The idea of love probably is understood the best by the Sufis; they are the ones who cultivate and utilize the true power of love as the medium to connect with God. In Sufism, the ultimate truth is the presence of God in every human heart through its ability to love, this only, in reality, is said to be the manifestation of God. So a Sufi would say, if God is already present as love, to realize love is to realize god.
They would further say, Ishq-e- Majazi or the cosmic love is present in potential form in everyone, which needs to be attained by walking and walking through the path of love. However the realization happens after one walks enough – normally the way starts from Ishq (translated to passion), or the intense desire to possess the beloved. However the higher state is attained when one can erase the existential boundaries of his self in love – the state is called “Fanaa”. In this state, there is no desire for possession of beloved as the concept of possession itself is a derivative of the concept of self – if you do not exist, how will something be yours?
The even higher state would be the state of competing for assimilation into the infinite, realizing the state of oneness between the infinite & formless love and the finite beloved be it the Mashooq (beloved), Murshid (teacher), or the Maula (God).
So as you walk along the path your love becomes first selfless, then it transforms from passion to worship. And in worship, the passion of possession is dissolved, the expectation of reciprocation is forgotten, claims over soul and body go irrelevant – what remains only is the infinite ocean of joy, love itself.
I can’t resist but stating a story here, I heard in quite trying times, which has once deepened my understanding of the magic of love. An old co-passenger of mine, who was known for his inclination towards Sufi mysticism, once found me in a sort of miserable state in a lone corner of an empty circular rail compartment around the noontime – circular rail is known for its empty compartments even in peak hours, so one can imagine how empty can summer noon be in the same.
His experienced eyes somehow could see a deep-rooted frustration, anger, sorrow, and whatever depressing could a broken heart hold, brewing inside me to collectively produce something endlessly negative – so as like an elder brother, he tried giving me help. After listening to the outline of the turn of events in the last two-three weeks, he chose to tell me a story of one of his friends, whom he said to have lost in the abyss of time.
“Once I had a friend called Qais”, he started. “Qais loved a girl since his childhood, so did the girl. People always said, ‘these are two inseparable souls, contained by different bodies’ – such powerful was their bond. But like your story the villainous father of the girl got her married to a rich businessman, who along with her left the country to be settled in some other. Much like your IITian competitor here”, he chuckled.
It was his storytelling, and it’s magic, made be slowly dragged into the story, even for some moments into the character too.
He continued “After the girl is gone, Qais had nothing but the unfulfilled longing in his heart which enslaved him completely, the longing became stronger and stronger by each passing day to reach a stage where people around the boy considered him to have gone mad. He saw his beloved everywhere, sometimes in deers – as they had similar eyes, sometimes in birds – as their song resembled the beloved’s voice, sometimes in the sky as the white autumn clouds looked like her complexion. That endless longing he could not get rid of and in his life, he desired nothing in life but a glimpse of his beloved, and yet when he prayed to almighty he neither asked her glimpse nor a meeting, he rather said,
‘They ask me to crush the desire for my beloved in my heart! But I implore thee, oh my God, let it grow even stronger. My life shall be sacrificed for her beauty, my blood shall be spilled freely for her, and though I burn for her painfully, like a candle, none of my days shall ever be free of this pain. Let me, love, oh my God, love for love's sake, and make my love a hundred times as great as it was and is!’
“Why so ?” I was surprised.
“Surprise is yet to come”, my co-passenger said with a mystic smile on his face.
He concluded “You know what happened when he gets a chance to meet her ? he says, No, you are not my beloved. And says, Go, I don’t need you to love you anymore, as I realized the "love" itself, now this only is my Mashooqa, this only is Murshid, this only is my Maula”
He asked me to think and contemplate on the story and decide if I also had such power in my love that it could even become bigger and greater than the beloved.
With the amount of world I had seen so far, the best explanation to me was of a selfless lover, who probably did not want to meet his beloved later in life – so that it does not hamper hers. It could have created issues in the married life, it could have given the beloved a shock wave of past shattering her present, etc. Even to some extent, that feeling of pride - of having a selfless love, which does not demand to possess (at least the way I understood then), helped me get rid of the discomfort inside me at times.
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I can’t say, I could do enough justice to the contemplation with such a disturbed mind –but the story for sure had given me a fresh angle to look from.
Almost a decade after this incident, I somewhat realized what he meant. Firstly Qais is the name of the famous Maznu of the Layla – Maznu story. What he narrated that day was the mystic version of Layla – Maznu story – Qais became Maznu when he started behaving irrationally in the excitement and ecstasy of love; the word Maznu, itself means demented.
Secondly, Maznu is seen as an ideal of the lovers by the Sufis embodying almost all the qualities of a flawless lover. His very madness images how - “When love comes reason disappears. Reason cannot live with the folly of love." As famously said by Attar the Sufi poet.
Thirdly, beloved helps the lover to enter the path of love, and separation churns that love to go stronger and stronger – so stronger than the lover at the end of it realizes it was always "Love", even the beloved was a manifestation of the omnipotent force of "Love" – this is the state of liberation.
A Sufi starts the journey of “God-Realization” from this fact of the separation – as the Sufi and his beloved God are separate, this love goes stronger and stronger by the route of unfulfilled longing. What comes finally is the ultimate realization of the oneness between love and Beloved (God). So a successful love story is not always the one that has a happy ending – it rather depends on the angle you are looking from.
~Avirup Chakraborty
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