The Visionary Recital (II)

excerpts from the introduction to The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  by W.M. Thackston, Jr.:


THE INTERNAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE MICROCOSM:



The type of the internal quest into the self is best exemplified by Love's
allegory in Treatise VI. Here, in order for the seeker to reach the prime
intellect, called Jawed Khirad ("eternal wisdom") the "young old man" who
guards the City of the Soul, a journey through the various human faculties
is undertaken.



The seeker progresses from the highest faculties of sensorial perception
common to the animal kingdom back to the lowest faculties of basic
alimentation common to all organisms. Cast into this allegorical symbolic
type the seeker progressively gains conscious control over the faculties by retrogressing, so to speak, back to the most elementary of the life functions.



In the process he breaks the spell of amnesia, vis-a-vis his
origin into which he has fallen and thereby purifies the corporeal shell
that contains the divine spirit so that the nostalgic yearning for the
original abode, personified as his steed, can carry him across the
celestial barriers of the City of the Soul where he is bathed in the living
waters that confer the immortality of divine wisdom.




The vegetal faculties common to all life forms are necessary for the
maintenance and growth of the individual and reproduction of the species.
The three major faculties of the vegetal class which Suhrawardi, like
Avicenna, calls the faculties that are "to be served" are :

1) the Nutritive , the sine qua non of any living thing, the faculty that
obtains nutrition for the individual and without which the individuals
survival is impossible;

2) the Augmentive, the faculty that supervises growth of the organisms
various parts; and

3) the Generative, the faculty that ensures survival of the species through
reproduction of the individual



The minor, or subordinate faculties , all of which "serve" the Nutritive
faculty , which in turn serves the "growth" faculty and which in tandem
with the Augmentive serves the Generative, are:

1: the Attractive, by means of which the organism attracts itself to
nutrition, or nutrition to itself

2. the Retentive, by means of which what is deemed necessary and good for the individual's nutrition is retained

3. the Digestive, which breaks down raw nutritive material into an
acceptable, assimilable form

4. the Expulsive, which eliminates what is deemed unnecessary or harmful for nutritive purposes.




Next come the motor and sensory faculties that distinguish the Animal Soul from the Vegetal Soul. The motor faculty has two functions:


1: the Concupiscible, which stimulates motion towards things deemed
necessary and/or beneficial, i.e., the quest for pleasure


2) the Irascible, which stimulates motion away from what is deemed harmful or destructive, i.e. the quest for domination



The second part of the animal soul is the conglomerate of faculties that
constitutes sense perception...



It appears that [Surhawardi] follows the developed Avicennan approach to the categorization of the senses into the external five and internal five.



The external five are... sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.



They provide the raw material for the first of the post-sensationary
internal senses, the senses communis, the immediate recipient and
integrator of the sensory perceptions of the external perceptions. [It]
enables an animal to know, for example, that a form visually perceived as
white and gustatorily perceived as sweet is one and the same.



The second sense is the retentive imagination that retains the common forms of the senses communis.


Third is the compositive-imaginative, which performs an unstructured and
disorderly analytical and /or synthetical function on sensibles.



When dealing with these analyzed/synthesized sensibles on the animal level, it is called the imaginative faculty. When it presents its analyzed/synthesized intelligibles to the rational faculty, it is called the cogitative.



The fourth faculty, the estimative, reduces perceived things to their
intangible intrinsic meanings to form a judgement, as a cat judges the
intrinsic meaning of a mouse-form to be something to chase, and the mouse judges the intrinsic meaning of a cat-form to be something to run away from.



In animals, this faculty is very strong, and is generally called instinct;
in humans, however, it is in constant contention with the rational faculty.



The estimative tends to draw man towards the material, while the rational
seeks to extricate him from the material toward the spiritual. By ascetic exercise and mortification, however, the estimative can be subordinated to the rational.



The fifth faculty is memory, which serves to retain the intrinsic meanings
of the estimative and compositive imagination, much as the retentive
imagination stores the forms of the sensus communis.



Suhrawardi's analysis of the senses is solidly based on Avicenna's
categorization, which in turn has as its starting point, the Peripatetic
view of sensation as modified and refined by Islamic thinkers like the
Ikhwan al -Safa and Alfarabi...



Suhrawardi... eludes to the senses in order to make the neophyte aware of the proper function of these senses, so that he may come to know their limitations and then elude their "shackles" thereby becoming receptive to the "dawning of the lights" of the soul's true realm.



Allegorical description of the vegetal and animal faculties


... these faculties are depicted as people gathered around a pot in
which something is being cooked, separated and distributed.



 The fire and pot over it represent the stomach, the cook is the attractive faculty; the fanner of the flames, the digestive; the one who waits patiently, the retentive; the one who separates the light from the heavy, the expulsive (the four minor faculties); the one who distributes the cooked victuals to the people represents the nutritive faculty; while the one who pulls up by the ears those who have finished eating is the augmentative faculty.



Nearby, in a "forest" are a lion, which rips and tears things and a boar
that pilfers, eats and drinks, and these two appear to represent fairly
clearly the motor functions of the irascible and concupiscible, since the
"seeker of the microcosm" lassoes them and binds them tightly, lest they
get out of control .



Since none of the vegetal faculties can very well be disrupted without the
destruction of the organism, it is upon precisely these two motor functions
of the animal soul that the Sufis tend to concentrate. For these functions
receive impulses for motion from the estimative faculty, the very one that
can be dominated through ascetic discipline by the rational faculty, which
man alone possesses.



Just as the seeker in Love's allegory [in Treatise II] proceeds in his
journey through the souls, notably from the highest, the internal senses,
back through the lower animal faculties and the vegetal soul to emerge
victorious from each encounter, so Suhrawardi postulates a ruling spirit,
the "animate spirit " (ruh-i hayawani) for the various faculties.



This spirit, a "subtle body" made of a subtle mixture of humours (much as
the physical organs are made of a gross mixture of humours) speads through the body from the left side of the heart. That part that goes to the liver, where it is called "the natural spirit" (ruh-i-tabi'i) rules over the locus of activity of the stomach, the digestive system, and the vegetal
functions.





The other part, which ascends through the arteries to the brain, is called
the "psychic spirit" (ruh-i-nafsani) and rules the locus of activity of the
animal functions.





Ten senses are represented in the treatises by the ten wardens set over the captive bird. When the prisoner realizes that they are not really paying any attention to him, he discovers how easily eluded they are...




[In another treatise] when sensory input is no longer allowed to interfere by providing its imperfect information on the world of gross materiality,
the [world-revealing cup] can be taken from the turner, removed from the
confines of the material cosmos, and allowed to glow with the brilliant rays
of reality and display the real world.



The purgative of Treatise IV has the effect of "opening the inner faculties"
so that the soul can see, hear, taste, feel and smell without recourse to the defective external senses, much as the soul, affected by music, overrides the external sense of hearing in order to listen directly for itself [Treatise V] and in consequence, moves the body upward.



The first step of the aspirant out of material bondage into the realm of the
soul is to "close the door to the city" and to "open the door to the
wilderness". It becomes a common place of Persian poetry... that the "city" is the realm of rationality, while the "wilderness" is the abode of the "mad"...or those who have transcended the boundaries of ratiocination and entered into the area of trans-rationalism, or intutive knowledge, knowledge "through the heart" rather than "through the intellect".



For this reason, the aspirant must leave the rational city and venture into
the metanoetic wilderness in order to encounter the "Archons" of the "other world."



In each of the treatises, the aspirant meets someone who acts as his guide or initiator into the process of material divestiture...



The master/guide is considered by the Islamic spiritual tradition to be
necessary for the neophyte, lest he lose his way or be tempted off the
right path toward the goal by any of the myriad distractions that present
themselves along the way.



The means for breaking out of the cage of time-space-matter are variously given...



When "warmed" by Illumination , i.e., the outpouring of the source of light
and luminosity, toward which the vertical orientation draws the aware soul, an intutive and experiential receptivity to the gravitational pull back towards its origin, the soul can pass easily out of the strictures of matter, time and space. A necessary concommitant to the passage of the spiritual nature out of its temporary boundary is the loss of ego identity, described in treatise VIII... in terms of the five-fold distinction of tawhid and in treatise VI in terms of the salughter of the yellow cow...



Both these vivid images deal with the hold the carnal soul maintains over
the individual so long as he remains in his amnesiac state vis a vis his
true origin.



The carnal soul is responsible for each individual's ego-identity, the
identification of the carnally dominated self as a discrete being,
possessed of an existence of his own.



... the loss of ego identity means that the stranglehold of the carnal self has been broken: It no longer dominates in the individual's conscious self-identification, and the mystic has been disindividuated into the consciousness of the Godhead.



The remaining state, the fifth and highest of all, is the ineffable mute
state wherein all connections with humanity have been severed and all
traces of temporal existence in the soul have been obliterated. To reach this state renders words meaningless and explanations useless.




[In Treatise VI] the carnal soul is explained as the unusual yellow cow
[described in sura 2 of the Quran] which was required to be slaughtered in order to identify a murderer.



The carnal cow, wandering capriciously through the city of the body, will
continue to wreak havoc unless it is slaughtered so that Love, portrayed as the policeman of this world and the next can enter the city and establish his reign of order.


Once the carnal cow of conscious identity is sacrificed to love, then one
can become like the polished mirror of the moon which reflects the splendor of the sun so faithfully that it can say "So close have I come that I imagine you are I."



Suhrawardi is careful to state explicitly that never, even in ecstatic
proximity, does substantial union occur between mortal and divine...
However... this did not save him from the wrath of the orthodox... for whom his ideas, like those of the martyred al-Hallaj before him, represented a dangerous espousal of immediate cognition of God, a doctrine they were not prepared to accept... like al-Hallaj, he paid for his conviction with his life.



Notes:




Senses communis is... quick to accept forms, but unable to retain them because its dominant humour is wetness, which readily accepts a shape but cannot maintain it in...


*****


The compositive-imagination or the imaginative faculty is so-called when it deals with the animal-sensibles and its locus of operation is the estimative faculty. When it deals with intelligibles and is localized in the rational faculty, it is called the cogitative and is inclined towards the deduction of sciences, crafts and the perception of intelligibles...


*****

Estimative faculty:... [gives] instinctive, intrinsic meanings, like the enmity and malice a sheep recognizes in a wolf. This sense is quite prone to error, says Avicenna. It was introduced explicitly into the system by Alfarabi.



*****

Correspondences [in the allegories]... were worked out by an anonymous Persian commentator.

*****


Sometimes Suhrawardi refers to all the animal and vegetal faculties together as the fourteen coffins, which the Persian commentary explains as:


the four major faculties of Avicenna's scheme in the cannon, the four subordinate faculties, the two motor faculties and the four humours  (hot, cold, wet and dry)


***** 
The rational faculty, the human intellect, is traditionally divided into the theoretical (speculative) and practical. Suhrawardi does not, oddly enough, elude to its divisions.



*****
The "amazing things" Love chooses not to tell Zulhaikha because she would not understand, in [Treatise VI], would all have to do with the realm of the intellect and beyond.




(from The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Suhrawardi,  translated and introduced by W.M. Thackston, Jr., Octagon Press, 1982.)