The ultimate Reality or Eternal Beauty, according to the Ṣūfīs of this school, is infinite in the sense that "it is absolutely free from the limitations of beginning, end, right, left, above, and below."[115:1] The distinction of essence and attribute does not exist in the Infinite—"Substance and quality are really identical."[115:2] We have indicated above that nature is the mirror of the Absolute Existence. But according to Nasafī, there are two kinds of mirrors[115:3]—
(a). That which shows merely a reflected image—this is external nature.
(b). That which shows the real Essence—this is man who is a limitation of the Absolute, and erroneously thinks himself to be an independent entity.
"O Derwish!" says Nasafī "dost thou think that thy existence is independent of God? This is a great error."[116:1] Nasafī explains his meaning by a beautiful parable.[116:2] The fishes in a certain tank realised that they lived, moved, and had their being in water, but felt that they were quite ignorant of the real nature of what constituted the very source of their life. They resorted to a wiser fish in a great river, and the Philosopher-fish addressed them thus:—
"O you who endeavour to untie the knot (of being)! You are born in union, yet die in the thought of an unreal separation. Thirsty on the sea-shore! Dying penniless while master of the treasure!"
All feeling of separation, therefore, is ignorance; and all "otherness" is a mere appearance, a dream, a shadow—a differentiation born of relation essential to the self-recognition of the Absolute. The great prophet of this school is "The excellent Rūmī" as Hegel calls him. He took up the old Neo-Platonic idea of the Universal soul working through the various spheres of being, and expressed it in a way so modern in spirit that Clodd introduces the passage in his "Story of Creation". I venture to quote this famous passage in order to show how successfully the poet anticipates the modern concept of evolution, which he regarded as the realistic side of his Idealism.
First man appeared in the clan of inorganic things,
Next he passed therefrom into that of plants.
For years he lived as one of the plants,
Remembering nought of his inorganic state so different;
And when he passed from the vegetive to the animal state,
He had no remembrance of his state as a plant,
Except the inclination he felt to the world of plants,
Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers;
Like the inclination of infants towards their mothers,
Which know not the cause of their inclination to the breast.
Again the great creator as you know,
Drew man out of the animal into the human state.
Thus man passed from one order of nature to another,
Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now.
Of his first soul he has now no remembrance,
And he will be again changed from his present soul.
(Mathnawī Book IV).
It would now be instructive if we compare this aspect of Ṣūfī thought with the fundamental ideas of Neo-Platonism. The God of Neo-Platonism is immanent as well as transcendant. "As being the cause of all things, it is everywhere. As being other than all things, it is nowhere. If it were only "everywhere", and not also "nowhere", it would be all things."[118:1] The Ṣūfī, however, tersely says that God is all things. The Neo-Platonist allows a certain permanence or fixity to matter;[118:2] but the Ṣūfīs of the school in question, regard all empirical experience as a kind of dreaming. Life in limitation, they say, is sleep; death brings the awakening. It is, however, the doctrine of Impersonal immortality—"genuinely eastern in spirit"—which distinguishes this school from Neo-Platonism. "Its (Arabian Philosophy) distinctive doctrine", says Whittaker, "of an Impersonal immortality of the general human intellect is, however, as contrasted with Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, essentially original."
The above brief exposition shows that there are three basic ideas of this mode of thought:—