The Living Universe - Duane Elgin [44]
Abu-said Abil-Kheir (967–1049) was another Sufi whose passionate spiritual poetry expresses his intimate connection with the Beloved:
Love is Here.
It is the blood in my veins, my skin.
I am emptied of my self.
Filled with the Beloved.
His fire seizes every part of my body.
Who am I? Just my name; the rest is Him.
Here is the wisdom of the Sufi poet Rumi with regard to love:
Through Love all that is bitter will sweeten.
Through Love all that is copper will be gold.
Through Love all dregs will turn to purest wine.
Through Love all pain will turn to medicine.
Through Love the dead will all become alive.
Through Love the king will turn into a slave!
In Hinduism we also find the idea of bhakti, which is loving devotion to the supreme God. This is not romantic love, but an unselfish, sacred love that wants only union with the divine. Tiru-Mular, a Hindu poet of the Middle Ages, sang: “The ignorant say love and God are different. . . . When they know that love and God are the same, they rest in God’s love.” When the love of the devotee meets the love of God, there is an experience of undivided union.
The Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield describes the unbounded love at the foundation of the universe in this way: “I will tell you a secret, what is really important . . . true love is really the same as awareness. They are identical.” As we deepen our awareness, we find that love is our core essence—at the very heart and center of our experience. Buddhism teaches a path of compassion, where we see ourselves as inseparable from the overall ecology of life. A core practice in Buddhism is cultivating metta (lovingkindness) toward all sentient beings.
All religions recognize that a life force, whose essence is love, sustains and permeates all existence and is accessible to everyone. The Mother Universe holds us in love as, with limited consciousness and great freedom, we make the long journey of awakening. When we learn the greater our love, the greater our awareness, we further our evolution.
A Body of Knowing
Physics has revealed that beneath the seeming separation of things there is a deeper unity—a nonlocal connectivity to our universe. We live in a holographic universe in which everything is exquisitely connected with everything else. Everything is mutually interpenetrating. The world’s spiritual traditions agree that by going into the center of our life-stream we tap into the flow that sustains the entire universe and this naturally has great wisdom within it. The wisdom of creation is directly accessible to us as the hum of knowing-resonance at the core of our being. When we relax into the center of ordinary existence, we penetrate into the profound intelligence out of which the universe continuously arises.
Because the universe is a unified system, it contains within it all of the conscious experiences of all forms of life. Understandably, to touch into the consciousness of the cosmos even briefly—to experience “cosmic consciousness”—is a profound experience.
Jesus declared “The Kingdom of God is within you.” If we look within, we will discover immense wisdom within our direct experience. The “Kingdom” is also all around us. Recall Jesus saying in The Gospel of Thomas, “The Kingdom of God is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it.” The treasures of this kingdom are both within (the felt wisdom and love of the heart) and without (a divine presence infuses all of creation).
All of the world’s wisdom traditions declare this world is infused with sacred meaning and knowledge. The direct experience of life carries its own meaning and requires no intellectual explanation. Playwright and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell offered this wisdom when in her nineties