On Love: In the Muslim Tradition

The Self at Peace

The Self at Peace In the preceding reflections, six doors were knocked on for the sake of finding an answer to the question of love.1 Whenever the path toward one of them led to the right, whether it was open or remained closed, the ‘‘here and now’’ of the traveling self lay between that orientation and what remained to the left. It was the same when the direction toward that door or what lay behind it led straight: the ‘‘here and now’’ of the self remained between that and what was left behind. But two paths and two doors remained impossible—the one leading vertically upward and the one leading steeply down. And the ‘‘here and now’’ of the human self is revealed as clearly divided in that impossibility that determines it more than any one of the paths on the surface of the earth. It is the same in potential and impossibility. And, since it is not manifested in potential, what remains is impossibility. By conquering that, one would be transformed into the other. The potential would, really, become the way it would seem if it were drawn out of the higher, if the visible were simply the revelation of the invisible. Through the confirmation of the signs in himself and in the horizons, a man would open the door of heaven. And with that his dividedness would be resolved. And that dividedness is in the ‘‘here and now’’ of his self. It is between darkness, whose fullness is nothingness, and light, whose fullness is the treasury of all things. 152 / On Love Darkness is always beneath light. The seventy thousand veils of darkness and light on God’s Face correspond to a different expression, the world of darkness and the world of light. Only with light does the relationship of the two remain the manifestation of the One. Without light the worlds are nothing. Everything is created with it and returns to it. The reason for creation is knowledge, which reaches its perfection in the worlds. The worlds as a whole make manifest the names of the Creator, and man does the same, for in himself he encompasses all phenomena: The Reality wanted to see the essences of His Most Beautiful Names or, to put it another way, to see His own Essence, in an all-inclusive object encompassing the whole (divine) Command , which, qualified by existence, would reveal to Him His own mystery. For the seeing of a thing, itself, by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror; for it appears to itself in a form that is invested by the location of the vision by that which would only appear to it given the existence of the location and its (the location’s) self-disclosure to it.2 If all the worlds are seventy thousand veils of light and darkness or, put differently, light and dark, the first corresponds to the Self, which rules, and the second to the territory of that rule. The hiddenness of the first is made manifest in the visibility of the second. So it is in the human self. It is divided between its extremes in darkness and light, evil and good. Both those directions belong to it, and they are in tension. The tendency downward, toward darkness or evil, is the presence of the self that leads to evil. But no state is without Reality or light. And that is the cause of the lack of serenity of the self in evil. In the span of that divergence the self that reproaches itself is always present . Those two sides of one and the same self, which are in a constant, great war one against the other, reflect divergence. And only unity is victory. Unity can, in the final outcome, belong only to Reality. And The Self at Peace / 153 that is why the only path of the human ‘‘here and now’’ is the one that leads to that victory and return. That is the one the Almighty summons us to: O serene soul! Return to your Lord, joyful and pleasing in His sight.3 ...