(34) No longer can we wonder that the principle evoking such longing should be utterly free from shape. The very soul, once it has conceived the straining love towards this, lays aside all the shape it has taken, even to the Intellectual shape that has informed it. There is no vision, no union, for those handling or acting by any thing other; the soul must see before it neither evil nor good nor anything else, that alone it may receive the Alone.

Suppose the soul to have attained: the highest has come to her, or rather has revealed its presence; she has turned away from all about her and made herself apt, beautiful to the utmost, brought into likeness with the divine by those preparings and adornings which come unbidden to those growing ready for the vision- she has seen that presence suddenly manifesting within her, for there is nothing between: here is no longer a duality but a two in one; for, so long as the presence holds, all distinction fades: it is as lover and beloved here, in a copy of that union, long to blend; the soul has now no further awareness of being in body and will give herself no foreign name, not "man," not "living being," not "being," not "all"; any observation of such things falls away; the soul has neither time nor taste for them; This she sought and This she has found and on This she looks and not upon herself; and who she is that looks she has not leisure to know. Once There she will barter for This nothing the universe holds; not though one would make over the heavens entire to her; than This there is nothing higher, nothing of more good; above This there is no passing; all the rest, however lofty, lies on the downgoing path: she is of perfect judgement and knows that This was her quest, that nothing higher is. Here can be no deceit; where could she come upon truer than the truth? and the truth she affirms, that she is, herself; but all the affirmation is later and is silent. In this happiness she knows beyond delusion that she is happy; for this is no affirmation of an excited body but of a soul become again what she was in the time of her early joy. All that she had welcomed of old-office, power, wealth, beauty, knowledge of all she tells her scorn as she never could had she not found their better; linked to This she can fear no disaster nor even know it; let all about her fall to pieces, so she would have it that she may be wholly with This, so huge the happiness she has won to.

(34) Sobriety is wrong, and a straying from that other road. O thou who seekest to be contrite for the past, How wilt thou be contrite for this contrition? At one time thou adorest the music of the lute, At another embracest wailing and weeping." While the "Discerner" reflected these mysteries, Like a soul he was freed from weeping and rejoicing, His old life died, and he was regenerated. Amazement fell upon him at that moment, For he was exalted above earth and heaven,

ALL this equipment the Sage has ordained for the sake of wisdom; so he that seeks to still sorrow must get him wisdom. We deem that there are two verities, the Veiled Truth and the Transcendent Reality. The Reality is beyond the range of the understanding; the understanding is called Veiled Truth.... Thus there is never either cessation or existence; the universe neither comes to be nor halts in being. Life's courses, if thou considerest them, are like dreams and as the plantain's branches; in reality there is no distinction between those that are at rest and those that are not at rest. Since then the forms of being are empty, what can be gained, and what lost? who can be honoured or despised, and by whom? Whence should come joy or sorrow? What is sweet, what bitter? What is desire, and where shall this desire in verity be sought? If thou considerest the world of living things, who shall die therein? who shall be born, who is born? who is a kinsman and who a friend, and to whom? Would that my fellow-creatures should understand that all is as the void! They are angered and delighted by their matters of strife and rejoicing; with grief and labour, with despair, with rending and stabbing one another, they wearily pass their days in sin as they seek their own pleasure; they die and fall into hells of long and bitter anguish; they return again and again to happy births after births and grow wonted to joy.... In life are oceans of sorrow, fierce and boundless beyond compare, a scant measure of power, a brief term of years; our years are spent in vain strivings for existence and health, in hunger, faintness, and labour, in sleep, in vexation, in fruitless commerce with fools, and discernment is hard to win; how shall we come to restrain the spirit from its wont of wandering? There, too, the Spirit of Desire is labouring to cast us into deep hells; there evil paths abound, and unbelief can scarce be overcome; it is hard to win j, a brief return, exceeding hard for the Enlightened « to arise to us; the torrent of passion can scarce be stayed. Alas, how sorrow follows on sorrow! Alas, how lamentable is the estate of them that are borne down in the floods of affliction, and in their sore distress see not how sad their plight is, like one who should again and again come forth from the waters of his bath and cast himself into fire, and so in their sore trouble deem themselves to be in happy estate! As thus they live in sport that knows not of age and dissolution, dire afflictions will come upon them, with Death in their forefront. Then when will the day come when I may bring peace to them that are tortured in the fire of sorrow by my ministrations of sweetness born from the rain-clouds of my righteousness, and when I may reverently declare to the souls who imagine a real world that all is void, and righteousness is gathered by looking beyond the Veiled Truth?

Then follow exhortations to undergo "the pains of negation," as they are called in the Gulshan i Raz, i.e., even as the great saint and poet Faridu-'d-Din 'Attar cast away his drugs, to cast one's own will, knowledge, power, and ''self" into the unique river of "annihilation," and from that state to rise to the higher state of eternal existence in God. The end and object of all negation is to attain to subsequent affirmation, as the negation in the creed, "There is no God," finds its complement and purpose in the affirmation "but God." Just so the purpose of negation of self is to clear the way for the apprehension of the fact that there is no existence but The One. The intoxication of life and its pleasures and occupations veils the Truth from men's eyes, and they ought to pass on to the spiritual intoxication which makes men beside themselves and lifts them to the beatific vision of eternal Truth. This is the same thing as saying they must pass on from negation to affirmation, from ignorance to the highest knowledge. This is illustrated by the story of the Turkish noble and the minstrel, which is given with an apology for using illustrations derived from drunkenness. A Turkish noble awoke from his drunken sleep, and called his minstrel to enliven him. The minstrel was a spiritual man, and proceeded to improve the occasion by singing a song with a deep spiritual meaning:

(11) The abasement and exaltation of weary time Is otherwise again, half day and half night. The abasement and exaltation of this compound body Know all the conditions of the world are in this wise, Drought, famine, peace, war, and trials. This world flies, as it were, with these two wings; Through these all souls are homes of hope and fear; So that the world keeps trembling like leaves, Till tbe jar of pure wine of our 'Isa (Unity) Shall supersede the jar of many-colored wine (plurality),

(11) He wanders into the boundless desert, Sometimes halting and despairing, sometimes running. He has no lamp wherewith to light himself on his way, He lacks wisdom, so as to boast of being alive, And also half wisdom, so as to assume to be dead? That half wise one became as one utterly dead If you lack perfect wisdom, make yourself as dead Under the shadow of the wise, whose words give life. The fool is neither alive so as to companion with 'Isa,

(1) "I know not if thou art a moon or an idol, I know not what service to pay thee, Thou art not apart from me, yet, strange to say, I know not where I am, or where thou art. I know not wherefore thou art dragging me, Now embracing me, and now wounding me!" That wine of God is gained from that minstrel, Both of these have one and the same name in speech, Men's bodies are like pitchers with closed mouths; Beware, till you see what is inside them.

(11) Similarly any one, unable to see himself, but possessed by that God, has but to bring that divine- within before his consciousness and at once he sees an image of himself, himself lifted to a better beauty: now let him ignore that image, lovely though it is, and sink into a perfect self-identity, no such separation remaining; at once he forms a multiple unity with the God silently present; in the degree of his power and will, the two become one; should he turn back to the former duality, still he is pure and remains very near to the God; he has but to look again and the same presence is there.

This conversion brings gain: at the first stage, that of separation, a man is aware of self; but, retreating inwards, he becomes possessor of all; he puts sense away behind him in dread of the separated life and becomes one in the Divine; if he plans to see in separation, he sets himself outside.

The novice must hold himself constantly under some image of the Divine Being and seek in the light of a clear conception; knowing thus, in a deep conviction, whither he is going- into what a sublimity he penetrates- he must give himself forthwith to the inner and, radiant with the Divine Intellections , be no longer the seer but, as that place has made him, the seen.

Still, we will be told, one cannot be in beauty and yet fail to see it. The very contrary: to see the divine as something external is to be outside of it; to become it is to be most truly in beauty: since sight deals with the external, there can here be no vision unless in the sense of identification with the object.

And this identification amounts to a self-knowing, a self-consciousness, guarded by the fear of losing the self in the desire of a too wide awareness.

It must be remembered that sensations of the ugly and evil impress us more violently than those of what is agreeable and yet leave less knowledge as the residue of the shock: sickness makes the rougher mark, but health, tranquilly present, explains itself better; it takes the first place, it is the natural thing, it belongs to our being; illness is alien, unnatural and thus makes itself felt by its very incongruity, while the other conditions are native and we take no notice. Such being our nature, we are most completely aware of ourselves when we are most completely identified with the object of our knowledge.

This is why in that other sphere, when we are deepest in that knowledge by intellection, we are aware of none; we are expecting some impression on sense, which has nothing to report since it has seen nothing and never could in that order see anything. The unbelieving element is sense; it is the other, the Intellectual-Principle, that sees; and if this too doubted, it could not even credit its own existence, for it can never stand away and with bodily eyes apprehend itself as a visible object.

(11) This is the purport of that rule of our Mysteries: Nothing Divulged to the Uninitiate: the Supreme is not to be made a common story, the holy things may not be uncovered to the stranger, to any that has not himself attained to see. There were not two; beholder was one with beheld; it was not a vision compassed but a unity apprehended. The man formed by this mingling with the Supreme must- if he only remember- carry its image impressed upon him: he is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; no movement now, no passion, no outlooking desire, once this ascent is achieved; reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection and even, to dare the word, the very self; caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; all the being calmed, he turns neither to this side nor to that, not even inwards to himself; utterly resting he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the beautiful; he has risen beyond beauty; he has overpassed even the choir of the virtues; he is like one who, having penetrated the inner sanctuary, leaves the temple images behind him- though these become once more first objects of regard when he leaves the holies; for There his converse was not with image, not with trace, but with the very Truth in the view of which all the rest is but of secondary concern.

There, indeed, it was scarcely vision, unless of a mode unknown; it was a going forth from the self, a simplifying, a renunciation, a reach towards contact and at the same time a repose, a meditation towards adjustment. This is the only seeing of what lies within the holies: to look otherwise is to fail.

Things here are signs; they show therefore to the wiser teachers how the supreme God is known; the instructed priest reading the sign may enter the holy place and make real the vision of the inaccessible.

Even those that have never found entry must admit the existence of that invisible; they will know their source and Principle since by principle they see principle and are linked with it, by like they have contact with like and so they grasp all of the divine that lies within the scope of mind. Until the seeing comes they are still craving something, that which only the vision can give; this Term, attained only by those that have overpassed all, is the All-Transcending.

It is not in the soul's nature to touch utter nothingness; the lowest descent is into evil and, so far, into non-being: but to utter nothing, never. When the soul begins again to mount, it comes not to something alien but to its very self; thus detached, it is not in nothingness but in itself; self-gathered it is no longer in the order of being; it is in the Supreme.

There is thus a converse in virtue of which the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendent of Being. The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme: if from that heightened self we pass still higher- image to archetype- we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we awaken the virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more; once more we are lightened of the burden and move by virtue towards Intellectual-Principle and through the Wisdom in That to the Supreme.

This is the life of gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth, the passing of solitary to solitary.

(101) How long, O Lord, is this trial to last? Give me one ruling principle, not ten principles! The whole world flees away from its own will and being In order to escape a while from self-consciousness, Men incur the reproach of wine and strong drink; For all know well this existence is a snare, Therefore they flee from self to being beside themselves, Call it intoxication or call it preoccupation, O guided one. Ere it is annihilated, no single soul What is "ascension" to heaven? Annihilation of self;

(2) ... For in any one science the reduction of the total of knowledge into its separate propositions does not shatter its unity, chipping it into unrelated fragments; in each distinct item is talent the entire body of the science, an integral thing in its highest Principle and its last detail: and similarly a man must so discipline himself that the first Principles of his Being are also his completions, are totals, that all be pointed towards the loftiest phase of the Nature: when a man has become this unity in the best, he is in that other realm; for it is by this highest within himself, made his own, that he holds to the Supreme.

At no point did the All-Soul come into Being: it never arrived, for it never knew place; what happens is that body, neighbouring with it, participates in it: hence Plato does not place Soul in body but body in Soul. The others, the secondary Souls, have a point of departure- they come from the All-Soul- and they have a Place into which to descend and in which to change to and fro, a place, therefore, from which to ascend: but this All-Soul is for ever Above, resting in that Being in which it holds its existence as Soul and followed, as next, by the Universe or, at least, by all beneath the sun.

The partial Soul is illuminated by moving towards the Soul above it; for on that path it meets Authentic Existence. Movement towards the lower is towards non-Being: and this is the step it takes when it is set on self; for by willing towards itself it produces its lower, an image of itself- a non-Being- and so is wandering, as it were, into the void, stripping itself of its own determined form. And this image, this undetermined thing, is blank darkness, for it is utterly without reason, untouched by the Intellectual-Principle, far removed from Authentic Being.

As long as it remains at the mid-stage it is in its own peculiar region; but when, by a sort of inferior orientation, it looks downward, it shapes that lower image and flings itself joyfully thither.

(13) Joy and sorrow come and go, and over them I have no control. "Alas! the life of man is but as a stoppage at an inn. He knows that which comes within the range of his experience. Otherwise, he knows not. He knows that he can do what he can do, and that he cannot do what he cannot do. But there is always that which he does not know and that which he cannot do; and to struggle that it shall not be so,—is not this a cause for grief? "The best language is that which is not spoken, the best form of action is that which is without deeds. Spread out your knowledge and it will be found to be shallow."

(50) When the lover feels no longer LOVE's quickening, He becomes like a bird who has lost its wings. Alas! How can I retain my senses about me, When the BELOVED shows not the light of His countenance? LOVE desires that this secret should be revealed, For if a mirror reflects not, of what use is it? Knowest thou why thy mirror reflects not? If it were purified from all rust and defilement, O friends, ye have now heard this tale,

(1) WHEN thus vigour has been nurtured, it is well to fix the thought in concentred effort; the man of wandering mind lies between the fangs of the Passions. It cannot wander if body and thought be in solitude; so it is well to forsake the world and put away vain imaginations. Because of love, or hunger for gain, and the like, men will not forsake the world; then in order to cast it aside the wise will lay to heart these thoughts. Passion is overcome only by him who has won through stillness of spirit the perfect vision. Knowing this, I must first seek for stillness; it comes through the contentment that is regardless of the world. What creature of a day should cling to other frail beings, when he can never again through thousands of births behold his beloved? Yet when he sees him not, he is ill at ease; he rests not in concentred thought; and even when he beholds him he is not satisfied, but is distressed by the same longing as before. He sees not things in their reality; he loses his horror of the world; he is consumed by his grief in yearning for union with the beloved. In thoughts thereupon his brief life vainly passes away hour by hour; and the eternal Law is broken for the sake of a short-lived friend!

(9) When the desire for silence comes, not a single thought arises; he who is looking inward suddenly forgets that he looks. At this time, body and heart must be left completely free. All entanglements disappear without trace. Then I no longer know at what place the house of my spirit and my crucible are. If a man wants to make certain of his body, he cannot get at it. This condition is the penetration of Heaven into Earth, the time when all wonders return to their roots.

(51) In like manner He will give you thousands of existences, One after another, the succeeding ones better than the former. Regard your original state, not the mean states, As these mean states increase, union recedes; As they decrease, the unction of union increases. From knowing means and causes holy bewilderment fails; Yea, the bewilderment that leads you to God's presence. You have obtained these existences after annihilations; Wherefore, then, do you shrink from annihilation? What harm have these annihilations done you

(28) Since my bashfulness is destroyed, I will publish secrets; How long must I bear this trepidation and anxiety? Formerly I was covered by modesty as by a veil, Now I will leap from it under Thy coverlet! O comrades, our Beloved has closed up all paths; We are as lame deer, and He as a raging lion. Say what remedy is there but resignation When one is fallen into the hands of the raging lion?"

(1) "How is it with thee this morning, O pure disciple?" He replied, "Thy faithful slave am I." Again he said, "If the garden of faith has bloomed, show a token of it." He answered, "I was athirst many days, By night I slept not for the burning pangs of love; So that I passed by days and nights, For in that state all faith is one, A hundred thousand years and a moment are all one; World without beginning and world without end are one; Reason finds no entrance when mind is thus lost." The Prophet's final counsels of "Reserve".

(171) Then he said, "Though she lacks clothes of silk and wool, 'Tis sweeter to embrace her without those veils. I have become naked of the body and its illusions, I am admitted into the most intimate union." The story admits of being told up to this point, If you should speak and try a hundred ways to express it, 'Tis useless; the mystery becomes no clearer. You can ride on saddle and horse up to the sea-coast, But then you must use a horse of wood (i.e., a boat). A horse of wood is useless on dry land,

(15) Such dependence is as though it were not dependence. We are embraced in the obliterating unity of God. There is perfect adaptation to whatever may eventuate; and so we complete our allotted span. "But what is it to be embraced in the obliterating unity of God? It is this. With reference to positive and negative, to that which is so and that which is not so,—if the positive is really positive, it must necessarily be different from its negative: there is no room for argument. And if that which is so really is so, it must necessarily be different from that which is not so: there is no room for argument. "Take no heed of time, nor of right and wrong. But passing into the realm of the Infinite, take your final rest therein." The Penumbra said to the Umbra, "At one moment you move: at another you are at rest. At one moment you sit down: at another you get up. Why this instability of purpose?" "I depend," replied the Umbra, "upon something which causes me to do as I do; and that something depends in turn upon something else which causes it to do as it does. My dependence is like that of a snake's scales or of a cicada's wings.