Allah

“The words “Allah” and “God” refer to the ineffable reality, the essence of all things. Allah includes everything and depends upon nothing for existence. That absolute state is called dhat (often transliterated zat). That is the essence of all the Names. What we are looking into is a relationship between divine essence and divine attributes. The sifat, or attributes of Allah, the divine Names, have no independent existence of their own. They only exist as differentiated aspects of Allah. They are neither identical to nor distinct from the essence…

The word “Allah,” according to some scholars, comes from the root waliha, and this root combines the vast concepts of total love and being passionately beyond all the constraints of mind. Combining these, we get the meaning “to fall madly in love, to utterly dissolve in an insane yearning.” Another jewel of meaning is disclosed by looking into the phrase la ‘ilaha ‘illa allah. At the highest level, la ‘ilaha ‘illa allah means “There is no existence except Allah.” The root meaning of the Arabic word for existence, wujud, is “a voyage to ecstasy.” The Arabic words for “ecstasy” and “to find” both come from the same root as wujud, the sound W-J-D. All this leads us to the affirmation, “Nothing exists except Allah, whose existence is pure ecstasy, and there is no ecstasy to be found except the unrestrained ecstasy of total yearning and love…”

Hazrat Inayat Khan emphasized individuation when he said in his widely known Sufi invocation that we should orient ourselves to be “United with all the illuminated souls, who form the embodiment of the Master, the Spirit of Guidance.” This recognizes an important principle. By orienting in this way, the traveler on the spiritual path affirms there is only one Spirit of Guidance and that there are many individual points— the illuminated souls— that are available to merge into. We are therefore encouraged to come to know the God reality as Abraham, Christ, the Buddha, Muhammad, and so on. Such a teaching honors and evokes divine individuation.

When someone says, “Jesus is God,” or “Buddha is the ultimate reality,” they are calling out to that divine individuation. We should not skip over that point. There is a progression. You should move through the process of individuation, and this ultimately will allow for a full merging with the universal cosmic absolute. Having emphasized the principle of individuation as it relates to our quest for wholeness as human beings, we now need to direct our attention to the structure of the human ego. The overall ego structure is made of many layers. In each layer, the ego appears as a separated and isolated reality with which each of us have self-identified because of what has been missing in our earthly experience and because of being wounded in our relationships…

Primary narcissism carries a much deeper wound. “I failed the divine.” There is a sense of not fulfilling the soul’s destiny, not fulfilling what God wants you to do. Each soul comes into existence with a purpose connected to the cosmos and the great being. Often children feel they have not been allowed to fulfill the purpose with which their soul entered. Their environment demanded that they give up their own purpose in order to make Mom or Dad happy. As a result, children feel they were never allowed to fulfill God’s purpose, and now, because of that, they are incapable of fulfilling it. They feel both wronged and deficient. They feel that they are not being helped to fulfill what their soul came to do. Perhaps their soul came to learn about compassion, for example, but they are put into an environment that entices them to cruelty. Consequently human beings constantly carry around this wound, and feel like they have failed God…

A wonderful thing occurs when you reach your deepest wound and, at the same time, find the courage not to defend against the intense feelings that are aroused by reaching it. Then grace comes with a healing touch of love and divine generosity. Then the layer of ego containing the inner child feels that he or she is being loved all the time. You experience constantly being created by God. You are valued. Now there is a profound sense of the preciousness of your soul, right in this very embodiment. It is an individual light of empowerment. It is the light of self-value or inner worth. The divine Name al-’ Aziz expresses such true worth. Al-’ Aziz is the true value and strength that comes directly from God and needs no intermediary. Real strength comes from your sense of inner worth. If you have no sense of self-value, you can’t feel strong.

When you feel full of worth and value, because you have identified your self with the eternal reality of the soul, strength arises spontaneously from within. It is something to be cherished, and it gives you the courage to be, the strength and dignity to protect the divine quality within, and to honor it throughout your life. When you let down your ego defenses, you are able to see that you don’t personally have the power to do what needs to be done in order to heal the wound of being disconnected from God. The dawning of this light of self-value comes when you truly surrender the healing into God’s hands…

When a soul enters incarnation, this earthly realm is experienced as a kind of disconnection from the divine source. The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa described birth as a kind of reverse samadhi, just the opposite of the experience of merging with the one. Because the soul now experiences interference with its connection to the divine, entering the earthly realm is like entering disconnectedness. The disconnection may be in a very minute way, a very subtle way, but it is present. We can easily say that all sin, or error, arises from our disconnectedness with the divine. So in this one sense, sin does come with our birth…

Recollecting self, through reconnecting with your ultimate source in the God reality, is the culmination of the individuation process. You realize how you have been stuck in a fixedness of ego, but now you see that your real self is in constant motion, and the fixedness breaks. The ego surrenders its stubborn clinging to an idea of itself that is isolated and deficient, and comes into a continual influx with being. In this way, the ego transforms into an image of God. It is no longer an image of the parents. The soul realizes that it is the inner reality at the core of the ego-self, and that it is made in the divine image and likeness. It is immortal and filled with divine qualities. Such union, or continual remembrance, produces a wholesome fluidity of being that is the desired goal of the psychological process.”

~ Wali Ali Meyer, Bilal Hyde, Physicians of the Heart: A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah