I was thinking to myself, "when you fall in love with someone, how do you know you are actually in love with them and not your own image of them?" And of course you do fall in love with your image of them. Over time that image may be changed and improved as you learn more about them, but is it still an image of them rather than them? In some ways at least, it still is.
Then I thought, "how is the love of G-d any different?" Well, in a sense you can love G-d without knowing anything about Him. If you love peace, mercy, truth, justice, you DO love G-d even without knowing him. So then can we keep on loving peace, mercy, justice and the rest and leave off loving Him in any other way?
Well many do. And I am not saying that is wrong: in fact it's pretty right. But let me tell you what IS wrong.
We are. We and the world are. We are ourselves sin.
In Daoism, it is said that you can see the "unity" or else you can see the "ten thousand things." The "ten thousand things" are the multiplicity of stuff in the world. The world as it is, the world as it appears to normal folks. The world of the "ten thousand things" is itself sin because it is itself sundered, fallen from the primordial unity.
If you are a normal person, the idea is that you be a good person and do what is right and that is pretty cool. That's what you are supposed to be. Nobody could ever argue with that.
If you are a weirdo like me however, that might not be enough, that might not satisfy, because you understand that the world - or at least the world to YOU - is sundered. Is Fallen. And nothing else will do but to ultimately cease to see yourself and to cease to see the world, but only see G-d. Even the word "God" goes.
The Sufis are so much better at language for this than anybody else is, though they speak often in terms of romantic love. Which is what I started this post with, the strange difficulty in ever actually knowing the Beloved (human or otherwise.) Do you know them, or do you know your image of them? This also ties into my previous post for today, on idolatry. Do you know Jesus, or just the Bible or that wooden figure on a crucifix? Do you love G-d or just the Tanakh? This is part of the "ten thousand things," the sundering. We are separated from our object, from the object of our inquiry. When you love another person, that person is not us and in many ways is forever unknown to us. Everything is separated. The Ten Thousand Things.
But I see before me a great shining sword to sunder the sundering, to render it whole. To render it whole the only way it could be. "I" passes away, we pass away, the world passes away, and there is left only G-d. Where there is no longer Robert looking at G-d, but only G-d, and Robert is no longer thought of and the world is no longer thought of. And He is there always... in any given moment that could happen. That I forget myself, that I am annihilated yet still live. Dead yet alive. I leave - He stays.
"All things in creation suffer annihilation
and there remains the face of the Lord
in its majesty and bounty."
~Surat-L-Rehman 26-27
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