystics than just exercising speculative dissertations. Therefore, before ending my paper, I would like to offer a brief version of Coleman Barks’s story of Jelaludin Rumi[16], best-known mystic of Persia from where he fled during raids of the Mongols and settled in Konya, Turkey.

“Rumi’s life seems to have been a fairly normal one for a religious scholar – teaching, meditating, helping the poor – until in the late fall of 1244 when he met a stranger who put a question to him. That stranger was the wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz. Shams has been praying for someone who could endure his company and a mystical voice has asked him what he will give in return. “My head”, he had said. So he was guided to Rumi.

The question Shams spoke made the learned professor faint. Shams had asked who was greater, Muhammad or Bestami, for Bestami had said, “How great is my glory,” whereas Muhammad had acknowledged in his prayer to God, “We do not know You as we should.”

Rumi heard the profundity out of which the question came and fell to the ground. He was finally able to answer that Muhammad was greater, because Bestami had taken one gulp of the divine and stopped there, whereas for Muhammad the way was always unfolding. Various versions of this encounter exist, but whatever the facts, Shams and Rumi became inseparable. This mystical connection caused difficulties in the community. Rumi’s students and family members felt neglected. Sensing trouble, Shams disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. …it was at this first disappearance that Rumi began the transformation into a mystical artist. “He turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whirling around, hour after hour.”

Word came that Shams was in Damascus. Rumi sent his son, to bring his Friend back to Konya. On return, again the long mystical conversation (sohbet) began, and again the jealousies grew.

On the night of December 5, 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. Most likely, he was murdered.

The mystery of the Friend’s absence pervaded Rumi’s world. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus. It was there that he realized

The annihilation (fana) in the Friend became complete. Rumi recited the poems Shams wrote. Rumi called the huge collection of his odes and quatrains The Works of Shams of Tabriz”.

We are infinitely humbled, both by the limits of science to know the nature of ultimate reality, and by the mystics’ great leap right into the heart of reality. The underlying message coming from the realm of scientific enquiry is a reflection back from reality itself, a kind of slap on our clever faces. On the other hand, the realm of mysticism invites us to contemplate. Only if we could contemplate enough with open minds and seeking hearts we will find ourselves in the embrace of the Infinite where all the separation melts away and where with a quantum leap of faith we will know that it is love, which is the ultimate reality.

The essence of mysticism as doctrine of love is most beautifully summed up in Prophet Mohammad’s saying (Hadith Qudsi) about God.

[1] Dante Alighieri, Italian poet, born c. May 21–June 20, 1265, Florence died Sept. 13/14, 1321, Ravenna

[2] Virgil Roman poet, best known for his national epic, the Aeneid (from c. 30 BC; unfinished at his death). born Oct. 15, 70, Andes, near Mantua died Sept. 21, 19 BC, Brundisium

[3] God: A Brief History by John Bowker.

[4] Socrates, Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern philosophy, born c. 470, Athens, died 399 BC, Athens

[5] Olaf Stapleton as referred in “Meditation” by by Naomi Ozaniec

[6] George Berkely, Irish philosopher and theologian, 1685 - 1753

[7] Albert Einstein, German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921; born March 14, 1879, Ulm, Württemberg, Germany
died April 18, 1955, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S

[8] Heisenberg Warner, German physicist and philosopher who discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices (1925). For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.,

[9] Neils Bohr, born Oct. 7, 1885, Copenhagen, Den. died Nov. 18, 1962, Copenhagen, Danish physicist who was the first to apply the quantum theory, which restricts the energy of a system to certain discrete values, to the problem of atomic and molecular structure. For this work he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.

[10] John von Neumann, born Dec. 3, 1903, Budapest, Hung. died Feb. 8, 1957, Washington, D.C., U.S. Hungarian-American mathematician who made important contributions in quantum physics, logic, meteorology, and computer science. His theory of games had a significant influence upon economics.

[11] Hilbert’s space of many dimensions.

[12] Hamlet, William Shakespeare, Act1, Scene 5, 167 -168

[13] Immanuel Kant born April 22, 1724, Königsberg, Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia] died February 12, 1804, Königsberg; German philosopher whose comprehensive and systematic work in the theory of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics greatly influenced all subsequent philosophy, especially the various schools of Kantianism and Idealism.

[14] Martin Buber born February 8, 1878, Vienna, died June 13, 1965, Jerusalem. German-Jewish religious philosopher, biblical translator and interpreter, and master of German prose style. Buber's philosophy was centred on the encounter, or dialogue, of man with other beings, particularly exemplified in the relation with other men but ultimately resting on and pointing to the relation with God.

[15] Evylin Underhill, Author of “Mysticism, A study in the nature and development of spiritual consciousness”

[16] Jelaludin Rumi born , c. September 30, 1207, Balkh, Ghurid empire [now in Afghanistan],died December 17, 1273 also called by the honorific Mawlana the greatest Sufi mystic and poet in the Persian language, famous for his lyrics and for his didactic epic Masnavi-ye Ma’nvi (“Spiritual Couplets”), which widely influenced Muslim mystical thought and literature