Like a candle I was melting in His fire:
Amidst the flames outflashing—only God I saw.
Myself with mine own eyes I saw most clearly,
But when I looked with God’s eyes—only God I saw.
I passed away into nothingness, I vanished,
And lo, I was the All-living—only God I saw.”
The whole of Sūfism rests on the belief that when the individual self is lost, the Universal Self is found, or, in religious language, that ecstasy affords the only means by which the soul can directly communicate and become united with God. Asceticism, purification, love, gnosis, saintship—all the leading ideas of Sūfism—are developed from this cardinal principle.
Among the metaphorical terms commonly employed by the Sūfīs as, more or less, equivalent to ‘ecstasy’ are fanā (passing-away), wajd (feeling), samāʿ (hearing), dhawq (taste), shirb (drinking), ghaybat (absence from self), jadhbat (attraction), sukr (intoxication), and hāl (emotion). It would be tedious and not, I think, specially instructive to examine in detail the definitions of those terms and of many others akin to them which occur in Sūfī text-books. We are not brought appreciably nearer to understanding the nature of ecstasy when it is described as “a divine mystery which God communicates to true believers who behold Him with the eye of certainty,” or as “a flame which moves in the ground of the soul and is produced by love-desire.” The Mohammedan theory of ecstasy, however, can hardly be discussed without reference to two of the above-mentioned technical expressions, namely, fanā and samāʿ.
As I have remarked in the Introduction [(pp. 17-19)], the term fanā includes different stages, aspects, and meanings. These may be summarised as follows:
1. A moral transformation of the soul through the extinction of all its passions and desires.