Arthur Osborne - Adventures on the Path #6

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I was taken to see the guru (or murshid) in the cool cloister

of an old stone house, looking out on a dusty courtyard. He

kept me waiting a few minutes before entering: a short, broad

man of about sixty, white-haired, bearded and bright eyed, with

a brisk, alert manner and a look of keen intelligence. He was

wearing a skullcap, gown and pyjama trousers, all of gleaming

white cotton, freshly laundered and ironed. It was always so

that I saw him. He asked general questions about my life, my

work, my circumstances, touching on nothing spiritual. I felt a

strong wave of disappointment. I had no impression of

spirituality but put it down to my lack of psychic receptivity —

the spiritual power must be there or my friends would not have

recognized it. One of them, after two years ineffectual search,

when he heard of this murshid had cancelled his ticket. The

other had met Martin’s guru but was more attracted to this one.

Neither had any doubts.

 

It was some days before I received initiation. One day,

during this interval, I was alone in the hotel when two of our

neighbours came across to speak with me, professional men of

about my age. After speaking about the pure doctrine of nonduality

(which so many Indian Muslims, imbued with Sufi

teachings, understand as clearly as Hindus) they suggested to

me in a tactful way that I might not be very wise in my choice

of a murshid and showed me a pamphlet in English by their

own. I was not impressed by it and disliked his transliterating

his name in such a way as to make it look English. Nor did I

approve of their proselytising for a guru. I decided that rivalry

was at the base of their warning and ignored it. In fact, I willed

myself to believe in my murshid just as I had willed myself to be

tragically in love at Oxford. Simplicity and sincerity are seldom

natural qualities; they have to be acquired.

 

It was not into one Sufi order alone that I was initiated

but into the group of great Indian Muslim orders, my murshid

being entitled to represent them all. The spiritual exercises I

was given are such as are only revealed on initiation; there was,

however, one meditation among them which there is no harm

and some interest in speaking about. There is a verse in the

Quran: “He is now as He was”; and I was to meditate on the

two in conjunction. If there was God alone and if He remains

as He was, utterly unchanged, if the creation of the universe

and all that it contains has not limited Him in any way, has not

touched even the fringe of His Being, then all other-than-God

is an appearance without intrinsic reality; He alone is the Real.

Therefore whatever is the essence or reality of me cannot be

other-than-God. I cannot say “I am God” but I can say “I am

not other-than-God”; there is an enormous difference, for the

former might deify the ego, the individual in me, while the

latter denies its very existence; and when all the illusory otherthan-

God is denied, what remains? Only God, Who is now as

He was.

 

 

This is a good example of how the Sufi saints read the

highest meaning into the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet.

There have been Western scholars who have questioned their

right to do so, maintaining that no such meaning was intended.

This is preposterous. What it comes to is the implication that

men whose whole lives are a quest for Truth, some of whom

have attained the supreme super-rational Truth, have built their

work on a foundation of error or falsification; also that the

founder of one of the world’s great religions had himself not

seen beyond the exoteric wall to the deeper meaning of his

message. It is ignorance criticising knowledge. People who do

not understand the universal truth, even in theory, but look

upon Sufism as a mere set of philosophical ideas may accept

such a view, but not those who have understood that Truth is

one and universal.

 

Why, then, is the truth of non-duality not explicitly taught

in Islam, as it is in many Hindu and Buddhist texts? Why should

it be necessary to seek it in hidden and symbolical sentences? A

religion has to be adapted to an entire people, not only to a

spiritual minority, and the type of adaptation required varies

from the age and community. The various religious traditions

teach that there is a process of diminishing spirituality in the

history of mankind, and therefore the latest religion revealed

has to be the most hard and exoteric in order to hold the masses,

which means that its higher implications will be veiled in the

most cryptic and symbolical form. That is the case with Islam.

But how does belief in the existence of Sufism from the

very origin of Islam, in fact as the very essence of Islam, fit in

with the evidence which historians and philosophers profess to

find of its gradual development and of the influence on it of

neo-Platonism? There is no doubt that neo-Platonism did exert

an enormous influence on the formulation of Sufi philosophy.

 

Modern philosophers could, therefore, hardly help regarding

Sufi philosophy as a derivative of neo-Platonism once they made

the initial error of considering it a philosophy at all. Of course

it is not; it is a path, which is something quite different. Some

of those who teach or follow a path may like to give a

philosophical exposition of it, but there is no necessity to do so.

Studying a philosophy is quite a different type of activity from

following a path. Those philosophers who study neo-Platonic

or Sufi philosophy today are not Sufis, are not even training to

become Sufis, since they are not following a Sufi path, whereas

I, on the other hand, when I set foot on the path, was not

expected to study neo-Platonic or any other philosophy. No

disciple of the Sufis is. A basic understanding of the theory of

non-duality is expected, but that is simple; and after that practise,

not theory, is needed.

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from Arthur Osborne's MY LIFE & QUEST