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Do you know
how beautiful you are?
I think not, my dear.
Again, reading this, the one who hides inside me responds, and there are tears in my eyes.
Let me explore this with you, reader, and let’s dare to take this as personally as Hafiz is obviously inviting all of us to do. Imagine for a moment that everything about you, just as you are, were already perfect, or if the word perfect has confusing connotations for you, just as you need to be; that nothing about you needs changing, correcting, or getting on top of.
Yet when I let myself touch down into what I believe to be my sense of self, now, this trying to hold something together that is doomed to fail goes deeper than merely the writing of this article. It is something I am always doing; inside that restlessness there is a sense of holding together a self that is like a castle built on thin ice. The more solid I try to make this castle, the more anxiously I try to hold together this sense of self, and the more likely it is to disappear with a splash through a crack in the ice. I am asking you, reader, to sense within your body-awareness for that feeling of holding on, of tension, of effort to maintain who you are, or who you take yourself to be. I am suggesting that what we hold on to, or what we hide behind, is a many-layered constructed self that we are almost constantly, in all our day-to-day, moment-to-moment relating, trying to defend. A mental construct, a self-image that is based on our confusing and contradictory life-experience. It’s an idea in the mind that we experience as a contraction, on the physical level as a tension in the body. This idea has become linked to other ideas, such as nation, religion, race, that likewise exist in the mind. It is in defending this identity-idea that we are sometimes willing to commit atrocious acts of violence.
It is this, I believe, which both Rumi and Hafiz and other mystical poets are referring to where they speak of hiding, holding on, and falling. What they are implicitly suggesting is that the sense of self we not only have created but are also constantly in the process of re-creating, is something we hold on to for dear life because we’ve lost contact with the direct experience of Being, not of being something or somebody, but of being as a palpable presence – a presence that is alive and real. We have all come to depend on an image, a concept, as a substitute for that direct knowing, we should talk about this problem!
Says Hafiz:
God was so full of Wine last night,
So full of Wine,
That He let a great secret slip.
He said:
There is no man or woman on this earth
Who needs a pardon from Me –
For there is really no such thing,
No such thing,
As Sin!
The good news, so to speak, is that we are always already this Presence, that which does not come and go. We were never anything but that – the beautiful Creature who hides inside us. Then, again, how do we “get there”? How can we know this, and really know it? This we might call the bad news. As Rumi says in the poem about sky-circles and falling: the road there is devastation.
We fall. I would call it the Fall into Grace. In a society where the dominant religion is Christianity, we’ve all been brought up to believe that we have fallen from a state of Grace into a state of sin. And, all of our spiritual efforts are directed towards a climb upward, up out of that state of sin towards a self that is worthy of the ascent into Heaven. The illusory, mental-construct self we so anxiously maintain to get us through the days and years we cling to as the vehicle that will get us “there”. Along comes a forgotten poet-mystic who tells us tells us that we can fall into Grace, instead of straining towards a peak we all secretly believe to be unattainable but for a very few. And would it be any fun to be one of them?
Pulling out the chair
from under your mind,
and watching you fall upon God,
what else is there
for Hafiz to do
that is any fun in this world?
Hafiz, Rumi, and a handful of others have already fallen. He himself has walked the road that is devastation, the devastation of what was never anything but an image, a mirage, a substitute. With the voice of the Beloved, or as he is sometimes called, the Tongue of the Invisible, he cajoles us with fruit and grain, he sings to us, to get us to come out of our hidey-hole. But still, we will not come out. We will not fall; we have already invested too much in the upward ascent, in the job of perfecting the ramshackle vehicle that is supposed to transport us to the dizzying heights where we imagine the Divine doth dwell. Why should we? What reasons do we have to trust that there is a God to fall upon? Isn’t it all just words? Isn’t all this mystical poetry just totally irrelevant to the business of keeping ourselves from drowning?
Our religion, and in their different ways all of the religions that have degenerated into institutes, is a religion of disempowerment. We are sinners, fallen from Grace, and therefore we must submit to authorities – parents, teachers, priests and politicians – that give us all these conflicting messages as to how we must change in order to stand the remotest chance of climbing back into Grace. Aren’t all those authorities, whoever they are, ultimately representatives of an imaginary Authority that exist outside us, a God we can never know directly? Perhaps, against this fundamentally disempowering view of ourselves as condemned to a life of strife to gain this Divine Approval, there is a gentle antidote.
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