Remembering

“Mysticism seeks to introduce humanity to the intuitive factor through sensory feeling of what is within the mind and the body coupled with their responses to the Universe around. Intellect can describe thus if it is used in warm emotional ways, dealing with human encounter and the sharing of experience. Symbols and their impact at an emotional or intellectual level can only be truly understood if they lead to what is unseen but which is of the food of love for a real mystic, who encounters that unseen factor in the spirit of ecstasy. For example, a Gothic cathedral is full of symbolic meaning; the rose windows, the soaring arches and the individual geometric analysis of each cathedral can appeal to the emotions and to the intellect in turn, but what it is conveyed is at the heart of the cathedral in the depth of its crypt, where it exists unseen and cannot be encountered unless a personal course of development has being undertaken by a pilgrim with the aim in mind that he or she should, during that encounter in the crypt, understand momentarily the meaning of the drop meeting with the ocean.

Mysticism is a process which is a development of latent faculties within the whole of life. It has been said by the Sufis that the whole of life is on a journey and that mankind has the ability to complete that journey, by developing the latent faculties which we have inherited through exposure to evolutionary processes which took place throughout the aeons of time and are stamped within our being. We can only gain access to these different levels of experience by using the energy of life within ourselves to regenerate the memory in our body in such a way that the mind and the body develop another method of comprehending the experience dwelling within our being in an endeavour to understand what we have stored within ourselves through a process of remembering. The Sufis remember their Creator who is the Source of all knowledge, and in this way recover what humanity has forgotten in the passage of time covered by its evolution. The same remembering was undertaken when Isis reassembled the body of her husband Osiris. Isis represented the passive element within our being, which has been more closely associated with feminine than with masculine activity (the nine months of gestation of the child within the womb is an example of development being taken place in a passive climate). The process of contemplation is therefore one in which sacred repetition of phrases stops the flow of conscious confused thinking in the mind so that information from subliminal levels within ourselves can arise from the depths to appear within our consciousness, where it can be assimilated and reassembled.

~ Sheikh Abdullah Sirr Dan al-Jamal.