The Wisdom of the Sufi Poet Who Started It All

And this book is translated as The Walled Garden of Truth. And it’s got some very interesting poems in it. It’s an abridged version, but it packs a punch. I’ll read an extract of just the first poem, which is entitled “The Garden of Reality”.

“The seeing soul perceives the folly of praising anyone other than the Creator.”

OK, so I think this is an important statement: no one but the Creator is worthy of praise—and yet isn’t the Creator working through everyone?

“The self is a servant in his cavalcade. Reason a new boy in his school. What is reason in this guest house but a crooked scrawling of God’s handwriting?”

So, although it seems to be an attack on reason, it’s actually saying that what the ego takes for reason is a distorted version of the reason that flows through the Mind of God. The human level of reason is actually idiocy: it’s a primitive form of calculation that it doesn’t even deserve the name of logic because it is trapped in a two-valued paradigm which allows for no wider spectrum of possibilities than yes or no, black or white. And this kind of primitive thinking is exactly what creates karma because it is not in sync with the attunement to the panorama of all of the potentialities of being and becoming, that do not fit into either good or bad, right or wrong, yes or no.

So what we require is a form of wisdom that is the real reason, that is beyond what humans refer to as that which is really only mental chatter. It’s not true reasoning. The human ego is not capable until the fourth and fifth assemblage point of beginning to know what reason really is, and to be able to read the Mind of God and translate that into language and action.

So, “Had he not shown himself”, meaning God, Allah, “how should we have known Him?

Unless he shows us the way, how can we know Him?”

But how did He show Himself? The Christians would say, well, He showed Himself in the form of Jesus. How did He show Himself to the Muslims? Was it through the writing of the Quran? Was it through the poetry of that inspired text? Or was there an inherent knowing of God within that one can attune to in prayer, in adoration of Allah, which triggers a remembrance of one’s relationship to God before birth, before one ever left the Kingdom of the Light to incarnate? And is he not still always showing us the way? If we are willing to attend to the messages of the Dao that are presented.

“We tried reasoning our way to Him. It didn’t work. But the moment we gave up, no obstacle remained.”

So, in other words, not through language, which presents a very primitive form of reason in the form of subject and predicate, a linear kind of presentation of reality that forms itself into a frame of reference of succession, therefore of time and space and of duality, of subject and object, but of an intuitive knowing that is present as soon as there is a giving up, a surrender of the ego’s attempt to grasp reality through its own modes of thinking, rather than to attune to the mode of God’s presence and intelligence that is constantly directing and manifesting all that appears.

So, “He introduced Himself to us out of kindness. How else could we have known Him? Reason took us as far as the door, but it was His presence that led us in.”

So you can think about God or you can feel God’s presence in your consciousness, because God is present here and now as yourself, but your Self that is not the thinking, language-based stream of egoic mental chatter, but the Self that is the pure presence that underlies it all.

“But how will you ever know Him as long as you are unable to know yourself?”—since God is yourself—“Once, one is one, no more, no less. Error begins with duality, unity knows no error.”

So true reason begins when you understand you are in a condition of nonduality. Until then, reason cannot begin to function because the mind is based in illusion, and therefore cannot see one’s own errors.

The error of perception that, because it is limited in time and space, can only know oneself in the future, and only then will one be able to answer the question who was I? But one will still not know the answer to who am I? You see? And so most people are constantly trying to figure out why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I go there? Why, why, why? And trying to figure out what was the basis of their identity that brought them to make such choices, and fall into such patterns and such tenacious identification and attachment to a particular way of thinking. So it’s only when one has attained nonduality that the errors of false reasoning fall away.

He continues, “Place itself has no place. How could there be place for the Creator of place? Heaven for the Maker of heaven?”

OK, in other words, God is not located in space or time. God is omnipresent, and in all times one can connect with God but only because God is beyond time, in eternity, and without place. Which is why you can connect with God everywhere and nowhere, and whether the body is alive or dead. And so, to limit your consciousness to a frame of reference based in space and time limits your ability to understand the true nature of who you are, that transcends that limited linear arc of becoming that is the fate of the ego.

“He said,” Allah said, and this is a famous quote, I think it is from the Quran, “I was a hidden Treasure. Creation was created so that you might know me.”

But isn’t it really so that I might know myself, since all that is created is in fact still a reflection of God himself, but a reflection that is not able to know its own original image? OK?

In the Kashmir Shaivite Wisdom School, they refer to this concept as well as the Bimba Pratibimba concept or principle. And Bimba means “God’s image”, and Pratibimba is the “reflection” of that image. So the image is the archetypal form that is, for the Greeks, the Nous, the Mind of God that is reflected as a cosmos. The world is simply the reflection of the archetypal image being transmitted, and transmitted in a slightly different way through each facet of the infinite Diamond Mind that God is, and each of us being one or more of those facets that is able to see the world through a particular archetypal idiom.

So he goes on, “Why, tell me, if what you seek does not exist in any place, do you propose to travel there on foot?” He’s talking about why are you taking a pilgrimage to the Hajj, to Mecca, when God is right here, wherever you are?

I don’t know if you all saw the great storm in Mecca the other day? People were being destroyed, the whole Kaaba was in chaos. It was an extraordinary scene, you might want to check it out. (One of the few reasons it’s good to have an internet, I think, but it gives us the images of the end times that we are in.)

So he says, “The road yourself must journey on lies in polishing the mirror of your heart.”

Where have we heard that before?

Audio File: The Wisdom of the Sufi Poet Who Started It All.mp3