Love is all about drowning in the ocean

“The intellectual is always showing off; The lover is always losing his self. The intellectual runs away, afraid of the water; Love is all about drowning in the ocean,” said Mevlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, the globally loved 13th-century Sufi mystic in his celebrated work, Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi.

Most of us don’t understand love the way the Sufis understood it. Most of us tend to see love as a person-to-person emotion in a romantic context. Sufis see love as the all-consuming divine force that enables the soul to transcend worldly attachments and merge in the Divine Beloved in eternal spiritual ecstasy. Turkish Sufi master Hazrat Muzaffer Ozak Aski al-Jerrahi regarded love to be a very high spiritual station of the heart where one is forever lost in the glorious divinity of the Almighty. Hazrat al-Jerrahi said, “Love is to see what is good and beautiful in everything. It is to learn from everything, to see the gifts of God and the generosity of God in everything.”

Sufi masters have regarded supreme love for the Almighty as Ishq-e-Haqiqi, the divine love where God is the Divine Beloved, closer than one’s own self, and where the soul merges into his Divine Glory. In Sufi philosophy, romantic love or ishq-e-majazi is a mere reflection of divine love. Once the heart is illuminated with divine love, the seeker undergoes a glorious transformation and ascends to the state of fana, where the self ceases to exist and the seeker is blessed with absolute awareness of Tawhid, viz. unity with God. When the seeker is blessed with Ishq-e-Haqiqi, the heart radiates compassion towards all of God’s creation.

Through centuries, the teachings of Sufi masters have centered on achieving proximity to God through love, selflessness, and abandonment of the “I” (ego). The lower ego or nafs, if not subjugated, can be as impenetrable as a wall. The dominance of nafs can defeat the efforts made by a seeker to achieve unity with God. 

Through deep practice of dhikr, meditation and surrender to the Divine Almighty, a seeker can endeavour to eliminate nafs. Then finally the veil that separates him from the Divine Beloved shall fall. Hazrat Abu Sa’id Abi’l-Khayr (967–1049), the renowned Persian Sufi mystic and poet who played a significant role in the evolution of Sufi literature and philosophy, achieved the bliss of union with the Divine Beloved. He exclaimed, “Without thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest; thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon. Though every hair on my body becomes a tongue, a thousandth part of the thanks due to thee I cannot tell.”

When the heart achieves this sublime station in love, the devotion is so profound that all veils of illusion between the seeker and the Divine Beloved dissolve. The duality of two dissolves, and the seeker achieves the glorious oneness with the beloved. Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri (1680–1757), lovingly called Baba Bulleh Shah in the Indian sub-continent, mocked love in which the seeker tries to weigh the pros and cons of loving God. Baba Bulleh Shah exclaimed,

Zeher vekh ke pita

te ki pita,

Ishq soch ke kita

te ki kita.

Dil de ke

dil len di aas rakhi,

Ve Bulleya pyar eho jeya kita

te ki kita.

(You decided to take poison but first carefully examined it. What did you achieve? You loved someone, but first carefully examined whether to love. Was this love? When you fell in love, you demanded that your lover must love you too. If this is the kind of love you desire to experience, then ask yourself – have you truly experienced love?)

Sufis say that man is able to immerse himself in God’s love when God himself blesses him with grace. Mevlana Rumi wrote, “God loves all His creatures, particularly man, who alone in the creation reflects all His attributes. Coming from God, his soul longs to return to Him. The very origin of its love is in His love. He loves them, and they love Him. His love precedes man’s love for Him. If man searches for God, it is because God searches man.” Blessed are those who are able to lose themselves in their search for the Divine Beloved.

In Sufi philosophy, Majnu’s mad longing for Laila symbolizes the seeker’s wanderings toward God. Ancient Sufi stories use the metaphor of Laila and Majnu to illustrate that for lovers, there is nothing but their beloved in the world. The beloved is their world.

Hazrat Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901), the beloved Sufi master of the Indian sub-continent and a mystic of the Chishti Nizami order, wrote of the sublimity of love in his famous verses, “Meda Ishq Vi Tu.” Baba Farid wrote:  

Meda Ishq Vi Toon

Meda Yaar Vi Toon

Meda Deen Vi Toon

Eeman Vi Toon

Meda Jism Vi Toon

Meda Rooh Vi Toon

Meda Qalb Vi Toon

Jind Jaan Vi Toon…

“You are my Ishq; you are my friend. You are my religion; you are my faith. You are my body; you are my soul. You are my heart; you are my life.”

Love is the spiritual force that transforms an ordinary individual into a seeker. Those who seek God always practise dhikr – loving remembrance and recitation of God’s name. They work towards annihilation of nafs – the lower ego. Love is so all-consuming that the lover becomes the love, and ultimately if the love is true, the seeker becomes one with the Divine Beloved.

A lover came to the house of the beloved and knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” asked the beloved.

“It is me,” replied the lover.

“Go away!” said the beloved. “This house does not have room for a you and a me.”

The lover went away into the wilderness to ponder these words. What did this mean? Love had pulled the lover to the house, and love continued to pull the lover to the house.

The lover went back and knocked again.

“Who is it?” asked the beloved.

“It is you,” replied the lover.

The door opened at once.

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