Dear Y.,
I would like to return to our last conversation in which you said that you cannot feel the divine presence as you desire.
I will be as simple as possible because the human mind tends to complicate things.
We agree that everything we seek in Life, including divine proximity, is to make ourselves feel happy.
And we also agree that the happiness that external things bring is neither complete nor lasting.
This is why some people stop their search outside and turn inward to themselves.
Normally, their search should stop there. They should stop their race and rest within themselves.
But it happens that many of them begin another race, supposedly spiritual. They start listening to speeches that give them advice to follow and exercises to perform, and they become eternal seekers. The more they listen, the further they feel from their goal.
Truth is simple, but the human mind makes it complicated. This is why children are happier than adults. They have no ideas about things, so they can feel and taste them more.
When they begin their search for Truth, or God, or all the qualities attached to them, many believe they must learn new things, and they begin to accumulate knowledge. They believe they are getting closer to their goal; in fact, they are moving away from it. They may feel temporary mental pleasure, but their heart remains thirsty. They should instead seek to unlearn what they ”believe they know” about Truth. Why? Because the mind is like a mirror. When it is cluttered, it is a mirror full of dust and can no longer clearly reflect what is before it. Yes, what is before it. Is it not written in the Quran ”Wherever you look, there is the Face of God“?
One who truly thirsts for Truth should understand these simple words. We affirm that God is present everywhere, and we repeat the Quranic verse ”We are closer to Man than his jugular vein,” so what prevents us from seeing Him? It is the idea we form of Him that veils Him from our sight. Our ideas are subtle but they can veil the Truth. Just as clouds, which are only water vapor, veil the light and heat of the Sun that created them.
The main false idea that prevents us from seeing Him is believing that we exist outside of Him. So we seek to see Him as an ”other” than ourselves. Yet this Hadith is very clear: ”He who knows himself knows his Lord“.
Rumi said the same thing:
I sought God, I found only myself; I sought myself, I found only God. — Rûmi
Al-Hallaj too, pointing a finger to his chest: ”Under this robe, there is only God“.
I read long ago this Sufi saying: ”On the path of Love (of God), there is room for only one person; when I am there, my Beloved is not there, and when my Beloved is there, I am no longer there“.
In other words, we can only feel the Presence of God when all the ideas we form about Him have fallen silent. This is the meaning of the Hadith ”Die before you die“.
One of the 99 attributes of God is ”Al-Wasi” (The One who encompasses all), thus you and I and all human beings are not outside, but inside Him. He created us within Him. When we seek Him and wonder where He is, we are like a fetus wondering where its mother is. It cannot see her because it is in her. But it can feel her warmth and protection if it stops worrying and agitating in her womb. We too can know peace of mind and joy of heart if we cease our mental agitation and listen to the silence… which is the language of God.
The best way to calm our mind is through remembrance of divine omnipresence. Let us forget everything we believe we know about God, and remember Him with the certainty that if we do not see Him, He sees us. It should be enough for us to think that He sees us and watches us. Let us not seek mental proofs. The mind will always have doubts. Only the heart can know, because it is the only one that can taste the divine presence. And each time doubt arises in our mind, rather than listening to it, let us silence it by repeating this: ”I have arrived, I am home”. This is not autosuggestion, it is the truth, because we cannot exist outside of the One who is everywhere. It is thinking the opposite that is a false autosuggestion that makes us believe we are separated from God and makes us unhappy.