"In Hinduism the faculty of transcendent vision (in the Heart, which is the connection between the soul and the Spirit) is represented in statues and other forms of sacred art by a third eye placed in the middle of the forehead. In Christianity and Islam it is named the "Eye of the Heart," which in Arabic, the sacred language of Islam, means also "the Fountain of the Heart, "and it is at this fountain that the soul drinks the "Elixir of Life:" In Christianity also the two symbolisms are combined, for there is a tradition that when Lucifer fell from Heaven his frontal eye dropped to earth in the form of an emerald, which was then carved into the cup of the Holy Grail."

This transcendent vision is represented symbolically in the ghazal and in other sacred art as the marriage of the Moon and the Sun. "The sun is universally the symbol of the Spirit, and sunlight symbolizes direct knowledge of spiritual truths, whereas the moon represents all that is human and in particular the mind; mental knowledge being, like moonlight, indirect and reflected," continues Lings. Thus the idea of "illumination," and the two symbols easily representing consciousness and unconsciousness.

So one can see that the "Perfect Man" or one in whom these principles are balanced, lives, in fact, in a "third dimension," for he is as a man fully awake in the midst of his own dream. It is for this reason that Jungian symbol psychology, which is primarily designed to analyze symbolic dreams as manifestations of the unconscious, can be applied so successfully to sacred art, because all such art is "pointing " to a fundamentally unitive state, shared literally by all men. Thus the efficacy of a symbol will be in direct relation to the depth from which that symbol is produced. The significance of the ghazal is that the symbolism was deliberately introduced by "Master poets," those who possessed this vision in varying degrees. The reason the symbol has so many levels of meaning is because it exists on each level, or perhaps one would say "resonated" on each level, much as a pure fundamental contains a (theoretically) infinite number of harmonics. Any three-dimensional object could have infinite mobility in a two-dimensional world, and the possession of the consciousness of the unconscious (which is not the same thing as the awareness of the unconscious) makes these poets virtually "three-dimensional."

Chuang-tzu, the Chinese master, said "the sage in repose is the mirror of the universe." The Sufi poets in the ghazal say that the heart is the mirror of the universe, the "world-revealing cup of Jamshed," the mythical Great King. Thus to the Perfected Man, who has merged his individuality into that of the Cosmos, all things become symbols in the "Divine Dream" and so the likeness of God is seen in flowers, trees, stones, even in human lives; the vision of unity in frag­mentation. In this cosmic "vision", all the veils have been lifted; in conquering himself, the microcosm, man has merged with the macrocosm, and in their unity is the correspondence between ishq-i-mejazi and ishq-i-haqiqi, the "full dimension" of love: the one external, the other "transcendently within" -- the symbolic union of the sun and moon. So it is that he is able to breathe life into the voluptuousness of the images of the Beloved. The "tress," the "mole," the "lips," all spring from this direct vision, and resonate on as many levels as love resonates on. And love, it has been observed, manifests even in the law of gravitation between planets!

THE RELEVANCE OF THE GHAZAL TODAY

In viewing and analyzing modern "popular art," one notices a tendency on