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A Series of Lessons on the Inner Teachings of the Philosophies and Religions of India1278
of the phenomenal world, or “appearance of Being” (imkan), which reveals
the divine image of the Creator but does not partake of His Substantial
Being, and which is, on the contrary, in truth but a phantasy and an illusion.
Man is the Eye of the phenomenal world, when he is able to see God as the
One and Only Reality behind the phenomenal universe of appearances;
and to see the illusory nature of the latter; then he is able to escape from
the bondage of the shadow-world—the phantasmagoria of the world—
and attain absorption in the Divine (fana fillah). By the study of the Mystic
Teachings (shariat), and the following of the Mystic Path (tariqat), the mystic
student and Seeker of Truth arrives at his goal, and sees and realizes the
Truth (haqiqat). Evil is held to be but a negation of Good, and therefore has
no real being. “There is no absolute Evil in the Universe—Evil is but relative,”
says the old Sufi mystic Jalalud-Din Rumi.
There is little or no doctrine or dogma in Sufiism—it is taken up with
statement of the existence of the Lord, and his abiding Spirit within the soul,
and with instruction whereby one may plant his feet firmly on The Path that
leadeth to Paradise. The whole aim is toward Union with God, in which there
are two stages, viz., (1) the Recognition of the Union in consciousness, during
earth-life, by means of Spiritual Consciousness, Ecstasy, or Illumination; and
(2) the final and complete “Union with God, in which the individual Spirit
returns to the bosom of the Great Ocean of Spirit and loses itself in the
One—or as the Buddhists put it, “the dew-drop slides into the shining sea.”
The first stage is akin to the Hindu Samadhi, the higher phases approaching
Nirvana; while the second stage is akin to the Buddhist Para-Nirvana, or
Complete Absorption. There are but two Truths known to the Sufi—(1) The
One; and (2) the Way to the One. The first is called “Ahad”—the second
“Tariqat.”
The first Truth (ahad) is that which we have stated, i.e., that there is
naught but God in Reality—that all is delusion and illusion, un-truth, a
phantasmagoric puppet-show, operated by “the Master of the Show,” so
long as it pleases his fancy to allow it to remain in his view—God made