Abusing Love
An individual sent a posting to the Sufi Spiritual Abuse Recovery Assistance Group that sought to make several points. Among these was that the idea that if someone feels excessive love for someone, then, this is blessing from God – even if, subsequently, the focus of that love is taken away. Moreover, the posting mentioned how the mind should not control the heart.
Love is one of the most abused words in the English language. People speak about love, when they actually mean: emotion; liking; attraction; inclination; passion; compatibility; fondness; obsession; sex; need; dependency; pleasurable; compassion; control; empathy; abuse; oppression; addiction; or various pathological forms of interaction.
There is a Hadith Qudsi which says that 'Whoever seeks Me, finds Me. Whoever finds Me, comes to know Me. Whoever comes to know Me, loves Me. Whoever loves Me, that person I slay. Whomever I slay, I owe that person blood-money, and to whomever I owe blood-money, I am the recompense.' Before one begins to talk about love, perhaps, first one needs to explore the nature of seeking, finding, and coming to know, since all of these precede the station of love.
The foregoing Hadith mentions a number of stages of suluk or spiritual journeying -- seeking, finding, knowing, loving, death, and the Divine recompense. Now, in one sense, every stage of the Path has its Divine recompense which are the experiences, understandings, tastes, knowledge, disclosures, states, stations, insights, and unveilings which come, by God's Grace, to an individual as signs and indications that one's journey is still on course and still on-going (as opposed to being dead in the water when some spiritual journeys get becalmed or stuck in a particular state or station).
Seeking, finding, knowing, loving, and fana are all different modalities or ways of engaging the Divine Reality. None of these conditions are complete in themselves but must be integrated and harmonized with all of the other spiritual conditions which, God willing, are realized along the path.
The final stage of the journey -- the part which helps demarcate the difference between traveling and having been said to 'arrive' is the Divine Recompense which goes to those who have been slain in the way of Allah.
The Qur'an says: "Think not of those who are slain in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are living. With their Lord, they have provision. Jubilant (are they) because of that which Allah has bestowed upon them of His bounty." (3:169-170)
The bounty or recompense which has been bestowed upon these 'abd of Allah is the condition of baqa which is the realization of one's unique, individuated spiritual capacity within a context of being united with Divinity in the sense that although in essence we are Divine, we are not Divinity in Essence (and there is no other meaning for "There is no reality but Allah", for whatever human beings are in essence, this cannot be other than Divinity even as it cannot be synonymous with Divinity, for Divinity in Essence transcends all of Creation).
Every stage has associated with it a certain element of jazb or spiritual intoxication which is the state which comes over us when one is in resonance with the Divine and the reverberations of that resonance are manifested in a sense of well-being, happiness, peace, understanding, trust, security, and rootedness. Moreover, the jazb which is felt at any given stage can cover a continuum of possibilities, running from very mild to quite intense (a state of ecstasy).
The condition of jazb which is experienced through the Divine recompense which is alluded to in the Hadith Qudsi is one of Jubilance as indicated in the ayats from the Qur'an. The people of sobriety experience this jubilance on the inside, but outwardly are in touch with the realities of the realm of Nasut and so on ( and are able to help guide people along the spiritual path because their understanding is immersed in the Truth of this condition of baqa). The people of ecstasy (on whatever level or stage of jazb) are not in any spiritual condition to help guide people because they operate only from the understanding of ecstasy which has not been integrated with, and adapted to, the realities of the needs of spiritual journeying, and this is why it is generally agreed among shaykhs that the path of sobriety is superior to the path of intoxication -- that is, primarily because people in the former condition are better able to assist people on their spiritual journeys than are people who are intoxicated and look at the events of life through the colors which are peculiar to a given state of intoxication which remain uncorrected, so to speak, for purposes of guidance.A lot of people say they love heaven, but few people want to die in order to become united with their alleged beloved. The suicide bombers who claim they do what they do out of love for God and the Hereafter, don't have a clue about either. They do what they do because they have been conned into believing that a certain delusional world-view is true, and they have a passion for that delusion, and they confuse this with love.
Through techniques of control, hypnosis, compliance, obedience, confusion, ambiguity, social pressure, suggestion, manipulation, deceit, duplicity, and lying, a vulnerable person can be brought into a state where they are prepared to sacrifice anything -- job, money, possessions, family, spouse, time, talent, and even one's life, and this willingness to sacrifice is called love, but it is not love because, among other things, there has been no real seeking, finding, or coming to know which has preceded it -- and, one can only come to love that aspect of the Divine which has been disclosed in Truth within one's being.
Iblis or Satan considers himself to be a lover of God. Before his fall from grace, he was said to have worshiped God for 500,000 years, and that his spiritual station was raised to such a high degree that he was permitted by Allah to not only associate with the angels, but to teach them as well. However, when push came to shove and the so-called love was tested, Iblis was more enamored with himself and consumed with jealousy toward human beings than he actually loved God -- Iblis may have known many things, by the Grace of Allah, but he didn't know his essential nature and, therefore, he did not know God, and as the aforementioned Hadith Qudsi indicates, one cannot love God -- or, more precisely, love the manner in which the Divine Names and Attributes are manifested through our essential capacity -- without knowing -- that is having experiential understanding of the Presence of God both within and without such that one experiences unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity.
Before saying that "one who has felt excessive love for someone, it is a blessing of God", one needs to know whether what is being felt is truly love, or it is something else which we merely refer to as love, without the reality of love being present. Out of love for the potential which God has placed in us, God may, indeed, put us through different experiences, trials, challenges, problems, and so on, but the task from our side of things is to learn the significance of these different events and just what it is that God is trying to teach us through the events of life.
When we are attracted to a fraudulent spiritual teacher -- perhaps even passionately so, and, then, because of this passionate attraction we permit ourselves to trust such an individual, only to have that trust betrayed, in one way or another, then, perhaps, what we are being taught is not how excessive love for a person is a blessing of God, but that it was a blessing of God which has showed us that what we thought was love was not actually love and that we have more work to do in our search for the actual Reality of love.
God does guide us in any way Divinity pleases. However, our job as spiritual seekers after Truth is to try to figure out what the nature of that guidance is as it is manifested through the events of our lives -- like the symbols of dreams, the symbols of life events have to be interpreted ... and sometimes our interpretations and understandings are correct and sometimes they are not, and the task of a spiritual guide is to help us learn the differences between the two.
Every experience has a taste or dhawk. The Sufi path is the journey of learning the art and science of dhawk.
Love has many tastes, depending on the dimension of heart or spirit from which it comes. Some Sufi speak in terms of nine stages of love -- (1) compatibility; (2) inclination; (3) fellowship; (4) passion; (5) friendship; (6) exclusive friendship; (7) ardent affection; (8) enslavement; and (9) bewilderment. Some people mistake confusion for bewilderment, and the two are at the opposite ends of the spectrum, although many people who are confuses suppose that their confusion is an expression of love.
Other Sufis speak of five stages of love: (1) shari'at; (2) tariqat (seeking); (3) haqiqat (finding of Reality); (4) ma'arifat (Gnosis -- true knowledge); and (5) wahdat (the experience of unicity or unity with the Beloved). Again, people who have the first kind of love involving Shari'ah suppose that this is the same as someone who experiences the love of stage (5) -- and there are worlds of differences between the two -- although stage (5) does bring one back to stage (1) and one comes to understand them real nature of shari'ah for the very first time.
In the aforementioned Group posting, the word “heart” is mentioned, but nothing is said about which level of the heart is being addressed, and this is important. A name for one of the most exterior facets of the heart is "qalb" -- this is an Arabic word which means 'that which turns' because this facet of the heart is continuously swinging back and forth between the influences of the nafs and the spirit as they each vie for control over the faculties of the heart.
A fully realized and illumined heart is one thing. A heart which is steeped in darkness and confusion is quite another.
It is only the former which should be permitted to lead the mind as the latter interacts with life and the world. Until that sun rises, one is in need of guidance and spiritual assistance because the path has many pitfalls and one is constantly vulnerable to the influences of nafs, Iblis, dunya, and those who claim to be lovers of God, but, like Iblis, are individuals who acknowledge God's Reality without wishing to know that Reality or love that Reality with the capacity which God has given to all human beings and jinn.
There are many lessons to be learned from situations which seem to resonate with love, but, subsequently, have been shown to reek with hypocrisy and malevolence. These can be bitter lessons to learn, but once one begins to differentiate the taste of sham-love from real love, then, one is in a much better position to seek assistance on the path and one is in a much better position to sense where one needs to go.
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