Many years ago I came across a Sufi book, called The Meaning of Man, that states quite clearly how we perceive existence, or conversely existence perceives us.
Once we start getting our heads around the notion that we are built out of standing waves, the idea of duality becomes a little clearer. A standing wave stands there because there are waves travelling from opposite directions, therefore the very nature of our being, is built out of opposites.
Here are some pages from the Sufi book. This is not the complete book, just the images which are partially explained in the text that follows.
I haven’t included the main text of the book, one reason is that the book is in a trunk stored in Yorkshire right now so I can’t photograph the rest of the book, but the main text does seem to have been written for study within a Sufi group, and the book does state that all of the wisdom can be deduced from these images.
I do believe that the book was translated by Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley and Aisha Bewley, so thanks for gifting such a wonderful, elegant, learning tool into our perception.
adab – Inner courtesy coming out as graciousness in right action.
ayat – This term indicates a phrase structure of Qur’an and also means a sign, both in the linguistic and semiotic sense.
‘ayn – The source.
badl (pl. abdal) – The abdal are those exalted gnostics who by the per- fection of their slavery to Allah remain in constant contemplation of His Presence. The proof of this Station is when it is attested that he has been seen at Ka’aba while others confirm his presence elsewhere. (Thus the word badl means substitute for he appears to use a substitute body).
baraka – A subtle energy which flows through everything. It is experienced in certain places more strongly than in others, and in some places and objects overpoweringly so. Its highest realm of activity is the human being. Purity permits its flow, for it is purity itself, which is Light. Density of perception blocks it. It is transformative, healing, and immeasurable. To deny it is to limit Allah and deny tawhid. For further and deeper explanations see the Qur’an. As a subject it is endless.
dajjal – The antithesis of Jesus. A manifestation that will take place in the last stage of human existence on earth. The science of recognising Dajjal is very intricate and carefully delineated. The manifestation will appear both as a person, and as a certain historical situation, and as a series of cosmic phenomena. Dajjal will affect the masses and cause chaos.
dhikr/dhikru’llah – Invocation of Allah. Declaring the unity of Allah, prostrating, fasting, giving to the needy, pilgrimage. These are its foundation, recitation of Qur’an is its heart, and invocation of the Single Name, Allah, is its end.
din – (pronounced deen) This means the life-transaction, literally the debt or exchange situation between two parties, in this usage the Creator and the created, or as some say between the conditioned and the unconditioned, the limited and the limitless, or the many and the One, and It can not be associated with any form.
du’a’ – A supplication.
dunya – The world, not as cosmic phenomenon but as experienced. It derives from a root describing those grapes which appear on the vine but when you stretch out to pick them, prove out of reach. Dunya takes on its actuality through attachment. When the heart is liberated dunya disappears and akhira the next and invisible world appears. Dunya is vanishing and moving away, the next world is appearing and approaching. This change of circuit in consciousness is achieved by the existential processes of transformation that are the field of the sufic science whose subject is fully explained within the text.
faqir (pl. fuqara’) – Literally, the poor. These are the men of knowledge.
fard (pl. fara’id) – Obligatory acts in shari’a.
figh – The formal study of knowledge.
ghawth – A qutb who heals. A granter of requests, his followers always range in their thousands. He is characterised by vast generosity.
halal – Permitted in shari’a.
haram – Not permitted in shari’a.
hijra – To emigrate in the way of Allah. Islam takes its dating from the first hijra of the Prophet, blessings and peace of Allah be upon him, from Makka to Madina.
hikam – Wisdom. This is also the title of the great work by the Shadhili Shaykh Ibn ‘Ata’Illah. Unfortunately no acceptable translation exists in English, at the moment.
himma – Yearning. It is by the heart’s yearning that the goal is reached. All human action is based on himma only the force is directed onto the illusory palimpsest of the world. Once the faculty is directed at the non- objective it reaches its goal which is not other than the source from which the himma has come.
hizb – A designated section of Qur’an to be read at one sitting.
ibada – Acts of service.
idhn – Permission. Given by the teacher to the student. It is itself a station. of knowledge and a door to the freedom of the student. It is used not for existential matters but for entering realms of knowledge and for adopting certain practices which are useless if adopted without it.
ihsan – The core of gnosis. The subject of this work defines this term, again and again. You imagine/think you are observing the cosmos as a sub- ject. The reality is that you are being observed. When you discover that your watching and the being watched are not two realities but one and that your aspect in it is non-existent you have arrived. This experience does not take place in the realm of separation. The zone of the theory is not that of the practice. Thought is not deed.
jabarut – The source world, light and power.
janaba – Physical impurity demanding the washing of the whole body before prayer is permissible again.
karamat – Miracles. That is events in the phenomenal world that imply a break in the causal chain. It is not miracles that should be questioned. This is ignorance. The root of the matter is the nature of what seems to be the causal chain. It lies in perception. It is better to discuss the matter following the performance of a miracle. This is not an unusual event for the people of knowledge and no fuss is made about it.
khayal – An important term. It means imagination, but not in the popular sense. Rather it is that faculty in the human brain which perceptually and experientially solidifies the objects. For example, under the influence of hypotropic drugs the wall may melt. The observer is quick to adopt an imperialist position which denies the experience of the other through fear, i.e. call it a hallucination. If this domination does not take place the observer will realise that ‘for him’ the wall has melted. It is this shared agreement that ‘the wall is there’ that constitutes that limited spectrum of experience that we call sanity, just as ‘sight’ is a very limited zone of the light spectrum. Liberation from the khayal without madness, that is, with the capacity to ‘return’, is the goal of the sufi. To be free of the khayal and not be able to ‘re-enter’ would be madness. This is almost certain without a Shaykh for meta-biological reasons, not political ones, as can be demonstrated.
kufr/kafir – Kufr means to cover up reality: kafir is one who does so. The kafir is the opposite of the mu’min. The point is that everyone knows ‘how it is’ only it suits some people to deny it and pretend it is otherwise, to behave as if we were going to be here for ever. This is called kufr. The condition of the kafir is therefore one of neurosis, because of his inner knowing. He ‘bites his hand in rage’ but will not give in to his inevitable oncoming death.
la ilaha illa ‘llah – There is no divinity but Allah. More precisely ‘No god only Allah.’ The last term in the formula is a proper name, therefore it can only indicate but does not define. If I say ‘cat’, I both indicate and define at the same time. If I say ‘John’ my naming indicates him but he is not enclosed by definition in his name. All religion is decadent in this proposition, and idol-worship. Idol-worship means giving delineation to the Real. Encasing it in an object, a concept, a ritual, or a myth. This is called shirk, or association. Avoidance of shirk is the most radical element in the approach to understanding existence in Islam. It soars free of these deep social restrictions and so posits such a profoundly revolutionary approach to existence that it constitutes – and has done for fourteen hundred years the most radical rejection of the political version of idolatry, statism. It is very difficult for programmed literates in this society to cut through to the clear tenets of Islam, for the Judaic and Christian perversions stand so strongly in the way either as, rightly, anathema, or else as ideals. The whole approach to understanding reality has a quite different texture than that known and defined in European languages, thus a deep insight into the structure of the Arabic language itself would prove a better introduction to the metaphysic than a philosophical statement. The uncompromising tawhid that is affirmed does not add on any sort of ‘god-concept’. Nor does it posit an infra-god, a grund-god, even an over-god. Christian philosophers were so frightened by this position that when they met it, to stop people discovering the fantasy element in their trinitarian mythology they decided to identify it with pantheism in the hope of discrediting it. That they succeeded in this deception is an indication of how far the whole viewpoint has been kept out of reach of the literate savage society. Let it suffice here to indicate that there is no ‘problem’ about the nature of Allah. Nor do we consider it possible even to speak of it. No how, who, or what or why. It is not hedging the matter in mystery. It is simply asking the wrong ques- tions! The knowledge of Allah is specifically a personal quest in which the radical question that has to be asked is not even ‘who am I?’ but ‘Where then are you going?’ It is this revolutionary question, placing the human being as a zone of direct confrontation with his or her own project, that lies at the heart of the sufic experience.
lutf (pl. lata’if) – Subtlety. All-pervading texture of the universe that be grasped or defined. Its opposite is kathif or thickness – as of the solid objects. Thus by applying the method of Sidi ‘Ali al-Jamal we find that the kathif IS latif, and vice versa. Thus the object is not there. Thus the subject, the perceiving locus, awareness, is itself a density with form.
majdhub – A man who is mad-in-the-Divine. There are five major categories of insanity.
- The idiot, born without complete brain structure/function.
- The damaged, whose brain has been injured.
- The distracted. Those whose extremity of suffering has left them in an interspace from which they cannot return or return with difficulty.
- The possessed. Inhabited by jinn. They speak with a different voice, or another language, they act not only irrationally but with deliberate mischief. They are aware if you try to cure them and resist. Very different symptomatology from 3.
- Mad-in-Allah. A spiritual condition which in itself has five stages. These range from complete absorption in divine light cutting off contact from body function (eating, sleeping) to states which permit quite ravishing and impressive lucidity, and an elevated capacity to teach wisdom, often in song and often in spontaneous highly sophisticated verse forms. This is the case with the great wali, Moulay Hassan al-Majdhub. (photograph p. 374)
malakut – The hidden world.
makruh – A term in shari’a meaning ‘not forbidden but frowned on’.
miskin – (pl. masakin) – Utterly bereft in poverty. Helpless need.
mithal – A metaphor. It has a different texture of meaning in this science than it does in ordinary usage. According to this teaching there are different modalities of experiencing reality, one of these is by thinking about it, and that in turn has different forms or qualities. The use of abstract thought is a function of intellect. The use of analogue, however, is a higher mental operation and involves, as it were, an extra dimension. If you like, abstract thought is linear and diagrammatic or structural. The mithal when used is like leaving the drawing explanation behind and constructing a hologram in space. This function in turn is superceded by a higher zone of intellection which calls, quite literally, for the invention of, as it were, a special language so that the mithal itself has to be extended into the active language structure. Then a kind of high, hermeneutic coding takes place. The outward expression of this is so fine that it is sung and not spoken, and the inner experience is so fine that the ‘song’ in no way can even suggest the experience of the listener. Some of these songs are to be found in the text of this book.
mulk – The phenomenal world. The universe. The macrocosm.
mu’min (pl. mu’minun) – One who trusts that existence is inwardly as it is. He takes his evidence from inside himself. His first acceptance of the know- ledge of existence is dependent on his accepting a fellow human being. Thus to be Muslim you must be able to trust the other. When you are given certainty, that is, confirmation, you trust yourself – that is mu’min.
A muslim is one who accepts his existence outwardly, and does not try to defy his cosmic situation. He is a frail boat within the ocean. The mu’min allows to dawn on him that outwardness is only one dimension of existence, and that his inwardness must contain the other. He sets out to develop this capacity. He discovers the ocean within the boat. This takes him to the station of being muhsin, a man of Ihsan. He then smiles and declares: “What a wonderful thing this is the boat within the ocean and the ocean within the boat!” Such a man is the subject of this book.
murid – The student of a Shaykh of instruction. Its root is irada’ meaning will, for he must hand over his will to the teacher in order to discover who he is.
nafs – The self. Nafs as experienced is complete illusion. It is the permanent adherence to the life energy of the subject’s actions which appear to have reality in his (inner) unseen experience. This aggregate solidifies in the locus of the heart which becomes darkened by these shadows which become more and more dense. The practice of dhikr – invocation – dispels the illusory nafs from the locus of the subject, or we can say it polishes the heart until it becomes like a mirror and finally reflects on its surface nothing but light. Opposite the self is the universe. When by dhikr the universe disappears, the Real appears. This is to say that the substance of the gnostic experience is that the only existent is the Real, and the illusory subject is nothing other than the object in which the Real contemplates its beauty and majesty. This gnosis is called in the language of shari’a, Ihsan.
qasida – A verse, in our context a verse from the Diwan of one of the Shaykhs of Instruction. They contain the ultimate ‘means’ by which our subject is approached. These have never been studied or translated in this society, where they have been brilliantly rendered meaningless by pseudo- poetics, who have projected onto them an aesthetic value they never sought nor can tolerate. The whole science of Diwan method remains to be explored.
qut-al-qulub – by Al-Makki, “The Nourishment of Hearts”, one of the seminal texts of this knowledge, of which this work is the tremendous climax
qutb – The Pole or axis of the Universe. This term is only understood by the one who has attained to it. An approximation would be to say that in him gnosis is complete inwardly so that outwardly his gnosis radiates as a sun over all the other gnostics. The proofs of the qutb are these – that he is surrounded by a circle of gnostics as a King is visibly recognisable by his Court, that the Din of Islam revives around him bringing life to the people, and thirdly that he names his successor before his death, (as Shaykh al-‘Alawi designated Shaykh ibn al-Habib).
rahamut – The ‘arsh manifesting as pure tajalliyat of lights. Here the heavenly bodies, the macrocosm, becomes as a small ring flung onto a vast plain. This is sometimes equated with jabarut, in the triad nasut, lahut, rahamut.
ridwan – The sublime serenity of dynamic contentment that fills the heart and remains.
rijal – (sing. rajul) Literally, Man. The man of Allah. The whole book defines him in considerable detail.
ruh – (pl. arwah) ruhaniyya – The spirit. Spiritual realities.
sadaga – A gift to another or others without any other motive than the giving. The smallest sadaqa is to come out to your brother or sister with a smiling face.
salih – (pl. salihun) – A developed man. By definition, one who is in the right place at the right time.
samad – The Real in its endless effulgence of creative energy, by which the whole universe of endless forms emerge from the possible into the existent. It is the richness whose wealth is every form in creation.
shari’a, shar’ – (pl. shara’i’) – Literally, a road. It is the behaviour modality of a people based on the revelation of their Prophet. The last shari’a in history has proved to be that of Islam. Its social modality abrogates all previous shara’i’, e.g. Navaho, Judaic, Vedic, Buddhic, etc. These shara’i’ however, continue until the arrival and confrontation takes place in that culture with the final and thus superior shari’a – Islam. It is, being the last, therefore the easiest to follow, for it is applicable to the whole human race wherever they are.
shirk, mushrik – To associate anything with Allah. (see la ilaha illa’llah.)
siddiq – A man of truth. Sincerity is his condition, not his adopted posi-
tion.
siwak – Toothstick of a certain tree. It is a sunna to use it.
Sunna – Literally, the form, or practice that was that of the Messenger Muhammad, blessings and peace of Allah be upon him. It is a complete behavioural science that has been systematically kept outside the learning framework of this society.
tajalli – (pl. tajalliyat) – A divine manifestation witnessed by the inner eye of the seeker. Outer experience is event, inner experience is vision, Mulk, the kingdom of outwardness, is the realm of event. Malakut, the kingdom of inwardness is the realm of vision. Jabarut, the kingdom of the source, is the realm of annihilation.
Mulk – is the realm of darknesses, malakut of lights, and jabarut of light upon light.
taqwa – Being careful. Knowing your place in the cosmos. Its proof is the experience of awe.
tariqa – The Way.
tawhid – Unity in its most profound sense. True tawhid is based on com- plete understanding and appreciation of the self. Until you know you do not exist you can not know that only He exists. This idea is itself a veil over knowledge of this, and its final enemy.
tayammum – To make the bodily purification before prayer with dust or stone in the absence of water.
‘ulama – Men of outward knowledge.
wali (pl. awliya) wilaya – Literally, the friend of Allah. In Islam wilayat, the condition of the wali, refers uniquely to the gnostic station of a person. The station of the wali is the station of knowledge of the Real by direct seeing.
warid (pl. waridat) – Another key term. A warid is what descends on the awareness of the student while performing dhikr or sitting in the company of the Teacher. The warid is sometimes described as the unwinding of the talisman, for its effect is at the core of self experience and it is a kind of un-doing. Warid is the first stage of awakening. In the warid the experienced field of reality is at last tasted as being with less and less separateness. It is the first oncoming of gatheredness. The objects are recognised but can no longer be distinguished. Action may still be possible but not speech. It is as if the body’s contours – not the intellect’s – were the perimeter of one’s vision, so that the room or place where you are is part of your body which you can feel and recognise as shimmering and melting – that is, its melting and yours are one event. Here there is no compassion for the other, but compassion is itself the reality of the state, without other. This is the first hint that the self/universe is one cosmic situation. Anything can unlock it, a glance from the Shaykh, the action of another faqir, or a mithal sung in the Diwan.
wird (pl. awrad) – A unit of dhikr constructed to contain in it certain patterns of knowledge and self awakening. They are medicines, and their recitation makes them effective in altering the self-form of the student. Shaykh Muhammad al-‘Arabi’s wird lasts three hours, others can last only a few minutes.
Yathrib – The name for Madina before Islam.
zawiyya – Literally, a corner. The building used as a meeting place by the Shaykhs of instruction.
zahid/zuhd – Zuhd means doing-without, the zahid is the one who does without. It does not mean ascetic. The one who is zahid no longer needs or desires the thing he does without, so his avoiding it eases his way and does not result in a struggle or denial.
Click on this link for the introduction to the book, you can also buy the book here: The Meaning of Man
And this is a link to some of the text that’s within the book
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