Unity and Diversity. An Introduction to the main Spiritual Traditions of the World

Transcription

1 Unity and Diversity An Introduction to the main Spiritual Traditions of the World The boat we are sailing in, was made by many hands The sea we are sailing on, touches every land Wali & Ariënne van der Zwan

2 Contents Introduction 5 Acknowlegments 6 The Unity of Religious Ideals 7 The perennial philosophy 8 Bhagavad Gita: when adharma rules 9 The Prophets 11 Universal Worship 13 Wisdom from the East 15 Addendum: What is an inclusive Sufi order or spiritual path? 17 The Great Mother Goddess 19 The Earth Goddess 21 The Moon Goddess 22 Decline and fall of the Mother Culture 23 The Goddess reborn 24 Nature Traditions 27 Before history begins 28 A spiritualized and enchanted world 29 Totems 30 Rites and Rituals 31 Sacred space 31 Hinduism 33 History 34 Crime, Punishment and Reincarnation 37 The Caste System 38 The Stages in Life 39 Yoga 40 Basic needs 41 Illusion: All this world is but a play 42 Purusha and Prakriti 43 Other concepts 45 Advaita and Bhakti 45 Pitfalls in Advaita and Bhakti 47 Deities 48 The Bhagavad Gita 52 Buddhism 55 The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path 56 Lord Buddha s last words 58 Indo-European ancestry and the role of the female 59 The bodhisattva ideal 59 More Buddhas 60 Different branches of Buddhism 61 Nirvana and the Four Immeasurables 64 No mud, no lotus 65 Buddhism: a religion or a philosophy? 65 Practices: sitting and walking 67

3 Zoroastrianism 69 Zarathustra 70 Amesha Spenta 71 Angra Mainyu 72 Fire worship 73 Heaven and Hell 74 Judaism 75 History and origin: Abraham and Moses 76 The holy book 77 The two faces of the Divine 79 Orthopraxis, the Ten Commandments 80 Maimonides Principles of Faith 81 Holy Days 82 Sabbath 83 Mystical Judaism 85 Midrash 87 Addendum: Music and Dance in the Chassidic tradition 91 Christianity 93 The historical Jesus according to the Gospels 96 The historical Jesus and modern research 98 The Gospels 99 Mary and the feminine side of Christianity 101 Creation Spirituality 104 Addendum: The Aramaic Jesus 106 Islam and Sufism 111 The Quran 112 The Prophet Muhammad 113 Shia and Sunni 116 The Perfect Being 117 The Hadith of Gabriel 118 The five Pillars 119 Angels and different worlds 122 Islam and Mysticism: the Sufi Path 123 The two faces of the One 125 Wasifas and zikr 129 Symbolism 131 Also available as booklet or PDF download 135 About the authors 137 Quote cover: from the singing of Pete Seeger. Song Somos el Barco by Lorre Wyatt PIM Productions 2017 W. & A. van der Zwan Khankah Samark

4 Introduction In search for the Truth, a man climbed the mountain. As he seemed successful, the devil had him shadowed by a demon. After a while, the demon reported that the man indeed had caught the Truth and already was on his way down. This surely would make the work of the devil on earth much more difficult. The devil only smiled and said: I already took care of it. The people will make it into a religion. 1 The great historian Toynbee states that the religion you grew up with is so deeply rooted in your being that no one is effectively in a position to judge between your own religion and your neighbor s. 2 His sobering conclusion is that the place where you are born is decisive for your convictions. Most people see their religion as true. Why otherwise believe at all? Unfortunately, many also see their religion as the one and only true religion. This is the cause of many of the problems in the world. As history shows, eighty to ninety percent of wars are fought out of conviction, religious or political. One look at a newspaper is enough to realize our species hasn t evolved much in historical times. Only our weapons have become more refined. On a personal level, the keyword to address this issue is respect. Respect for each other and each other s convictions as long as it causes no harm, as the creed of modern Wicca has it can bring us closer to one another. A starting point of respect can be interest in the faith of one another. We can only hope this book will add to this interest, leading to a deeper understanding in the realization that in the end there is only one source, one unity behind the apparent diversity that we sense, feel and experience in our present world. The mountain doesn t care which way you climb it. From the top, the unity behind all can clearly be seen, as mystics of all ages and cultures have told us. The fact remains that we have too many mystical statements that are coherent, the obvious products of sound minds, that speak of real experience (not hallucinations), and that are no deviations of an individual. That means we are dealing with claims to truth, in the face of which the erudition of objective facts is a mere escape-mechanism. 3 In the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan with commentary of his student Samuel L. Lewis: If people but knew their own religion, how tolerant they would become, and how free from any grudge against the religion of others. 1 Free after Huston Smith: The World s Religions, HarperCollins, 1991, foreword to second edition. 2 Quoted by Geoffrey Parrinder in Comparative Religion. London 1976, p Kees Bolle, cited in: Guy L. Beck: Sonic Theology, Hinduism and Sacred Sound. University of South Carolina Press, 1993, p. 10

5 What is this knowledge of religion? In its fullest sense, it is nothing but knowledge of God. Without knowledge of God, there is no knowledge of religion. There may be belief in religion but that is not knowledge of religion. Until there has been the personal experience and contact such that the mind has grasped its significance, it cannot be called knowledge. Certainly when another has learned it, it is not one s knowledge. But when it has become part of one s own life, it is one s knowledge. Now this knowledge of God, how does it bring tolerance? It brings tolerance because it makes one see all and know all. If it does not make one see all and know all, it is not knowledge of God. The God of popular religion is that name given to the human thought-concept of Divinity, but that human thought-concept is not the Reality. It is the Reality which, when apprehended, causes this condition of universal beneficence and compassion toward all creatures. That is why Allah is called Er-Rahman, Er-Rahim [most merciful, most compassionate]. Bowl of Saki for January 8 Acknowledgements Some twenty-five years ago, we followed a Dutch training program for the Dances of Universal Peace, a form of spiritual circle dance where people sing mantras and sacred phrases from all over the world. Part of the training program involved making a study of the most relevant spiritual traditions. Later, when we started offering training programs ourselves, these studies augmented with articles Wali wrote as journalist for different spiritual magazines formed the basis of the syllabus we handed out to our students. The study of the main spiritual traditions didn t end there. We dove deeper in the well of Universal Sufism of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Samuel L. Lewis. We drank from the well of the Eastern Sufis of the Golden Age. We were part of the Dutch friends of Creation Spirituality, studied Kabbalah and sat at the feet of the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of these and other teachers were formal, some informal, some just passing by. Naming more is forgetting many. As a writer, Wali was fortunate to sustain the family partly by writing articles on the spiritual side of religion, thus deepening my understanding. As our daughter lives in India, we have a first-hand experience of Indian family life, which both triggered and deepened the interest in Hinduism with Vivekananda as main teacher. Our gratitude goes to all who crossed our path, knowingly or unknowingly inspiring us. A special thanks goes to Neil Douglas-Klotz, who put the Aramaic Jesus on the map. He gave permission to publish an addendum on the Aramaic Jesus filtered through our experience and study. While writing, we had in mind both the Dances of Universal Peace and the Universal Worship of Hazrat Inayat Khan, as both ask for a deeper understanding of the main spiritual traditions. The Universal Worship and its background is explained in chapter I. This religious ceremony honors the different faiths. To these faiths, we added in this syllabus the Great Goddess tradition and the Native Traditions, as they form the foundation of the connection with the divine and have their echo in the modern historical traditions. Unterbirkholz, Germany March, 2017 Wali & Ariënne van der Zwan

6 The two faces of the One In his healing prayer Nayaz, Hazrat Inayat Khan addresses the One as Beloved Lord, Almighty God. As explained in the Nayaz booklet 4, this refers to the dual character of the One, expressed through intimacy (in Sufi terms: jemal, literally: beauty) and awe (jelal, literally: power) or in more formal theological terms the immanent and transcendent aspect of the One. The Quranic basis of both the nearness and the awe is to be found in the trust the primordial humans expressed on the so-called Day of Alast (The Day of the Covenant, Quran 7: 172), where we in our pre-born state full-heartedly said YES to recognize the One as our Rabb (literally: Sustainer). 5 The awe aspect is the unspeakable reality of the One, surpassing and transcending all. In Islam, this is expressed in the creed la ilaha illa llah (no god but God) and in the phrase Allah ho Akbar: God is great (greater than we ever can fathom or imagine). As the Quran tells us (42: 11): Nothing is like Him. The Jewish tradition warns us not to make images of the One. This is the reason behind the practice of nigun, the singing of syllables like lay lay, da da or ya ya with seemingly no meaning: a word or noun is also an image. The Quran also expresses the closeness of the One, for God is nearer to us than our jugular vein (50: 16). Also: wherever we look, we can see the face of the One (2: 115), as wherever you are, God is (57: 4). The jelal aspect of the One is more emphasized in traditional Islam, the jemal aspect more in Sufism. Although these two faces superficially seen seem to contradict one another, both are essential to a full understanding of both Islam and classical Sufism. If we want our heart to have wings, we need the wings of both Majesty (jelal) and Beauty (jemal). As Ibn al- Arabi says in his Bezels of Wisdom: If you insist only on His transcendence, you restrict Him and if you insist only on His immanence, you limit him. If you maintain both aspects, you are right, an Imam and a master in the spiritual sciences. 6 Elsewhere in the same book, the Great Sheikh says: Do not look upon Reality, lest you abstract Him from creation. Do not look upon creation, lest you invest in with what is not the Reality. Know him as both Comparable and Incomparable and so sit in the abode of truth. 7 4 Wali & Ariënne van der Zwan: The Nayaz, the Healing Prayer of Hazrat Inayat Khan. PIM Publications, See for more on this and the relation between the Day of Alast and the phenomenon of Zikr, our booklet: The Art of Remembrance and the Stations of the Soul, PIM Publications 2013, p. 7 6 Ibn Arabi: Fusus al-hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom), translation R.W.J. Austin. Suhali Academy Lahore, 1999, p Fusus al-hikam, p. 109

7 The Islamic scholar Sachiko Murata to which we owe much of the following talks about the incomparability and the similarity of the One. 8 We are born in the image of the One, yet at the same time, the One is beyond comparison. She concludes that both are sides of the same coin (zat, the essence of the One), expressed through Cosmos and Nature and through us human beings, both as part of Creation and Nature and in the unique human position in Creation as khalifas (vicegerents, made in the image of the One). Our relationship with the One is horizontal (through Nature, the Holy Book according to Hazrat Inayat Khan) and vertical (our direct relationship). In our complex relationship with the divine and nature, we live in many different shades of intermediate colors between these two realities. Pressing intimacy to its limits can lead to the view that God and human beings are the same, a heresy in Islam called hulul (incarnationism), for which the martyr Hallaj (858/ ) was persecuted and of which Ibn al- Arabi ( ) was accused. Pressing the abstractness of the One to its limits can lead to a complete disconnection of the One from the world (also a heresy, called ta il). This may very well be the reason for Murshid SAM to state that the Jewish people should start pronouncing the Name of the One to gain more power, as apart for mantric qualities left unused the Name being unspoken leads to a very distant God with no relationship to our daily affairs. Let us look closer at this dual relationship and its consequences for our relationship with the Divine from Islamic and Sufi standpoint, again following Sachiko Murata 8 Sachiko Murata: The Tao of Islam, a Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought. State University of New York Press, 1992.