The Spirituality of Hafiz

THE SPIRITUALITY OF HAFIZ

‘There is no equal of Hafiz in Poetry. He was a Perfect Master.’ Meher Baba.

At the age of sixty-one Hafiz experienced God-realisation at the hands of his Master, the Perfect Master Mahmud Attar, after serving Attar faithfully for forty years.

Before proceeding further in this discussion on Hafiz’s spirituality and its influence on his life and work, and on the stages of the Path to God, in relation to Hafiz, and on what it means to be a Perfect Master (Man-God) and Avatar (God-man, Christ, Rasool, Buddha etc.), it is important to first define God-realisation and the clearest and best definition that I know is that by Meher Baba in Discourses Vol 11. ‘To arrive at true self-knowledge is to arrive at God-realisation. God-realisation is a unique state of consciousness. It is different from all the other states of consciousness because all the other states of consciousness are experienced through the medium of the individual mind; whereas the state of God-consciousness is in no way dependent upon the individual mind or any other medium. A medium is necessary for knowing something other than one’s own self. For knowing one’s own self, no medium is necessary. In fact, the association of consciousness with the mind is definitely a hindrance rather than a help for the attainment of realisation. The individual mind is the seat of the ego or the consciousness of being isolated. It creates the limited individuality, which at once feeds on and is fed by the illusion of duality, time and change. So, in order to know the Self as it is, consciousness has to be completely freed from the limitation of the individual mind. In other words, the individual mind has to disappear but consciousness has to be retained . . . The consciousness which was hitherto associated with the individual mind is now freed and untrammelled and brought into direct contact and unity with the Ultimate Reality. Since there is now no veil between consciousness and the Ultimate Reality, consciousness is fused with the Absolute and eternally abides in It as an inseparable aspect promoting an unending state of infinite knowledge and unlimited bliss.

‘God-realisation is a personal state of consciousness belonging to the soul which has transcended the domain of the mind. Other souls continue to remain in bondage and though they also are bound to receive God-realisation one day they can only attain it by freeing their consciousness from the burden of the ego and the limitations of the individual mind. Hence the attainment of God-realisation has a direct significance only for the soul which has emerged out of the time-process . . . It is possible for an aspirant to rise up to the mental sphere of existence through his own unaided efforts, but dropping the mental body amounts to the surrenderance of individual existence: This last and all important step cannot be taken except through the help of a Perfect Master who is himself God-realised.’

When Hafiz was twenty-one and he became a disciple of the Perfect Master Attar, Hafiz’s consciousness was that of a ‘normal’ person. He was conscious of the ‘gross’ world, of its sights and smells and sounds. One shouldn’t really call Hafiz a ‘normal’ person because he was in fact spiritually inclined from an early age and was fascinated by stories about the great Perfect Masters and saints of the past and he read all the Perfect Master-Poets and also learnt all of the Koran by heart. Already at an early age his thoughts dwelt constantly on God and he experienced great longing to be united with Him. Then at the age of twenty-one an incident occurred that was to become the ‘point’ of departure for him towards the spiritual Path to God-realisation. He saw the beautiful woman Shakh-e-Nabat, ‘Branch of Sugarcane,’ and fell in love with the beauty of her. In her he saw the mirror of the beauty of his own true Self, the beauty of God. As Ibn al ‘Arabi says in ‘Futuhat 11, 326’: ‘And if you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for He is the beautiful being. Thus in all its aspects the object of love is God alone. Moreover, since God knows Himself and he came to know the world, He produced it ad extra of His image. Thus the world is for Him a mirror in which He sees His own image, and that is why God loves only Himself, so that if He declares: ‘God will love you,’ it is in reality Himself that He loves.’’ Trans. by R. Manheim.

Hafiz loved Nabat all his life, but it was not a lustful or possessing love that ‘wants’ an object for oneself, but a creative love for the Beauty of God, which eventually led him to his Master Attar; and it was this Bea-uty which he praised in his poetry, and in the ‘Beloved’ he recognised God’s Beauty as symbolised in the being whom he loved: his ‘Branch of Sugarcane.’ This love of Hafiz was so great that it became Divine. For forty years he obeyed and loved Attar, and over this period his ego and his desires were completely worn away.

Much has been written about Hafiz’s ‘philosophy’ of life which has been called ‘rind’ or unreason. It is true that Hafiz approached the Truth or God through this subjective approach in which he advocated being an outcast, an outsider, outside formal religious rituals (although he probably participated in them under fear of death), to get intoxicated on God’s love, to turn the back on reason and trying to ‘know God,’ and not to care what the world may say or think, for the relationship with God the Beloved is a personal one, a relationship between the lover and the Beloved; and the only way to gain the Beloved’s special glance is to dare and dare again by surrendering everything at the Beloved’s feet everything, including the mind. This surrenderance that Hafiz advocates in his life and poetry is of course a surrenderance of all inner thoughts and desires and eventually surrenderance of the whole of the ego. Hafiz, as seen in the first chapter, was a responsible man, who was a husband and father and worked all of his life in a variety of occupations. He did not throw away his responsibilities and become a mad seeker searching for God. For Hafiz, true love for God was an inner thing and the outer must be looked after also, so that it would in no way interfere with this surrenderance which is the most difficult surrenderance of all. Hafiz continually in his poems, criticises those who make a show of their love for God, the false Sufis in their blue robes or patched garments, and the priests on the pulpits preaching one thing to the masses but in private acting in a completely different way. For Hafiz, the path was an inner path, walked down in the midst of everyday life, but fulfilling one’s obligations in this world to family, friends and the state, and inwardly fulfilling one’s obligations to God, by dedicating all of one’s thoughts, desires and actions to the Beloved and not holding back even one.

This was not the only approach that Hafiz advocated. The other way he followed all his life was an objective approach which showed that he never underestimated intelligence, when it is used to gain the Objective of everlasting value. The other approach that Hafiz believed in was that of Pure Reason and as only the Perfect Master, the Complete Man, has knowledge of the Truth and has experienced the Secret of Life and has attained true detachment, peace and happiness, then one should recognise this fact and use all of one’s intelligence to follow and gain the Secret of such a Master of Knowledge. The two paths are one, because the heart and the mind have to be balanced to achieve the balance that allows the soul to manifest itself.

In the poems of Hafiz and the other great Master Poets who proceeded him, there is much imagery of a sensual nature if viewed only in a physical sense. This imagery concerns the power and allurements of wine and praises and describes the various features of the Beloved: the lip, hair, eyes, neck etc. All these symbols are used by Hafiz to describe the aspects of God and the different stages the lover must pass through to gain Union with the Beloved (God). As has been explained by many of the commentators of this kind of Love poetry, there are many types of ‘love.’ There are the kinds of human love from the most lustful, to the highest kind that becomes selfless and eventually leads to Divine Love, which can only be gained by the Grace of God.

Those who have entered the Spiritual Path have been fortunate enough to have received from God this gift, and they have made God the Objective of all their love and striving and praise and poetry (if they write poetry as Hafiz did).

The subject of the ghazals and other poems is this love (wine) which the Beloved feels for the lover and which the lover longs for, and experiences flowing from the Beloved’s cup (heart) to him, filling his heart (cup) to overflowing. If the lover cannot feel this flow of love from God, this causes him great pain and despair.

The sensual imagery that Hafiz and others use is the cloak that they use to dress this inner experience. By using such sensuous imagery Hafiz spiritualises the physical form and uses a language which is understandable to all, even the most gross conscious (even if he doesn’t ‘get’ the essence of the poem, it still infiltrates his unconscious) and raises human love into the possibility of the Divine. Through such imagery Hafiz expresses the agony and the ecstasy of his direct experience of God and makes these experiences available for all to share, whatever the stage of the reader’s consciousness may be at the time of ‘experiencing’ the poem.

This imagery of the whole of creation that Hafiz raised to the Sublime, became recognized symbols used in later poetry and gave rise to later arguments (mainly by Western scholars, whose intellects were like steel walls between themselves and the true ‘heart’ of Hafiz poetry) as to whether Hafiz’s poetry was to be regarded in a physical or a spiritual sense. Hafiz himself many times throughout his Divan states that the symbols he uses are for spiritual states, that the Beloved, the Winebringer, Friend, Minstrel, Rose, are all God and that wine is Divine Love, the Truth. The scholars that have argued against Hafiz’s own statements have obviously been blinded by their own egos and have read Hafiz’s poetry as they wanted to, and not as he wanted them to. (I recommend that the reader of any English version familiarize him or herself with the meaning behind Hafiz’s symbolism by consulting the Glossary, before reading Hafiz’s poetry.) When one reads the poems of Hafiz in this context, as he wrote them and wanted them read, then every line, couplet and poem of Hafiz becomes clear and tells the tale of Love in a universal and beautiful way, in such a human fashion (for love needs the form to express itself through), that Hafiz talks to everyone, for everyone at some time has felt some kind of love. Hafiz tells us of all the stages of love from the human to the Hu (=God) man, but always from the understanding that the goal of all life is to eventually be able to Love in the Divine way, and to experience the Love of God, and to become united with one’s own true Self.

Ever since Hafiz dropped his physical body in 1392 there has been a continuing discussion and argument among the various religionists and scholars of Persian Literature as to what was the ‘religion’ of Hafiz. This is a hollow argument for a number of reasons: 1. God (or the Perfect Master) does not belong to a religion, all the religions belong to God. 2. Hafiz was always concerned with the essence of Truth and continually denounced those who believed in the ‘shell’:

Pay regard to the jewel and leave the shell alone;
by that way, a bad reputation is left to its own.

from ‘The Wild Deer’ masnavi.

3. Hafiz was the lover or disciple of the Perfect Master Attar, and so Attar (until Hafiz was God-realized) was Hafiz’s ‘religion.’

Hafiz is claimed by many Sufis to have been a Sufi. In the true sense of Sufism (love of God, respect for the essence of all paths to God, the need for a Perfect Master to help one to attain unity with the Beloved) Hafiz was a Sufi, a true Sufi. But Hafiz recognised that any approach to God can become abused and many ‘Sufis’ at the time when Hafiz lived were doing this (as in the case of Shaikh Ali Kolah), and he continually criticises their hypocrisy and deceit and was persecuted by them for doing so. It is claimed that Hafiz was a Shi’ite Muslim because he wrote poems in praise of Mohammed and of Ali, their first Imam. What true Christian would not praise the bravery of Peter, and in this manner Hafiz praised Ali and so he definitely understood it in its essence. One could also call Hafiz a Christian for in many of his poems he praises Jesus, but he also praises Abraham and Moses, so was Hafiz a Jew? Zoroaster was also praised by Hafiz, and Noah, and in fact all the Perfect Masters and the Godman Who were known in Persia at that time for the religion of Hafiz was the existence of God in human form, and this is the foundation of all true religions and Hafiz was brave enough in an often strict Muslim country to recognise this and to declare it for all to hear.

The ‘religion’ of Hafiz was the love of God in human form and beyond all form, and this ‘religion’ Hafiz proclaims in all his poetry, and this ‘religion’ Hafiz lived throughout his life. To try to put Hafiz into a box labelled this or that ‘religion’ is an impossible task because God is impossible to classify; God can only be lived and ‘religion’ is the creation of man, and God is the Creator of all of mankind. As Hafiz says,

O God, You are the remedy of those without remedy.
You know the remedy for me ... and for those like me.

from: ‘The Wild Deer’ masnavi poem.

Discourses Vol. 2 by Meher Baba. Sufism Reoriented 1967. U.S.A.

Divan of Hafiz. English Version by Paul Smith. 2 Vols. New Humanity Books. 1986.

Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi by Henry Corbin, Trans. by Ralph Manheim. Princeton University Press. 1969. U.S.A.

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