1.Once in a setting of unsurpassable grandeur one of the Shaikh's disciples said to me, with a movement of his hand towards mountains towering with pine-forested slopes and summits white with snow, and blue sky with white clouds and half-hidden sunlight: 'God is like that';
and I understood in that moment with far more than mere mental understanding, that if it were not for the Divine Beauty everything that lay before my eyes would vanish in an instant.
- from the marvelous book, A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century: Shaikh Ahmad al-Alawi, his spiritual heritage and legacy by Martin Lings
Salzburg, Austria | photo, sadiq2.
During a visit to Central Europe back in 2006 for an academic conference, I was blessed to have the opportunity to visit Salzburg, Austria, the city mostly famous for its splendid landscape, for being the birthplace of Mozart and for the classic movie, The Sound of Music. When I visited the surrounding landscape, specially when I traveled to this mountain top where the clouds passing below the summit, mysts and silence merging with each other - the tremendous beauty that even can not be imagined by the most talented artistic imagination and I came face to face this grandeur of beauty that is so vivid, I had an experience unlike anything before.
The beauty was so intense that all I wanted to do was to die, right there, right then. Beauty which is beyond our ideas of beyond, that can make one wish to escape from this prison of body is something I was so unaware. It was beauty revealed in what sufis call Jalal, in its Awesome Majesty and Power. Later I realized how the intensity of beauty merged with a certain state of our being can take away some veils from our heart and create such a desire to flee this existence to the Unknown. Perhaps this is what Rumi calls as tendency 'to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.' Reading that section (shared above) from Martin Lings book reminded me of the reality of reflection of the Divine Beauty etched upon nature.
During a visit to Central Europe back in 2006 for an academic conference, I was blessed to have the opportunity to visit Salzburg, Austria, the city mostly famous for its splendid landscape, for being the birthplace of Mozart and for the classic movie, The Sound of Music. When I visited the surrounding landscape, specially when I traveled to this mountain top where the clouds passing below the summit, mysts and silence merging with each other - the tremendous beauty that even can not be imagined by the most talented artistic imagination and I came face to face this grandeur of beauty that is so vivid, I had an experience unlike anything before.
The beauty was so intense that all I wanted to do was to die, right there, right then. Beauty which is beyond our ideas of beyond, that can make one wish to escape from this prison of body is something I was so unaware. It was beauty revealed in what sufis call Jalal, in its Awesome Majesty and Power. Later I realized how the intensity of beauty merged with a certain state of our being can take away some veils from our heart and create such a desire to flee this existence to the Unknown. Perhaps this is what Rumi calls as tendency 'to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.' Reading that section (shared above) from Martin Lings book reminded me of the reality of reflection of the Divine Beauty etched upon nature.
3.
Love keeps revealing to me that once hearts have touched
and felt their oneness, the bond is never broken,
and the beauty of it slips quietly into the soul,
where it is never lost.
- Naomi
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