Previous Page
Table Of Contents
Next Page

 

 

 

second" is contemplated, there is no room for love for God or longing for God. The soul has the intellectual conviction that it is God. But in order to experience that state actually, it goes through intense concentration or meditation on the thought, "I am not the body, I am not the mind; I am neither this nor that; I am God." The soul then experiences through meditation what it has assumed itself to be. But this mode of experiencing God is not only hard but dry.

 

The Path is more realistic and joyous, when there is ample play of love and devotion for God, which postulates temporary and apparent separateness from God and longing to unite with Him. Such provisional and apparent separateness from God is affirmed by the soul in the two Sufi conceptions, "Hama az Oost," which means Everything is from God and "Hama Doost,” which means Everything is for the Beloved God. In both these conceptions, the soul realizes that its separateness from God is only temporary and apparent and it seeks to restore this lost unity with God, through intense love which consumes all duality. The only difference between these two states is that whereas the soul, in the state of "Hama Doost,” rests content with the Will of God, as the Beloved, in the state of "Hama az Oost,” the soul longs for nothing but union with God.

 

Since the soul, which is in bondage, can be redeemed only through Divine Love, even Perfect Masters, who attain complete unity with God and experience Him as the only reality, often apparently step into the domain of duality and talk the language of love, worship and service of God in his Unmanifest Being as well as in all the numberless forms, through which He manifests Himself.

 

Love Divine, as sung by Hindu saints like Tukaram, as taught by Christian Mystics like St. Francis, as preached by Zoroastrian saints like Azer Kaivan, and as made immortal by Sufi poets like Hafiz, harbors no thought of the self at all. It consumes all wants and frailties, which nourish the bondage and illusion of duality. Ultimately, it unites the soul with God, thus bringing to the soul True Self-knowledge, Abiding Happiness, Unassailable Peace, Unbounded Understanding and Unlimited Power. Be ye inheritors of this Life Eternal, which comes to those who seek!

 

3

 

Previous Page
Table Of Contents
Next Page