Earth and air and water and fire, nay, body and soul too—’tis I.
Truth and falsehood, good and evil, ease and difficulty from first to last,
Knowledge and learning and asceticism and piety and faith—’tis I.
The fire of Hell, be assured, with its flaming limbos,
Yes, and Paradise and Eden and the Houris—’tis I.
This earth and heaven with all that they hold,
Angels, Peris, Genies, and Mankind—’tis I.”
What Jalāluddīn utters in a moment of ecstatic vision Henry More describes as a past experience:
“How lovely” (he says), “how magnificent a state is the soul of man in, when the life of God inactuating her shoots her along with Himself through heaven and earth; makes her unite with, and after a sort feel herself animate, the whole world. He that is here looks upon all things as One, and on himself, if he can then mind himself, as a part of the Whole.”
For some Sūfīs, absorption in the ecstasy of fanā is the end of their pilgrimage. Thenceforth no relation exists between them and the world. Nothing of themselves is left in them; as individuals, they are dead. Immersed in Unity, they know neither law nor religion nor any form of phenomenal being. But those God-intoxicated devotees who never return to sobriety have fallen short of the highest perfection. The full circle of deification must comprehend both the inward and outward aspects of Deity—the One and the Many, the Truth and the Law. It is not enough to escape from all that is creaturely, without entering into the eternal life of God the Creator as manifested in His works. To abide in God (baqā) after having passed-away from selfhood (fanā) is the mark of the Perfect Man, who not only journeys to God, i.e. passes from plurality to unity, but in and with God, i.e. continuing in the unitive state, he returns with God to the phenomenal world from which he set out, and manifests unity in plurality. In this descent