Sweet Blasphemy
Elif Shafak, a contemporary Turkish author, wrote a novel a few years ago entitled "The Forty Rules of Love" -- about the encounter of Rumi with the Sufi Master Shams of Tabriz. In the novel, still another person has written the story of this mystic-encounter, and that book is called "Sweet Blasphemy"... the title that lends itself to this little essay... Sweet Blasphemy is the "Truth behind the truth of every truth -- but a truth that can neither be known nor spoken of"... Now, a "truth that can neither be known nor spoken", of what use is that?
Ah, isn't that the point? That truth can be of "no use"? And isn't that what matters? Above all else, religion is "useful": it tends to comfort the weary or the sorrowful, it consoles both the fearing and the doubtful, and it can challenge delusion with some small amount of objectivity. Sweet blasphemy, on the other hand, offers only the emptiness of subjective annihilation...
Carl Jung wrote, "Organized religion becomes a defense against having the religious experience." Organized religion has always looked askance upon the mystic who dared upon the path of personal experience, nevertheless, countless persons within / without it have set out for those precise encounters. Perhaps the most grievous problem associated with organized religion is how it lends virtual power-without-limits to the subjective "I". Believing that "I" am separate from the One "frees" me from the responsibility that would super-naturally flow from identification with the One and with Every Other: this "no difference" is the warp and woof of the mystic experience: as it also is a "sweet blasphemy"...
The tiny bubble of our ego identification seldom (if ever) goes "pop" all at once: identification with / as the One and Every Other needs steady attention and cultivation. Organized religion cultivates and serves every isolated "I": as often as not through versions and visions of pain and fear: projecting both into an endlessness that is perhaps the most "diabolical" concept ever imagined. Meanwhile, mysticism exhorts the practitioner to cultivate both forgetfulness and remembrance: forget the illusion of separation of an isolated and subjective "I"; and then the cultivation of the remembrance of union, or Oneness, with / in the One and Every Other. In place of pain and fear, the mystic-practitioner gives attention to pleasure and ecstasy (our divine birthright!)...
The limits of our skin and mind can define us as "American" or Anyone Else, as Christian or Muslim or Whatever, as "sinner" or blessed, etc. But the actual limits of our consciousness knows only the limits of our imagination: if we cultivate the limitless heart consciousness of Divine Love, we will tend to leave the limits of our skin behind: One Love Heart Consciousness becomes an opened Earth Awareness and Compassion for Everyone and Everything becomes an ever-expanding Wisdom... opening... opening...
Opening into a "sweet blasphemy" there is, to be sure, the "room of requirement": where we learn how and why it is necessary to completely disappear. Only the one who is "empty of I" can be filled with anything other than "that". "I" is now and ever shall be a crowd of lonely and afraid: perhaps certain enough of something or of anything so as to be able to judge others or even to kill them, but always lost in self-identification and self-righteousness... While "I" is a crowd of lonely and afraid, when it disappears -- as is required -- there is "only" a forever of welcome home: welcome home everyone who only sees in a mirror the reflection of everyone else! Ultimately, there is Only One Reality which is a One Love Heart Consciousness manifesting as Light-Energy-Vibration- Matter-Life... Now this, now that, but always Only One...
The Unitive Experience can be cultivated and facilitated by working in a Soup Kitchen, operating a House of Hospitality, and neighborhood community organizing for peace, justice, and equality. Likewise, it can be equally cultivated in a monastic setting, by the practice of the creative arts, by homemaking, gardening and farming, teaching, nursing, and any other work not motivated primarily for profit or privilege. But always this cultivation and facilitation is by the interior means of identification with the Divine: and increasingly, with the Divine Feminine: "Knowing the male, but keeping to the female" (Lao Tzu) is to consciously align oneself with the generative principle of the entire manifested Universe: striving, pushing, lifting higher and higher into an ever-evolving Consciousness: open-ended with Infinite Possibilities!
What does this Rising Consciousness do all day? "What does God do all day? He / She lies on a maternity bed giving birth" (Meister Eckhart) "We become the Mothers of God through our words and actions" (St. Francis). The Unitive Experience is to deliberately enter into the vivification of Life and Matter: it is to participate in the "return" of the Divine Mother: it is a share of the Bodhisattva Witness -- "I" will serve the liberation of every sentient being and willingly disappear into Love Only... until there is Only One in Ecstasy, in Divine Pleasure... The Divine Mother is the Temple of the Universe: all that lives, moves, and has being in any sort of "is-ness" proceeds from and returns to, in an endless evolutionary spiral, Her Womb... Likewise, the union of your soul / body / mind is the Holy Ground in which you may encounter every aspect of the Divine: in Pleasure and in Ecstasy: become, if you will, Love-in-Action, embrace a life commitment to nonviolence, love the One, love Every Other (especially the weakest and marginalized), and feed everyone: and your brand new "no self" will be actualized in the "sweet blasphemy"...
