“He said, ‘Do not seek until thou art sought, for when thou findest that which thou seekest, it will resemble thee.’”
“He said, ‘Thou must daily die a thousand deaths and come to life again, that thou mayst win the life immortal.’”
“He said, ‘When thou givest to God thy nothingness, He gives to thee His All.’”
It would be an almost endless task to enumerate and exemplify the different classes of miracles which are related in the lives of the Mohammedan saints—for instance, walking on water, flying in the air (with or without a passenger), rain-making, appearing in various places at the same time, healing by the breath, bringing the dead to life, knowledge and prediction of future events, thought-reading, telekinesis, paralysing or beheading an obnoxious person by a word or gesture, conversing with animals or plants, turning earth into gold or precious stones, producing food and drink, etc. To the Moslem, who has no sense of natural law, all these ‘violations of custom,’ as he calls them, seem equally credible. We, on the other hand, feel ourselves obliged to distinguish phenomena which we regard as irrational and impossible from those for which we can find some sort of ‘natural’ explanation. Modern theories of psychical influence, faith-healing, telepathy, veridical hallucination, hypnotic suggestion and the like, have thrown open to us a wide avenue of approach to this dark continent in the Eastern mind. I will not, however, pursue the subject far at present, full of interest as it is. In the higher Sūfī teaching the miraculous powers of the saints play a more or less insignificant part, and the excessive importance which they assume in the organised mysticism of the Dervish Orders is one of the clearest marks of its degeneracy.
The following passage, which I have slightly modified, gives a fair summary of the hypnotic process through which a dervish attains to union with God:
“The disciple must, mystically, always bear his Murshid (spiritual director) in mind, and become mentally absorbed in him through a constant meditation and contemplation of him. The teacher must be his shield against all evil thoughts. The spirit of the teacher follows him in all his efforts, and accompanies him wherever he may be, quite as a guardian spirit. To such a degree is this carried that he sees the master in all men and in all things, just as a willing subject is under the influence of the magnetiser. This condition is called ‘self-annihilation’ in the Murshid or Sheykh. The latter finds, in his own visionary dreams, the degree which the disciple has reached, and whether or not his spirit has become bound to his own.
“At this stage the Sheykh passes him over to the spiritual influence of the long-deceased Pīr or original founder of the Order, and he sees the latter only by the spiritual aid of the Sheykh. This is called ‘self-annihilation’ in the Pīr. He now becomes so much a part of the Pīr as to possess all his spiritual powers.
“The third grade leads him, also through the spiritual aid of the Sheykh, up to the Prophet himself, whom he now sees in all things. This state is called ‘self-annihilation’ in the Prophet.
“The fourth degree leads him even to God. He becomes united with the Deity and sees Him in all things.”[19]
[19] J. P. Brown, The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism (1868), p. 298.