So the yogis came up with an important definition of maya as the obstacle of imagining that what one is imagining is happening outside of one’s imagination. For most people in the ego, that’s the definition of reality, not maya. It’s that definition because mistaking the unreal for the Real and the Real for the unreal is the belief that your imagination is actually a world that you are in rather than a world within your imagination, which creates then a loss of empowerment and of free will and of the power to dream. One has consented to identify as an artifact of the dream of the Dreamer (who is, yes, in nonduality, oneself); but if you are identified with the character, now there is a need to worship our Lord because it’s no longer the Self within that frame of reference. And until one has broken free of that frame, one will not be able to establish one’s consciousness (free of one’s imagination) in the Real.
So it is this that we mean by breaking through to the Light, which is the subject of our next retreat (not that I’m trying to answer a question that hasn’t been asked). But that’s really what’s being pointed to here as the necessity of finding a technique to overcome this thick postmodern shell of resistant, nihilistic, cynical oppositionalism which is self-defeating and self-sabotaging at every turn in order to keep its growth from happening and stay stunted throughout life as an infant. It’s called the “Peter Pan complex” among Jungians, or the puer aeternus complex if you’re more academically inclined. But it’s simply the common state of the ego today because, in this fallen culture, no one goes through the rite of passage that leads to ego death—or even to adulthood, in which one could choose ego death. So this becomes a technical problem for those on the spiritual path and those who are functioning as guides.
Now in the Sufi tradition they had a very interesting way (I put it in the past tense because I think there are very few authentic Sufi sages any longer—at least, I don’t know of too many)—but the first stage—well, maybe I’ll try to write it.
There was the Sharia and then the Tariqa and then the Haqiqa stage. Now, I think that there are actually stages beyond these three; but in the Sharia stage, your relationship to God was one of asking for mercy and forgiveness for one’s sins and for help in purification. This is why in Islam there is so much prostration. But you see this in Tibet, you see it in Bhutan, and you see it in Christianity with people kneeling as they go into the cathedrals—especially in Mexico and South America, right? There’s that same very humble prostration to God; but how many Westerners would be willing to actually take a path of prostration and really do a pilgrimage, you know, around Lhasa or around Mount Kailash—or even do Giri Pradhakshina around Mount Arunachala? There is very little willingness to humble oneself, and the ego is always trying to become empowered without first surrendering to the power that can empower one, thus remaining only with the fantasy of power—if that.
So, in the Sharia, you admit you’re in duality and you are worshiping Allah and praying to Allah. In the Tariqa phase, you are receiving grace. Now, your relationship to Allah, to God, to Buddha-consciousness (it doesn’t matter what you call it) is that of receiving the power that will then be turned into love, wisdom, the capacity to serve, the capacity to live coherently and authentically. One will be nurtured by one’s connection to God that gets stronger and stronger in meditation until one receives that lightning bolt that one can finally tolerate, which is the moment when it is written in the texts, “You cannot see the face of God and live.” That lightning strike will incinerate the ego instantaneously, and that’s the entrance into Haqiqa.
You remember Al Hallaj, a Sufi sage, who famously said, An al Haqq (“I have become Haqq, I have achieved that Haqiqa.”) And, of course, they burned him at the stake because you’re not allowed to say that in dualistic religions. Nonetheless, that’s always been the real path of the Sufi, who recognizes in that moment of Haqiqa that all is Allah and, therefore, there cannot be such a thing as a religion of Islam. Every religion is Allah’s religion—every path—there is no path; and it’s all beauty, it’s all truth, it’s all goodness. Then that vision of nonduality becomes real, not simply a belief or a fantasy. But if the scales haven’t fallen away and one does not see with the Third Eye, then one doesn’t really perceive the radiance of God’s Presence. Then it becomes something that is never realized but only talked about or thought about or read about.
So in that phrase “nobody, son of nobody” (which was written by a famous Sufi poet, a well-renowned sage), if you think about it, what does that mean to realize I am no body? What am I? I am not only bodyless, but I am not an identifiable individual person or being in a world. And I am the son of nobody, right? If I am not the son (and let’s say son, daughter, offspring, child) of God—it’s obviously not a gendered issue—if I am not the son, then what does that mean? Doesn’t that mean I am the father or the mother or the Absolute Itself, not some derivative? So nonduality is being expressed, but it’s being expressed in a dualistic phrase. The Sufis could get away with that, even though they were expressing nonduality, because it was a humble submission of the ego to that Inconceivable Presence.
