The Ineffable

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”—Rumi

“If you want special illumination, look upon the human face: See clearly within laughter the Essence of Ultimate Truth.”—Rumi

“Lede: A lead paragraph in literature refers to the opening paragraph of an article, essay, news story or book chapter. Often called just ‘the lead,’ it usually occurs together with the headline or title, it precedes the main body of the article, and it gives the reader the main idea of the story. In the news journalism industry, particularly in the US, the particular news-style of lead used is sometimes referred to as a lede. This spelling is no longer labeled as jargon by major US dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster and American Heritage.”—Wikipedia

TEANECK New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—11/14/11—A longtime friend of mine, a “Famous Journalist,” accuses me, quite regularly, of “burying the lede.”

In other words, it takes me a long, long time to “get to the point” of any given essay, or column, or disquisition. Famous Journalist, Esq., accustomed to the strictures of 20^th-century print journalism, looks upon lede-burying as a grave journalistic failing: one should, one must, “lede,” or lead, with the most important nugget of news in one’s story. Otherwise, one loses one’s reader; otherwise, one should lose one’s reader.

A good reporter ranks her information in order of importance (based upon the criteria of newsworthiness yadda, yadda, yadda—I could list them, but you haven’t got all day), and then structures her story according to that list. No extraneous matter. No hemming and hawing.

“Asteroid to hit Earth at 2 p.m. GMT tomorrow, claims renowned astronomer, Dr. Somesuch.” (Not much need for more story beyond that lede, Famous Journalist might grant me.)

Or: “God appeared to Moses in a burning bush in The Sinai early this morning, numerous trustworthy observers report.” Some further elucidation should follow that lede but, basically, the lede communicates the essential nugget of information, true or not.

However, Gentle Reader, I have found, over the past 60 years of living on our fair planet, that the real lede is always buried and, I ask your indulgence if my prose style reflects that glaring reality.

Recently, I’ve written a novel. A short novel but, I believe, one that packs a certain wallop.

People ask me, “What’s it about?”

And I say, “Everything I know about love, sex—mainly sex, I admit—and The Ineffable.”

“’The Ineffable’?” they ask.

“Well,” I say, “All my life, I’ve been seeking one thing only—Enlightenment; God; Goddess; Whatchamacallit; you know, Him, Her, Them. And the novel is also largely about that, about finally finding it (The Ineffable; the lede), at least in my own life.”

Then, of course, they look at me funny.

An aside here. A segue, or a diversion: who knows which.

Since the early 1980s, I’ve been studying Yoga, and I’ve been mightily disappointed with most of my teachers, especially the “highly ranked” ones, the ones with all the credentials and diplomas and certifications. It has been my experience that, like the false prophets the Sufi poet Rumi is always going on and on about, these “teachers,” these “gurus,” are just a bunch of paper tigers, fakes, charlatans.

It actually took me almost four decades to realize (or, more properly, remember) that the student knows the teacher when she sees her, hears her, watches her, observes her at work, not when she reads the diploma(s) on the wall.

This is something I once knew, “got,” really well a long, long time ago, when I said that all of us should be granted PhDs, MDs, Ladyships, Orders of The Garter, etc., etc. at birth.

In the pudding, not the titles, is the proof. Always.

I’ve had veritable butchers perform surgery (oral) on me; butchers despite whatever strings of capital letters accompanied their names. And I’ve had highly-ranked Iyengar teachers abuse me, emotionally and physically, though they have, in truth, “studied” (put in their time) in the vicinity of Guruji Iyengar, a true Enlightened Master and, somehow, got their pedigrees to teach via his underlings.

I guess this is something that’s simply taking a long, long time to get through my noggin’: I, myself, and only I, myself, will know God/dess when She/He speaks to me . . . and I will, do, need no priest/ess; no middle-man; no medium; no avatar; no prophet; no pope, etc., etc., etc. to hear The Ineffable’s message.

Call this my “Joan of Arc Epiphany.” A long time coming and, thank God, in my case, there’s no burning stake at the story’s end. Yet.

I call myself a Presbyterian-Yogini-Sufi now, for lack of any better moniker; and I actually believe God speaks to me, in perfectly understandable, perfectly comprehensible, ways. Probably all the time, were I listening carefully which, often, I’m not (I do watch “Law & Order” re-runs; I do ignore all incoming, from all sources, even The Divine, much of the time).

But, in my 60s now, I have to admit, I have to report, that, for decades, I have been reaching Enlightenment, reaching always towards Enlightenment. And it’s a reaching that happens interiorly. It happens within the individual soul. Not, of necessity, in churches, though they’re not excluded from the entry of the light; and not, of necessity, in the presence of teachers, though some teachers, at some times, can lend some help along the path, usually willy-nilly; and not, usually, through the means of following any of the precepts of our currently dominant world religions.

Along with Idries Shah and other such unclassifiables as G. I. Gurdjieff, I believe, most closely, in the Sufism that pre-dates Islam, and all other religions. I believe in a strain, a path, a way of spirituality that goes way, way back, before homo sapiens clapped his/her bureaucratic/prehensile paws on the real deal.

I am a Sufi in the sense of Rumi, with whose luminous quote I opened this essay: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”

And you may well look at me funny but, if you like, I’ll meet you out there in that field, and we can talk about what I can only call The Ineffable, that Entity with whom I maintain a dialogue now, sans interpreter.

But, if you’re seeking Enlightenment, don’t come to me. Don’t go to anyone. But yourself.

Interminable Footnote Follows; Apologies in Advance from The Author:

Sufi/Sufism  Two origins of the word Sufi have been suggested. Commonly, the lexical root of the word is traced to ṣafā (صَفا) which, in Arabic means “purity.” Another origin is ṣūf (صُوف), or “wool,” referring to the simple cloaks the early Muslim ascetics wore. The two were combined by the Sufi al-Rudhabari who said, “The Sufi is the one who wears wool on top of purity.” The wool cloaks were sometimes a designation of their initiation into the Sufi order.

Others have suggested that word comes from the term ahl aṣ–ṣuffah (“the people of the bench”), who were a group of impoverished companions of the Prophet Muhammad who held regular gatherings of ḏikr.According to the medieval Iranian scholar, Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī, the word “sūfi” is a derivation of the Greek word sofia (σοφία), meaning wisdom. Sufism or taṣawwuf (Arabic: تصوّف‎) is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a ṣūfī (صُوفِيّ).

Another name for a Sufi is Dervish.

Classical Sufi scholars have defined Sufism as “a science whose objective is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God.”

Alternatively, in the words of the Darqawi Sufi teacher, Ahmad ibn Ajiba, it is “a science through which one can know how to travel into the presence of the Divine, purify one’s inner self from filth, and beautify it with a variety of praiseworthy traits.”Classical Sufis were characterized by their attachment to dhikr (a practice of repeating the names of God) and asceticism. Sufism gained adherents among a number of Muslims as a reaction against the worldliness of the early Umayyad Caliphate (661—750 CE).

Sufis have spanned several continents and cultures over a millennium, at first expressed through Arabic, then through Persian, Turkish and a dozen other languages. “Orders” (ṭuruq), which are either Sunnī or Shī’ī or mixed in doctrine, trace many of their original precepts from the Islamic Prophet Muhammad through his cousin ‘Alī, with the notable exception of the Naqshbandi, who trace their origins through the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. Other exclusive schools of Sufism describe themselves as distinctly Sufi. Modern Sufis often perform dhikr after the conclusion of prayers. Some mainstream scholars of Islam define Sufism as simply the name for the inner or esoteric dimension of Islam.

René Guénon in “Insights into Islamic Esoterism and Taoism,” (Sophia Perennis; 2003) contended that Sufism was the esoteric aspect of Islam supported and complemented by exoteric practices and Islamic law.

However, according to Idries Shah, the Sufi philosophy is universal in nature, its roots predating the rise of Islam and the other modern-day religions, save for perhaps Buddhism and Jainism [Emphasis my own. EB-H]; likewise, some Muslims consider Sufism outside the sphere of Islam.

Sufism is popular in such African countries as Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical expression of Islam. Sufism is traditional in Morocco but has seen a growing revival with the renewal of Sufism around contemporary spiritual teachers such as Sidi Hamza al Qadiri al Boutshishi. Mbacke suggests that one reason Sufism has taken hold in Senegal is because it can accommodate local beliefs and customs, which tend toward the mystical. Sufism suffered many setbacks in the modern era, particularly (though not exclusively) at the hands of European imperialists in the colonized nations of Asia and Africa.

The life of the Algerian Sufi master Emir Abd al-Qadir is instructive in this regard. Notable as well are the lives of Amadou Bamba and Hajj Umar Tall in sub-Saharan Africa, and Sheikh Mansur Ushurma and Imam Shamil in the Caucasus region. In the 20th Century some more modernist Muslims have called Sufism a superstitious religion that holds back Islamic achievement in the fields of science and technology. A number of Westerners have embarked with varying degrees of success on the path of Sufism. One of the first to return to Europe as an official representative of a Sufi order, and with the specific purpose to spread Sufism in Western Europe, was the Swedish-born wandering Sufi Abd al-Hadi Aqhili (also known as Ivan Aguéli).

René Guénon, the French scholar, became a Sufi in the early 20th Century and was known as Sheikh Abdul Wahid Yahya. His manifold writings defined the practice of Sufism as the essence of Islam but also pointed to the universality of its message. Other spiritualists as, for instance, G. I. Gurdjieff, may or may not conform to the tenets of Sufism as understood by orthodox Muslims. Other noteworthy Sufi teachers active in the West in the modern era include Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Inayat Khan, Nazim Al-Haqqani, Javad Nurbakhsh, Bulent Rauf, Irina Tweedie, Idries Shah and Muzaffer Ozak. Currently active Sufi academics and publishers include Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Abdullah Nooruddeen Durkee, Abdal Hakim Murad and the Franco-Moroccan Faouzi Skali. (Source: Wikipedia)