In Defence of Mysticism — Continued, Part 3 / Aydin Areta

It was in order to revive this thought that Suhrawardi undertook his final journey and gave his life for an idea. In the last years of his own life, Avicenna too began writing a book called The Logic of the Orientals (Mantiq al-Mashriqiyyin), of which unfortunately only the introduction survives today. In this introduction, the Peripatetic philosopher and follower of Aristotle whom later generations called the “Master Physician” speaks of a philosophy named “the wisdom of the Orientals” or “Illuminationist philosophy,” describing it as an “ancient wisdom” and speaking of its influence upon him. He openly distances himself there from his earlier Aristotelian works, The Salvation and The Healing.

Iranian mysticism is not Sufism. When Hafez once wrote, “The Sufi, delighted by this hand, tilts his cap... with two more cups his turban will be disordered,” he was referring to Sufis who, in imitation of the Magi, tilted their caps upon their heads. Yet drinking that sweet wine will bring them nothing but disorder. One is founded upon servitude, while the other is founded upon a free individuality and a human being centred on the Logos. The fear of expressing what confuses these boundaries in the eyes of philosophy-haters and rigid jurists has always made the metaphorical language of poetry a refuge for Iran's mystic-philosophers. Suhrawardi writes:

“If there are symbols in my words, do not attribute them to obscurity in my writing. Know that the sages of old also expressed their words through symbols and allusions out of fear of the ignorant masses, and the one who is of the people of glad tidings will himself understand the allusion.”

“I have said many times that I would reveal
whatever secrets there are in this age;
but from the wounds of the swords of the unknowing,
a nail has been driven across my lips.”

Everything mentioned above may be dismissed as unimportant—merely one poem among countless mystical poems, with no reliable philosophical meaning for the movement of contemporary humanity, especially the Iranian human being. But I see a very different picture before me.

I believe that attaining an independent individuation moving toward its own realisation; transcendence in the sphere of human action; the union of the forces of thought and feeling—as in the union of the neocortex of the modern human brain with the millions of years embodied in the paleocortex that shapes our instincts and emotions at a much deeper level; acting in the world after recovering the light of the Self; and giving meaning to human suffering through the heroic struggle to expand the light of consciousness and freedom—all represent capacities whose scattered sparks can be seen over the last three centuries, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and from Heidegger to Jung. These scattered sparks, which have filled the worlds of philosophy and psychology with stars over the last three centuries, may lead to the dawn of a form of thought whose sun of perennial wisdom has travelled through the entire history of this land.

In the end, each person's philosophy is the method they choose for finding truth, and this method is a way of living, not a creed to be believed. Believing in a philosophy is as baseless an illusion as believing in God: like the belief of a deaf person in music, or of a blind person in a light they cannot see. Such belief never moves beyond imagining what has not been understood. True philosophy is a vision that asks the human being to shake free of beliefs and, by moving toward a free and realised individuality, to experience and live God rather than merely believe. The purpose of such philosophy is not to define one word through other words, but to change the human being and their world.

There is no need to reject mysticism or suppress poetry. It is enough to interpret them by returning them to the same force that originally shaped their development in this land. I would like to conclude this essay with this profound and enduring statement attributed here to Henry Corbin:

“The ideal of the philosopher is the transformation and change of the Self, expressive of a spiritual rebirth. The initiatory journey of the mystic-philosopher is his advance toward the Light.”