ISF Publishing

Hardly anything will shake the intellectualising observer in his confidence that everything which he is studying is made up of a patchwork of other things.

‘I travelled to Syria,’ he says, ‘and remained there for two years. I had no other objective than that of seeking solitariness, overcoming selfishness, fighting passions, trying to make clear my soul, to complete my character.’ He did this because the Sufi cannot enter into understanding until his heart is prepared to ‘meditate upon God’, as he calls it.
This period of time was sufficient only to give him sporadic flashes of spiritual fulfilment (foretaste) — the stage which is considered by most non-Sufi mystics to be the ultimate, but which is in fact only the first step.
It had become clear to him that ‘the Sufis are not men of words, but of inner perception. I had learned all that could be learned by reading. The remainder could not be acquired by study or by talk.’

The Perfected Man (insani kamil), because of his living in different dimensions at the same time, must appear to follow more than one set of doctrines. A man who is swimming across a lake is carrying out actions and responding to perceptions other than a man walking down a hill, for instance. He is the same man; and he carries with him when he is walking all the potentiality of swimming.