Enlightenment is not something you achieve, it is the absence of something.
-- Charlotte Joko Beck
Learned learning may generate a sense of "knowledge," leading to isolation and lack of inner sustainment. Of course, we know that in the Book of Genesis, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is represented as a deadly sin. Even in ancient times, it was believed that in knowledge the gods are robbed of their fire.
Yūnus Emre, the famed Sufi poet, also doubtful of knowledge, praised only unlearned learning. He along with several other saints and holy men had the reputation of being illiterate. This reputation made their achievement seem even greater to the common folk and enabled him to share a characteristic with Muhammad, the Prophet, who was also a "self-proclaimed illiterate." This concept of the simple holy man untainted by worldly learning is common to all religious traditions. Emre himself spoke disparagingly of ilm (formal book learning), which he compared unfavorably with irfān (soulful knowledge). "Holy ignorance...verges on the sacred," says Thomas Moore in Original Self.
The Hindu saying "None but a god can worship God," is intended not to be blasphemy but to urge us to dissolve into a godlike existence of our own. The love of God takes away "I"-ness. For the same reason, Christ is conceived as a bridge (the Pope, vicar of Christ, is still called the Pontiff, from pons, meaning "bridge"). So the Incarnation represents the presence of the invisible in the common matter of human life. Thus, a god-man, who is both visible and invisible, becomes joined into one. Jesus is both a divinely inspired but visible man and the invisible God borrowing human shape. Duality transcended; forms disappear and all elemental forces embody themselves in a human being and reconcile humankind with God.
Why should I seek? I am the same as he.
His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!
-- Jalālu'l-Dīn Rūmi
Yūnus Emre pleaded with God for such union when he said, "Give me a love so that I won't know where I am. Let me lose myself; seeking, let me not find myself. Take away, remove from me ‘I-ness'; fill me with ‘You-ness.' Kill me in Your Life, so that I won't go there and die." For centuries, stories and legends end in parting from this world and divine dissolution. In Japanese tales, the hero frequently is left in the same position at the end that he occupied in the beginning, except that he has become one with his mission. Similarly, American cowboys, at the end of their heroic deeds ride off alone into the dissolving sunset.
In his writings on deification, the great thirteenth-century mystic poet Jalālu'l-Dīn Rūmi speaks of the phrase Ana'l-Haqq, "I am God." Although it may seem that such words make a presumptuous claim, it is really even more presumptuous to say Ana ‘l'-abd, "I am the slave of God." It is the former that is actually an expression of great humility. The reason is as follows: The person who says "I am the slave of God" affirms two existences, his own and God's, but the person who says, "I am God," has made himself nonexistent. He has given himself up by virtue of those words, in effect reducing himself in relation to God and believing "I am naught. He is all: there is no being but God's."
Thus the person arrived, transformed, relies on the message and not on the messenger, the content of the teaching, not the teacher; and the laws, not the judge.
A well-known Zen story tells of a student being taught to meditate on his breath.
One day the student rushed to his master saying that he had seen
the images of Buddha, radiating light. Ah, yes, said the master,
but don't worry; if you keep your mind on the breath, they will go away.
T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity
