S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 4 9 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos 6:8). We are also given the following instruction: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39); yet we need to understand “neighbor” as extending to all life: “There is not an animal on earth nor a flying creature with wings which does not belong to communities analogous to you” (Qurʼān 6:38). To understand human behavior, psychology needs to include a metaphysical awareness of the cosmic order. According to Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947): “The pattern of man’s behavior is not to be found in any code, but in the principles of the universe, which is continually revealing to us its own nature” (1957, 147). If our perception of Reality does not radically change, no outward attempts to overcome these destructive forces will succeed. Martin Lings (1909–2005; 1991, 3) unfolds the implications of this radical vision: The openness of the Eye of the Heart, or the wake of the Heart as many traditions term it, is what distinguishes primordial man – and by extension the Saint – from fallen man. The significance of this inward opening may be understood from the relationship between the sun and the moon which symbolize respectively the Spirit and the Heart: just as the moon looks towards the sun and transmits something of its reflected radiance to the darkness of the night, so the Heart transmits the light of the Spirit to the night of the soul. The Spirit itself lies open to the Supreme Source of all light, thus making, for one whose Heart is awake, a continuity between the Divine Qualities and the soul, a ray which is passed from Them by the Spirit to the Heart, from which it is diffused in a multiple refraction throughout the various channels of the psychic substance. The restoration of our transpersonal faculty of spiritual knowledge will allow the Divine to be seen everywhere: “Wherever you turn, there is the face of God” (Qurʼān 2:115). How this applies to the created order is expressed as follows: “When… I prayed with my heart,” recalls the Russian Pilgrim, “everything around me seemed delightful and marvelous. The trees, the grass, the birds, the earth, the air, [note: and] the light” (Anonymous 1991, 30). This is precisely what the English poet William Blake (1757–1827) confirms when he writes: “For everything that lives is holy” (1906, 47). He continues with these famous lines (Blake 1988, 493): To see a World in a Grain of Sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. It is through the cleansing of the lower dimensions of the soul that we can, once again, learn to see divinity in the cosmos and in ourselves. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) wrote (1926, 339): Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love. By purifying the “eye of the heart,” the link between beauty and the created order is more fully disclosed. By contrast, Whitall N. Perry (1920–2005) tells us that “the absence of beauty is metaphysically consonant with the very structure of the modern world” (1971, 659). And we must not forget Plato’s profound insight that “Beauty is the splendor of the Truth” (quoted in Stoddart 2008, 73). Dionysius the Areopagite of the fifth- and sixth century, writes (1957, 95): “Beauty… summons all things… unto itself,” and the Prophet Muhammad remarked: “God is beautiful and He loves beauty” (Muslim 2007, 178). We recall the memorable words of a Cree song: “There is only beauty behind me, / Only beauty is before me!” (quoted in Laubin and Laubin 2014, 2). In the same vein is the following Navajo (Diné) prayer (quoted in Luomala 1938, 103): In beauty I walk. With beauty before me, may I walk. With beauty behind me, may I walk. With beauty above me, may I walk. With beauty below me, may I walk. With beauty all around me, may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk. In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty. The spiritual traditions clearly understood what happens when our inner world becomes disconnected from its transcendent center. The tragic fracturing that ensues does not only apply to us but also extends, as Leo Schaya (1916– 1985; 1971, 61) notes, to the created order itself: The whole of existence… is the expression of the one reality, that is to say the totality of its aspects, manifestable and manifested, in the midst of its very infinity. Things are no more than symbolic ‘veils’ of their divine essence or, in a more immediate sense, of its ontological aspects; these aspects are the eternal archetypes of all that is created.
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