Nanda Kumara Gopala, Gopala, Gopala, Devaka Nanda Na Gopala, Gopala, Gopala, Nanda Kumara Na Gopala, Nanda Kumara [...] Gopala, Gopala, Gopala, Gopala, Gopala, Devakanandana Gopala. Nandakumara Gopala, Nandakumara Gopala. Nandakumara Gopala, Nandakumara Gopala. Gopala, Gopala, Devakanandana Gopala. Nanda Kumara Gopala Nanda Kumara Gopala Gopala Gopala

[01:06]

Ashivenu Adonai Eleichem Ashivenu Ashivenu Adonai Eleichem Vemashvore, Vemashvore, Kadesh, Kadesh, Yahweh, Ha-shi-be-nu Ha-shi-be-nu Ha-do-noi-eh-leh-chem Va-na

[02:46]

Now I shall sing the Muslim prayer to the Prophet. Ya Nabi, Salaam Alaikum Ya Nabi, Salaam Alaikum Ya Habib Salaam Alaikum Salaam

[04:08]

Dear fellow workers in the service of God and humanity. As a convener of a yearly congress of religions called the International Interreligious Congress, both in Paris and in London and once in New York and in Rome several times, I do value very greatly of the atmosphere, the conditions, the environment in which this Congress has been convened.

[05:10]

The serenity of the background in which we are meeting is conducive to not simply debate or an exchange of ideas, which remains sometimes rather superficial, but deeper communion in of our spiritual aspirations and also of our spiritual experiences. I only wish that we had more time to reach to a point where we could really start confronting one another with our, not at the mental level of course, but with our aspirations in a way that might be enriching to one another. It is quite natural of course that we should start by presenting our own way. And of course, everyone has to learn by understanding something of the way of thinking and a feeling of another.

[06:16]

But we do feel that we are longing to reach the stage when we are able really to exchange much more deeply our various aspirations I know that especially New Age people are tired of too much talking, and that is one of the reasons why the atmosphere, the conditions in which this Congress takes place, are so conducive to a higher form of communion. We are faced with a landfall in our time, or a landslide tidal wave of what one might call New Age consciousness, which brings about an invidious situation for many of the representatives of the world religions because they find themselves confronted with people who are quite prepared to practice methods of meditation or chants

[07:20]

appertaining to the various religions or esoteric schools and see no incongruity in making what one might call a potpourri, of course, of these different forms of meditation or worship. is this is maybe the first stage. One might call it syncretism, something like what happened in Rome, for example, or in Alexandria in the third century. It may be a first stage leading to a further stage where we can really get down to the basic problems or the basic, let's say, dichotomy in the various religions and try to understand if it is at all possible how one can reconcile what seems at present to be the irreconcilables. As I say, this cannot be done at a purely mental level, but by the sheer fact of, and by simply presenting dogmas, one, of course, does not get any further.

[08:27]

We are very polite in listening to each other's way of thinking and of feeling, but this is not good enough, of course. I very much appreciated what Professor Panikas said the other day and he said that, I think I understand him to have said that we should reach a stage where we can introduce a seed into our own tradition which might have an explosive effect in the sense that it may explode quite a number of dogmas or preconceived ideas and, let's say, fossilized rituals and so on. And this seed may possibly develop into something new, but within our own tradition. And this may possibly be a better way of going about it than to simply place different religions very superficially one next to the other without trying to see if there's any common measure between them. And therefore I think it is very important if we could understand the significance of the contribution of our particular religion to the symphony of religions.

[09:40]

And this symphony of religions seems to be growing between us. and seems to, if you don't mind my mixing metaphors, seems to follow hard upon sharing bread at the same table as we are doing. It brings about a communion of hearts which makes the understanding possibly easier. But because of this, I think the need at this stage in our conference for there to be a closer confrontation between the various religions represented here, I have agreed to step down in the question and answer period which was to follow upon this lecture so that we could constitute a panel of the representatives of the different world religions to consider in what way they might reach greater closeness or find a way of

[10:43]

of understanding on very basic problems. And therefore, if you don't mind, I will have to change the subject that we announced in my lecture, and I will present Sufism in the light of the dialogue between religions. At a camp which I organized in Chamonix in the high mountains in France shortly ago, I'll never forget a young man stood up and said, when you're talking about lifting your consciousness beyond all created things, in a sense of what is called in Hinduism paratparam, which means beyond the beyond, I follow what you are saying, I try to do it, and I'm not sure just how far I am able to succeed, but it does correspond with an experience, which makes sense to me.

[11:47]

But when you speak about God, then really I don't know what you mean. Now this is a very typical statement by someone whom one might call a cross-section of the public. And we are dealing continually with people in our time who have a great sense of authenticity, of reality. The New Age man is very realistic and is in search of experiencing things himself. We are in the do-it-yourself age. We want to experience things ourselves rather than pay lip service to ideas. And consequently I feel that we must try to understand in terms of experience what we are talking about when we refer to God instead of simply calling the name of God in vain as Jesus said one should not do.

[12:51]

My experience in meditation seems indeed to have drawn me into two directions which seemed at first to be contradictory until I reached a stage when it seemed that I was starting to bridge the gap between the two. The first one seems to be a withdrawal from all created things. of consciousness, one may experience the way in which consciousness is drawn through the senses into a focal centre, and the notion of I as a centre that knows. And one may also experience the fact of the suffering of something in us, possibly the soul, being enclosed in this narrow center and longing not to be conditioned by circumstances and therefore a longing to withdraw from the conditioning of the experience from without, in order possibly to experience higher realms, higher dimensions of reality, which cannot be experienced so long as one is subjected to the impact of the experiences from outside.

[14:14]

When the sun is in the sky, you can't see the stars. And this is possibly one of the reasons why one withdraws in meditation in order to be able to free oneself from the conditioning of, let's say, the more blatant expressions of life so that one may experience the higher dimensions of reality. This seems to be very much the kind of experience that one makes We know that the secret of doing this is to surround oneself with a zone of silence, as Buddha said, and it is an unemotional attitude of what Professor Paniker called unattachment rather than detachment, which enables consciousness to free itself from its centering in an individual center and consequently begin to sense wider dimensions of reality. The main problem here seems to be to be able to lift consciousness beyond the mental level.

[15:25]

And this can best be done, I think, by simply considering the mind as a wonderful computer that is able to meet problems and take care of problems far better than we can do in our consciousness, and consequently let the mind take over and let the thoughts gravitate in the let's say, the twilight of consciousness instead of turning one's attention towards the thoughts. It's a matter of abandoning, in a certain sense, mind consciousness and abandoning body consciousness, leaving them behind, and immediately consciousness, whatever it is, we don't have time to go into it, will rise and one will have a sense of having awakened from a state of illusion or maya into a deeper understanding but of a different nature altogether because that which one experiences seems to be the archetypes behind all living things or the laws or the relationships between things rather than the actual concrete things themselves.

[16:33]

And it seems, as a matter of fact, like as though physical reality were like a fossilized, let's say, a symphony of light that had become frozen into a crystal. No doubt one can use breath and many other techniques which can't enter into it at this stage in order to reach this stage, which I think really requires a kind of stripping. It's been called by the ancient church fathers via negativa, and it might lead to a kind of desolation or even a dark night of the soul, a sense of loneliness. The Sufis use this word, the loneliness of the divine unity. And I'll try and give an example of this. There's a wonderful saying by Sufi Abdul Qadir Gilani of Baghdad who says this whole

[17:37]

World is of course a veil, this is the general way in which Sufis consider the world as a veil covering the divine face. And he says, for those who cannot, God speaking, for those who cannot stand the intensity of my light, I have created the world of Maya, let's say the sensory world, as a veil. for those who cannot stand the light of my intelligence, and for those who cannot stand the solitude of my oneness, I have created the world of light as a veil. The solitude of my oneness, do we know the meaning of solitude? What it means to reach a point where multiplicity has disappeared altogether and there's just the notion of pure existence. Paratparam, beyond the beyond. This is of course Samadhi as described in Hinduism.

[18:40]

it's just like being catapulted out of existence and remembering having been a human being or rather having experienced things as all people do and that this remains committed to one's memory and being in a stage in which one has the notion of a continuity beyond change that is one isn't the same person and yet one remembers having been another person but one is conscious of another, possibly another level of one's being which one did not know, one was not aware of before. Abu Yazid Bastami, a Sufi, says, I sloughed myself of myself as a snake of its skin. And at a certain stage in his life he longed for this experience of transcendence or the absolute and when he knocked at the door of God in his absolute form, the answer came, you are not strong enough to stand the solitude of my oneness.

[19:57]

And the answer was, that is exactly what I wish. We, of course, we do aspire towards the ultimate. And everyone is vouchsafed as much experience of reality as he is able to contain, as he is able to countenance. And if one faces a richness of reality greater than one is able to to encompass, one will be shattered by it. In fact, the Sufis do refer to this shattering of the human being confronted with the awe-inspiring nature of reality. And therefore, this veil is a protection from experiencing that which we are not yet ready to experience. It's just like a fuse in an electric circuit. Bastami goes on to say, through his heinous, I looked upon my heinous and it vanished.

[21:10]

These are technical terms, his heinous, that means God in the sense of being the absolute. The expression of the church fathers here is teos agnostos, the unknown God, or the ensign of the Kabbalah. seeing things from that vantage point, the sense of I-ness disappears. In other words, the focal center of individual consciousness disappears. Now this seems to be one type of experience. On the other hand, I'm talking about my own personal experience, I seem to have an experience which is diametrically opposite or seems diametrically opposite. It seems to be the experience of the divine presence as a visitor, as a guest. And here again amongst the Sufis we have Al-Halaj, who was crucified as a matter of fact, and whose words are very typical of that type of experience when he says, for example,

[22:19]

Here I am, O my secret, O my trust. Here I am, O my aim, O my meaning. How could I have called? Is it thou? If thou hadst not already whispered to me, it is me. O end and aim of my destiny, O my language, O my stammering. This seems to be an experience of, let's say, relationship with the universe that has been reduced to the sheer awareness of a presence. We experience the universe, our relationship with the universe, at different levels. We may possibly simply experience the objective world, or we may experience meaning, or we may discover, for example, attributes that seem to qualities that seem to be, let's say, like the archetypes behind all living things. But at a certain stage, experience is reduced to an experience of the encounter with a presence.

[23:30]

which does not have any qualities, or it may have qualities, but at that stage you do not experience the qualities. It is like, and therefore it can only be described as the experience of lovers, art thou there? That's the only thing that is important, the presence. And this in many ways seems to be rather typical of the kind of experience that is described by Christian mystics And, as you see, it is to be found very strongly amongst the Sufis. Al-Halaj was crucified for reasons which are difficult to describe. He said, an-al-haq, that in me which says I, is God. And, well, that was a fair enough reason to be crucified. Actually, Master Eckhart said exactly the same thing. There is part of the soul, or he said the soul as a matter of fact, is increatus et increabile, uncreated and not subject to creation.

[24:35]

And as you know he was placed on the index for some time. I don't think he's on the index anymore now. Now, when Al-Halaj was hanging on the cross, his supposedly best friend Shibli said to him, had we not forbidden you to welcome any guest? He was crucified for having revealed the secret of his encounter with God. Now obviously in these two types of experience we recognize two types of religion. I'm generalizing it. I know that any attempt in comparative religion is bound to fail because each religion contains within it the aspects, or all these aspects. But we like to, when we are sometimes confronted with the problem of knowing when the Christians speak about

[25:39]

God, or Christ as God, in a personal way, is it the same thing as what the Hindus mean when they speak about Atman or the Self? Now, it seems to me that To understand the dichotomy between these two approaches to the same truth, of course, to the same reality, I think we must understand that humanity... First of all, I think we should consider the planet Earth as a being, and we should consider humanity as a whole. And it seems that humanity passes through at least two main phases in its unfoldment. Let us put it this way. Before one is able to fulfill one's purpose as a human being, one has to first, in all freedom, one has to first dismantle the process that has brought one into incarnation, to the state of incarnation.

[26:51]

That is, disincarnate, find out the laws which involve one into incarnation, and then having done so, one may reverse the laws in order to free oneself from those threads which involve one into becoming, into the process of becoming. And it seems that, if I may use Buddhism as an example of this endeavor, I think that it might help us to understand this particular step, first step in the forward march of human thought. When consciousness, as Buddha says himself, when consciousness is carried beyond the point where it is an individual consciousness, in the fourth jhāna of the Buddhists, then consciousness becomes all-embracing, cosmic, and begins to apprehend, begins to cognize

[27:59]

First of all, previous incarnations and then all the different angelic planes. In other words, consciousness, having become cosmic, is able to encompass the total reality behind all things. Buddha describes it in a very, in a breathtaking way, I would say, during his illumination. he says, what he says of his illumination was this, he saw worlds in becoming and worlds being shattered and new worlds being formed again, a kind of cosmic vision of reality at a breathtaking vantage point. So it seems that this type of endeavour, this search for the param, beyond the beyond, will lead one into this panoramic consciousness, but at this level one does not see the details, one sees, let us say, the laws, and that's why Buddhism is very much what is called Panna, transcendental knowledge, the knowledge of the laws behind the mechanism of the world, mechanism of creation and so on.

[29:18]

We have something rather similar to this amongst the Sufis. Junaid, a Baghdadi of Baghdad, refers to an experience of what he calls returning to the state in which you were before you became. It seems like a reversal in time, as though one had to unravel the whole reel in order to return to an original condition. which was at the origin, but the word used in the Qur'an to signify this azaliyat does not mean before. Well, it is often translated by pre-eternity, before time. I think it would be better to say it is beyond time. And so instead of thinking of a reversal in the past, it's better to think about rising beyond the level at which things happen in time and experiencing the eternity of one's being.

[30:26]

That's experiencing oneself as an amalgamate of qualities which have always existed in the mind of God, as the Sufis say. You existed in the mind of God or in the loins of Adam, they say. And everything, and Micey Eckhart says this too, of course, you have become what you always were. This seems to me to be an experience of causality, of the plane of causality, the causal plane, from whence all things manifest. It is possibly what Shankaracharya's Vedanta means by prajna, the bija, the seeds behind all created things, the experience of the seed instead of the plant, the plant unfolds in time, the seed is in some sense permanent, in some sense only relatively because even in the seed there is such a thing as mutation.

[31:29]

This is something that one does experience in meditation. One can reach a point when one is able to look upon one's whole life as a film, and if one does not involve oneself emotionally in the events of one's life, and one is able to look at them with detachment, one is able to see, let's say, the threads behind the puppet show, and eventually one is able to sense the reality of one's being beyond, let's say, the samsaric process, one's eternal being. This is probably what is meant by Samadhi, at least the first form of Samadhi, which is Sarvitarka Samadhi. Now it's quite clear to me that in doing this, or in order to do this, one has to destroy the center of individual consciousness. In order to experience things from universal consciousness, let's say, the center has been exploded.

[32:38]

It's a wonderful feeling of being no more as an individual. It's like being free of oneself, of the pressure of the self, which has a kind of tyranny about it. This all seems to lead to the so-called desired state of moksha, liberation. Liberation from what? From avidya, from ignorance, right? From what? From the need of being involved in incarnation. Now the question is, why should one seek for liberation? Well, I suppose one reaches a point when one wonders why one should keep on making the same mistakes and returning into the same state of unawareness and ignorance and therefore there is a longing to at least for higher awareness or higher consciousness but I'm not sure whether we long to be free from the joy of experiencing incarnation and so

[33:57]

This is a question that may arise in the minds of quite a number of people. What is the purpose of incarnation? I mean, if the world is the way it is, it seems that something is gained by it. I wonder why we should try and retire from it when it seems to have a purpose in itself. And this is where I believe Christianity comes in, of course. I think that the action in Christianity is on incarnation. I remember this wonderful poem whose author, I forget now, he was an American, who said, we ask for nothing less than the impossible possibility that we would like to see infinity in a finite fact and eternity in a temporal act. This seems to me to be perhaps the best and clearest definition of what is meant by Jesus as Christ as the incorporation in time and space and therefore in the flesh of something that is beyond time and space and which is of course divine.

[35:18]

And so it seems to me that the purpose of all of this is incarnation. instead of wishing to free oneself from incarnation but it was necessary first to know how to free oneself from the conditioning of circumstances so that one might incarnate freely and this is also present in Buddhism when Buddha says once you are liberated you can decide to come back if you so wish but you're not compelled to do so The Al-Halaj again, the Sufi who was crucified, referring to Christ said, glory to the one, that means God of course, who appears as one who eats and drinks. In other words, well, it says what it says. And in Islam, as you probably know, I don't know whether you all do know it, the Christ is called Ruh Allah, which means the Spirit of God.

[36:27]

And in one of the verses of the Koran it is said, to all prophets God grants a certain rank. To Jesus he gives pride of place because he passed the test of sincerity, which is, let's say, the truth. Now it seems to me that together with incarnation the other aspect of Christianity that is absolutely fundamental is resurrection. Now what exactly do we mean by resurrection? We have in Sufism, and this originated in Zoroastrianism, theories about resurrection. What we mean by resurrection is that that which has been gained by the convergence of all orders of reality into the fabric of the universe. That which has been gained, therefore, by incarnation, that means incarnation of each one of us, is never lost.

[37:37]

That's what resurrection means. It is simply transposed or transfigured or transmuted to use an expression used by the alchemist. It continues in another form. We can speak about a continuity and change as the Buddhists say. There is a continuation of, for example, a very beautiful person dies, and you may feel, now, isn't it incredible that someone so wonderful and so beautiful should have died, should no more be there? And one might say, yes, of course, but this person continues to live. Yes, as what? As spirit. Well, but how about that beautiful face? Resurrection means that the form itself is transfigured. Not just one doesn't simply live as spirit, but the actual, the quintessence of one's being has been drawn out of contingency, and whereas the contingency is bound to be scattered, that which is essential continues to live.

[38:54]

When talking about resurrection, The words of Al-Halaj come again to my mind. Al-Halaj was crucified, as I said a moment ago. And when he heard the verdict, he said, oh God, how is it possible that having wished for the creation of my body, thou should now wish that it should be tortured, crucified, burnt, made into smoke blown to the four winds and then he paused a few minutes and he said as a incense promise of my resurrection and in those words he said everything promise of my resurrection death as a promise of resurrection I remember this passage of

[39:59]

Père de Chardin, when he was in China and he was unable to celebrate Mass, although he was supposed to celebrate Mass, because there was not the wherewithal of... there was no altar, there was no bread, there was not the wherewithal to celebrate Mass. And then he realized that the altar is in the stars, and that the real Hostia The real host is the fabric of the universe that is continually being transmuted into the body of the Cosmic Christ. And that the Agnus Dei, the Lamb that is being sacrificed, is our very sufferings that are continually being transformed into joy, or we are the operators of the transfiguration, wherever we are able to transform our sufferings into joy. And therefore we are continually participating in the high mass celebrated in heaven.

[41:06]

If only we know how to accept a death, as Halaj said, as a gift, just as we've accepted life, because it bears within it the promise of resurrection. As you know, we are never so strong as when we are broken. And we cannot possibly be in a state of jubilation if we have any personal reasons to rejoice. Some of you may know that the Ideas about resurrection were originated or found originally in Zoroastrianism. And Zoroastrianism speaks about the formation of the body of resurrection.

[42:11]

And one of the prayers that is to be found in the Zend-Evesta is, O God, make us the operators of the transfiguration of the world. Because through personal experience, through experience through the senses, you are transforming something which is physical into something spiritual. Alchemists call this the transformation of matter into spirit and spirit into matter. Now it seems to me that the Hermetists had a very deep understanding of this process in the Ars Regia, the royal art of transformation, based on two principles, two cardinal principles, one being salve and the other coagulate, to dissolve and to coagulate, to dissolve the personality so that this seems to be the first phase or let's say the first half of the process to

[43:24]

draw the quintessence of our being from everything that is contingent, until one reaches the essence of the essence of the essence, which always corresponds to an experience of what is called the immaculate state. As a midway in the Ars Ratiat, or let's say it is the end of the minor mysteries, corresponds to returning to the stage in which we were in the beginning, Buddhism. Nirvana. A state of nothingness. But the best symbols for this kind of experience in meditation are snow, or the iceberg, the clarity of the crystal. A state of being of complete emptiness when you are in a state of readiness. Al-Halad speaks about giving up my personal attributes so that God may renew me by the descent of the Holy Spirit, as a matter of fact.

[44:34]

He speaks about the experience of the operation of the Holy Spirit in me, bringing the divine attributes down only insofar as I am ready to receive them in my state of readiness. It seems to be the first phase or the first half of the Asrajya. The dissolution of the personality can be a very painful process. It's a kind of forced schizophrenia, such as was described by the Dark Knight of the Soul of Saint John of the Cross. and the Sufis also, one Sufi particularly, Abu Yazid Bastami, seems to have experienced this sense of utter desolation and deprivation and negation and state of being nothing, being nothing and unable to

[45:37]

cling upon any thought for a support or an emotion, being in a state of complete abandonment, because this was the way to free oneself utterly from all that wasn't God, so that God alone may abide in one. And in the second stage, of course, there is A consolidation, a sense of becoming adamant like gold is adamant. This is called coagulate. This, of course, is when one is conscious of the convergence of all orders of reality into one's being, as Teilhard de Chardin speaks about the convergence of threads coming from all parts of the universe, when at first one could not have foreseen that they had intended to converge in the formation of that unique thing which is the person of each one of us, what is the work of human works, he said, if it is not the formation in each one of us of a unique centre in which the whole universe is manifested in a particular way.

[46:46]

The planet Earth, one might consider planet Earth as a plant that draws the Earth into itself, transforming the Earth into a plant, draws The water into itself draws the air into itself, transforming the air into a plant, draws the light of the sun into itself, transforming the sun into a plant, draws the light of the stars into itself, transforming the stars into a plant, and more so draws the heavenly planes into itself and transforms the heavenly planes into a plant. And in a sense we could say that maybe when there were There was no vegetation on the surface of the earth, it was just a ball of minerals in a state of incandescence. It is possible that within this buoyant state of incandescence, all our minds, all the richness of our beings were present, but it seems that for all this richness to unfold, it had to be fertilized by that which was brought

[47:56]

down into the fabric of the planet from other planes of being. And it seems that the human being is like the plant, an antenna that has the ability to draw the heavens into the flesh, making it a physical reality. And this is what is meant in the last phase of the asrajah by the ability of man to incorporate the spirit, to make it a reality in his being. This is probably the meaning of theosis in the orthodox tradition of the Eastern churches. Now, you will notice that in order to do this, it is necessary to reconstruct the centre of the individual I, which in Hinduism we had destroyed and Buddhism we had destroyed.

[48:59]

And here we are reconstructing it again and it seems that we have to destroy it first in order to rebuild it again in what one might call a second birth. Of course Christianity lays a lot of importance upon the ego, the center of the individual. And we know that Steiner's remarks, for example, the founder of Anthroposophy in Germany, on the danger of Eastern thought, because he said that it tends to destroy the notion of the ego or the self, which seems to be very important. And Teilhard de Chardin makes this more clear when he says that for Point Omega to be formed at the end of time, it is necessary for the various individual consciousnesses to be there, otherwise you cannot have an integration of centers if there are no centers to be integrated. However, Martin Buber has pointed out that consciousness

[50:11]

has to be able to flow into, let's say one center must be able to flow into another center in what he calls the I-Thou relationship, which is what we call in meditation contemplation, which is discovering in another yourself, discovering yourself in another yourself who is more yourself than yourself. And this can only be done if you experience a feeling of communion with him. You don't treat him as an it, as other than yourself. And Professor Sholem has shown, of course, the danger of what in Judaism, of the exoteric aspect of Judaism, of an exaggerated sense of otherness, as he calls it. If you are strongly centered in your sense of individuality, God seems to be other. If you are able to flow out of your individuality into all created beings, then God seems to be yourself.

[51:20]

And so we are continually balanced between these two horns of the dilemma. And in a sense, possibly, if we can integrate these two things, then of course we have reached what we are trying to reach at this conference, I believe. Of course, it is not true to say that Hindu thought is entirely oriented towards the impersonal God, because Ishvara is a very personal sense of God, of course. I think, so to say it very briefly, I think that what characterizes the Sufis is, first of all, the ecstasy of a being who is conscious of God, not as another, but as being the eyes through which he sees, as my Sekhat says, these eyes through which you look, you were hoping to see God, are the eyes through which God sees you.

[52:27]

The Sufis or Ibn Arabi says it even more, let's say fully, when he says, these eyes through which I wanted to see God, are the eyes through which God sees himself. And I am simply, therefore, the instrument of his sight and I'm also the object that he has become in order to discover himself. So he, God, is both the subject and the object. And when you experience yourself as being the instrument of God's vision of himself, It gives you a sense of ecstasy. You feel that you are participating in an act of glorification, whereby God glorifies himself from the beginning of time. I know that if one looks upon this problem intellectually, one would imagine that, as many of the early Sufis did say,

[53:39]

that God wished to know himself and we were the instruments through which he knew himself. But Darwish, Darwish means a man who's lost in the contemplation of God, called Abdul Jabir Nifari in Egypt said, it wasn't in order to know himself that God created you. It was out of love for you. that he consented to reach out of his state of aloneness. And so, ultimately for the Sufis, the whole process of creation is an act whereby God released the attributes within his being from the state of unknowing in an act of love And by so doing, he made us the beloved, he made us the objects of his love, and we respond to this act by making him the object of our love.

[54:49]

But it is his love for us that enables us to love him and make him the object of our love. And so for the Sufis, of course, the experience of life is an experience of communion with the divine beloved. Anything that might be experienced, like for example physical objects, are the ayat, are simply the signs in which he appears. But he is beyond these signs as this presence that I talked to you about. And therefore Ibn Arabi says, he is the one who is, who in every loved one manifests the view of each lover. And love is considered to be creative in the sense that it creates something that only exists latently in the beloved. And our love for one another is creative of one another because by loving God in one another, we are able to make him conscious of that which we love in him and consequently make it a reality.

[56:01]

And therefore love is the greatest, most creative thing there is in the universe. This is one of the reasons why Ibn Arabi said, God is the created creator and the creating creature. In the beginning, God contemplated himself and in so doing projected this image of himself which became endowed with life and man responds to this by always seeking for the archetype whose image he finds in himself and or he discovers himself as the image of that archetype so let me close with the words of first of all some words of Rumi this is love to fly heavenward to rend every instant a hundred veils, the first moment to renounce life, and the last step to fare without feet.

[57:08]

The man of God is a king neath a dervish robe. The man of God is a treasure in a ruin." And these words of my father, who was the founder of the Sufi Order in the West, make God a reality and he will make you the truth. Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection. It is not self-realization that leads towards God-realization, it is God-realization that leads towards self-realization. This attitude leads to a state of consciousness in which one is continually aware of God in all things, in all beings, as a living reality. And this, as I say, brings about a state of ecstasy. Wherever I roam, I meet Thee. Wherever I reach, I find Thee. Wherever I look, I see Thy glorious vision. Whatever I touch, I touch Thy loving hand.

[58:10]

Whomsoever I see, I see Thee in his soul. Whoever giveth to me, I taketh from Thee. To whomsoever I give, I give to Thee. Whoever comes to me, it is Thou who comest. On whomsoever I call, I call upon Thee. Thank you. God bless you. Yeah. Alleluia, [...] yeah yeah yeah Still the picture's good for me.

[59:33]

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. Christ is risen, [...] Super Mario to be the greatest hero of all time. Mario to be the greatest hero of all time. yeah yeah yeah

[60:28]

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