“A person may [seek] because of the wrong motives – such as curiosity, desire for power, fear, insecurity…”
I would like to explore this with an objective eye – with the realization that false motives are inevitable, not to be ignored but to be acknowledged and remembered, and addressed.
I imagine a circular room lined with doors, on each door an image of what lies within. Many images are appealing, many not. None offers anything but a roomful of activiti4es, not a passage but dead-end; the activities that attract me are ends in themselves, they require an attitude of devotion to the act – art, music, writing, mountaineering, traveling – and the possibilities are inherently limited – like a roomful of toys for the rest for the rest of my life.
So I can not choose a door, because of each one’s limited quality. I am left with no option other than the one dark passage that is not a door, that has no image, promises nothing but possibility and the absence of an articifial, false framework for life. There is no promice of success, in fact there is fear – fear of the dark vagueness, the stumbling and crashing into walls. But there is something, and so it is the only choice my real self can make.
Am I ignoring false aspects? Painting my search in a self-lauding way? No, I think any falseness must come in not by the idea but the methods of attaining that idea – in fact the methods may be in opposition to the real search, and I see this fact in me all the time. But essentially I want to avoid the habits, the activities, which are essentially ways of killing time, “making do” or “getting by” as best one can, until death comes.
…the only permanent reality possible consists of good works useful for another, immortal life. Every other hope that I desired to see realized was followed by melancholy, sometimes because what was ardently desired escaped me, sometimes because I decided to abandon it.
- Ibn Hazm, “Falsfat al-Akhlaq w-Al-Siyar,” translated by J. Kritzeck and quoted in The King’s Son, Eds. Cecil, Robert et al.
But there was something about Canopus itself that… is the word attracted? me. No. Obsessed? No, there was too much else in my life to allow a one-sided preoccupation.
I felt about Canopus that inward, brooding question, wondering, that one may sometimes feel about a person whose sources of action, of being, seem distant and other – as if understanding this being may open doors in oneself whose existence one does not do more than suspect. Yet they are there… one knows it… one cannot – may not? – open them… but other people have opened similar doors in themselves… they operate on altogether different – higher? – levels of themselves… if one understood how one could come close not only to them but to that area of oneself that matches their higher otherness… so one broods, ponders, questions, sometimes for long ages, about some individual who – one is convinced – is only part glimpsed, certainly only part understood.
- Doris Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (66-7)
Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare.
But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.- Saadi, Rose Garden
Metaphysically minded people, and especially those who feel that they are comfortable in the domain of mysticism or “inner perception,” have no greater start on the generality of humanity where Sufism is concerned. Their subjectivity, especially where it is linked with a strong sense of personal uniqueness ‘caught’ from other people, can in fact be a serious disability… Sufism does not trad in airyfairiness, mutual admiration, or lukewarm generalities.
- Idries Shah, The Sufis (19)
