Part 4
“I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart
I said: ‘Who are you?’ He said: ‘You!’ “
The path of love starts exactly from this world of apparent duality, where the idea of love has to do with two separate entities – a lover and a beloved. This is exactly the way the world is seen to naked eyes – subject and object, self and the others. The separation is so clear, evident, and convincingly placed in this perceivable universe that we all are compelled to believe it to be true.
The idea of duality, however, starts from ego, the agency of “I – ness” inside us. The others seem to be different not because they are different, it is because we learn to understand one particular entity in this world as I – that automatically differentiates everything that is not “I” as others. As mystics have claimed for ages, this “I-ness” or ego is at the root of duality or multiplicity. One who wants to understand the mystic “One-ness” has to somehow transcend this ego.
Different schools have given different ways of overcoming the apparent duality, but each at some stage clearly articulated the loss of this subjective self. Be it Buddha’s idea of “Anatta (No-Self)” or Rumi’s idea of “Fana (Annihilation)” or the “Nirvana Shatakam” by Adi Shankara to the recent concept of “Ego Death” in contemporary consciousness studies – pointed towards a complete dissolution of the concept of I or self.
The path of love has the most unique and blissful way to approach the oneness through the power of love. While the separation of lover and beloved is equivalent there to the subject-object duality, in Sufism the energy of love is used to go beyond this. As Rumi said “Love is the essence of the divine essence”, it indeed is the most powerful force in the universe, which is channelized properly can do whatever is wished for. Everyone tastes this inevitable force in the experience of "falling in love" which cripples our clear and rational thinking. In the words of 'Attâr, "When love comes reason disappears. Reason cannot live with the folly of love; love has nothing to do with human reason."
The meditation by these mystic lovers is done not by stilling the mind to transcend the ego, rather they focus on the heart and feeling of love within it – when the feeling is powerful enough it easily leaves the mind behind, thoughts disappear, emotions are muted revealing what’s beyond the mind – the state of egolessness.
~Avirup Chakraborty
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