Hence, in both cases, the indifference before noticed to all the various forms of positive religion. The Persian describes all religions as the same liquor in different glasses—all are poured by God into one mighty beaker.
The self-abandonment and self-annihilation of the Sufis rest on the basis of their pantheism. Personal existence is with them the great illusion of this world of appearance—to cling to it is to be blind and guilty. Mahmud (a Sufi of the fourteenth century) says, in the Gulschen Ras,—
All sects but multiply the I and Thou;
This I and Thou belong to partial being;
When I and Thou and several being vanish,
Then Mosque and Church shall bind thee never more.
Our individual life is but a phantom:
Make clear thine eye, and see Reality!
Again, (though here the sense may be moral rather than philosophic, and selfishness, not personality, abjured)—
Go, soul! with Moses to the wilderness,