When pure that Me from Self as clearest flame from smoke.
Angelus Silesius bids men lose, in utter Nihilism, all sense of any existence separate from the Divine Substance—the Absolute:—
While aught thou art or know’st or lov’st or hast,
Not yet, believe me, is thy burden gone.
Who is as though he were not—ne’er had been—
That man, oh joy! is made God absolute.
Self is surpassed by self-annihilation;
The nearer nothing, so much more divine.[[197]]
Thus individuality must be ignored to the utmost; by mystical death we begin to live; and in this perverted sense he that loseth his life shall find it. Hence, by a natural consequence, the straining after a sublime apathy almost as senseless as the last abstraction of the Buddhist. The absolutely disinterested love, to which the Sufi aspires, assumes, however, an aspect of grandeur as opposed to the sensuous hopes and fears of Mohammed’s heaven and hell. Rumi thus describes the blessedness of those whose will is lost in the will of God:—
They deem it crime to flee from Destiny,