Jun 30 2024
al-Shushtari – The night’s journey
The night’s journey
by Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari
English version by Stephen Hirtenstein
You who look in the mirror.
Do you see whom you see there?
Is the looker someone other than you,
or a reflection of your fantasy?
Turn your glance toward the glance itself,
for it holds wisdom concealed from the others.
When day breaks, may people
praise the night’s journey.
/ Image by Rishab Dharmani /
I am just beginning to discover and explore the poetry of al-Shushtari. He is a fascinating poet and mystic who, like ibn Arabi, was from Andalusia, that is, Spain when it was under Muslim rule. He was a Sufi who taught a radically unified vision of reality in which only God exists. Everything one might perceive, every person, every place, even finally oneself, is really just a passing phenomenon within the single reality that is God. We might say his poetry and teachings were a sort of non-dualism that can be compared in some ways to other non-dualist traditions, such as Advaita in India.
In fact, these lines sound like statements that could have been made by the famous 20th century Hindu Advaita teacher, Ramana Maharshi.
You who look in the mirror.
Do you see whom you see there?
Is the looker someone other than you,
or a reflection of your fantasy?
I think the real power of this short selection is in the lines:
Turn your glance toward the glance itself,
for it holds wisdom concealed from the others.
At first it sounds like a riddle that can’t be solved, almost a Zen koan (another non-dualist tradition). How can you “turn your glance toward the glance itself”?
Let’s back up for a moment and contemplate the image al-Shushtari has given us. We are looking in a mirror gazing at the face — our own face — reflected back at us. But is it our face? Reach out to touch your face and your fingers hit hard glass. It is a reflection, after all, a play of light on a reflective surface. It is not actually our face, but an image that represents our face. So is it really our face or a “fantasy,” a semblance? When we finally see through the illusion and recognize that the reflection is not actually our face we have to then accept that we have never seen our own face, and we never will.
The more deeply we work with this fundamental psychic dilemma, our certainty about who or what we are begins to slip. We cannot see ourselves, but– we can see ourselves seeing. We think of ourselves as this eye perceiving the world, this face fronting the world, this body interacting with the world. What if, instead, we are life moving through this body? What if we are this magical act of seeing happening through the eye? When we stop looking at the face in the mirror, saying, “That is me,” and begin to notice the one looking through us our identity radically shifts and we come to know ourselves for the first time. We open to reality in was previously unimaginable and see everything as a living, glowing, blissful interconnectedness. And only That is real. The pretense drops and everything “else” is seen as a play of appearance within that light — like a face reflected in the mirror.
When day breaks, may people
praise the night’s journey.
Have a beautiful day!
==
There is not a lot of information available in English about al-Shushtari right now. You can probably find the book Songs of Love and Devotion, by Lourdes Maria Alvarez. There is also a very good video about al-Shushtari on Filip Holm’s YouTube channel Let’s Talk Religion: https://youtu.be/Te-ohX1qfHs?si=QNClire3DaPJlZ_a. I highly recommend his channel for a broad exploration of religious and mystical thought from various cultures.
Recommended Books: Abu al-Hasan al- Shushtari
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| Abu al’Hasan al-Shushtari: Songs of Love and Devotion | ||||
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Abu al-Hasan al- Shushtari
Spain (1212 – 1269) Timeline |
