Limits of Linguistic Representation: Wittgenstein and the Unrepresentable that shows forth

Abstract
The paper seeks reexamination of the received critical heritage about Wittgenstein that treats him as a positivist or unquestionably derives inspiration for positivism from him or sees him as a philosopher of language instead of the translinguistic unrepresentable transcendence. It also questions the influential reading of Wittgenstein scholars who argue that he supports only foundationless view of religion and language game is best metaphor for characterizing his religious views. I argue for the centrality of the mystical or transcendence in understanding the whole corpus of Wittgenstein, especially the Tractatus and his ethics. Questioning the approach that writes off a few scattered mystical utterances here and there in Wittgenstein the paper, building on Russell  Neili’s arguments, argues for shift in the paradigm of approaching Wittgenstein by keeping subservient the “positivist” in him  and foreground the broader head of mystic in him. A proper understanding of mysticism is all that we need to have in order to appreciate the mystic Wittgenstein’s transcendence of logic and language in both life and thought and foreground him as a philosopher of transcendence and not merely a philosopher of language. Mysticism is the key to Wittgenstein though most Wittgenstein scholars have failed to put in proper perspective the primacy of the mystical and ignored this vital element that alone explains certain ambiguities and difficulties in traditional Wittgenstein exegeses. Far from being antimetaphysical positivist Wittgenstein is to be read as a mystic in the tradition of great mystical thinkers and can be compared with Simone Weil and other significant mystical thinkers of the recent past. His dialectic of transcendence has significant resemblances with transtheistic mystical philosophies such as that of Buddhism and Taoism. Arguing for continuity of his religious views from Tractatus onwards, the paper seeks to rectify problems resulting from emphasizing later Wittgenstein for deriving a philosophy of religion that has been perpetuating noncognitivist, fideist interpretations of him while failing to properly place ethical and aesthetic in his fundamentally mystical approach to religion and culture.

Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections are in large part, however indirectly, readings between the lines of the story of the soul in the Western metaphysical tradition.
Fergusson Kerr in Theology after Wittgenstein p.166
I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.
Wittgenstein
My thoughts are one hundred percent Hebraic.
Wittgenstein

Linguistic Representations and Dialogue with the Mystical

What do linguistic representations aim at? Mirroring reality? Or they constitute an autonomous play that gives us no insights into the most important foundation for culture? The dream or motivation has often been access to reality however imperfect that may be. Strangely there now seems to be increasing consensus over the thesis that language and reality are two different things and the latter is either opaque for the former or far too rich a thing to be captured in the net of the former. From Nagarjuna to Wittgenstein and Derrida many thinkers have denied language and thought access to reality. The question is what do mystics say about this problem? Could the path ahead for philosophers dealing with linguistic representations be opening for a cross disciplinary study with mystical philosophers or philosophers of mysticism? My contention in this paper is that it should be so. Particularly focusing on Wittgenstein it is argued that the royal road to reality is not through language and thought but modes of perception that bypass them. The most important point is that what matters at the end of the day is ethics and answer to fundamental existential questions, the problems that Culture and Value embodies and for these questions we need to explore other languages than the one ordinarily known. This language is the language of the Self. Wittgenstein fundamentally preoccupied himself with this problem though this concern has been largely sidelined by Wittgenstein scholars and those working on philosophy of language. The present paper pleads for a dialogue with this ignored Wittgenstein to contemplate the possibility for breaking fresh ground in tackling the nagging problems in the debate on language and reality.

There is hardly any difference in early and late Wittgenstein’s on the question of the mystical and the ethical. He remained Tractarian till the end in his mystical viewpoint. He did abandon parts of the Tractatus later but there was no evolution – and in fact could not by the very logic of mystical experience that converts its subjects for good. The mystics solve – for themselves at least – all important problems – intellectual and existential. In fact experiencing God dissolves all problems. For logical positivists what mattered most was what is in Tractatus but for Wittgenstein himself what mattered most was what was not in there, the unsaid part. That was not in the Tractatus because language could not handle that. That something is neither linguistic nor representable in any other way. However that shows itself and thus need not be spoken of or represented. Wittgenstein’s most decisive move was thus away from linguistic representations and the most important job for the philosopher was to delimit what can be represented and thus related to what only shows itself. Ethics and aesthetics and the mystical all belong to this second category. Man does not live by bread of facts (science, instrumental rationality) alone but needs supernatural manna embodied in ethical/aesthetical/mystical. It is ironic that what mattered most to him has not been given due attention by his successors. All his endeavor was to save the intelligence from the bewitchment of language. He was all for transcendence so that man becomes himself and lives truly, joyfully. In his search for happy life, life lived sub species aeternatatis  he paid great attention  to working of language, how language fails to represent reality and leads us astray by creating problems that are not there. It is how men lived that interested him rather than their speculative exercises. This alone solves the riddles of life. Language has no answers and answers can only be found when we step outside language.
As Wittgenstein was more interested in what cannot be linguistically represented his conclusions are radical. The most important things can’t be talked about. Ethics, religion and aesthetics are transcendental. The very fact that things exist is mystical or linguistically and conceptually unrepresentable. We can only gaze at it and get lost in wonder. We can dissolve into this primordial mystery, love and celebrate it. Wittgenstein lived almost like a saint. He is the most mystical of the greatest philosophers of the modern Western history. He tried to show exit to philosophy. He found no problems once we let intelligence operate naturally and it shatters linguistic cobwebs. He fought against pervasive bewitchment of intelligence by language.
However he also realized all pervasiveness of language and how it constructs the world for us. It hardly needs to be argued that we have nothing but linguistic representations even when we seek to talk about transcendence. Man, as has been observed in the classical ages, is a speaking animal. Language is a house of Being. In language the divine and the human meet. Prophets and saints too have spoken. Even the Buddha, the Prophet of silence, spoke even if it is about the impossibility of speech in matters transcendental. Man is condemned to speak and even speak to God and receive the speech of God in turn as scriptures narrate. Scriptures are all filled with linguistic representations of that which though ideally resists getting represented nevertheless is largely accessible though not quite adequately through language. Masses don’t know silence and even saints can’t afford it for too long. Man lives in dialogue, I and Thou dialogue. The absolute stillness is superhuman and for most humans synonymous with death. It is not given for man to conceptually know Truth or represent the divine. But nevertheless he has no other window to higher worlds. Language though imperfect is normally indispensable for humans. Later Wittgenstein is all about appreciating how divine suffuses and expresses in religious language, how ordinary use of language is steeped in transcendental world.

We must not confuse two senses of the term transcendental in Witttgenstein. Logic too is transcendental and we can only show rather than speak about/represent the correspondence between two pictures. To ‘say’ the correspondence between language and reality would require an intermediate language which in turn will require the same ad infinitum., but then that language would also require the same. This kind of transcendence has logical or intellectual function only and did interest Wittgenstein but what mattered for him both personally and as a philosopher is transcendence in ethical/aesthetic/mystical experiences, in the primordial encounter with the world and finding that things exist. The present paper is about this transcendence. As there can be no propositions about what is not in the world or is transcendental we shall have to focus more on life and experiences of the transcendent than on analysis of some theses regarding language or language games to make our point.

Wittgenstein’s Mysticism

Wittgenstein’s protests against being misunderstood notwithstanding, a great industry propounding a version of him he would strongly resent, has been flourishing. What he considered more important has been relegated to background. There is great agreement between scholars on almost everything except that mattered most to him. His motive for doing philosophy and living philosophy have been absent amongst his admirers, not to speak of detractors. His life has not been taken seriously as an aid in clarifying his basic theses and commitments. He has been read as philosopher of language though for him transcendence is more central for culture and value realization.

The mystical in Wittgenstein has not been duly noticed and if noticed  not quite well understood. His religious thought has been misunderstood and not read in continuation with his fundamentally mystical outlook. All kinds of theories have been put forward for accounting for his scattered mystical statements and observations on religion. The mystical is central for Wittgenstein and his philosophy and he has stated it in his Tractatus, Notebooks,“Lecture on Ethics” and in fact most of his writings develop this theme in novel ways, in so subtle a manner that few can notice. His attitude towards religion, often understood in connection with the thesis of language game, is to be put in proper context by foregrounding the empirical mystical foundation that he gives to religion. Wittgenstein scholars have not generally succeeded in integrating his mysticism with his view of religion, culture and aesthetics. Mysticism is in the background of many a theses of later Wittgenstein as well and not just the Tractatus. Even Philosophical Investigations’ central arguments that foreground illusoriness of the self, critique mentalistic picture of the soul, dissolve subject object duality and plunge headlong into the world which is all there us, alert us of dangers in asserting or making propositions on anything that transcends language.
Wittgenstein deserves a comparison with great mystical thinkers. If we understand that God is what is and is missed when we attempt to think or imagine or make images of Him or attempt to comprehend the Mystery we can understand Wittgenstein. According to mysticism God is the case. The only thing is we don’t see. We verbalize and babble and create theologies and metaphysics. Wittgenstein is a metaphysician in the same way Buddha is or Krishnamurti is. God is above speech. The Absolute has never been defiled by speech. But by metaphysics is here meant living or breathing the noumenal world, dissolving into it and not speculating about it with conceptual schemes. Metaphysics as the knowledge of the supraphenomenal reality is the soul of all traditional cultures or “epistemologies.” Man is made for the Absolute, to die in It and thus to eternally live. Certainty is the requirement of intelligence and man is not absurdity. If man fails to access the most certain, the indubitable, the absolutely safe in Wittgenstein’s terms, he has failed as a man. God is the greatest certainty – the greatest and most palpable of the present facts in Whitehead’s words –and a philosophy or epistemology that doesn’t account for this does not deserve to be called a philosophy. It is failure and betrayal of philosophy and of man and his intelligence if the  real is not knowable though of course not conceptually knowable.  Modern philosophy that is largely ignorant of God can’t qualify as a genuine philosophy, as Indians or great traditional philosophers from other traditions understood philosophy as darsana, as seeing or vision.
Wittgenstein had mystic experiences of both the ecstatic and nature-mystical kind. Seeing creation as wondrous is what Einstein correctly defined as religious or mystical attitude. God is attention without distraction as Simone Weil would say. He is the Mystery at the heart of everything. For Wittgenstein God is approached in all these ways and doubting our experience of wonder, of mystery, of eternity, of the ethical or unconditional goodness or his urge for it is absurd. Indeed God is the case and only the fools say in their hearts there is no God. Nasr has remarked that if it were possible to teach (traditional) metaphysics to everyone there would be no atheists around. Modern man has failed to understand what traditions meant by God. God is Reality for traditions and it is absurd to ask is there a reality. Only mystics can, however, say this so genuinely and Wittgenstein is a mystics. As ethics or aesthetics is transcendental and yet quite human and real concerns and constitute the grounds of all that we value most  so is religion understood as living/talking God (to be distinguished from talking about God or mere propsitional belief statement) so characteristic of human endowment that it is absurd to question it. In fact, as the Quran says, no question or doubt can be entertained regarding God. God is love, superabundant joy, beauty that kills, sweetness of every sweat thing, green in the leaves and red in the golden rays and  mystery that surrounds us.

This is not pantheism which is a heresy for traditions but our experience of God out of the world, so to speak, -and of course we also need to note that samsara is nirvana and this very garden is the Garden of Eden for the seeing or who know. Debating about God is height of folly like debating about pleasures of love by enunchs. Against this folly Wittgenstein asserted what normal men have always taken to be the case that God is reality or Reality and only saints truly live life. Wittgenstein was a saint though not of the order of great Western saints like Eckhart. Saints don’t talk about God but talk God, live God, breathe God and share the great joy that God is with lesser mortals. The real question for traditional philosophies is how we become Godlike (theosis) or prepare for death in life (which is the same thing or means for it) or live and move and have our being in God. All else is vanity.

Wittgenstein stood for this primordial heritage of man and that is why was misunderstood by most of his friends and foes like. Needless to remark that he didn’t consider Western civilization that refused to fully countenance the reality of the sacred as something of a monstrosity and like Gandhi a laughable “interesting” idea He complained of Russell, the paragon of modern rationality or philosophy – to have fatally misunderstood him. In fact what he considered most important has been dismissed by many a modern thinker as folly. God (understood mystically or more precisely metaphysically) is the meaning of life for all religions including transtheistic one as for Wittgenstein. I wish to argue the point that Wittgenstein is to be read alongside great traditional philosophers that saw the Good above everything, had little use for fashionable pursuits of today, considered ethics as first philosophy and metaphysical discoveries as fruits or realizations of real ethical life, were centred on God rather than man and saw quintessentially human in living up to the divine image in him, in transcending himself. There is nothing new or original in Wittgenstein’s mysticism as in fact there can’t be anything new in matters transcendental. One can refer to many mystics while explicating central statements of him. So far we have read – with few exceptions– Wittgenstein as a philosopher or failed to appreciate how mysticism informs/grounds his philosophy.
Wittgenstein is not only a philosopher of mysticism but a mystic, a practical mystic of great standing. All his work was dedicated to the “glory of God” as he once said to his friend Dury (Rhees, 1984: 168) – an expression quite unexpected from modern profane philosophers. He didn’t like philosophizing as a speculative/analytical  exercise, as an academic pursuit as is the case now in modern academies or universities but something that Plato would appreciate or other ancient traditional philosophers would prescribe as a way of life and nothing short of preparation of death. That he wanted his legacy to c of changed attitude towards ethics is hardly surprising.  “I am by no means sure that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all those questions superfluous.”(Wittgenstein, CV: 61). Philosophy, as pursued by his contemporaries or today, is a disease of modern form of life that needs cure. And that cure is ultimately provided by seeing the futility of the game called philosophy.

For ancients it was ethics and a vision and had little to do with language or concepts.  It was, most probably, his deep conviction borne from experience regarding sacrality of the world and thus the truth of the supernatural/eternal that made him loath modern civilization that had banished the sacred. It is in light of mysticism that we can understand his  unconventional attitude towards secular carriers or vocations, his renunciation of his property, his austerity in life and manners, his casual attitude towards dress, his independence in thought and action, his nostalgia for peasant life in Russia, his alienation from his times that he characterized as dark ages and many puzzles in his biography. His view of philosophy’s aim, his attempt at transcending it for getting the vision of the things as they really are, his rejection of the claims of conceptual analysis or linguistic analysis as explaining reality, his rejection of classical dualisms that have bedeviled Cartesian and post-Cartesian thought, his plea for convergence of the ethical and the aesthetic, his view that ethics is transcendental, his rejection of doing science and mathematics as the ideals of philosophizing endeavor, his critique of psychologism and rationalistic attempts at building a metaphysics and our addiction to use metaphysical notions in ordinary discourse at rational plane are all threads in the fabric of mystical tapestry that has so subtly woven. He rejected theological representations as many others before have done but he never rejected the symbolizandum.

He said there is no theoretical content in religious doctrines. This is, in a way, easily understandable. God is not a thing, an entity, a being among other being or existence. “God is not” as Eckhart would put it. God is Nothing as Buddhism would put it. God is all that there is as Sufism and Taoist mysticism see it. Samsara and nirvana are really one.
There can be no doubt about the mystical in Wittgenstein. Amongst the most loved books of him are included William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, Augustine’s Confessions, Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in which Father Zossima figures, and writings of George Fox and Plato. He claimed that Vienna circle people didn’t understand Tractatus and that few will understand it and in fact his learned commentators still mostly miss its kernel, its last pages and especially the closing proposition. His only public lecture is through and through a mystical piece. His only published book during his life time is an attempt to delineate the sacred realm and prevent its debasement by speculative metaphysics and exoteric theology. His notebooks are marked by the mystical passion. His Culture and Value criticizes modern Western civilization on precisely religious-mystical grounds. His Philosophical Grammar, Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations have mysticism in the background and in fact pave way for it. The most important questions of life that science or logical positivism or any reductionist philosophy miss need, according to him, to be treated mystically. His respect for religion as a form of life – though this belongs to the exoteric part of his work – and his refusal to take cudgels on behalf of theologians are explainable through the thesis of the mystical that he values above everything.
If we don’t comprehend such typical mystical statements as “Samsara and nirvana are one,” “God is what is,” “ I see nothing but God everywhere,” “God is the Hidden and the Manifest” “ God is our ultimate concern,” “Eternity is the present moment,” “Don’t prat about God; God is not,” “God is neither good nor true,” “God is the sweetness of all sweat things,” “ God is Beauty and Truth,” “ God is the real Doer,” “It is God that sees and listens rather than we,” “God is the knownest of the Known,” “No doubt can be entertained regarding God,” “God is the Light of the World,” “God is the Totality, the Whole,” “God is the most immediate of the present facts and unattainable quest” we can’t comprehend mysticism of Wittgenstein. He saw everything from mystical (what he wrongly called religious) point of view. His metaphysics of experience is built on the foundations provided by mystical attitude towards life and the world. The central doctrines and conceptions of religion or theology are understood in light of mystical interpretation that informs Wittgenstein.
Review of works on the mystical in Wittgenstein
The problem with most of the works done on this theme is that they have not been done by the students of mysticism but philosophy and that too a very hostile antimetaphysicalantimystical philosophy. How deeply ironic it is that Wittgenstein would be understood as supporter of the manifesto of logical positivism that banished as nonsense everything which concerned Wittgenstein the most. Science for Wittgenstein has not and could not even touch the problem of life, the problem of meaning, the problem of transcendence. His critique of psychologism meant saying good bye to one of the most fashionable reductionist approaches to spiritual reality. His denial of self was negation of everything for which secular humanism and modern individualism stands. His characterization of scientific-technological civilization as dark ages places him squarely with other great religious critics of Enlightenment thought. For him modern positivist civilization lacked culture and therefore was cursed. He lamented that Russell, Carnap and many others who were so close to him didn’t really understand him and those who claimed to be his followers didn’t make spiritual endeavour share the spiritual vacation that moved him. He was every inch a mystic and no doubt should be entertained regarding this. Both Russell and Carnap accused him of mysticism and in fact none of the Wittgenstein scholars or biographers has denied the element of mystical in him but none has been able to see how mysticism is the key to his whole thought not excluding the latter Wittgenstein. Logic is a tool for paving the way to the supralogical or transcendental. In fact mystical is the case for him and needs no arguments. The unrepresentable shows forth. It is there to be contemplated, breathed and enjoyed. God is everywhere and nowhere. Man is not. He lives and moves and has his being in God. My purpose here is to make some general remarks on the centrality of the mystical in Wittgenstein and thus help to put in perspective the critical writings on his religion besides clarifying why it should matter in any discussion of him. I shall particularly focus on his Notebooks (1914-16) to argue my case though I shall not ignore the Tractatus which has been much though still inadequately and often not quite rightly commented upon from this perspective.
Amongst those who have sympathetically written on his mysticism Russell Neili should count as the most important and balanced. Atkinson reads him as a pantheist as if Wittgenstein had not placed transcendence outside the world in so clear terms. Malcolm and some other critics who have written on his view of religion as a language game have missed the mystical core of his religiosity – his metaphysics of experience – to recall Pradhan’s title of his very useful book – I believe it is Indians who can better comment on Wittgenstein because the metaphysics that he affirms – metaphysics as suprarational intuitive or intellectual instead of speculative rational affair – belongs to India especially. (Indians have no difficulty in understanding Buddha as a mystic and Buddhism as a great metaphysic even if Buddha refused to answer 14 metaphysical questions). Brian McGuiness has made a useful small study and there are valuable insights in Kerr’s Theology after Wittgenstein. Mark Lazenby in The Early Wittgenstein on Religion pays attention to the mystical in him and rightly points out that McGuinness’s view that Wittgenstein is a nature mystic in the Tractatus is not correct and instead argues that he is actually a theistic mystic. He notes that there are two worlds in Tractatus, namely the factual and the spiritual and points out that realizing this is in order to understand how there can be value inside the world. Lazenby develops this position by arguing that the factual world is the everyday one which logic characterizes and that value lies outside this world. The mystic looks back upon this world after transcending it and once it has been transcended there is nothing to say and hence silence ensues. Engleman, Dury and other acquaintances of Wittgenstein have also pointed out the profundity of his mystical outlook. In fact logical positivist camp soon discovered that he is not amongst them. Wittgenstein’s differences with Russell and positivist friends are largely attributable to his mystical-ethical convictions. Many papers have been written to argue the point that Wittgenstein had mystical convictions but very few studies have been able to convincingly link his life and work and interpret him consistently on mystical lines. He has been approached more from theological/religious than from mystic-metaphysical viewpoint. The present paper seeks to fill the gap.
K.C Pandey’s edited collection Perspectives on the Unsayable shows a glimpse of confusion on Wittgenstein’s fundamental contributions to the debate on religion or transcendence. There are disagreements over the nature of his religiosity, cognitive status of religious claims, central metaphysical notions such as the self in relation to God, the meaning of the unsayable etc. Wittgenstein has been approached as a philosopher and not as a mystic and this contributes to confusions. So far few scholars specializing in mysticism have written on Wittgenstein and this has complicated problems. Wittgenstein is a mystic and a metaphysician of a different order – he does metaphysics as many traditional philosopher-sages have been doing it. It is nonrational route for doing metaphysics that he takes. I think the best guide to understanding traditional non-rational metaphysics is the trinity of perennialistmetaphyiscians Rene Guenon, AnandaCoomaraswamy and FrithjofSchuon. For Wittgenstein – to refute his postmodernist appropriations that argue he is a prisoner of language and textuality – what can’t be said is the case. The world is not explained by science or philosophy or anything that employs language.
In a remarkable book Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice  Fredrick Sontag sets ten themes that run throughout Wittgenstein’s work. The “themes” dominated Wittgenstein’s life and, Sontag argues, provide a way to understand Wittgenstein’s work. The themes are, as his reviewer puts it, : (1) Philosophy as an ascetic practice; (2) The philosopher as existentialist/pragmatist; (3) The monk’s isolated search for forgiveness; (4) The penitent’s search for forgiveness; (5) The struggle with God as an unknown object; (6) Philosophy as a “religious” way of life; (7) Philosophy as a life of courage; (8) Serious philosophical pursuit has an affinity to mysticism; (9) Language has a mystical quality; (10) Insight can be imparted only to one who is serious and dedicated.
The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s texts
I focus here particularly though not exclusively on Notebooks (1914-16) and then subsume those observations and comment on them from mystical viewpoint. Some statements from Tractaus are too well known and commented to need quoting here. Almost all the statements on religion, ethics and aesthetics in the Notebooks need to be kept in focus for appreciating our reading. Here only a few statements can be quoted or alluded to while commentary proceeds.
Ethics is transcendental.
The work of art is the object seen sub species aeternitatis and the good life is the world seen sub species aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.
The urge towards mystical comes after non-realization of our wishes by science. We feel that even with all possible scientific questions answered our problem is still not touched at all.
It is true: Man is the microcosmos.
There is no such thing as the act of the will. Will is the attitude of the subject to the world.
World in itself is neither good nor evil.
Everything is perfect.
Objects I can only name.
Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be found?
There is no riddle.
How things stand is God.
…my will is world will.
There can and must be mentioned of I in a non-physcological sense in philosophy.
Skepticism is not irrefutable, but obvious nonsense if it tries to doubt where no question can be asked
For doubts can only exist where a question exists; a question can only exist where an answer exists, and this can only exist where something can be said.

The fact that Wittgenstein had personal mystical experience is well attested. His description of being absolutely safe and seeing creation as a miracle are so compelling that we hardly need to entertain any second opinion about the mystical in him or his encounter with the mystical. The cognizance of the fact that there is a world is enough to make one dance with ecstasy and wonder. Wonder is the beginning and end of human wisdom.
According to him philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. He made the aim of philosophy more a vision than any things else (Pradhan:237). He aims was to get “vision of things as they are and therefore he aimed transcending philosophy itself. Philosophy could be transcended only after it has given us the correct vision of the world. As we have said earlier, this vision consists in man’s knowledge of the world, or in other words, in the metaphysic.” Although metaphysical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s thought has been disputed we can still say that he does argue for a new way of looking at the world which involves a kind of transcendence quite similar to the one advocated by mystics. After enlightenment the world continues to be the same but we have one foot above the ground as famous Zen anecdote recounts. This is the whole burden of a remarkable work titled Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing. To quote only one statement from Philosophical Investigations “What you have discovered is a new way of looking at things. As if you had invented a new way of painting; or again a new metre or a new kind of song” (401). Wittgenstein is a metaphysician in a special sense. He is a philosopher of transcendence. This point may need a clarification.
Metaphysics as conceived by its greatest masters across traditions from Nagarjuna to Sankara to Lao Tzu to Eckhart and IbnArabi consists in a vision that transforms our ordinary perception or attitude regarding the world. It is not necessarily a vision of beyond in the sense that involves moving out of oneself and talking of an abstraction or higher world ontologically distinguishable from the world we all know. It always presupposes samsara-nirvana or world-heaven equivalence. The immediate is the ultimate and path is the goal as Zen tradition would put it. God is the green in the trees and the red in the sunrays. Transcendence could well be construed as true being of beings as Heidegger would tell us or mystery of things or depth dimension of things. Everything is within according to all traditions.There is no other in absolute sense. All are one. IbnArabi’s words “you are everything, in everything, and from everything” express the vision of all great mystical thinkers. Thus all the higher worlds are part of the Self or consciousness. Ken Wilber has been emphasizing this point especially in almost all his writings. things.

To be open to revelations of transcendence is simply to keep the sense of wonder alive. Philosophy begins in wonder and mysticism makes this wonder a permanent state. The highest stage in the path is the stage of wonder or getting lost as IbnArabi says. Nietzsche was right to emphasize loyalty to this earth. In fact father Zosima in Dostovesky’s mystical work The Brothers Karamazarovsees every garden as the Garden of Eden. He says: “We don’t understand that life is a paradise [at present], for we have only to wish to understand this and it will immediately appear before us in all its beauty.”Rabbi Herschel has made the same point in different terms “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.”
The quarrel between transcendentalists and antitranscendentalists of almost all hues is largely verbal quibble. Platonic ideal world is not a separate world, an abstraction. But the world ordinarily thought to be world is also not the whole world but a mental construction. Blake sees eternity in an hour or infinity in a grain of sand. In fact for the mystics everything is, as it is infinite. Eternity is not an abstraction or some new realm as opposed to time but present moment. To live in eternity is to live in the present, to live moment by moment. What characterizes a philosopher of transcendence is he continues to find a depth in the world, something that excites wonder, something that invites our response and even love. Wittgenstein lucidly made this point in these words:

Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what maybe called “loss of problems.” Then everything seems quite simple to them,no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flatand loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallowand trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this (Z, 456).

His remark about Ayer after listening to his debate with Father Copleston  that ‘he has a point but he is shallow’ underscores the same sensibility. His remark that “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious”(p. 80 of his dairy) is in line with this viewpoint. Though he granted that only strictly scientific statements are meaningful but  he cautioned against positivists that natural science could never touch what was really important in human life, the mystical.
That would have to be contemplated in silence. For “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent/’ as the last proposition of the Tractatusdeclared. We can understand his famous statement “I am not areligious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”in this light. In fact religions don’t aim at even vision but advocate a discipline that makes us open or vulnerable to reality, to richness of being, to thingliness of things as Heidegger would have it, to essences of things that get expressed through things when looked at rather than thought. Wittgenstein would recommend looking instead of thinking. Transcendence of thinking is what contemplation/meditation is all about. It appears to me that Wittgenstein says nothing because nothing needs to be said. He advocates no position or privilges no point of view because this can’t be done. All his endeavor, like the mystics and prophets, is to emphasize that we need to see with open eyes, unburdened by memories or anxieties of thought. We need to see through God’s eyes. And that consists in nonegoistic vision and this makes it possible to assert that “How things stand is God.”
Wittgenstein gave great attention to language in order to show that what constitutes us and what we value most is delimited from what could be expressed in language, from profane textual domain. The Tractatus’s design was expressly determined by this consideration. For him the metaphysical self that constitutes us transcends the world, the urges that move us point beyond the world, experiences that we most cherish are of the world beyond the ordinarily familiar world, our ethical and aesthetic dimension is anchored outside the world.

For him both the willing subjects and the knowing subjects are one and both are outside of the world, and are the source of our language and world-cognition. However, as in mystical traditions, transcendence is not consummated; it remains an unfulfilled quest. It is movement, perpetual movement and not reaching anywhere. It is the limit that can never be reached. Absolute is inexhaustibly rich. Man must perpetually travel. Experiences are open ended and self is perpetually creative. Our search for transcendence, like our need to engage with philosophy is, as Pradhan has noted, “merely an ideal never to be fulfilled, because the metaphysics of experience as unfolded through our subjectivity has to be constantly guarded against unclarity and confusion through language itself. Therefore, philosophy can never ultimately be transcended, since transcendence of language itself is a continuing activity which is performed by philosophy” (Pradhan, 237). It means one can never stop worshipping or glorifying God and travel on the plane of servitude or perfect his surrender or state of innocence or vulnerability to reality. Mystics, as true philosophers (as traditionally understood activity) are always striving to remove the veils of language and thought in order to reach the still centre of existence that transcends language and thought. Wittgenstein is quite clear on the point that Conceptual analysis can teach nothing about reality. Nor resolve the puzzle of how we should understand the world and how we should live. He leaves all questions open and thus paves way for alternative approaches that bypass conceptual analysis and science for understanding or living the great mystery of life.

As Paul Johnson notes: “The conclusion of a Wittergenstein investigation still have all great questions open. As far as the Inner is concerned, in one sense it will always remain as mysterious as life itself” (Johnson: 239). This is precisely mystical attitude towards mystery of life. No question is answered. Only our plane of seeing life shifts and dissolves the ordinary sense of questions. We consent to unlearn. The learned ignorance. “The mystic is an extraordinarily ordinary person” He is a non-knower, non-caner. “The human need for account for the world and our place in it will not disappear, because traditional metaphysics has been shown to be flawed… accepting these points doesn’t involve embracing relativism and is close to a moral argument. (Pradhan, 239). It means the mystic, the artist, the poet, the scientist, shall ever be busy and man needs to be humble. Let Reality speak to him. Let him learn to be receptive. Imposing conceptual structures is violence. We need to learn to be still so that God speaks to us in silence. This opening up, surrender of self, emptying out and polishing our receptivity is what is the crux of Vedanta as Som Raj Gupta has argued in his largely ignored but superb work Word Speaks to the Faustian Man (1991). In fact all religious and mystical traditions are agreed on this point.
Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘God is the meaning of life’ is quintessentially mystical and best understood in light of mystical writings. Underhill’s explication of the meaning of life in mysticism is best commentary on this statement. One can’t be more God intoxicated to equate the most significant thing in life with God. Wittgenstein’s statement that man is a microcosmos is comprehensible only in mystical worldview. He also observed that “As a thing among things each thing is equally insignificant. As a world each one equally significant” (7-10-16) which reminds of Blake’s seeing the heaven in a grain of sand. Mystics have never doubted the significance of the meanest flower or blade of grass seeing everything as the face of the Absolute, as participating in everything.
Wittgenstein famously remarked that the riddle doesn’t exist and the solution of the problem of life is seen in the disappearance of the problem of life. For mystics God is the Light of the world. The question is how to live and that dissolves the problem or riddle. Life is not a riddle to be solved but a mystery to be lived, dissolved in. Riddle exists for those who want to conceptually approach life that resists all logic. The problem of meaning of life is the problem of how to live, how to live so that life stops being problematic.  For him good life is world seen in certain way rather than in a way of behaving. For him there is no value in the world (6.41). It is impossible for to be there proposition of ethics (6.42). The problem of how to live becomes for him not  some epistemological inquiry  the problem of how to  look at that world, the problem of how to find the right spirit in it.
Wittgenstein assigns key importance to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life. For him art is the solution. Compare this with Coomaraswamy or Schuon on art and aesthetics and we get the full import of the statement.
Wittgenstein has categorically stated the error of moderns for believing that laws of science explain nature. The world is suffused in mystery that is divine. The very fact that there is a world is incomprehensible and metaphysical. God has been conceived as mystery, as given, as something that is – ‘what is’ in Augustine’s and Krishnamurti’s phrase. Who can afford to deny the “gratuitous” universe? Philosophy begins and ends in wonder explaining nothing and demanding our opening up towards the transcendent miracle of existence. Modern man’s key problem in engaging positively or creatively with religion/mysticism arises from felt absence/hiddenness of God in contemporary experience.  But taken as synonymous with Reality the complaint seems to lose all warrant. God is the only Experiencer, Knower and Actor.

 

For IbnArabi, the great Sufi metaphysician, we don’t see but God sees and we don’t hear but God listens. God is immanent in every experience. As he says:
If we gaze, it is upon Him; if we use our intelligence, it is towards Him; if we reflect, it is upon Him; if we know it is Him. For it is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the invisible and the visible. The whole world prays to Him, prostrates itself before Him and glorifies His praise; tongues speak of Him, hearts are enraptured by love for Him, minds are bewildered in Him (Futûhât, III: 449-50).
For Wittgenstein these lines of IbnArabi would be perfectly comprehensible given his notion of metaphysical subject and its role in constituting experience, his view of the world as my world. Here I propose to compare Wittgenstein and IbnArabi by keeping IbnArabi’s explication in the background while applying the same for understanding Wittgenstein. Agnosticism and skepticisms of various orientations in the contemporary world have a point if understood as the declaration of impossibility of conceptually knowing the Reality, Transcendent Principle, the Ground of existence, the whole Truth, the Mystery. However these are often presented in cruder versions that deny men any knowledge of the supraphenomenal or the very existence of the sacred for which Wittgenstein and IbnArabiwill have zero tolerance. The Pure Absolute or Essence (Dhat) in its fundamental aspect – and thus Meaning/Truth/ Presence/ Identity/ Reality per se – is beyond the human quest and all attempts to reach It, track it, pinpoint It, catch It in the net of language or realm of the finite or time, to conceptualize It, to imagine It, to speak about It, to affirm anything of It are doomed. Before the Ipseity or Dhat one can only be bewildered according to Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein. The world is ultimately a Mystery, a Mystery of Mysteries and no rational or scientific approach could finally and completely demystify it. The world being ultimately a mystery that resists being demystified by means of conceptual intellect is what transcendence implies as Stace has explained in his Time and Eternity (1952). There is no humanely discoverable ultimate truth. All representations of the Real are provisional. Godhead/ Absolute/ Zat-uz-Zat is opaque, deep deep darkness, impenetrable, the absolutely inscrutable unknowable Other. Gnosis consists in knowing that God can’t be known as Abu Bakr is quoted time and again by IbnArabi. As the world is not-He and man ever a worshipper of his Lord or conditioned by his belief – a notion subsumable under the concept of form of life in Wittgenstein, and nothing is ever repeated as God’s theophanies change ceaselessly imply that the world will never cease to be an object of wonder and fascination and Beauty never cease to be worshipped and act as an efficient net through which God catches most of his servants as Plato also noted.
Rationalization, familiarization, demystification and descaralization of the world that ultimately make it inhuman, alienating and absurd and disrespectful towards the Big Other  can’t happen in the Akbarian/Wittgensteinian perspective that sees the mysterious, sacred divine face in everything. Western philosophy, as Heidegger pointed out, is oblivious to the ground of being. It is not open to the sacred mystery of Being. It is not the philosopher but the poet who can show the track of the holy, to the sacred mystery of Being. Nothing in the world of known can express the Divine Darkness. All quests end in wonder. In the last analysis man knows nothing to its depth by means of senses, language and reason. Other modes of knowledge such as intellectual intuition give us another kind of knowledge that instead of making things comprehensible dissolves the knowing subject in the object preserving the ultimate mystery of things in the process. If to comprehend means to have discursive conceptual knowledge we comprehend nothing ultimately. All our explanations, analyses stop at a certain point. Things are as they are. There is something instead of nothing. Being or wajudis in the last analysis a miracle or a scandal to reason. Why should there be a knowing subject and why should our universe be comprehensible are perhaps unanswerable. Man knows but little and this applies to everything from God to quarks. God is incomparable, transcendent. Symbols are all we know. We can only name things and that is all but things escape us as Wittgenstein would say. God alone knows or is Knowledge. The knowledge of reality given to mystics and prophets is of a different order. God remains inscrutable and the sacred inapproachable. Man’s prerogative is to contemplate and dissolve in the mystery of being. Though being is aware of itself this awareness has no analyzable or knowable structure.
We are here and there is no cure for it. But, more precisely, we are not. Only God is. Only the play of divine names is and man happens to be a locus of their action rather than some independent subject or agency. The cloak of mystery can’t be removed from the universe. All human knowledge is progressive unveiling of the ultimate impenetrability of the veil that disguises Reality. Essences are not discursively known.  Existence is a mystery and its grandeur and sublimity defy our reason and its categories. Rereading of Kantian sublime by such writers as Derrida or Lyotard is based on increasingly felt inability of reason to contain the brutal power of imagination. We can’t conceptualize or represent in language the infinity which human beings do encounter. The highest station is that of bewilderment according to IbnArabi and Wittgenstein . All this implies that dogmatisms are unwarranted.  Exoteric theologies need to be on guard and take Wittgenstein seriously as Kerr has also argued in Theology after Wittgenstein.
It is God and not the name of God that religions seek. Exoteric theologies may not distinguish between the Truth and the descriptions or representations of Truth. Nothing can capture the Reality in rational propositional framework. Even ethical propositions are not possible for Wittgenstein. This means we can only know our inability to know God and will good on our own and this means humility in the face of the Great Mystery that God is. This vetoes all self righteous fundamentalist ideologies. Jaina doctrine of syadvada is a corollary of the fundamental mystery and transcendence of the First Principle, the Absolute. This rules out all totalistic or totalitarian claims. Ideological conflicts are based on one’s exclusive claim to have access to truth and denying one’s fallibility. Religions by relegating truth to transcendent realm  and its access to transcendent intellect (which is in us but not ours) veto all quarrels about accessibility to it of any worldly ideology and self-centric person. Secular philosophies that require no moral purification on the part of the philosopher are barred from entering the doors of the great King or Truth.
The essential ethics of Wittgenstein like that of IbnArabi is constituted by such virtues as disinterest, self-denial, charity and love which form the ethical core of all religious/mystical traditions. God is experienced by everyone who sincerely cultivates these virtues. (Post)Modernity has essentially no argument against these values and indeed affirms them. Ibn ‘Arabî has nothing to argue for and against – he only invites us to experience things afresh, to be open to the Real which alone is really experienced in every experience. Wittgenstein’s endeavour is similar in his invitation to transcend language and thought in order to see what is, to see things sub species aeternitatis, to see solution in aesthetics, to live rather than think the mystery that life is. God is not a hypothesis that one needs to prove or could question – He is the ground of every perception, every imagination, every conception or thought, every experience. As Wittgenstein puts it there is no answer as there is no question where nothing can be said.
Wittgenstein is not himself a philosopher in the modern sense of the term which sees reason as the chief if not the only tool for understanding or approaching reality. His view of modern philosophers could not but be largely negative. For projecting IbnArabi or Wittgenstein as a philosopher we need to refer to perennialist conception of philosopher and philosophy. His denunciation of rationalism and much of what today passes for intellectuality aligns him to  perennialist critics of modern thought. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. For Wittgenstein knowing and willing subjects are one and man is knowledge, so to speak. Instead of conceptualizing we can see and in order to pave way for that direct seeing he removes the traps and cobwebs that language builds. Philosophy should not be a mere theoretical rational inquiry, a conceptual analysis or analysis of language as an end in itself but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Philosophy as an abstract philosophical discourse based on rationalistic scientific method and its methodically obtained “truths” is what Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein  often critique. Philosophy for Wittgenstein is not a method to discover truth but a sort of shock therapy to prepare us for receiving truth, to make us innocent or children again. It is a sort of death to the linguistically/conceptually constructed self. Philosophy implies for all of the ancients a moral conformity to wisdom: only he is wise, sophos, who lives wisely as Schuon notes (8:136). Living happily is living wisely. Living in such a way that problem disappears and there is no more sorrow and one partakes of eternity by living in the present is what  Wittgenstein is all about. Philosophy in the traditional Orphic-Pythagorean sense is wisdom and love combined in a moral and intellectual purification in order to reach the “likeness to god.”( Uzdavinys, 2005). It is contemplation of Beauty and Good. This is attainable by gnosis. By philosophizing ancients meant “both noetic activity and spiritual practice.” Wittgensteinian conception is remarkably similar.
In IbnArabi’s understanding the Real alone is and there is no distance between us and It. We are already there in the lap of God – we have never been really away and cannot be away from It. God has never been missed. We have forgotten or fallen asleep but this doesn’t alter the fact that God is our very being, our inmost reality. Man is inwardly God and outwardly a creature according to Ibn ‘Arabî. The world is God’s visible face. The real, the obvious, that which is always with us, has been always with us, will always be with us, is God. God is the world. God is how things are as Wittgenstein would put it. But this doesn’t make him a pantheist as he has categorically stated also that God is outside the world, the world constructed by language, by a self that sees it as the other.

God is the Isness of things. He is the Meaning of everything as Wittgenstein said. God constitutes all pervasive Environment (al-Muhitin the Quranic parlance) in which normal man lives, moves and has his being.
Realizing that everything is perfect this very moment or, in Buddhist (Nagarjunian) terminology, that samsara is nirvana is realizing God. Wittgenstein’s transcendence of good/evil binary and pleading for a vision of perfect harmony between the self and the “alien will” called God and seeing everything as unalterably perfect makes the same point. Such notions as  “Ground of being” “ depth of life” “mystery of things or existence” which many moderns have advocated as substitute metaphors for what used to be conventionally called God and most often pictured with a human face by anthropomorphic idolatrous imagination seem to be given some representation in this fundamentally Unitarian view of God as Totality, as Reality.
God is not an epistemological problem at all that our mind/reason can investigate. He is a percept rather than a concept for Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein. In more poetic terms He is a song to be sung rather than an abstract Being, a Being among other beings but a Being of beings. God is “the knownest of the known” and so close that we only need to open our eyes, to cleanse the doors of perception to see how. Belief in God is not a proposition for Ibn ‘Arabî and Wittgenstein but a matter of tasting, experiencing the divine (or the revelations of sheer Being), which, to him, presents itself in all experiences every moment and for everyone – in fact God is the Hearing and the Seeing as is often reiterated in the Quranic verse – and not just to a select few in the so-called religious experience which is a Jamesian construct uncritically accepted by many modern philosophers of religion. All the roads lead to His abode as they proceed from it. God is the name of ‘that which is.’ He is not something within isness, he himself is that which is.
Knowing oneself after denying the illusory desiring ego one comes to subsist in God. All beliefs and disbeliefs are in the realm of duality and need to be transcended. IbnArabi’s and Wittgenstein’s  Unitarian Metaphysics is transtheistic and transcends both theism and atheism. This Unitarianism leads to the realization that the world is ultimately none other than the Absolute and thus finding everything perfect this very moment or seeing eternity here and now.  Wittgen
Modern man’s problems are primarily with a constricted dualistic theological view of God and static absolutes of idealistic philosophies. Ibn ‘Arabî’s and Wittgenstein’s conception of divinity is not vulnerable to these standard critiques of theistic and idealistic philosophical pictures. Most empiricist-positivist-postmodernist critiques look beside the point and based on faulty construction of religious experience. Modern philosophy of religion seems to have gloriously misunderstood the central experience of religion if Akbarian exposition is accepted. It is not a subject that sees something which constitutes the essence of religious experience or mystical vision for Wittgenstein or IbnArabi. It is more a discovery or insight into things as they are, an attitude, a way of seeing the world rather than a particular or extraordinary experience.
Wittgenstein, like traditional philosopher-sages, is more concerned about certainties “seen” or “lived” by the immanent Intellect, as did the best of Greeks than about building rational speculative metaphysics.  Cracks, crises and emasculations of the discipline of philosophy in the modern West could have been avoided if the West had not opted for Latin Averrorism and Cartesian rationalism and consequent dualisms and irresolvable problems that still haunt its epistemology and other areas like ontology.
Wittgenstein, like IbnArabi, provides a possible exit point from the choking morass of skeptical thought currents which otherwise doom us to abysmal ignorance regarding our most important questions in life including possibility of certain knowledge and knowledge of good life or good action.
“The final end and ultimate return of the gnostics … is that the Real is identical with them, while they don’t exist” said IbnArabi. Wittgenstein arrives at similar conclusions through a different route. It is through the metaphysical realization that one realizes that the Self withdraws from the “servant-Lord” polarity and resides in its own transpersonal being. The subject-object dichotomy is transcended by virtue of pure intellect or Spirit, which is identical with the divine Essence” (Qaisar, 2002:133). Once the soul or nafs has withered away in the experience of fana, the self-identity of mystic realization is transformed into the Self-identity of metaphysical realization. In the metaphysical perspective the reality of the ‘I’ doesn’t belong to man or nafsbut to the Spirit which is the divine spark at the center of man’s being identical with the unmanifest consciousness or Divine Essence. The crucial distinction between soul and Spirit is necessary to understand the Akbarian-Wittgensteinian metaphysical conception of religious experience. This distinction is largely forgotten by most philosophical critics of religious experience. Numerous misunderstandings and debates of theological vs. mystical debate in religions and meaning of such notions as soul/spirit, God/man, could be resolved if we keep these key points in mind. A fruitful dialogue with critics of religion and mysticism and in fact with secular thought in general is possible if we keep in mind ingenious interpretations put forward of many exponents of nondualism in the contemporary world.

Love of the World and Discovering God as Unutterable Joy

For Wittgenstein happy life is life divine and the great moral prerogative. It comes by loving the world, byamorfati. It comes from transcending the principle of ego which judges from self-centric perspective. Jesus said “judge not.” For Wittgenstein joy accompanies this surrender of vanity of the self in the All Embracing Divine Environment or “alien” Cosmic Will. He defined God as the Other, the Great Other that dictates terms, that constrains one, that embodies principle of Necessity.
One is reminded of many writings and especially the following from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 32 in one of his sermons.
As the harvest, in the vineyard, wherever men must labour hard, they begin with songs whose words express their joy. But when their joy brims over and words are not enough, they abandon even this coherence and give themselves up to the sheer sound of singing. What is this jubilation, this exultant song; It is the melody that means out hearts are bursting with feelings words cannot express. An to whom does this Jubliation most belong? Surely to God, who is unutterable.  And does not unutterable mean what cannot be uttered? If words will not come and you may not remain silent, what else can you do but let the melody soar? (Qtd.In Kerr, 1986:167).

In mystical perspective God is joy and awareness of God is joy and thus awareness of reality in which all association with the self is put aside. If it is possible to access Reality or God nihilism is overcome. Weil has an ingenious argument to show that awareness of reality is joy and despair or sadness is a loss of contact with reality. This is her expression of old mystical /metaphysical viewpoint which identifies God as ananda, bliss. Simone Weil expresses the identity of joy with the awareness of reality. Since beauty is manifest appearance, the striking sign of reality, joy can only be a feeling, an awareness of reality. Weil describes sadness as a loss of contact with reality. Through sadness we cannot fulfill our vacation – to understate misery of our condition and to accept our reduction to what we truly are: nothing.  The memory of the revelation of reality through joy keeps us from plunging into despair, and the joy felt in our nothingness can be inscribed in our sensibility only by suffering. “Joy and pain are equally precious gifts both of which must be savoured fully, and each in its purity…” ( Weil, 1951: 132).
Simone Weil best captures the essence of many ideas that Wittgenstein only briefly touches. I think her observations allow us to make sense of Wittgenstein’s many observations from a mystical perspective. I reproduce some of her observations to put Wittgenstein in perspective and make him comprehensible.
Wittgenstein maintained that God is the Meaning of life and one must love the world unconditionally to appropriate this meaning. Weil is at her best in showing how one creates the meaning in life by renouncing all personal meanings, by complete acceptance of submission to the order of the world. One loves the order of the world by renouncing all personal interests. This is, in practice, close to Spinoza’s view of love of God by renouncing every vestige of personal interest. Freedom lies in recognizing our utter dependence on Totality, on God and in fact giving up sense of illusory autonomy or freedom that we associate with a separate individuality. We are not asked to do something against which our heart or head rebels but just shifting the perception in accordance with the nature of things.  One is just asked to accept or recognize the obvious fact that there is the order called necessity, which exists prior to us and which is there for reasons not necessarily understandable in human terms. Reality is there that transcends all our estimates, evaluations, desires and constitutes the given and man has no choice but to accept it by renouncing that which would have led him to rebellion – the sense of individuality and freedom outside God. “Where there is complete, authentic, and unconditioned consent to necessity, there is the fullness of love of God” (Weil, 1956: 267). Other texts identify the supernatural faculty in us as consent. For Weil that consent is always consent to the good, and, as such, it is the good itself. Faith is itself this faculty of submission or consent according to her. Absurdism rejects this notion of consent as a species of bad faith. Affirming the principle of autonomy and freedom in man independent of God it can’t but reject consent and consequently suffer alienation, angst and all those things with which absurdist literature is suffused.
All traditions emphasize remembrance of God. Modern mystics such as Krishnamurti translate it as attention or choiceless awareness. Weil has a similar understanding. Attention bridges division of subject and object, knower and known. Attention consists in suspending thought, in making it available, enmity, penetrable by the object….Thought must be empty, waiting, not searching for anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which will penetrate there (Weil, 1951: 92-3). For her God is attention without distraction. It is living as a witness, a detached subject or awareness that watches every moment, that lives in the present by transcending thinking which distracts one from the given, the present. Living beyond the mind, in what has been called as the space of no-mind where time doesn’t enter and thus neither fear nor hope nor any need of consolation. God is what is in Krishnamurti’s phrase and to live in God is to be aware of what is without judgment, without condemnation, disinterestedly. Wittgenstein pleaded for seeing without the conceptual glasses, seeing things as they are after transcending philosophy. He meant something similar. Contemplation is a means of transcending confusions created by use or misuse of language.
Giving up the centre of one’s own value system is harder, but when we succeed, the very sensibility changes and we become capable of a new way of seeing. We are able to “empty ourselves of little false divinity, deny oneself, to renounce being at the centre of the world, to discern all the points of the world as being centers in the same title and the veritable centre as being outside the world.” Wittgenstein was all for this ascesis, this transformation in attitude and not correcting one’s views by updating our knowledge of history or science. By saying that God is outside the world or aesthetics is transcendental he meant adopting the divine perspective of seeing things from outside the world. This necessitates transcendence of individuality and human way of seeing and judging. When we are no longer centers we can’t condemn anything and can justify the world.
Weil argues that one shouldn’t desire particular things or pray for particular things because that is slavery.  Her argument practically converges with the formula of amorfati and loving everything as if there is eternal recurrence. This alone ensures unconditional love. Total renunciation is demanded for loving the order of the world or affirming everything unconditionally. To quote her:

Nothing can be produced unless the conditions for its production are brought together.
Such and such a thing calls for such and such a condition. But if one thinks: everything can be produced, given the conditions, and everything is equivalent…
If one desires a particular thing one becomes enslaved to the series of conditions. But if one desires the series itself, the satisfaction of this desire is unconditioned.
That is why the one and only liberation is love of the order of the world.
Christ on the cross, the greatest harm inflicted on the greatest good [can anything be more absurd and more revolting]: if one loves that, one loves the order of the world (Weil, 1970:143-144).

Nietzsche suggests a similar way of overcoming nihilism. Affirming the order of the world, praying for nothing, or letting one consent to the order of the world, freedom from the self that seeks consolation and this or that thing – these are the strategies common to Weil and Wittgenstein and in fact is the mystical position. Eckhart teaches the same thing.
Man has only two choices – to affirm his will, his autonomy or to affirm divine or cosmic will and his creatureliness, his nothingness. The first choice pits him against God and against cosmos and leads him to wail and despair for that which is thwarted, which is not honored in the scheme of things. When one renounces free will and thus choice between good and evil one no longer wishes good against evil to be done to him. Everything is justified because both good and evil are really one. (This relative understanding of good and evil is to be distinguished from that supreme value which Plato calls Good which stands above all relative distinctions.) Camus finds Christianity based on great injustice as an innocent lamb was sacrificed. Weil leaves no scope for any such reading.  We too are asked to consent to die, to be crucified, to love God in utter desolation of the Spirit when He seems absent as He was when the Christ cried.
Wittgenstein wanted us to see things from God’s perspective or sub species aeterneti. Weil asks for adapting the perspective of God or the non-perspective of supraindividual faculty of intellect (nuous as distinct from ratio or discursive reason). For attaining this perspective one has to die first. One starts from the Absolute and from the perspective of the Absolute man, his free will, his dreams, his autonomy is an anomaly, a state of disequilibrium.  If individual is engulfed in the Absolute as critics of perennialists point out or as existentialists argue against monists, it is something for which nothing can be done. If we are concerned with truth and not sentimentalism there is no escape from the tragic fact that individual or ego doesn’t count in the face of the Absolute. Are we after truth as such or truth as it appears to our subjective predispositions, to our heart? God is Truth and man may be in need of consolation though truth need not be necessarily consoling. From perennialist/Weil’s perspective the need for consolation is a weakness and a species of bad faith. This also explains Wittgenstein’s critique of conventional prayer as petition.We need to be iron-willed, capable of facing utter solitude or Void (Neant). It is only the strong man, the superman, who can unconditionally affirm and love fate – a fatalist in this higher sense is a man of strong character – or consent to eternal recurrence. Weil thus advocates the perspective of God in contrast to man-centric perspectives that individualist subjectivist thought currents advocate. This appropriates Keatsian negative capability, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Jainism’s syadvadaas all these imply openness to infinitely nuanced and multidimensional character of reality or truth.
Meaning of Providence
Wittgenstein observed in Tractatus. “How things in the world are a matter of complete indifference what is higher.  God does not revel him self in the world.” He rejected conception of prayer as petition. He, however, attempted to make sense of religious person’s trust in God and religious language that express care of God. Weil explains this difficult problem in her own characteristic way. We need to note that nothing is gratuitous and nothing is meaningless and nothing is out of God’s control, care and mercy in God-centric view though nothing is respectful of human egoism which wants things according to the self’s desire. Not a sparrow falls except by the writ of providence. There is no role for chance. God is equally present everywhere, in all circumstances. Even rain drops fall in a measured quantity and angel accompanies every drop. This is the conviction of all religions, even those who have no personal God to look into the affairs of the world. However these statements are best understood by those who are familiar with the strange language of God. One can approach such statements not as cognitive verifiable statements that positivist or empiricist could handle but only by being within a “form of life” and mastering the rules and conventions of the particular game. Despite the fact that God is “absent’’ for Weil there is providence, the mystery of which is not decipherable to the uninitiated, to those profane inquirers who refuse to be annihilated in God and insist on seeing things outside God. The following account is irrefutable on its own terms by outsiders.
All the events of life, whatever they may be, without exception, are by conventions or signs of God. God establishes a conventional language with his friends. Every event in life is a word of this language. These words are all synonymous but, as happens in beautiful languages, each of them has its completely specific nuance, each of them is untranslatable. The meaning common to all these words is: I love you.
A man drinks a glass of water. The water is God’s “I love you.” He is two days in the desert without finding anything to drink. The dryness in his throat is God’s “I love you” … Those who are beginning to learn this language think that only some of its words mean “I love you.” Those who know the language know that it has only one meaning (Weil, 1970:128-129).
There is no providence that pertains to our created nature which itself is a result of injustice because by definition it tends to be autonomous and in opposition to the whole, the totality that the term God designates. What transcends the world is indeed indifferent towards the concerns of the world as Wittgenstein would say. To be born is indeed sin according to both Christian and Eastern traditions because it involves separation from the ground and thus a kind of fall. (Redemption consists in, according to Weil, consenting to return to God what is His, i.e. our very being or existence. Metaphysically our being is a non-being and God alone is truly real and the illusory dream of separate existence must be given up and this constitutes salvation.) Providence has, as in Beckett, only a negative meaning, of ensuring decreation so that the dust returns to dust and the uncreated Spirit comes to its own glory. Because creation is abandonment it necessarily implies subjection to necessity and thus, in a sense, absence of providence in the usually accepted sense of the term.

God abandons our whole entire being – flesh, blood, sensibility, intelligence, love – to the pitiless necessity of matter and the cruelty of the devil, except for the eternal and supernatural part of the soul.
The Creation is abandonment. In creating what is other than Himself, God necessarily abandoned it. He only keeps under His care the part of Creation which is Himself – the uncreated part of every creature. That is the Life, the Light, the Word…” (Weil, 1970: 103).

God himself can’t prevent what has happened from having happened. What better proof that the creation is an abdication? What greater abdication of God than is represented by time?
We are  abandoned in time. God is not in time.
God emptied himself of his divinity and filled us with a false divinity. Let us empty ourselves of it. This act is the purpose of the act by which we were created
At this very moment God, by  his creative will, is maintaining me in existence, in order that I may renounce it (Weil, 1970:140).

One doesn’t ask of providence to take care of this and that because if one loves the order of the world one transcends it with all its misery. Love is transcendence. It is we who are asked to redeem or justify ourselves in relation to the Totality. Love of the world takes all its pain. Love, in the final analysis, is the one thing needful that solves all problems. Here Rumi comes to mind who says love cures all ills. As Weil says: “It is sufficient if we consent to this order of things.” Faith is precisely this demand for loving the world which God has made and found good. Faith is trust in the order of things. It is gratitude towards Existence. It is self effacement before the whole, the Totality, the Tao. It is renunciation of all claims to a separate selfhood over and against the Whole.
Meaning of time and Eternity
Weil has a time tested mystical mechanism of ending of time called decreation. Decreation, according to Weil, means the “end of time.” There is an eternal and hidden part of soul which has the reservoir of energy “beyond time.” Through it one lives beyond time. Nihilism is overcome by those prepared to live it to hilt by annihilating oneself, by eliminating the seeking self which lives in time and rising above the mind which lives in past and future and never beyond time, in the moment. Cultivating the faculty of undistracted attention and intelligence one breaks through the prison of time. Weil is convinced as is Beckett that there is a timeless dimension which is our home.
The entire life of the self is directed towards the future because its substratum is supplementary energy, “produced” only by motives whose ends are in the future (or in the past) (Weil, 1956: 184). One should live in the present breaking the ties with the future and the past. Here Heidegger comes to mind who sees life as project into future. Being reduced to the present moment also implies a sinless state, since sin is essentially a claim to mastery over the future, the refusal of future love or suffering, or the refusal to repent of an evil act committed in the past: “If we contemplate ourselves at a specific moment – the present moment, cut off from past and future – we are innocent… Isolating a moment in this way implies forgiveness. But this isolation is detachment” (Weil, 1956: 216).
Remarks on his Ethics and Suffering
In 1939 Wittgenstein said,
The fat that life is problematic shows the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear.
Or shouldn’t I say rather: a man who lives rightly won’t experience the problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem but a joy rather; in other words for him it will be a bright halo around his life, not a dubious background  (CV:27).

This is the crux of mystical theodicy. This is what Buddha said in a different way. Eliminate desire and you will be in peace. Wittgenstein said this quite clearly and wondered what for are amenities. He was the monk in the true sense.
‘Ethics,’ Wittgenstein says, has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense (TLP,6.422) and he adds that “the ethical consequences must lie in the action itself. If we assume that it is a person’s actions and the way those actions are performed that create a life, then the ethical desert of those actions is simply that life itself, and since life and the world are said to be one, the ethical reward is nothing else but the fact with which the world looks back at you. To complete the account let us remember that the face that looks back at our is your own: it is tempting to speculate that your ethical reward is no more nor no less than the discovery of your own character.” From Lao Tzu to IbnArabi and Eckhart mystical ethics and its eschatological significance has been almost similarly understood. For mystics like IbnArabi people choose their stations in the other world. God only unveils their reality. People judge themselves in the light of the Absolute. Choosing to live inside the cocoon of limiting self amounts to obstructing Divine Mercy or choosing separation from the Real. Prayer establishes the dialogue between the self and transcendence. Refusing to pray – which is, for IbnArabi, simply gratitude to Existence for the gift of life – amounts to condemning oneself to self referring and self enclosed windowless subjective space. Hell is self love and nothing burns there but self will as one Christian mystic has said.
Modern world is largely convinced that ethics is relative and everything is permissible. There is no ontological foundation for ethics. There are some isolated thinkers who challenge dominant model but in almost all spheres of secular life there are no imperatives like those bequeathed by religions. In contrast Wittgenstein’s  ethics, like mystical ethics, is grounded in ontology. Noble character traits are not merely extraneous qualities that have no bearing upon our mode of existence. They define our mode of existence and the extent to which we participate in the fullness of the Light of Being. He accepted and further developed by including aesthetics also in it Moore’s definition of ethics as a discovery of the Good or Divinity. Ethics, he said, is transcendental. The moral law within is not biological or cultural product. It is the voice of God. Values are from the transcendental world. His disagreements with Plato come to end here. Ethical commandments have to be observed if man desires felicity. Modern wishy washy do goodism or absolutization of ethical relativism or ethics complicit with Capitalism and other power centric ideologies are not compatible with Wittgensteinian theomorphic ethics. Capitalism and State Capitalism disguised as Marxism have little room for attributes of beauty. There is no warrant for ignoring the Scale of the Law interiorized in conscience which provides the norm. Antinomianism which has been popularized by certain libertine Gurus has no place here. Men with all their limitation and imperfections can’t claim to be infinitely beyond this world and thus beyond good and evil which we encounter at every stage of existence. Man must always separate divine viewpoint which is corollary of his incomparability from his own human, all-too-human viewpoint which is a corollary of divine similarity as IbnArabi would insist.

However all this should not be construed to imply that he countenances moralism which is typical modern heresy. The deadly criticism of Nietzsche on morality doesn’t apply to his view of ethics. Wittgenstein read Gospels in Brief by Tolstoy and then read Anti-Christ of Nietzsche and could not be moved an inch from his commitment to Tolstoy’s Christian ethical universe. Postmodern probematization of ethics and modern scientific discoveries implicating relativism of morals can’t problematize Akbarian- Wittgensteinian position as he too, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, speaks from the high mountains of the Spirit which transcends all actions, good or evil. Wittgenstein emphasizes that man is not an agent of action. He can’t will to do good. This is explainable by reference to God as the Only Doer or what Taoism calls wuweiwei, actionless action. Evil action in ordinary parlance is possible only when man is under the dominion of ego or lower self and Wittgenstein’s demand for possibility of ethics is transcendence of this principle of egoism.
It is religion taken as a metanarrative, a system, an ideology explaining things, as privileging of the otherworld or eternity at the cost of this world and time here-now and privileging of soul over body, elaborate creedal formulae coached in terms of propositions privileging the religious as distinct from or opposite to the secular, as unqualified belief in the representation of Reality and their absolutist exclusivism that IbnArabi and Wittgenstein plead for transcending by virtue of their Unitarianism that puts the Real at the centre while questioning absolutization of all conceptions and theorizations of It. The world is one. And It must be affirmed in toto. Language and thought divide the One of experience and integrity of unitary subject and the world.  The Real is the essence of everything and no dualistic apprehension or categorical framework can capture it. It is the totality of all existents, a metaphysical whole that can’t be reduced to an object of knowledge by a subject that is thought to be separate from the object. All this implies that meaning closure, epistemic chauvinism, totalistic thought and consequent war on the basis of a particular conception or delimitation of the Reality/ Truth are unwarranted. Truth rather than discourse about Truth which is the prerogative of exoteric theology and rational philosophy is what the gnostic comes to realize and as it is the One and All it necessarily follows that the knower transcends all particular beliefs and views. Living Truth, dissolving in Truth rather than talking about it and fighting for it is the way to end all conflicts that arise from dualistic theological and rationalistic philosophical approaches.
For Wittgenstein religion gives one new eyes so that everything looks different and redeemed by and  suffused with love. God is wherever love is, beauty is, blessedness is and grace is. In fact God is these things and not an abstraction or object. This solves the important problems of theology as well without making it pantheism either. Seen with the eyes of love, trust and faith everything appears God. God is not the name of a person or entity but the very thingness of a thing, the beauty of beauty, the goodness in the good. As Weil puts it: “God ‘not as I love, but as emerald is green. He is ‘I love.’ And I too, if I were in the state of perfection, would love as emerald is green. I would be an impersonal person (like God)” (Weil, 1970: 129). God speaks these words through all of us who love and more effectively through those who love so intensely and selflessly as to become love. What differentiates a bhakti mystic or Sufi from ordinary mortals or nonmystics is their capacity to love and it is this love which redeems them. All positive experiences – aesthetic, moral, cognitive – are bridges to God-realization.
Representation or Practice of the Self
Wittgenstein is concerned, above all, with t he happy life and that he links with transcendence of desiring or willing self. His problem is ethical and existential and his proposed solution too is on these planes that have little to do with language or representation business. His solution involves contemplating, looking, wondering, loving rather than thinking or questioning. He is struggling with/against language rather than doing business with it. His object (ethical/aesthetical/religious or mystical) is not in the world, is untouched by scientific discoveries or any speculative exercise. His concern is metaphysical and metaphysical is what he calls mysterious, mystical, outside the world, supernatural. He was interested in speaking without words – “conveying thoughts by themselves without words” (CV:15). He thought, with Goethe, that we need to learn from contemplation of untrammeled nature rather than laboratory experiement and hypothesis that distort the truth (CV:11). Like Heidegger he found the richness of being to which poets rather than philosophers point out the key to salvation.
Wittgenstein was supremely religious man and it is because he is religious in every important sense of term (rather than only in a trivial sense as G. H. von Wright claims) that he said he is not a religious man. Humility is the supreme virtue of a religious man. He had not only respect for religion (including even its rituals) but moulded his life by its dictates. One of the things Christianity says, Wittgenstein thinks, is that all sound doctrines are of no avail. One must change one’s life (or the direction of one’s life). According to him Christianity didn’t talk about what has happened or will happen to man but what happens daily to him, every moment (CV: 28). Existentialist theology and demythologization movement have been emphasizing this point as have been mystics in all climes. For all religions the greatest obstacle in one’s journey to God or beatitude is pride/ego and Wittgenstein was supremely concerned about this thing all his life and many of his biographical details can be understood in this light only.
His remarks about symbolic significance of rituals and how they embody our search for the sacred in Culture and Value and elsewhere show how profound his religious sensibility is. His dismissal of Frazer and defence of ‘primitives’ at many points against moderns show what kind of a man he was. His critique of modernity and European civilization is fundamentally on religious grounds. He found in it loss of respect for mystery, the idea of progress, lack of culture and direction or purpose, and the cult of the ugly in its art objectionable. All his beloved writers and philosophers have been religious/mystical.  God was his ultimate concern as shown by exemplary moral life he lived and his wish to have been able to dedicate all his work to the glory of God. His biographer, Brian McGuiness reports that before doing any action, he prayed like this: “God be with me!”, “The spirit be with me.”  Sin and thus hell were terribly real for him. He thought about sin as seriously if not more as about logic as his reply to Russell to the question regarding what he was thinking about when he came to meet him during night. Explanations, reasons, justifications come to an end in religious thinking for Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, like the mystics before and after him, did not favour a cosmological conception of a Deity. For mystics theology is in fact autology.He was, like Spinoza, God intoxicated and standard reading of him as fideist or noncognitivist is far off the mark. His considering himself wretched and in need of infinite help and never ceasing to scrutinize the desires, vanity and all that religion cautions against shows how seriously he took religion and what grounds it.
Wittgenstein’s stand on different aspects of ethics is the following. Ethics deals with absolute value; value judgments that we often use can be reduced to facts. We can re-formulated them as hypothetical judgments of if …then form and make them to be statements of facts. Paradoxically, Wittgenstein states that we can experience value. An experience, is an event, and hence ought to be factual. It seems strange that Wittgenstein maintains that values are absolute and transcendental and yet we can experience them. Ethical values cannot be spoken or discussed about since they are transcendental
There are explicit statements of Wittgenstein that militate against any kind of fideist interpretation, extreme or moderate versions of it. For him God is the case. How things are is the mystical. These imply Wittgenstein can’t be framed in either ethical or conventional religious frameworks. He is fundamentally a mystic who has made metaphysical claims in the sense metaphysics is understood by perennialists. He has made cognitive claims of mysticism though not of religion. What better argument for cognitivity or knowledge claimand against fidiestic interpretations than his assertion that the mystical shows forth?
Wittgenstein scholars have not paid due attention to the distinction between the religious/theological and the mystical and confounded the two in approaching him resulting in quite divergent interpretations. I have foregrounded the mystical in him which grounds his religiosity and thus gives us a heremenutical tool to make sense of his different observations on religion. I argue that he is an absolutist and we should not approach him from the lens of Philosophical Investigations and then attempt to show that religion is a language game, a foundationless discourse making no cognitive or knowledge claims and a matter of faith. If Sankara or Eckhart or Augustine are absolutists Wittgenstein oo is an absolutist for whom God/eternity is absolute certainty, the first principle and is experienced rather than merely believed
The Unrepresentable shows forth
In a letter from the Russian front date 9 April 1917, to his friend Paul Engelmann, who had sent him a poem by the early nineteenth century poet Johann Ludwig Uhlan, Wittgenstein wrote.

The Poem by Uhlan is really magnificent. And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably-  contained in what has been uttered! (Qtd.In Kerr, 1986: 166).

Though one can’t clearly state what he means similar things in the writings of mystics that emphasize how God speaks when we become silent and how everything is lighted up by God and God is meaning of everything, how transcendence and immanence or samsara and nirvana are ultimately linked and even one. The unrepresentable shows forth and the gnostic sees nothing but That which is also the Light of the world, the light that is neither of the sea nor of the land but light that lights everything.
Though we should guard against the identification of the inexpressible and the mystical it is nevertheless clear that the really mystical for Wittgenstein transcends the world but can be accessed in ethical life rooted in transcendence and mystical and aesthetic experiences and concretely lived in religious forms and rituals. If the Unrepresentable were not accessible there would be no meaning for Wittgenstein’s taking cudgels on its behalf and judging modern intellectual thought currents from religio-mystical viewpoint.

Wittgenstein rejects all the important modernist myths such as that of progress and criticizes reductionism in anthropology and psychologism to pave way for faith. He judges modernity in the light of faith. It means how cognitive an affair religion is for him. He takes Frazer and his like to task for rationalistic interpretation of traditional ritual. He pointed out that many religious practices are not generated by any views that one could censure or verify. He saw university educated intelligentsia of the west carriers of moral and spiritual corruption that had thrusted human civilization into a new dark age.
For Wittgenstein “Symbolism of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. All religions are wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes.” (Qtd in Kerr, 1986). Nothing of this sort could come out from an agnostic. Like mystics he rejects literalism and believes in symbolism. He seems to appreciate the transcendental unity of religions by emphasizing mystical core at the heart of them. Religion for him is deed and not theory. This was so for Buddha also and in fact mystics have seen religion as transformative therapeutic towards a good life. Like mystics he underscored nonanthropomorphic character of belief.  God for him is not a thing, a being, a superbing, an existence.
Conclusion
No doubt can be entertained regarding Wittgenstein’s commitment to religion even if he didn’t deem himself pure enough to be called a religious man. He looked at every problem from religious point of view. He liked to call himself as ‘a truth seeker,’ and he had found it though one can’t claim that he had reached the peaks that advanced mystics have access to. “It strikes me  that religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference, hence though it is belief and assessing life. It is passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” If religion is a method of assessing life, it is in a way cognitive. If one takes it seriously it means one takes it to be truth of a certain kind. For Wittgenstein religion was a matter of life and death. He was not a phenomenologist observing it with a detachment of a scientist. He plunged passionately into God and found the treasure. He meant business when he talked about religion or philosophy. He had faith and learnt wisdom in the end, the wisdom of an Oriental sage who cultivates detachment.  For him it is wisdom that he finds nowhere in his contemporary professors of philosophy doing sort of a work as appears in Mind that really counts. To conclude there is a path that bypasses language and thought for accessing that which really matters, for realization of what has been eternal quest for values. Wittgenstein has outlined this path that needs to be kept in mind while we ponder on the limits and approaches to linguistic representations. No confusion needs to be entertained in understanding Wittgenstein’ essentially religious/mystical outlook. He was not a great mystic but a great mystical philosopher. He had very few intense mystical experiences.

He often behaved in a way that is not expected from a mystic. Contemplating committing suicide, extreme agitated mind at times, sense of gloom that obsessed him are not the mark of a great mystic. He didn’t take himself to be a saint but had the saintly ideal of moral purity to which he tried to conform. However if religion or mysticism are centred on deeds or practice we can’t but see him as a great soul who renounced wealth, fame, amenities and other guises that self love takes. He did find for himself the truth he sought and for him indeed philosophy has been love of wisdom. He has more wisdom than faith which is passionless and that is a sign of maturity of religion. His fundamental stance can be expressed in few sentences that express a worldview that is hundred percent Hebraic and hundred percent mystical.

I conclude by quoting and commenting on these few sentences.
The problem of life is “seen in the disappearance of the problem.” This means that the answer is not known, but seen and need not be known as the problem doesn’t demand an answer as it disappears. In fact the question can’t be asked. Vanishing of the problem is only found through a way of knowing other than language. “To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life” (NB:74).To believe in God means to understand that there is more than facts (NB:74).  For him to pray is to think about the meaning of life. Further explaining the meaning of mystical prayer he says that “I can’t bend the happenings of the world to my will; I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world.”It is impossible to know God through what can be said. What one knows about God is that this world exists. To be outside the world means to be outside what can be put into words. “I am my world”(TLP:5.63). Atkinson beautifully explains it:
The separation between the thinker and the thought, or the eye and the object of sight, occurs in language, not in the event itself. Thus the idea of the personal self or subject in terms of  a thinker of the thought among others. The subject is not a thing in the world and the thought one has of it does not correspond to a fact (Atkinson, 2009: 133).
The difference between seeing the object together with and in space and time is a matter of seeing the world from either the outside or the inside. From the outside it is to see the world like one’s eye in its visual field (NB:73). To see the object sub species aeternitatis from the outside is to see it from outside the world and language. Being outside language there is nothing that can be said about an object. Wittgenstein states that there are things that can’t be put into words. These things show themselves. They are the mystical. (TLP: 6.522) These things “don’t point to another world outside the world, but show themselves as the mystical.” The metaphysical interpretation of the Tractatus has been forcefully criticized by a host of scholars including Atkinson. The mystical is what one finds immediately in reality. What “can’t beput into words shows itself as the world that is and what shows itself must be coordinated with the solipsistic self in the moment of experience. This moment, I have argued, is to fell the world as a limited whole” (Atkinson, 2009: 69).

We need not advocate metaphysical interpretation and can remain contended with the fact that there is something that science can’t handle, there is a joy of the spirit available to a happy man who has consented to be nothing, the world is full of beauty, there are no problems and man’s hunger for higher things can be quenched. It hardly matters where we precisely locate transcendence that gives meaning to life and grounds ethics and aesthetics – beyond the world or immanently within its depths. Interpretations, theological and metaphysical ultimately can differ but what matters is what Wittgenstein achieves. He achieves the similar end that religions and mysticisms across traditions have sought. He gets the riddle dissolved and puts thoughts or philosophy to peace and that is the end of philosophical/mystical quest.

References
Atkinson, James R., The Mystical in Wittgenstein’s Early Writings, Routledge, London, 2009.
Johnson, Paul, Rethinking the inner, Rutledge, London, 1993,
Ibn ‘Arabî , 1972–91, al-Futûhât al-makkiyya, 14 volumes, O. Yahia (ed.), al-Hay’at al-Misriyyat al-‘Âmmali’l-Kitâb, Cairo. (Quotes and translations are mostly from Chittick and Chodkiewicz.)
Lazenby, Mark, The Early Wittgenstein on Religion, Continuum, 2006,
Kerr, Fergus, Theology after Wittgenstein, Balckwell, 1989,
McGuiness, Brian, “Mysticism of the Tractatus,”Philosophical Review, 75, 1966
Neili, Russel, From Mysticism to Ordinary Language Philosophy:A Study of Viennese Positivism and the Thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, SUNY, New York, 1987
Pradhan, R.C., Wittgenstein and the Metaphysics of Experience
Qaisar, Shahzad, Iqbal and KhawjaGhulamFarid on Experiencing God, Iqbal Academy, Lahore 2002.
Sontag, Fredrick, Wittgenstein and the Mystical: Philosophy as an Ascetic Practice, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Weil, Simone, 1970, First and Last Notebooks, tr. Richard Reese, Oxford University Press, New York. (Here in the text referred to as F).
……. ………..Waiting on God, 1951, tr. Emma Caruford, Putnam, New York, 1951 (referred as WG).
……………..  The Notebooks of Simone Weil, 1956, tr. Arthur F. Mills, 2 volumes, Putnam (referred as N).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,  Notebooks, 1914-16, 2nd Edition Ed. Wright and Ascombe.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, G.H. von Wright (ed.), P. Winch (trans.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,TractatusLogico-Philosophicus,D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (trans.), New York: Humanities Press, 1961.
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Courtesy of : Muhammad Maroof Shah

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कॅशीर کٔشِیر कश्मीर کشمیر‎ RESHIYYAT

Reshiyyat, Mysticism and Metaphysics

From the perspective of perennialism one could say that the term Reshi is Indian way of referring to Logos, the Light of Muhammad, and the Christ-Reality. If the first Reshi was Ahmad Reshi and the latter is synonymous  with the pole of Existence, the Universal Man, the envoy of the Absolute  as elaborated in Sufi metaphysics then Reshiyyat is an integral tradition and formulation of the Sanatana Dharma, the primordial Din, the Sophia perennis, javidaan khird.  This makes it truly universalistic. Reshiyyat’s history  doesn’t extend only to 4000 years as some have argued but to all eternity, to preeternity.  Specifying Muhammad as the first Reshi is not to restrict Reshiyyat to post-Islamic period. In fact the Prophet’s name is Ahmed in heaven in Islamic tradition.  Sheikh Nuruddin’s specification of the name as Ahmed Reshi seems to be an allusion to this heavenly or timeless transhistorical Muhammad. It is also established that Reshiyyat in Kashmir predates the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The Reshi’s journey is from pre-eternity to post-eternity and we are all, willy nilly summoned to take this great expedition. We are all fellow travelers on the path of Reshiyyat because to be a Reshi  is to be concerned, ultimately concerned with our Ground of Being, which is none other than God who is none other  the Self, the ideal pole of man.
What is common between Buddhism, Saivism, Tantricism and Sufism is the religious experience, the fruit of which is the peace that passeth all understanding. The path is transcendence of ego to realize the Infinite, the Unconditioned. Theologies are only different conceptual schemes to make sense of the religious experiences of the prophets and saints and are dispensable. Metaphysics which is the science of the supraphenomenal, the science of the Infinite and the Unconditioned transcends the theologies as it speaks of direct vision or gnosis (irfan). It is non-dualistic and takes Absolute or Godhead rather than the personal God of theology as the Ultimate Reality. Enlightenment/deliverance/ gnosis/ vision of God or the kingdom of God dissolves all questions that conceptual intellect raises. Theologies and forms are transcended as their supraformal referent and ground is realized. The great end is not merely mystical realization but metaphysical realization where the there is no limitation of finitude or individuality and knowing and being are merged as subject-object duality is finally transcended. Transcendence of the desiring self is the unifying element of all traditional religions. Perennialists convincingly argue that that there is no important difference between different mystical paths which constitute the inner reality of all religions. There can’t be any difference in the fruit either. They claim to derive logical conclusion from the Quranic verses that speak of the universality of revelation and ad-Deen and that describe the Quran as the testifier of previous revelations. Tawhid, Sufistically interpreted as ‘There is no truth but Truth or there is no reality but Reality,’ is seen to be the essence of all religious and mystical traditions. Iqbal’s description of the Prophet in such verses as Lowh b tou, kalm bi tou, tera wujood alkitab, Aayai Kaiyinat ka main-i- dareyaab tou/ niklae teri talash mai kafla haay rang-o boo, Nigahi isq-o- masti mai wahi awwal wahi aakhir approximates the metaphysical understanding of Muhammad (upon whom be peace and blessings – the very name Muhammad means the praised one. Organized ritual blessing on him is a practice in vogue in Kashmir. Praising Muhammad is, metaphysically speaking, praising and blessing Existence or Life. Durood is at root indicative of the attitude of yes-saying to life which could be contrasted to absurdist attitude of rebellion or nihilistic despair) that perennialists put forward in defence of their thesis that Muhammad is universally acknowledged by traditional communities. Muhammed, seen in mystical and metaphysical terms as the Pole of Existence, the Logos, the Principle of Manifestation, the positivity of existence, the envoy of the Absolute, the First stage of the Tanazullat-i-Sitta, the Praised One in the capacity of perfection of man, the ideal pole of man, the essence of Aadamiyat, the Light that was created before Adam, the revealer of Divine Attributes, the unfragmented integrated perfected manhood, the transhistorical or metahistorical or archetypal Muhammad is not denied by any integral religious tradition. Islam, metaphysically and mystically interpreted as the surrender of the finite self before the Infinite, the Totality, the Existence, is not a religion among other religions but the Religion. It is the religion of all prophets. Islam is not a set of propositions or a mere creedal system. It claims to be the Truth or Reality (Allah’s denotative name is al-Haqq) that is Manifest. Allah is the Manifest Truth according to the Quran. Islamic kalima is translatable in such terms that only a spiritually blind person who deliberately chooses to veil or cover the truth. Kafir, in the Quranic parlance, is one who denies the truth that is made manifest to him with dazzling clarity and not the one who denies certain theological proposition. The Quran is not reducible to theology. In fact it is not understandable in purely theological terms. Traditional Muslims have never encouraged kalam. At the stage of metaphysical realization the theological plane which is dualistic and inherently limited is transcended so that no question of exclusivist labels and identities is there. So the question whether Lalla was a Saivite or Muslim belonging to the theological plane cannot be entertained from the metaphysical plane.
Reshiyyat is not to be designated as a religion but as a metaphysic and esotericism that grounds different religions. This metaphysics assumes different forms in accordance with different religious traditions. This metaphysics forms the unifying element of all traditions religions. Religions are adaptations according to different human receptacles of the truths of metaphysics. Doctrinal content or dogmas of different religions are reducible to metaphysical principles. There is a difference between religion and metaphysics. As Guenon points out the metaphysical point of view is purely intellectual while as in  the religious or theological point of view the presence of a sentimental element affects the doctrine itself, which doesn’t allow of it complete objectivity.1
The fact that Reshi is a transreligious term and can’t be spoken of as belonging to only a particular religious universes means we have to see the underlying metaphysical truths that he comes to realize. Forms are relative; only the Absolute is absolute. Theologies are forms. The supraformnal truth that Reshi comes to cognize allows him to penetrate the forms from within and then at the same time transcend them. The fact that Reshis have arisen within specific religious traditions and have remained loyal to a particular religious universe disproves crude syncretistic view that dissolves forms as irrelevant. Forms are also divine though relative. They conceal an esoteric supraformal truth of which they are clothing. It is for the insider only that a journey to the centre of religious universe which is Godhead is possible according to the perennialists. Ad-Deen is the eternal truth that different sha’ria and theologies express and it is the later that vary across time and space in the history of religions. By virtue of crossing the dark night of the soul and attaining to the stage of haqq-ul-yakeen the Reshi or the Sufi is able to have unmediated vision of truth that ad-Deen is. A Muslim Reshi is born in the bosom of Islam and lives Islam but that doesn’t mean the truth in previous revelations is thereby negated but only relived in a different form. Reshiyyat is not approachable as a particular philosophical system. It because it refers to the Universal, the Unlimited can’t be contained in a particular system. Metaphysics, being the truth of Universal Principles or the Infinite and All-Possibility isn’t definable. One can’t make a system or ideology out of it. Only reason constructs systems or ideologies. Darsanas of Indian origin and Sufism are not philosophical schools in the Western sense of the term. So those authors who use such phrases as Reshi ideology, Reshi philosophy or Saivite philosophy misuse the terms. Western philosophy lacks complete metaphysics and is not what Plato meant by it: a way of life and love of wisdom. Philosophy in the primordial sense of the term that prepares one for death and assimilation to God as Plato said is not a rational logical abstract discipline only and is allied to gnosis, a way of life or realization of the good. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. Metaphysics, the science of supraphenomenal universal principles, the Infinite, that transcends all binaries and dualisms that have plagued the Western philosophical and theological tradition, and resolves all contradictions in the One, the Absolute, coincidentia oppositorum, is intellectual (non-discursive intelligence) rather than rational discipline and postmodern critiques are hardly relevant to it as it is not dualistic, “structuralist,” or to be identified with metaphysics of presence. It is not a mere theoretical rational inquiry but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Platonic philosophy, understood as a spiritual and contemplative way of life leading to illumination or enlightenment; an intellectual discipline based on intellection culminating in union (henosis) with ideal Forms; his “Orphic”-Indian conception of philosopher as one who seeks release from the wheel of cyclical term  concurs with the perennialist understanding of metaphysics and Indian understanding of darsana. Reshiyyat is a philosophy in this sense and not in the typical Western sense.
Reshi metaphysics is not rational construction. It is not a totalizing system either. It is not a metaphysics of presence either as the Supreme Principle or Absolute in Buddhism, Kashmir Saivism or Sufism is not Being but pure Being or Beyond-Being or Non-Being best described as Void or Northing in Reshi literature. Deconstruction and other postmodern philosophies problematize rational metaphysics and theology only. Reshiyyat also doesn’t take a humanist view of self which postmodernism challenges. Postmodernism has indirectly helped to strengthen the realm of unreason that mysticism takes care of. Mystical traditions such as Reshiyyat transcend all thought constructions and the binaries of dualistic mind and thought. Reshi talks about the language of silence, of prelinguistic prereflective witnessing of phenomena and deconstruction can do nothing to discredit this “discourse” of silence.
History shows that mysticism in Kashmir has been the defining element of Kashmiri tradition and identity. Buddhism and Saivism are essentially mystical religions. Ritualism had been  questioned from the very beginning in the history of religious thought in Kashmir. Buddhism that coloured Kashmir religious  landscape before the advent of Saivism is strongly critical of ritualism. Saivist sages emphasized relativity and even dispensability of forms. Kashmir Saivism was especially Unitarian or nondualistic like Sufism that followed it.  Tantricism was  extreme development of  esoterical viewpoint that led ultimately to disregard of law. Muslim Kashmir’s greatest  sons have been mystics. Our greatest poets have been mystics. Our art is a reflection of our mysticism.

Reshiyyat: Key to Kashmir Religion and Philosophy

Muhammad Maroof Shah

 
Kashmir is traditionally held to be a sanctified or blessed land of the Spirit. Kashmir is indeed a pir-waer and the garden of paradise on earth if paradise is the name of saints’ dwelling. Kashmir as the fairyland of peace and contentment warped round the devotion and silence of the Himalayas, musical streams and limpid lakes is an ideal location for japa or zikr, for contemplation or meditation. It is no wonder that the history of Kashmir is a history of its saints and sages who have provided the life style and culture to its people. The valley itself was founded and established by a legendry mystic, Kashyapa who drained the waters of “Sati Sar.” He recognised the sacredness of the land and designed it to be the abode of saints. If there is any land where the order of eternity and the order of time, the heaven and the earth, intersect and overlap, where celestial lights illumine everything it is Kashmir.
Our aim is to argue that it is the mystic that defines the ideal of Kashmiri consciousness. Throughout history it is mysticism that has given identity to Kashmiris. It is not dualistic exoteric religion but esoteric or mystical thought that has been central to the definition of Kashmiri culture in all its different forms – Buddhist, Saivist or Islamic. If history is any guide to the determination of present identity then mysticism emerges as a strong candidate for it. Kashmiri culture has been and is mystically oriented. It has upheld a mystical or philosophical (more precisely metaphysical) outlook and not simply a religious worldview which could easily lend itself to communal or sectarian appropriation. Kashmir, historically speaking, has never been a theologically oriented culture. Its religiosity can’t be measured in terms of more conventional parameters and amazement expressed by many scholars regarding the Kashmiri’s lax religiosity is not difficult to comprehend. In this paper it is argued that the traditional mystical identity of Kashmir needs to be understood from metaphysical rather than religious perspective and that it could be deployed in charting a response to  a host of current challenges – social, economical, religious and  environmental. Mysticism has sample resources for us to squarely face the problems that bedevil  the postmodern West and a world condemned to live in the midst of divergent cultures and identities . So far there has been no comprehensive attempt to study diverse religious traditions of Kashmir simultaneously especially in relation to modern secular thought currents and exclusivist theological voices. In the absence of any attempt to apply by comparativists any comprehensive methodology to deal with divergent religious world-views  we have yet to develop outlines of what could be called as Kashmir philosophy. If the most important task of comparative philosophy is to understand common basis of different traditions as Ananda Coomaraswamy said we can say that Kashmiri scholars have yet to contemplate such vital a task.  In this paper the task before us is:
Identifying mystical/metaphysical basis of different religious traditions that have informed our heritage.
Attempt to argue for the centrality of the mystical in Kashmir religion and culture.
Salvage the mystical worldview of Kashmir against its modern day critics especially exotericist critics.
Identify misappropriations of the mystical in occultist and pseudomystical circles.
Critique  exploiting power structures that  trade in the name of the mystics.
I shall be taking a series of questions and attempt to answer them from the perennialist viewpoint to establish the basic theses that Reshiyyat is the integrating and unifying element of all the important religio-philosophical traditions of Kashmir and that the state of Reshi, identified as the sage or the mystic in less precise terms, is the ideal posited by different traditions. The thesis of the paper is that transtheological, transsectarian  and thus metaphysical Reshiyyat as Kashmir’s quintessential  tradition and its defining identity. Reshiyyat approached from the framework of traditional metaphysics unites diverse theological traditions without denying the validity of particular religious traditions. It is unfortunate that it has not been approached from this perspective so far and in fact there is no systematic presentation of Reshi metaphysics available. A lot of religious/theological, sociological and historical studies of it have been done but the profound metaphysical grounding of it has yet to be attempted. Understanding Reshiyyat from metaphysical perspective serves to foreground the essential transcendent unity of contributing traditions and help evolve a response to pluralism and multiculturalism that has become the reality of the postmodern world. The questions I shall take for discussion include What is Reshiyyat and its history? Who is a Reshi? What is the relation between exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religions? Could traditions be under threat from “rival” traditions and in need of revival.
Who is a Reshi?
How does one become a Reshi and who qualifies as a Reshi? The answer is a good Muslim or Sufi is a Reshi according to Sheikh Nuruddin. The Reshi is Sanskrit equivalent of mystic or inspired person, one to whom the vision of God has been vouchsafed. It signifies mystical consciousness which precedes or transcends diverse theological formulations or expressions. Reshi is a generic term for mystic or enlightened person or anyone who seeks to realize the esoteric aspect of his religious tradition. The fruit of the path that he follows is self realization. “Know thyself” is first commandment of all mystical traditions, Eastern and Western. Reshi goes on the great adventure to know this self.  The debate over Persian vs. Sanskrit origin of the term is hardly warranted in view of the fact that the mystic is a bird of lamakaan for whom these things hardly matter.  There has been an attempt by Hasan and certain other scholars to Islamize the term Reshi, its origin and the whole chronology that Nurrudin gives in his famous verses. This should be understood from the same perspective and we need not fight over the literal or historical validity of this Islamized history of Reshiyyat in Kashmir. We need to caution against confounding literal with the symbolic and historical with metahistorical and absolutizing the names and labels.  The Reshi, the sage, the self realized one, the inspired poet, is the image of primordial man or Adam. One becomes a Reshi by transcending desiring self or ego and becoming a mirror to Reality or God.  When the realm of the known ceases, when thoughts cease, when the mind is transcended, when carnal self goes, man becomes a fit receptacle of divine tajalliyat.  When nafs or hawa don’t speak, God speaks.  The Quran must be revealed to us for authentic existential response from our side, as Iqbal has famously said in his Urdu couplet.  The Reshi is name of a medium, an empty receptacle (where no fog of passions and mind obstructs the Unknown, the revelation to descend), a flute, a clean slate on which God writes with his own qalm.  One must be gone to be able to assimilate the mighty speech of God.  No earthly tongue can be vouchsafed the ability to utter God’s word.  The ego or the lower self must be annihilated so that only God remains as happened in case of Mansur. The Reshi passes away from this phenomenal world, as the Beloved’s word consumes him, burns him.  One can’t live (as the ordinary self) and know God.  That is what is the purport of the following verses of the Sheikh, the revivalist, the resurrector of Reshi movement in the 14th century A.D. “The reading of the Quran should have broken the flashy talisman of your life. In reading the Quran  Mansur annihilated himself.”  These verses explain the meaning and making of a Reshi.  God can only speak through man/ to man when man is no longer man in the ordinary sense of the term.  To let God speak man must be silent.  He must pass through that severe mystical discipline and control his mind and self.  It needs, to quote our Shiekh, “Consecrating life to the search for Truth.” One who “tighten the belly to learn (the virtues of) patience/Gives up his ego/ Contemplates Him in seclusion” could be eligible for the lofty station of the Reshi.  Shiekh Nuruddin, identifying true Muslim with the Reshi, explicates attributes of him.  “Who longs to live by the sweat of one’s mind/ Who shows fortitude in provocation/who shares meals with the hungry / who is obsessed with the idea of removing huger, who scorns anger, greed, illusion, arrogance and self conceit.”  The Reshi reaches  arsh by the load of his nobler actions and then only “the grace of the Omnipotent embraces him.” The Reshi is one “who remains humble despite his substance and sits  very low on the wheel of life.”  Consuming himself in the fire that the kalima generates and realizing the mirage of existential unity he finds the Eternal and transcends space.  The Reshi may be ummi or unlettered but by knowing the meaning of kalima which is “the source of all knowledge”, he appropriates all the essential metaphysical, eschatological and moral truths that are contained in the kalima.  The Reshi kindles the lamp of knowledge and religion as he realizes the essence of all knowledge contained in alif, lam and mim. The Reshi realizing the oneness of existence (what Shaikhul Aalam calls kunyr) radiates peace.  There is no “other” for him as he has realized unity by transcending all dualities and dualism.  His principle of nonviolence extends to all nature, inanimate and animate.  His Unitarian weltanschauung dissolves all exclusions and marginalization. He isn’t guilty of any epistemic violence.  He is one with Existence.  He makes no claims over and against it.  He surrenders to Reality and that is why he attains peace within and without.   Islam as another name of peace and non-violence and an ethic of social justice has been practically realized by the Reshis. For Nuruddin the Reshi is more a name of a consciousness than a name of particular historical or concrete personality and by virtue of that belongs to all of us.  We are all, by virtue of being humans, Reshis or Reshis is the making.  This world is the Vale of Reshi making and the Reshi in widest sense of the term is Spirit or its archetypal image.  The Reshi possesses the essence of all religious traditions and is heir to everything grand and noble in the history of humanitarian and mystical thought.  He sacrifices his desires for the good of others.  That is the meaning of his vegetarianism and faqr.  He has no self or ego and is epitome of altruism. To be a Reshi is a realization that mere creedal formulae can’t save. It is to be the object of one’s knowledge or belief. It is not merely consent to a proposition but whole hearted effort to submit to the Truth that makes one a Reshi. Becoming a Reshi is a process and not an event. It is lifelong commitment to follow a different life. It is not consummated at some point of time. It is lifelong odyssey. God is the name of perpetual creativity.  Life divine is an unfinished project. One never reaches God. God is a perpetual quest, unattainable ideal. Reshi life is a matter of choices that one makes every moment. Seeing God is the last luxury of life and very few can afford it. It costs one everything including one’s soul. It is idle to debate who is a Sufi or a Reshi from outside. Forms must be transcended according to all Sufis if one has to make the great leap to God. There is no address of the man of God. The man of God is trackless, traceless as Rumi says. One wonders how one can judge Sufis or Reshis on the basis of the world of forms which they have realized in depth and then transcended.
Reshiyyat, Mysticism and Metaphysics
From the perspective of perennialism one could say that the term Reshi is Indian way of referring to Logos, the Light of Muhammad, and the Christ-Reality. If the first Reshi was Ahmad Reshi and the latter is synonymous  with the pole of Existence, the Universal Man, the envoy of the Absolute  as elaborated in Sufi metaphysics then Reshiyyat is an integral tradition and formulation of the Sanatana Dharma, the primordial Din, the Sophia perennis, javidaan khird.  This makes it truly universalistic. Reshiyyat’s history  doesn’t extend only to 4000 years as some have argued but to all eternity, to preeternity.  Specifying Muhammad as the first Reshi is not to restrict Reshiyyat to post-Islamic period. In fact the Prophet’s name is Ahmed in heaven in Islamic tradition.  Sheikh Nuruddin’s specification of the name as Ahmed Reshi seems to be an allusion to this heavenly or timeless transhistorical Muhammad. It is also established that Reshiyyat in Kashmir predates the birth of the Prophet of Islam. The Reshi’s journey is from pre-eternity to post-eternity and we are all, willy nilly summoned to take this great expedition. We are all fellow travelers on the path of Reshiyyat because to be a Reshi  is to be concerned, ultimately concerned with our Ground of Being, which is none other than God who is none other  the Self, the ideal pole of man.
What is common between Buddhism, Saivism, Tantricism and Sufism is the religious experience, the fruit of which is the peace that passeth all understanding. The path is transcendence of ego to realize the Infinite, the Unconditioned. Theologies are only different conceptual schemes to make sense of the religious experiences of the prophets and saints and are dispensable. Metaphysics which is the science of the supraphenomenal, the science of the Infinite and the Unconditioned transcends the theologies as it speaks of direct vision or gnosis (irfan). It is non-dualistic and takes Absolute or Godhead rather than the personal God of theology as the Ultimate Reality. Enlightenment/deliverance/ gnosis/ vision of God or the kingdom of God dissolves all questions that conceptual intellect raises. Theologies and forms are transcended as their supraformal referent and ground is realized. The great end is not merely mystical realization but metaphysical realization where the there is no limitation of finitude or individuality and knowing and being are merged as subject-object duality is finally transcended. Transcendence of the desiring self is the unifying element of all traditional religions. Perennialists convincingly argue that that there is no important difference between different mystical paths which constitute the inner reality of all religions. There can’t be any difference in the fruit either. They claim to derive logical conclusion from the Quranic verses that speak of the universality of revelation and ad-Deen and that describe the Quran as the testifier of previous revelations. Tawhid, Sufistically interpreted as ‘There is no truth but Truth or there is no reality but Reality,’ is seen to be the essence of all religious and mystical traditions. Iqbal’s description of the Prophet in such verses as Lowh b tou, kalm bi tou, tera wujood alkitab, Aayai Kaiyinat ka main-i- dareyaab tou/ niklae teri talash mai kafla haay rang-o boo, Nigahi isq-o- masti mai wahi awwal wahi aakhir approximates the metaphysical understanding of Muhammad (upon whom be peace and blessings – the very name Muhammad means the praised one. Organized ritual blessing on him is a practice in vogue in Kashmir. Praising Muhammad is, metaphysically speaking, praising and blessing Existence or Life. Durood is at root indicative of the attitude of yes-saying to life which could be contrasted to absurdist attitude of rebellion or nihilistic despair) that perennialists put forward in defence of their thesis that Muhammad is universally acknowledged by traditional communities. Muhammed, seen in mystical and metaphysical terms as the Pole of Existence, the Logos, the Principle of Manifestation, the positivity of existence, the envoy of the Absolute, the First stage of the Tanazullat-i-Sitta, the Praised One in the capacity of perfection of man, the ideal pole of man, the essence of Aadamiyat, the Light that was created before Adam, the revealer of Divine Attributes, the unfragemented integrated perfected manhood, the transhistorical or metahistorical or archetypal Muhammad is not denied by any integral religious tradition. Islam, metaphysically and mystically interpreted as the surrender of the finite self before the Infinite, the Totality, the Existence, is not a religion among other religions but the Religion. It is the religion of all prophets. Islam is not a set of propositions or a mere creedal system. It claims to be the Truth or Reality (Allah’s denotative name is al-Haqq) that is Manifest. Allah is the Manifest Truth according to the Quran. Islamic kalima is translatable in such terms that only a spiritually blind person who deliberately chooses to veil or cover the truth. Kafir, in the Quranic parlance, is one who denies the truth that is made manifest to him with dazzling clarity and not the one who denies certain theological proposition. The Quran is not reducible to theology. In fact it is not understandable in purely theological terms. Traditional Muslims have never encouraged kalam. At the stage of metaphysical realization the theological plane which is dualistic and inherently limited is transcended so that no question of exclusivist labels and identities is there. So the question whether Lalla was a Saivite or Muslim belonging to the theological plane cannot be entertained from the metaphysical plane.
Reshiyyat is not to be designated as a religion but as a metaphysic and esotericism that grounds different religions. This metaphysics assumes different forms in accordance with different religious traditions. This metaphysics forms the unifying element of all traditions religions. Religions are adaptations according to different human receptacles of the truths of metaphysics. Doctrinal content or dogmas of different religions are reducible to metaphysical principles. There is a difference between religion and metaphysics. As Guenon points out the metaphysical point of view is purely intellectual while as in  the religious or theological point of view the presence of a sentimental element affects the doctrine itself, which doesn’t allow of it complete objectivity.1
The fact that Reshi is a transreligious term and can’t be spoken of as belonging to only a particular religious universes means we have to see the underlying metaphysical truths that he comes to realize. Forms are relative; only the Absolute is absolute. Theologies are forms. The supraformnal truth that Reshi comes to cognize allows him to penetrate the forms from within and then at the same time transcend them. The fact that Reshis have arisen within specific religious traditions and have remained loyal to a particular religious universe disproves crude syncretistic view that dissolves forms as irrelevant. Forms are also divine though relative. They conceal an esoteric supraformal truth of which they are clothing. It is for the insider only that a journey to the centre of religious universe which is Godhead is possible according to the perennialists. Ad-Deen is the eternal truth that different sh’aria and theologies express and it is the later that vary across time and space in the history of religions. By virtue of crossing the dark night of the soul and attaining to the stage of haqq-ul-yakeen the Reshi or the Sufi is able to have unmediated vision of truth that ad-Deen is. A Muslim Reshi is born in the bosom of Islam and lives Islam but that doesn’t mean the truth in previous revelations is thereby negated but only relived in a different form. Reshiyyat is not approachable as a particular philosophical system. It because it refers to the Universal, the Unlimited can’t be contained in a particular system. Metaphysics, being the truth of Universal Principles or the Infinite and All-Possibility isn’t definable. One can’t make a system or ideology out of it. Only reason constructs systems or ideologies. Darsanas of Indian origin and Sufism are not philosophical schools in the Western sense of the term. So those authors who use such phrases as Reshi ideology, Reshi philosophy or Saivite philosophy misuse the terms. Western philosophy lacks complete metaphysics and is not what Plato meant by it: a way of life and love of wisdom. Philosophy in the primordial sense of the term that prepares one for death and assimilation to God as Plato said is not a rational logical abstract discipline only and is allied to gnosis, a way of life or realization of the good. It is not a prerogative of ratio or mental faculty of reason but of nous, the supraindividual universal faculty of intellect. Metaphysics, the science of supraphenomenal universal principles, the Infinite, that transcends all binaries and dualisms that have plagued the Western philosophical and theological tradition, and resolves all contradictions in the One, the Absolute, coincidentia oppositorum, is intellectual (non-discursive intelligence) rather than rational discipline and postmodern critiques are hardly relevant to it as it is not dualistic, “structuralist,” or to be identified with metaphysics of presence. It is not a mere theoretical rational inquiry but a realization, intellection or noetic vision that transcends subject-object duality and demands something like ethical discipline that Plato argued for. Platonic philosophy, understood as a spiritual and contemplative way of life leading to illumination or enlightenment; an intellectual discipline based on intellection culminating in union (henosis) with ideal Forms; his “Orphic”-Indian conception of philosopher as one who seeks release from the wheel of cyclical term  concurs with the perennialist understanding of metaphysics and Indian understanding of darsana. Reshiyyat is a philosophy in this sense and not in the typical Western sense.
Reshi metaphysics is not rational construction. It is not a totalizing system either. It is not a metaphysics of presence either as the Supreme Principle or Absolute in Buddhism, Kashmir Saivism or Sufism is not Being but pure Being or Beyond-Being or Non-Being best described as Void or Northing in Reshi literature. Deconstruction and other postmodern philosophies problematize rational metaphysics and theology only. Reshiyyat also doesn’t take a humanist view of self which postmodernism challenges. Postmodernism has indirectly helped to strengthen the realm of unreason that mysticism takes care of. Mystical traditions such as Reshiyyat transcend all thought constructions and the binaries of dualistic mind and thought. Reshi talks about the language of silence, of prelinguistic prereflective witnessing of phenomena and deconstruction can do nothing to discredit this “discourse” of silence.
History shows that mysticism in Kashmir has been the defining element of Kashmiri tradition and identity. Buddhism and Saivism are essentially mystical religions. Ritualism had been  questioned from the very beginning in the history of religious thought in Kashmir. Buddhism that coloured Kashmir religious  landscape before the advent of Saivism is strongly critical of ritualism. Saivist sages emphasized relativity and even dispensability of forms. Kashmir Saivism was especially Unitarian or nondualistic like Sufism that followed it.  Tantricism was  extreme development of  esoterical viewpoint that led ultimately to disregard of law. Muslim Kashmir’s greatest sons have been mystics. Our greatest poets have been mystics. Our art is a reflection of our mysticism.
Genealogy of Reshiyyat
Reshiyyat has been the Great Tradition of Kashmir from preIslamic times. The origins of the Reshi movement go back to pre-Islamic times in the Vedic period. The founder of the Muslim Reshi movement in Kashmir, Nuruddin Nurani (1377-1440), moulded the pre-existing Reshi tradition, transforming it into a vehicle for the spread of Islam, using local institutions and methods to make Islam more comprehensible  to the Kashmiris. After Nuruddin Reshi movement made deep inroads in Kashmir. Mystical ethos found newer expressions and continues vigorously in the form of Sufis and their shrines. Most Kashmiris are followers or admirers of some local Sufi.
The first Reshi, from traditional metaphysical and mystical viewpoints is Logos, the Pole of Existence, the Principle of Manifestation.  He brings into consciousness the archetype of God. The term Reshi should be seen as a “perspective, a standpoint, an archetype of certain dominant historical personalities and even dominant images, a way of looking at experience as a whole, a way of interpreting certain fundamental features of human existence” (Khan, 1994). Shiekh Nuruddin has used the term Reshi in this universal transhistorical and transempirical sense. This is evident in his famous eulogization of the ‘legendry’ Reshis.  He wants to convey something more valuable than an elementary historical definition of the term.  Mystical quest is perennial.  In this sense one could well argue that the Reshi movement didn’t originate in the 14th century but has been always there. Consciousness has no beginning in time; rather it creates time and history. The Reshi is the name of this consciousness. The Reshi lives in eternity, in timeless moment. The present author strongly disagrees with traditional historical approach to phenomenon of Reshiyyat which belongs more to metahistory than history and it is only metahistoric or transhistoric dimension of the Reshi movement that makes it perennially relevant. The origin and evolution of the Reshi movement  should be discussed in terms of its metahistorical archetypal image rather than in purely historical terms.
All the great names in Kashmir’s religion and mysticism which include such Buddhist sages, philosophers and kings as Nagasen, Mender, Nagarjuna, Kumarajivia, Gautama Sanghadeva, Punyatrata, Vimalaksa, Dharmamitra, Ashogosh, Varsobando etc. and suchKashmiri Saivite sages and philosophers as SriKantha, Vasugupta, Kallata, Prodyumna Bhatta, Prajnarjuna, Somanand, Utpal Dev, Abhinavgupta, Jayaratha are links in the Reshi chain.  Lalla connects Saivism with Islamized  Reshiyyat of Shiekh Nuruddin.  Great Khulafa (disciples) of Shiekh Nuruddin and Khulafa of those Khulafa and the Sufi appropriation of Reshi movement by Shiekh Makhdoom and from then on a galaxy of Reshis of 3rd period (Ist period is up to Shiekh Nuruddin and from him up to Harda Reshi is 2nd period and from then on may be labeled) as third period when Reshis modified their socio-economic structure by abandoning strict “monkish”  asceticism and began to earn their own livelihood) have been keeping alive the great Reshi tradition. The Sufi poets of Kashmir have been vital in preservation and transmission of Reshi message. Sufi poetry represents the essence of Reshiyyat.  Thus not only the great Reshis such as Bamuddin, Zainuddin, Latifuddin, Nasiruddin, Payamuddin, Lacham Reshi, Reshi, Rupa Reshi, Sangam Dar, Hardi Reshi and later day representatives like Shankar Reshi, Aali Baba Saeb, Rajab Baba Saeb but also great Sufi poets of Kashmir whose names are too well known are links in the great chain of Reshiyyat.  Intellectual and religious history of Kashmir is the history of Reshiyyat.
Islam and Development of Reshiyyat
We now take up the discussion of development of Reshiyyat in relation to Islam in Kashmir to foreground the centrality of the mystical in the whole process of conversion and consolidation of power by Muslims. The story of Islam in Kashmir is one of the most interesting stories in the history of civilizational dialogue. There is hardly any similar example in history of peaceful takeover of one religion and culture by the other. This feat became possible because of the role of Sufis. It is a unique story exemplifying Islam’s resilience and potential to appropriate alien traditions. It shows contours of interfaith dialogue in action. It refutes the dominant perception of Islam as monolithic exclusivist legalistic tradition. The story of Islam in Kashmir is an interesting case of larger story of cultural transformation brought about by mysticism. How mysticism approaches and solves certain important problems is illustrated in Kashmir.
We need to know historical reasons for the ascendency of Islam in Kashmir.  Saivism had lost vitality. It degenerated in the course of time as traditions do. No major thinker was produced by Kashmir Saivism after the 12th century. Spirituality had given  place to occultism. Buddhism had already yielded to dominant tradition and even adopted the latter’s many forms. Masses had been alienated from decadent religiosity and oppression of priestly class. Prof. Rattan Lal Hangloo has, for instance, argued in his The State in Medieval Kashmir that the mass conversion to Islam was facilitated by the then “Hindu society and polity” which produced “deteriorating social system, the broadening crisis in economy or political insecurity” (Hangloo, 2000).  According to him the spread of Islam appeared as an answer and solution to the “problem of injustice, disharmony and the people’s misery.” Islam filled the vacuum quite admirably. It was Sufism that was destined to play historical role in consolidating and revitalizing centuries of spiritual heritage. Mysticism has been the religion of man from the very beginning. It has adapted itself to diversity of forms. Men are programmed to worship God according to the Quran. There is no escape possible from God who is our Environment, our Origin and our End.
Mansur al-Hallaj, the famous mystic-martyr, is said to have visited Kashmir. It took many centuries, until the advent of Sufis from Central Asia and Persia, for the process of conversion to significantly transform religious and cultural landscape of Kashmir.  Islam won mass conversion in the 14th century and from then on it has been the dominant tradition displacing both the already enfeebled Buddhism and the decadent Saivism.
The thousands of years long heritage of Reshiyyat easily adapted to the Sufistic face of Islam. Reshiyyat got Islamized at the hands of Sheikh Nuruddin and his followers. Native thought currents thus got assimilated` in the new “synthesis” of the Shaikh, popularly called Shaikhul Alam or Jagat Guru. Masses didn’t feel alienated from their tradition in embracing Islam at the hands of Sufis and Reshis as Islam’s spiritual dimension converged significantly with the Hindu-Buddhist Unitarianm outlook. Ibn Arabi’s wajudi Unitarian version of Islam that Syed Ali Hamdani, the great leader of about 700 Sufis that constituted organized mission for Islamizing Kashmir, advocated could easily get acceptability in already monistically oriented mind of Kashmir. It has been amply demonstrated that conversion to Islam was either by Reshis or Sufis rather than state sponsored enterprise.
New life was breathed into the age old Reshi tradition by Shiekh Nuruddin.  He transformed it from the perspective of Sufism and gave it a social dimension.  As is usual with the mystics, hardly anything is known with certainty about his life.  And we needn’t know! One wonders why biographers and historians exhaust so much energy on these issues. The Sufi comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere.  Indeed from nothingness to nothingness is man’s journey.  God who is our Origin and End is both Void or Nothing or Sunyata (in the tradition of negative divine) and Fullness or Plenitude of Being, Goodness, Beauty and Truth or Truth, Existence and Bliss (in the tradition of positive divine). Only God is, man as an independent self subsisting entity isn’t.  Man can attain baqa only when he ceases to be, when he transcends his “I” or ego consciousness and only mirrors God by total surrender.  This is the essence of mysticism of which Shiekh Nuruddin is the exponent.  Body and details of its earthly career which subject of biographies are hardly of any significance from the mystical point of view.  So our historians’ obsession with the facts or concrete details of worldly life of saints is unwarranted.  What isn’t important for a saint because of his transcendence of all labels, all the coordinates of space and time that could be used to fix his position, shouldn’t of much importance to us also and our obsession with it creates such needless controversies as ‘Was Nunda Buddhist or Muslim?’ or ‘Was Lalla Savite or Muslim?’  These questions needn’t be asked and can’t be answered and even if answered by careful sifting of historical evidence, Reshi’s cause isn’t served – who essentially belongs to the supraformal world and not to the realm of nasut, to metahistory and not to history.  India, the land of the seers, never cultivated history as a discipline in the modern sense of the term.  To the extent modern man (and modernist Kashmiri historian) has lost the sense of the Sacred, the Immutable, the  Metahistorical, to that extent he is interested in prying in historical facts and details. We have, generally speaking, no biographies of saints available. We need not either. Historical life of a saint has not to do much with the essence of the thing for which  mysticism stands.  The earthly period of a saint hardly matters as he lives in eternity. The Spirit (which is the purely divine element in man as is clear from the Quranic verse nafiktu fir-ruhi as distinguished from soul) is never born and never dies. It transcends history and time completely. Our inmost reality is constituted by spirit. This is why, generally speaking, saints don’t care for biographies. As individuals or egos saints don’t exist. They are nobodies, nameless, trackless gone in the experience of fana. Only God is absolutely real; only God’s Face abides and everything else is annihilated and strictly speaking nothing is existent in the real sense.
That is why most modern historians (and this is true of G.M.D. Sufi, A.Q. Rafique and to some extent Ishaq Khan though the last mentioned takes great care to approach it from within and go against the orthodox rationalist historical viewpoint) can’t make sense of hagiological literature with its preponderances of the supernatural. It is modernist historians’ credulous attitude towards the myth and metanarrative of rationalistic scientism that makes him incredulous towards the element of supernatural in the lives of Reshis.  The present author is much pained to see misappropriations of hagiographical accounts of our Reshis in rationalist naturalist reductionist framework of modernist historians. Modernist Kashmiri historians’ representations/appropriations of hagiographical sources or miraculous or supernatural  element in the lives of the Reshis have serious limitations and sometimes we see gross distortions on account of their rationalist modernist assumptions. There is no space here to elaborate the point.
While analyzing the question of Islam in Kashmir from a theological viewpoint serious misunderstanding have arisen and scholars are still fighting over unresolved issues regarding the distinctive character of Kashmiri Islam or the relationship between Sufism and Reshiyyat, the religious identity of Lalla, communalist vs. secular interpretation of Reshi movement etc. A purely historical approach has led to unending problems for scholars of Kashmir Studies. There is a need to situate Islam and Reshiyyat in the context of pre-Islamic heritage of Kashmir by foregrounding metaphysico-spiritual dimensions of the respective traditions that have contributed to the formation of Kashmiri identity and culture. The theological as against the metaphysical approach adapted by communalists needs to be transcended. This will put in proper context the role of Saivite mystic Lalla vis-à-vis Islam’s emergence in the Valley. The origin and evolution of the Reshi movement  should be discussed in terms of its metahistorical archetypal image rather than in purely historical terms. Is Reshiyyat different from Sufism in the same manner in which Saivism and other religious tradition of Kashmir are different from Islam? Is Islamic framework dispensable in Reshiyyat as it developed after Nuruddin? The issue of religious affiliation of Lalla or Buddhist influence on Sheikh Nuruudin is also very controversial. How to make sense of popular perception of Sufi connection of this Saivite mystic? These and other problems are best approached, in the opinion of the present author, by taking recourse to insights of perennialist scholars which are represented by Ananda Coomaraswamy in India.
The story of Islam in Kashmir has largely been a story of Islamic mysticism or Reshiyyat as Islam entered the valley through the efforts of mystics called Sufis and Reshis. The legalist exotericist exclusivist version of Islam that attained dominance in certain regions in the world today could not take roots in Kashmir. Kashmir has been a pir-waer, the land of saints and it is mysticism which has been instrumental in determination of its  sensibility. The modernist rationalist historian or an exoteric exclusivist theologian can’t fully deal with the transcendery phenomenon of Reshiyyat, the former being uncomfortable with the supernatural ambience surrounding it while as the latter being uncomfortable with its inclusivism and sulhi-kul (peace with all).
Reshiyyat and the Question of Conversion
Another issue that has been subject of much controversy is Reshis’ role in conversion of non-Muslims.  This is also made more complex issue by sensitive issue of conversion itself.  For such scholars as Rafiqi the Reshis “didn’t go out to seek adherents to Islam as proclaimed “conscious missionaries”, like the immigrant Sufi and their Kashmiri followers.  Not did they act as “high priests” but as the saints who were willing to help the needy on the spiritual path.” (Rafiqi:). In contrast Khan credits them with primary role in Islamization of Kashmir.  Again esotericist or metaphysical perspective of perennialist authors could be used as a corrective to limitations of traditional historical scholarship.  It is a fact of history that despite their tolerance of other faiths and inclusivism the Sufis from Central Asia and Persia and the Reshis have been instrumental in Islamization of Kashmir. It is only in the integral tradition of a particular religious tradition the seed of mysticism grows and fructifies pace the belief of our syncretists and secularists.  Sufism is understandable only in the light of Islam. The question of syncretism and borrowing doesn’t arise if we understand what Frithjof Schuon calls universal orthodoxy of mysticism.  The Sufis/Reshis needed to preach Islam as an integral tradition so that the souls could be weaned for their spiritual growth.  Esoterism can’t be practiced in isolation from exoteric religion, despite what libertine mystics like Osho and Krishnamurti assert.  What I want to point out is that conceptual framework of our scholars of Reshiyyat and Kashmir history suffers from certain limitations, which could be redressed by recourse to perennialist insights.   Then only could the sensitive issue of conversion and the Reshis’ role in it be clarified and the process of Islamization of Kashmir understood in its proper context.
Orthodoxy of Reshiyyat
There is also not much warrant for doubting orthodox credentials of Reshi version of Sufism.  From the insider’s perspective there is hardly anything such as borrowing from any alien source. The form of spiritual practices and discipline don’t constitute the essence of a mystical tradition like Sufism.  Masters of tariqah know that in the path of enlightenment or irfan any practice or mode and discipline are substitutable.  It is only a saint like Nuruddin who can decipher the esoteric significance of exoteric dimension (sh’aria) of Islam.  There are as many kinds of spiritual practices and disciplines as there are men.  There is no such thing as orthodoxy in this context.  There is a lack of sound scholarship on mysticism and metaphysics in literature on Reshiyyat.  It needs a metaphysician and a mystic of the calibre of Frithjof Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) to clarify the question of origin, orthodoxy/heterodoxy and borrowings in case of Reshi movement.  It is the end of the quest or path i.e., enlightenment or irfan (gnosis) that is important for the mystic.  Paths, the practices and the modes of discipline  are variable even within the same silsilah sometimes.  These can’t be made the basis for labelling and categorizing such saints as Nuruddin and Lalla.
One can’t properly speak of Reshiyyat as Reshiyyat because “ism” has the connotation of an ideological system. However the suffix ism has now been used widely on even such non-ideological traditions as Sufism so we may retain the use of such terms as Reshiyyat but without understanding thereby that it is name of an ideology. One can say that Reshiyyat is not a name of some entity over and against different integral religious traditions. It is not a rival religious or philosophical tradition. It is the esoteric and metaphysical content of these religions.
The God of Islam is synonymous with truth (God is named the Truth in the Quran) and truth has infinite faces, aspects and layers. One can’t impose a version of Islam as orthodox and disqualify all divergent interpretations. The Quran and the Prophetic traditions contain inexhaustible treasures of meaning and are vulnerable to potentially countless interpretations. Purely literal understanding of Islam is impossible. Even an uncompromising Zahiri exotericist or literalist theologians is bound to resort to non-literal interpretation at certain places. All truths are mediated through our linguistic, cultural and conceptual filters. So labelling certain interpretation such as Reshi interpretation of Nurudduin as deviant or heterodox is to be guilty of what Lyotard calls meaning closure. Strictures of certain exoteric authorities regarding the Islamic credentials of mystically inclined Kashmiri people’s understanding of Islam reflect an imposition of certain totalistic and totalizing preconceived ideological reduction of Islam at the hands of these exotericists. Islam has not outlawed any interpretation as long as the frame of reference is the Quran and Sunna. Islam resists and transcends all totalistic ideological reductions because of its universality and timelessness.
There are some huge misunderstandings about the Reshis’ attitude to orthodox religious forms. For instance, the issue of Sufi connection of this Saivite mystic Lalla is a problem for exoteric authorities.  She inherited and organically fused in her own way Saivism, Upansadic wisdom and Sufism. Her transcendence of dualist plane is revealed by the fact that her religious identity is still a matter of dispute. The message of Nuruddin and Lalla is hardly distinguishable. Saivism comes close to Islamic metaphysical doctrines and Sufistic “wahdatul wajoodi” thought  and that accounts for Lalla being at home in either of them. It doesn’t regard phenomenal world as unreal but as the self expression of Siva, His poem, His art. It, like Islam, sees God both as Immanent (Shakti) as well as Transcendent (Siva). A Reshi is a bird of lamakaan and every attempt to circumscribe him in conceptual categories or theological labels that are derived from makaan or time is a category mistake. The realm of eternity is incommensurable with the realm of time. In God’s proximity all labels must drop as that station is attained only by the surrender of finite self and individuality before the Nameless Infinite.
One can loosely take Reshiyyat as Perennial Philosophy as it developed in India. Islam is simultaneously a religion and a metaphysic. So Reshiyyat as traditional metaphysics itself is part of integral Islamic tradition. As Sufism can’t be practiced outside the formal religious universe of Islam according to perennialists so Reshiyyat after Nuruddin needs the supposing framework of Islam. Esotericism isn’t realizable in religious vacuum despite the assertion of libertine mystics to the contrary. Without the background particular religious forms Reshiyyat becomes almost impossible to become a concrete reality. One can loosely say that Reshiyyat as tariqat is the fruit of sha’ria. Over and above Islamic sha’ria Reshiyyat has no inalienable doctrinal or practical principle. Reshiyyat is Kashmiri version of Sufism and if it appropriates and accommodates influence of certain local or indigenous practices it is in keeping with the principle that in every age Sufism needs new formulations and adaptations in consonance with the spirit of that age. Kashmir’s collective unconscious, its archetypal inheritance necessarily needs to be taken into consideration when a spiritual genius such as Nuruddin wishes to Islamize it. Reshi version of Islamic Sufism is the best creative adaptation of Islam with religious universe of Kashmir that had moulded it from centuries. Local context has always affected the expression of the “alien” religious tradition. Such praiseworthy innovations as the  practices of loud recitation of durood and awrad in Kashmir make smooth assimilation and penetration of “alien” religious universe possible.
Limitations of Historical Approach to Reshiyyat
No purely historical approach will be able to clarify what Reshiyyat is and make sense of its diverse and rich literature. Only the shell of Reshiyyat enters history. That is why our historians have created more controversies than they have been able to resolve. The core of Reshiyyat which consists of ineffable experience of God can’t be philosophically, theologically or historically approached and analyzed. The Life of Sprit which Reshiyyat actualizes is living life in a spirit of detachment, as a witnessing self. The Spirit transcends all the humdrum of life. It watches and watches without identifying with any of life’s actions and experiences. The philosophy of actionless action or wu wei wei is what mystics or Reshis advocate. The Reshi transcends mind and lives in the space of no-mind as God is revealed only when we transcend time and mind. A purely historical approach that gives much importance to the life lived in time and the life of mind can’t do justice to such a person such as Reshi and his thought that transcends all discursive thought. Authentic life or the life of freedom in mystical perspective is possible only when one transcends ego and the dualistic plane of action, the fret and fever of the life of mind. The joy that the Reshi finds in God is expressed either through dance as in Lalla or in aesthetic contemplation or poetry of love and bliss or in selfless service. What is visible to the historian from the life of Reshi is only a surface or outward face of it.
Reshiyyat does enter history as an institution in a particular spatio-tempioral setting which, however, is to be differentiated from the eternal essence of religion or mysticism. We must not confound the eternal and the temporal dimensions of the Reshi movement. For the temporal setting historical and phenomenological approaches do have ample relevance but must caution against the reductionist tendency that is quite fashionable with modern academic disciplines. It is not a name of an historical movement that began somewhere at sometime in history. It is not in its essence a merely human thing. It is a celestial song, a celestial feast. It is celebration of love and peace that passeth all understanding. It is Kashmiri adaptation of perennial wisdom that is the common property of all traditional civilizations. The modernist rationalist historian or an exoteric exclusivist theologian can’t fully deal with the transcendery phenomenon of Reshiyyat, the former being uncomfortable with the supernatural ambience surrounding it while as the latter being uncomfortable with its inclusivism and sulhi-kul. From the perennialist perspective only a Reshi can authentically talk about Reshiyyat. Reshiyyat aims at self realization which is something very personal and beyond the jurisdiction of any categorical propositional framework. It can’t be discussed, analyzed, proved or refuted in the usual sense of these terms. It is too existential an affair to be handled by abstract philosophical theorizing. It is more akin to a love affair with the Absolute rather than to an abstract philosophy or religious ideology. It is a celestial song, a grand and life long adventure of spirit. It demands transcendence of subject-object duality and that is what metaphysical meaning of tawhid implies. It is a monologue of the Self, heard in silence. It is an unheard melody. It is not a matter of kal (talk) but hal (existential state or taste). It is a concrete living experience. It is synonymous with innocence of becoming and the repose of being. No categorizing conceptual framework could deal with it. Historical/philosophical analytical and ideological appropriations of Reshiyyat may miss its kernel. It is a matter of experience or realization and not of discourse or debate. It demands the whole of our life, a free response to the call from the Absolute.
Societial Dimension of Reshiyyat
Mysticism isn’t a flight into dreamy foggy subjectivity but as manifested in concrete historical milieu is Eternity permeating and informing time as supernatural order suffusing natural order, as heaven showering life giving rain on earth, as Presence transmitting and transforming our baser elements into gold.  It is deeply concerned with this worldly problems also.  It has a deep social concern.  The mystic doesn’t enjoy the solitary bliss of divine vision but like Buddhisatva is concerned with salvation of whole humanity. He returns from his cave, having reached the other shore after crossing the dark night of the soul, into the world of time and space, of evil and suffering, to transform it in accordance with his transcendary vision.  He celebrates mystery and beauty of life and shares woes and sufferings of his fellows and leaves forests to jackals and monkeys and caves to rats.  He in no way denies life or this world at the cost of the other world, but only uplifts it, transforms it. All these characteristics of mysticism are evidenced in Reshiyyat and its history.
Political readings of Sufism need to be cautiously appraised. Sulhi kul of Sufis is not passive resignation in the face of adverse socioeconomic and political realities. Though Sufism as such has no ideological commitments but it seeks realization of the God of justice. Sufi care of the self is not at the cost of the world of form and colour. Both Saivism and Sufism transcend the dichotomy of the sacred and profane and take ample care to beautify the world. Both are conscious of our historicity, our temporality. The world is not left to dogs. It is a belief of Sufis that rulers are first chosen in the higher world and monitored strictly according to divine standards of justice. Sufism need not be dragged into the service of one’s political belief.   Political appropriations of spirituality are at the cost of spirituality itself and always dangerous.
The Sufis have played very important role in the political life of Kashmir.  They have been informal advisors to kings. They have been influential in some important decision making. It is a widely shared belief amongst Kashmiri Muslims  that Sufis play key role in making and marring of the kingdoms. Most rulers from the great Budshah to Farooq Abdulla, the chairperson and former chief minister, paid obeisance to Sufis, living and dead. The Sufis have been, according to popular belief, closely monitoring performance of authorities in terms of rendering social justice.
Mass Appeal of Sufism
Reshi/Sufi thought has deeply impacted on the development of artistic and literary culture of Kashmir. Sufism has become an integral part of Kashmiri artistic sensibility.  Most of the great names in the history of Kashmir Sufism have been great poets. There exists a strong oral literary tradition amongst Sufis. Most Sufis and their students remember  great number of verses by heart and routinely sing Sufi poetry in sama gatherings.  There are numerous Sufi poets in Kashmir. Almost every Sufi writes poetry as if the latter  is a spontaneous expression of a heart tuned to the divine. Sufism has shaped Kashmiri music and given rise to a distinct brand of classical music in Kashmir called Sufiana music All great names in Kashmir literature, until recent times,  have been either Reshis or influenced by Reshiyyat. Poetry in Kashmir is either mystic poetry or sort of romantic poetry that we can subsume under the head of mysticism. Many Kashmiris believe that Habba Khatoon wasn’t married to Yusuf Shah and that their relationship was spiritual or platonic. Even modern poets such as  Mehjoor, Rahi and Kamil  couldn’t afford to extricate themselves from Sufi influences. We need not to be surprised that a mystic verse occurs all of a sudden in their romantic poems. Legends and myths too have been appropriated in mystical terms e.g., five Kashmiri mystic poets have versified the folk story of “Aka-Nandun” and appropriated mystic themes in it. The same is the case with “Heemal Naagraj.” The Gulrez of Maqbool Shah Kralwari, the “Bakawali” of Lassa Khan Fida and such mathnavis and narrative poems as “Heemal Nagraj” appear love poems when superficially read but are “essentially a journey from an outer world towards the inner.” The poet is called gwanimath – a word charged with mystic connotations. Didacticism and certain artistic lacunae don’t generally mar the merit of great mystical poetry of Kashmir.
Sufism in Kashmir embodies one of the most interesting experiments in world spirituality. Here is a test case for integration of different traditions. Reshiyyat appropriates the  central insights of four different religions of the world. It expresses the metaphysical core of all religions. Though Reshiyyat no longer survives in the form of a movement it continues to live in and impact essentially Sufistic tradition of Kashmir. The shrine of Nuruddin is still the most respected shrine of Kashmir. Nuuddin is called Alamdar or standard bearer of Kashmir. There is hardly any room for any sectarian or fundamentalist outlook in a predominantly Sufistic culture. But the unfortunate political legacy has precipitated certain communal problems which have been misappropriated by political forces.
Walter Lawrence wrote about Kashmir in his famous The Valley of Kashmir that no niche is without a shrine here. It may well be said that Sufism is today the most popular tradition in Kashmir. It has resisted all attacks and campaigns from legalistic theological schools in recent years. Almost every Kashmiri is a Sufi in  making. Sufi gatherings and festivals are spread round the year. Kashmir’s prayer food culture, niyaz culture and shrine culture all testify to the deep influence of Sufism. Kashmir is traditionally called as a land of mystics (pir waer). Here even many mentally deranged people are respected because suspected to be majzoob Sufis. Most families have a family saint. Though newer generations are critical of antinomian tendencies in some Sufis and of pseudoSufis for promoting polytheistic interpretation of Sufism. However the fact remains that Kashmir culture remains an essentially mystical culture.
Perennity of Mysticism in Kashmir
Mysticism survives the change of religious guises in the course of history. The Quran makes it clear that God’s words can’t change or don’t change. The eternal element in religions that perennialists designate as Sophia perennis and the Quran subsumes in the notion of Ad-din  is the living element of mysticism. It ensures continuity of religious thought across millennia. Exoteric religion or the form of religions changes but the essence that forms seek to express remains the same. Metaphysics can’t change by definition. God is unchangeable. The Truth is timeless. Metaphysical foundation of all traditional religions is one as perennialists have demonstrated.  In Kashmir different traditions have been living and displacing one another and in a way continue to live in different forms today. In fact one may remark here that traditions hardly ever die in the course of history. They get transformed and their spirit gets adapted to newer vehicles. They continue to influence even after their supposed death substituting traditions. This point is illustrated in the fate of Buddhism in Kashmir.
Reshiyyat and Impact of Buddhism
Buddhism penetrated into the heart of Hinduism and transformed it from within so much so that the greatest Vedantic philosopher Sankara is accused to be a cryptobuddhist. Buddhism changed its guise and continued to flourish in Saivism of Kashmir. Similar remarks could be made and applied in case of Islam. Neither Buddhism nor Saivism died here. Their essential spirit and many peripheral practices  continued to be, in one or the other form, in Rishiyyat or post-Nuruudin Islam in Kashmir. Risshiyyat has appropriated key Buddhistic elements in its practice. A poem composed in honour of Buddha by Sheikh Nuruddin is ample evidence of impact of Buddhist tradition. Buddhist metaphysics of Void, its eightfold path, its four noble truths, its silence towards speculative metaphysical theological issues, its emphasis on orthopraxy rather than any particular view of Ultimate Reality, its pragmatism, its monkish culture, its ahimsa and vegetarianism all could be traced in Risshiyat of Kashmir in the Muslim period. Kashmiris continue to use, both consciously and unconsciously key Buddhist concepts and formulations in their discourse. Kashmiris blame their karma rather than any external factor or force for their suffering. Whenever something untoward happens he cries panien gunah, aamali baden hienz shamat (My bad karma, bitter fruit of bad actions). Many proverbs and folk stories have possible connection with Buddhism. Many traditional Kashmiris seek refuge in God and in Pir which seems to echo Buddhist practice of talking refuge in the Buddha. The world is described as a place of suffering by common Kashmiri (dunya chu tawan). Impermanence of everything is asserted by such common sayings as dunya chu napayidar, yaet kya chu rozwun(nothing stays long in the world). “Permanence” is attributed to Spirit or Absolute only, to Void in Buddhist terms. “Rozuwun chu bas tamsund naw”(God’s name or Essence alone is permanent) is a common saying in Kashmir. One can cite many more similar expressions used in different contexts of which we can find equivalent in Buddhism.
Kashmir remains a land of the Buddha despite centuries of oblivion of Buddhism. Buddhism never really disappeared in Kashmir. It impacted on deeper structures and in subtle ways on Kashmir’s history, religion and culture and its impact continues. It continues to live in Muslim Kashmir, not to speak of Leh etc. Contemporary Muslim Kashmir is not understandable without appreciating impact and living presence of Buddhism.
Islam in Kashmir is a fulfillment of socially engaged egalitarian Buddhist project rather than a new faith that negated the spirit of Buddhism and usurped its throne by force. Buddhism is not history here and its study is not of merely historical importance. It lives in archetypes and as a metaphysical and mystical darsana it can’t be exiled from the collective unconscious of Kashmiris. Of course its distinct identity may be nonexistent now but it doesn’t bother about its distinct identity. Wherever people attempt to conquer suffering and identify desire, the desiring self (nafsi amara) as the culprit) and seek the light (nur in the Quranic terminology) out of existential darkness that constitute samsaric becoming there Buddhism lives. Buddha will have nothing new to teach our Sufis and Sufism, properly understood and shorn of its theological dress, is living and authentic expression of timeless wisdom of which historical Buddhism was one expression.
Buddhism has a very sublime conception of tawhid, understood metaphysico-mystically. Originally it rejected image worship. It completely rejected anthropomorphism in its theology. It guarded against shirk so successfully that even now after centuries of development and even distortion Buddhism refuses to allow any human conception of the Ultimate Reality any validity and strictly advocates silence. Kashmiri Sufi poets have appropriated essential Buddhism in their conceptions of fana, devotion to Unitarianism, and sublime conception of divine transcendence. Qadir Sb Keyna is a Sufi poet who has specifically composed verses on void. “I am the Void, you are the Void/ What shall I speak of the Void.” Lalla’s vaakhs too have echoes of the Buddhist formulation regarding the Void. Nuruddin Reshi, popularly called the Sheikhul Alam (world teacher) has emphasized mingling of the Void and Shiva and thus foregrounding Islamic integral metaphysical formulations that take care of both the positive and the negative divine. Negation of all gods in Islamic terminology is what Buddhism asserts in its doctrine of impermanence of all manifested things. Kashmiri Sufi vision is strongly centred on this negative view of divine. A Kashmiri is fond of using tasbih and forms of collective meditation such as durood and azkar. Relic culture has Buddhist origins. Keeping photographs of pirs and parents and grandparents is a substitute for image culture which flourished from Buddhist times in Kashmir.
Though none can deny differences at theological plane the question is what differentiates Islam from Buddhism in such sharp terms at metaphysical or ethical plane. Metaphysical unity of diverse traditions which claim to be founded on religious experience of its founders has been amply demonstrated by various scholars, most importantly and most cogently and forcefully by perennialists. Theological differences when translated in terms of more foundational metaphysical or esoteric principles (of which theologies are distant and inexact or crude translations) get dissolved and can be easily reconciled. Let us analyze differences between Buddhism and Islam of which such critics as Harun Yaha make much fuss.
The doctrine of rebirth, anatta, absence of theism or “agnosticism,” different doctrines concerning hell and heaven, asceticism or world negation, which are part of Buddhism are found to be irreconcilable with Islam according to most scholars. But a deeper analysis of all these doctrines reveals remarkable convergence with Islamic doctrines. Here a very brief explication of these doctrines could be attempted in the following paragraphs.
There is no such thing as rebirth understood in animistic sense of transmigration of soul or personality in integral traditions according to Comaraswamy. God is the only transmigrant as Shankara put it. There is no reality behind the façade of ego/personality which could survive and transmigrate according to all religions. As long as man is trapped in the illusion that there is really a person So and so he is condemned to suffer and in the symbolic language of Scriptures to rebirth. Really there is no birth, no autonomous soul or self, no death. The Buddha taught suffering bred from illusion of desiring self and a way of escape from it. About the whither and whence of souls he is not concerned. His problem is salvation or conquest over suffering and ignorance. Islam too has not entertained discussion over  those questions which have no bearing on human salvation. Discussion divine Essence, destiny, eschatological states, origin of the world of manifestation are not encouraged. The only problem is correct knowledge or right view which leads to right conduct, to God or Truth.
The doctrine of annata is the integral part of Islamic conception. Only the Spirit, a transindividual faculty, the luminous centre of consciousness/knowledge is immortal or divine element in man. The body and  the soul are subject to sin and suffering. The Spirit transcends all the individualities of existence and is not liable to sin or corruption. The Spirit constitutes our buddha nature. Nirvana is a blissful experience because our Spirit is made of the substance of joy or ananda. Sufism ceaselessly talks about transcendence of nafs or desiring soul. The Quran asserts mortality of the soul (nafs) in clear terms (“for every individual soul is death” it says). All compounded things are mortal but the spirit is not a compounded thing. It is not born and death can’t approach it.
About the posthumous states there also is little difference amongst traditions. The final destination is no destination, the Garden of Essence where there is no separate individual desiring self hankering for pleasures. It is a state of utter contentment where Spirit comes to enjoy its eternal repose. Like parinirvanic state it is a state of unalloyed bliss. All seeking, all questioning is laid to rest. Nirvana is unimaginable as is the joy of contemplating God in the other world. Seeing God one is lifted above all cares and transcends all desires. Nirvana too is a state of cessation of desires. For the soul under divine tuition there are states and stations in hells and heavens according to Buddhism. Islam is in essential agreement with the conception of posthumous life on different planes. Hell is not the everlasting abode of any sinner. The flames of hell are finally cooled. Eternity belongs to God only and not to any created or manifested realm. God is the only Permanent entity. “Everything is annihilated and only God’s face remains” declares the Quran.
The question of theism/atheism loses its significance from the Sufistic metaphysical viewpoint. When doctrine of tawhid is approached as Unity of Existence the question of personal divinity is almost bracketed off. Personal God of Muslim theology is not the Absolute of  Buddhism and Islamic metaphysics. The former is in Divine Relativity and the Absolute transcends it.
It must be acknowledged that Buddhism is less open to the graces emanating from the world of hue and colour. Islam takes a more positive view of the world, of women and sexuality, of seculer pursuits. However Buddhism too, according to Mahayana school, declares samsara and nirvana as one. It too is compatible with worldly pursuits taken up in the sprit of detachment.
Attachment to doctrines, to rituals, to forms is to be transcended for attaining the ultimate goal. Buddhism has no quarrel with any religion, no truck with identity problem. The dispute for superiority of a doctrine or creed is vain from a Buddhist viewpoint thatis committed to no-view or transcendence of all views. Buddha is a mirror with no form of its own. It is the plain light of Spirit that shines inside all of us. Kashmiri Sufis have often used the metaphor of mirror for the arrived souls and for expressing the mystery of creation. The only significant question from Buddhist viewpoint is how free we are from the bondage of desires and attachments to perishing things. All other questions are secondary. Buddhism can enter into a dialogue with world traditions so readily because it has no views of its own to impose. Kashmir as a land of Rishis has been a land of Buddhist Reshis. Reshi movement of Kashmir has appropriated Buddhist wisdom and made it a part of Kashmir culture and heritage.    What emerges from the above discussion is that there is little divergence at deeper mystical-metaphysical plane between Buddhism and Islam. It is no wonder that Islam found a receptive audience in the Buddhist world.  I wonder why some Buddhist leaders of Kashmir  should be pained at Rinchana’s conversion and see it as betrayal of Buddhist community.
The Question of Identity
It is the question of identity of Kashmiris that has been hotly debated in recent times. In the light of perennialist insights this vexed issue could be resolved in a satisfactory way. We can’t write off any period of history or any of the major traditions Kashmir has been hosting in determining its present identity. Here we may turn to Reshiyyat and its revivalist Nuruddin who is acknowledged as the patron saint of the valley by both Hindus and Muslims. He is remembered as Sheikhul Alam or Jagat Guru (The World Teacher) by Muslims and as Shahjanand (The Blessed One) by Hindus. Reshiyyat that can’t be identified with or subsumed under any one historical movement or religious tradition and thus provides a transcendentally grounded identity. Nationalistic and religious appropriations of Kashmiryat (lately introduced term for Kashmiri consciousness and identity) are not quite warranted have been increasingly questioned in recent times. We must note that Kashmir’s identity can’t be defined in isolation from the distinct mystical and metaphysical ethos that has traditionally defined Kashmir. Kashmir has housed or appropriated most of the major world traditions. It has been argued that to its sacred ambience most of great religions and civilizations – Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim – have contributed. Reshiyyat seeks to transcend all local, regional, divisive identities perpetrated by various groups and to be grounded in the universal or cosmic or divine Reshi identity that duly encompasses and appropriates other identities as well.  Shiekh Nuruddin and Lalla, the patron saints of Kashmir, have emphasized transcendence of  all identities of self, caste, race, nationality and even religion taken in its exclusivist sense. In the Sheikh’s universalistic inclusivist humanitarian transcendental cosmopolitan vision of Reshiyyat could alone be true Kashmiriyat grounded. Kashmir has been hosting some of the most important world religions and has been largely unfamiliar with sectarian strife.  Its values of tolerance and non-violence are attributable to its mystical (Reshi) identity. Reshiyyat should be taken not in the narrow historical sense as a cult of Sheikh Nuruddin but in the wider sense as mystical dimension of Kashmir and that alone safeguards its universalism.
Kashmir’s resistance to all sectarian divisive identities and cults, to exclusivist fundamentalist dogmatic theological voices and to this worldly oriented secular visions that are divorced from the wellsprings of transcendence is attributable to its deep mystical ethos. It has been more interested in exploring inner landscape, in the great adventure of consciousness than in looting and plundering the neighboring territories. Believing in the gospel of truth and love it has not worshipped the Mammon of power and it has too readily succumbed to political subjugation from non-natives. Its cosmopolitan consciousness has assimilated Sayyids and Pathans, Mugals and Dogras. It knows no nationalism in the constricted sense of the term. Like India it has been a soft target of all imperialist forces. But it must be noted that the hell modern man is in is because the mystical gospel of love and compassion that has been promulgated by Reshis has been forgotten. In a postmodern globalized transnationalistic world only the kind of identity that mysticism gives could give us an abiding peace. All borders are becoming irrelevant and it is the renunciatory ethic that gives us transcendent grounding and identity that needs to be foregrounded.
Reshiyyat vis-à-vis Hinduism and Islam
It is also to be noted that Hinduism or Buddhism and Islam are not as divergent at deeper level as exotericist theological reading of Islam would have us believe. Originally every human collectivity has been blessed by the presence of prophets according to the Quran. Vedanta, Kashmir Saivisnm and Buddhism are not dualistic or polytheistic but essentially Unitarian or tawhid centred traditions if one grants Sufistic-metaphysical understanding of tawhid as the correct view of it in place of dualistic theological reading.  These are all Absolute-centric tradition and this Absolute is not to be subsumed under the theistic theology. At the level of Absolute (Zat) theism is transcended. Islam and other religions are not opposed in fundamentals of faith as all have originally been recipients of revelation in accordance with the Quranic dictum that all human collectivities have received revelation. Despite distortions and extrapolations in subsequent centuries it is still possible to unearth the core of Tawhid in these religions. Spiritually or mystically one can easily see how all religions are oriented towards God and none allows associating partners with God, the popular “polytheistic” idolatrous interpretation or mask of Hinduism not withstanding as it is quite heterodox reading of originally monistic/monotheistic traditions. Tawhid, according to the Quran, is the one message of all prophets and if we presently see anything that deviates from pristine conception of Unitarianism or Tawhid it is surely a product of misinterpretation according to perennialists. But one must first be sure that some doctrine alleged to be polytheistic/animistic etc. is really so. It needs great mastery in comparative religion to be able to understand different doctrinal formulations in different religions. There are few comparativists in the world, not to speak of Kashmir. Dismissive remarks and generalizations are too readily made betraying one’s ignorance of the traditions in question. Just one instance may suffice here. Abdul Wahid Yaha and  Isa Nuruddin, arguably the greatest metaphysicians and authorities on comparative religion in the 20th century, demonstrate that there is no pantheism, no idealism, no rebirth, no individualist subjectivist mysticism  as ordinarily understood in orthodox Hindu traditions.
Some critics here are needlessly apologetic about using the word Reshi by Sheikh Nuruddin. It suffices to mention that it was the Sheikh  who opted for this terminology and found no need of another term such as Wali for describing himself and his disciples. Had the Shiekh    adopted the strategy suggested by our critics which emphasizes differences instead of common points and wishes to prove that the advent of Islam was a radical break from the traditional past of Kashmir Islam could hardly have been firmly planted in Kashmir. It was great catholic, assimilating and appropriating genius of the great Shiekh to Islamize Reshi movement and it opened natives for Islam. Loud recital of durood, awrad etc. was another strategy to show Islam’s assimilating potential. Thank God Syed Ali Hamdani had no advisors to censure him for these “unIslamic” innovations as otherwise Islam’s diffusion in the masses would have been more difficult.  Our Sufi poets have appropriated pre-Islamic notions and allusions and nothing can be done to edit them from a supposedly Islamic perspective. Sufis are at home in different traditions and don’t feel Islam is polluted or in danger if one appropriates other than Islamic mythological or linguistic resources.
It must be noted that Sufism can’t be practized outside the doctrinal framework of Islam. The fact is that the post-Nurudin Kashmir is Islamic Kashmir that has already appropriated the best of spiritual genius of India. Islamized Reshiyyat appropriates, for all practical purposes, Buddhist, Saivite and other Indian traditional philosophical thought currents and is not to be construed as an appendage to them. By practicing Islam in all its depths, one practices all religions, as Abdul Wahid Yaha (Rene Guenon) said who wrote, despite being a Muslim, many greatly acclaimed and sympathetic work on Hinduism. We must not allow encroaching of Islamic identity of Sufism or present day Reshiyyat in the name of superficial syncretism. It is not for nothing that many of the greatest spiritual minds of the 20th century in the West became Sufis. Muslims don’t need to look here and there in the past for inspiration and metaphysics. Saivism, Buddhism etc. are to be read as historical religions in Kashmir and as independent traditions and not to be confounded with or grafted with or privileged in any sense against the Islamic context and framework of present Reshi thought. We need to respect uniqueness of all traditions and not attempt syncretism.
Some further clarifications are in order to put in right perspective the charge of Brahamanism against Kashmiri Muslims. Sufism isn’t to be confused with Vedantic Islam or Islam in Vedantic dress. Rumi’s or Ibn Arabi’s Unitarian (as distinguished from dualist monotheistic exoteric Islamic) perspective has also been well appropriated in orthodox terms. Islam has shielded diverse theological, mystical and philosophical schools in its history. Its tradition is far more catholic than usually conceded. The catholicity of Sufism is well known and if we grant that Sufism is indeed the esoteric dimension of Islam and not an alien growth on its soil we hardly need to argue for universalism or catholicity of Islam. Some passages of Ibn Arabi would appropriate even seeming atheists in the salvific scheme. In fact much to the delight of many ecumenists Islam transcends theistic/nontheistic binary. Islam is acceptance of truth in its widest sense. It isn’t an interpretation of truth despite the claim of exclusivists to the contrary. Islam doesn’t talk about truth but talks truth. It is witnessing the truth and that truth is the truth of Infinite and All-Possibility. The Quran identifies God as Al- Haqq or the Real. Truth has no face; it has infinite aspects. Whatever partakes of the Reality or truth is affirmed in Islamic shahadah which is translated by the Sufis and perennialists as “There is no reality but Reality.” Islam means surrender to God, Truth and Reality, for God is Al- Haqq.  It is too inclusive to be guilty of any exclusion which Foucault and others fear Thus Islam shields a great heterogeneity and the image of pure monolithic homogenous traditional Islam isn’t vindicated by its history, the protest from certain ultra orthodox sections notwithstanding. To be a Muslim is to be in a placeless place. He declares with Rumi (who is generally recognized by the orthodoxy as one of the greatest representatives of esoterism):
I have expelled duality from myself. I have seen the two worlds as one
Let me seek one, say one, know one and desire one
He the First, He the Last, He the Manifest, He the Hidden./Without Him and other than Him  nothing else I know.
I am drunk with the soul of love and the two worlds have passed from my hand
Further remarks seem to be warranted here for elaborating Sufi view of man- God relationship which has been misinterpreted by exoteric critics of Islam and Hinduism. The first premise of the doctrine of unity to which Rumi and the Ibn Arabi adhered is the vision of God in man, be it male (Shams in case of Rumi) or female (Nizam in case of Ibn Arabi) before which one feels one’s nothingness. It is after this vision of God, and love for it, that one strives to attain God Himself and finally becomes His vision, His proof (Ali), His testimony, Shahid (Hallaj) or His manifestation (Ibn Arabi), the perfect man. God and the world/man according to the Quran aren’t two poles apart. God is the other, the ideal pole of man as far as the latter is the Spirit or the abode of the Spirit (God having breathed the Spirit in him). Man as an ego or soul, as creature is of course not one with God. Ibn Arabi for whom God is the essence of all existence including man was nevertheless emphatic in maintaining that man can never become God and vice versa. Islam rejects hulul in no uncertain terms. It is only when the ego is gone in the experience of fana and only God remains that An’al Haq (I am the truth can be asserted). In fact this claim is made by the Spirit which is in man but is not his. The Quran’s conception of Unity perceives both God and the man as the two aspects of reality by underlying the apparent duality of God and the world/man on the one hand and their essential oneness on the other. This is best manifested in the Quranic conception of Jesus, who was a man like any other human being but he was at the same time the word of God (kalimatullah) or the one in whom God had breathed His own spirit (Ruhullah). The Sufi conception of the perfect man or Insan-i-Kamil also problematizes the absolutization of man-God polarity. The question of man’s relation to God is better approached from the Absolute-relative rather than the Lord-creature framework as the perennialist metaphysicians have argued. Theological controversies are resolvable at the metaphysical plane and it is losing sight of this point that has contributed to unwarranted dualistic polemical quibbles between Sufis and different theological schools and between Hindus and Muslims. The Quran emphasizes both God’s transcendence  as well as His immanence in creation (man/world). A typical verse in this connection is “Nothing is like Him and He is the Hearing, the Seeing.”
How perennialists reread theological differences may be shown with reference to the notion of Avatara in Hindu traditions. As Schuon explains:

Muhammad was not and could not be an Avatara; but this is not really the question because it is perfectly obvious that Islam is not Hinduism and notably excludes any idea of incarnation (hulul); quite simply, and using Hindu terminology, which is the most direct or the least inadequate, we would reply that a certain Divine aspect took on under particular cyclic circumstances a particular earthly form, something in full conformity with what the Envoy of Allah testified as to his own nature…,
In any case, if the attribution of divinity to an historical personage is repugnant to Islam, that is because its perspective is centred on the Absolute as such, as is show for instance in the conception of the final leveling before the Judgment: God alone in this conception remains ‘living’ and all else is leveled in universal death including the supreme Angels, and so also even the ‘Spirit’ (Er-Ruh), the divine manifestation at the luminous centre of the cosmos (Schuon,1963:90-91).
For Schuon (Isa Nuruddin) Islam is the way of intelligence; it is simply objective perception of the Reality. Allah means Reality, Truth as such which both transcendent and immanent. Islam in its deepest meaning is ‘that which is everywhere’ And ‘that which has always been’(Schuon, 1963:104) and the Prophet represents both universality and primordiality (Schuon, 1963:104). Perennialist perspective conceives Muhammad as Logos, as pole of existence, as one through whom God is known, manifested. As a spiritual principle the Prophet is not only the Totality of which we are separate parts or fragments, he is also the Origin in relation to which we are so many deviations; in other words the Prophet as norm is not only the ‘Whole Man’ but also ‘Ancient Man’(Schuon, 1963:103). Thus to be as Muslim doesn’t require belief in a certain proposition, a certain narrative or an ideology. It transcends all linguistic and conceptual categories and thought constructions. Metaphysics isn’t absolutization of certain viewpoint or aspect to the exclusion of other possible perspectives. It is the vision of totality of the Real as such and this is achieved by transcendence of merely rational faculty, by becoming a mirror that will reflect the truth, the Essence. Intuition of the mystic isn’t subject to any critique such as that of deconstruction. It is prereflective prelignuistic apprehension.
Schuon explains the limitations of the theological approach and thus of all those statements made by exoteric authorities while appraising doctrines of other traditions.
The ordinary monotheist theologies are hardly capable of giving adequate account of theism, owing to the fact that they operate only with the utterly inadequate alternatives of the “created and the uncreated.” For these theologies there is only God and the world m the creator and the created, whereas inn reality, there is first of all the Absolute and the relative, and then within Relativity itself, the Uncreated Creator, not the Uncreated in itself and all creation… .The alternative in question could be transposed to the Divine level and the distinction between the “created” and the “Uncreated” expressed instead as a distinction between the’ “personal God” and the “impersonal Divinity”, and hence between “Being” and “Beyond-Being”( Schuon, 1963: 185-86).
Schuon doesn’t see any essential contradiction between Muslim and Hindu eschatologies unlike exoterism that finds them simply irreconcilable. He finds the meeting point between the monotheistic eschatology of Islam and Indian “transmigrationism” in the concepts of Limbo and Hell and also in the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ in which the being isn’t however invested with a new individuality (Schuon, 1969:139). Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon and other perennialists reject popular animistic conception of rebirth as do they reject exotericist conception of afterlife, of perpetuity of hell or eternal damnation.
Sufism and nondualistic Saivism are, from the perennialist viewpoint, subsumable under the rubric of common traditional metaphysics as both share the conceptions of Absolute and nondualism. Both advocate almost analogous schemes of descent of the Absolute towards the increasingly grosser or impure states of existence. Both share a realist ontology taking the world of phenomena as real rather than illusory as they share the understanding of Divine Relativity or Maya. We see affirmative transcendence in both of them. Both recognize the importance of diverse approaches to God realization. Both are against a renunciatory life negating ascetism as they believe in metaphysical transparency of phenomena. Sufistic Unitarian perspective harbours an epistemology that could readily appropriate Kashmir Saivistic doctrine of recognition or pratibijna. Both see man as microcosmos. Mystical disciplines or meditational techniques and spiritual anthropology and psychology in both traditions show a remarkable convergence. Exoteric/esoteric division and a respect for exoteric formulations are noticeable in both traditions. One can also discern convergence in metaphysics of Beauty between the two traditions.  However if we approach the two traditions from purely theological viewpoint certain differences are easily noticeable. Theology and metaphysics are confusingly mixed in usual expositions of Saivism. A lack of philosophical rigour in theistic appropriations of  Saivism is evident. Panentheistic reductionist tendency in most of modern expositions of nondualistic Saivism compromises orthodox or traditional character of Saivism. There is a need of approaching Saivism from the perennialist perspective to put Saivism in the proper context of traditional Indian darsanas. Dualistic schools of Saivism are to be seen as stopping short of pure metaphysics. We need to reject against fashionable uniformitarian syncretistic approach to Saivism and Sufism and attempt to situate them in their respective traditions of Vedantic and Islamic frameworks that respects their unique character and different theologies while also emphasizing their shared metaphysics.
Reshiyyat and Environmentalism
Perennialists have made major strides in ecological reading of the sacred scriptures. The great relevance of perennialist perspectives lies in pointing out metaphysical errors of modern man and science that have contributed to ecological crisis. However they have been compelled to lean primarily on premodern traditional civilizations while showing the concrete examples of practice of ecological wisdom. I think we could point out to Kashmir as living example of traditional outlook that concretely embodies ecological consciousness even today. A very important dimension of Reshi thought is its ecological consciousness and that makes it vitally relevant to the world that has lost ecological health. The Reshi’s aversion to causing injury to all animate beings including plants, insects and animals; their concern for conserving  forests; dissuading hunters from hunting hangul; personal care of pets, tamed animals and birds; planting trees throughout the length and breadth of Kashmir – all these things show how deeply  eco-conscious has been the Reshi movement.  Long before ecological crises occurred Shiekh Nuruddin had anticipated it.  Mysticism provides the only valid ideological framework for practizing sound ecology.  Kashmir has traditionally been ecologist’s paradise. How ecological consciousness has been achieved in Kashmir is a forgotten chapter of history of ecology and it is again our duty to present ecological face of Kashmiri Reshiyyat to the world.  Shiekh Nuruddin could well be proposed as patron saint of ecology.
Appraisal of Major Criticisms of Kashmir Mysticism
Kashmir’s mystical credentials have been questioned only very recently by some circles. Progressivist writers found fault with Kashmir’s mystical bias. More recently some exotericist theologians have questioned authenticity of Kashmiri Muslim identity as they believe mysticism to be alien to Islamic tradition. Sheikh Nuruddin has been seen as social reformer and preacher rather than a mystic. To these points one may reply that for good or worse Kashmiris are mystically oriented. I think it is for good in the age that swears by pluralism and is fed up with self styled advocates of God. It is gross misreading of the text of Sheikh Shruks and history to write off the mystic in the great Sheikh. Sufism understood as spiritual dimension of Islam is inalienable from it. Nothing in Islam makes sense except in light of this spiritual dimension. AntiSufi rhetoric is modernist heresy. It is good to censure excesses and perversions and misuses of Sufism in Kashmir but to reject the esoteric in the name of literalism and supposed fidelity to scripture is quite unacceptable. Sufism is the metaphysical face or even basis of Islam. History of Islam is largely the history of its saints and philosophers and mystically oriented ulema. The most illustrious thinkers of Islam have been influenced by Sufism. Islamic art and architecture is incomprehensible without the knowledge of Sufi symbolism. Kashmir’s arts and crafts express Sufi symbolism. From turban to carpets everywhere we see symbolism in work. No wonder the Dargahs of Hazratbal, of Makhdoom Saheb and of Sheikh Nuruddin continue to attract millions of Kashmiris today.
Mysticism in Kashmir has been attempting to obliterate class and creedal divisions. Shrines have been acting as public guest houses providing food and shelter to anyone regardless of class. Shrines act as cohesive and integrating centers. They are retreat centers. Today newer generations nostalgically recall their immediate past that is believed to incarnate certain values of simplicity, honesty, purity of conduct and thought which we usually associate with saintly life.
One may point out that class analysis of Kashmir society is yet to be made. But one needs to note that Reshis were not complicit with ruling class. Neither were they associated with the rich. It might be objected that they were parasitic on common people’s properties. This too is contravened by history. It is only recently that a class of beggers and begger priests has been thriving in the name of past saints.
Mysticism is a million dollar industry in Kashmir according to critics. Of course abuse of mysticism is a huge industry in itself but we need to note that mysticism contributes significantly to Kashmir economy. Shrines are amongst the most visited tourist spots. Local tourism is largely concentrated on shrines. Much donation money is with Wakf Board which could be used to finance thousands of welfare projects if steps are taken in this direction. The Board could well experiment with a variation of interest free Grammein banking or Islamic banking that could potentially benefit thousands. Prayer food culture is a huge industry in Kashmir that contributes to cohesion of social bonds as well.
There is a pir class, occultist class and the class of so-called majzoobs that largely exploit the name of mysticism and contribute to discrediting it in the eyes of many. A large number of social drop outs and parasites support their living by masquerading as mystics. Salafi onslaught against abuses of mysticism in Kashmir is not quite unwarranted. Illiteracy and gullibility of local people contributes to their exploitation at the hands of many dabblers in the spirit business, black magic and the like.
Mystic class continues to be among the most influential one in today’s Kashmir though some mystics claim that there is hardly any genuine mystic living today. Too many are masquerading as mystics as mysticism sells like anything and could be resorted as a means of livelihood by all kinds of charlatans.
Mysticism is the best antidote to communalism and sectarianism. Communal violence does flare up occasionally. But it is ironic to note that the religious group playing the card of mysticism (Berelvees) is also the most dogmatic in certain issues and highly rejectionist and exclusivist. There are few traceable or accessible authentic mystics and mystical thinkers in Kashmir today. The serious and systematic study of mysticism is yet to be a prerogative of any academic institution. Masses are either simplistic believers in claimants of mystical power or alienated from the founts of traditional mystical wisdom on account of propaganda from certain antimystical quarters.
Reshiyyat vs. Humanism
Reshiyyat is often labelled as humanistic tradition . This is incorrect because humanism is a loaded term that arose in the Western against theocentricism of traditional Christianity. Reshiyyat though stressing the dignity of man as a mystical and metaphysical worldview is an antithesis of humanism which severs all ties with transcendence and defies man at the cost of God.. It shifts the emphasis from Being to being, from Nature to man, from universalism to individualism, from metaphysics to science. It rejects heart in favour of head. In place of traditional pontifical man it puts Promethean Faustian man. Man is considered as an end in himself. It takes man for granted as he stands, and takes man the world of man’s experience as it has come to seem to him. Man is defined as or identified with  Ego. Science and reason are its idols. Supernatural or higher degrees of reality or vertical dimension is rejected by such different varieties of humanism as Huxley’s evolutionary humanism, Sartre’s existential humanism, secular theological humanism or scientific humanism, Marxist humanism. Humanism  in Guenon’s words  implies a pretension to bring everything down to purely human elements and thus to exclude everything of a supraindividual order. Sartre thus gives a representative humanist statement “There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity… This is humanism, because we remind  man that there is no legislator but himself: that he himself, thus abandoned must decide for himself” It surrenders not to God but to human finitude and severes all ties with transcendence.  Humanistic theologian by identifying the Truth of God with this worldly truth degrades the essence of religion.
Contemporary Significance of Reshiyyat
Regarding contemporary significance of Reshiyyat which has been challenged by certain modernists it may be remarked that for modern man salvation and recovery of meaning could be possible only through the mystical. If theology no longer convinces and philosophy stands challenged from various quarters it is mysticism alone that fits the bill – it is no wonder that many (post)modern writers and philosophers are mystically oriented. Reshiyyat as a formulation of timeless perennial philosophy can’t be dead as long as man remains man in need of transcendence. Reshis have not been inflexible with regard to any dietary, juristic, theological, meditational prescriptions. No institutional framework is indispensable for practising mysticism. All of us who take transcendence or sacred seriously are Reshis or would-be-Reshis, to a little or greater extent. Man is condemned to be a meaning seeking or self transcending  creature. He is bound to transcend himself and look heavenward if he is not to be reduced to beastly status. God is the ideal pole of man. He is our “ultimate concern.” Any search for fuller and larger life, a more creative life, a more celebratory and more authentic life, is basically a search for God as God is really another name for Life. This is the purport of the Quranic name al-Hayy for God. God is our Environment (al-Muhit) as the Quran says. We live by transcendence and breath it. Transcendence is accessible through search for values. According to Plato anyone who chooses to seek beauty, truth and goodness (the three defining attributes of God) would qualify as a lover of wisdom or mystic. Man is properly called human only when he seeks to realize these values. In broader terms we can say that we are all travellers on the path (salikeen) of Reshiyyat. All travelers on the path of life who have faith in life and seek to beautify it are in a way Reshis.
There is something about Kashmir mysticism whether Saivist or Sufistic that  makes it quite interesting and relevant for modern man. Its attitude of affirmative transcendence, affirmation of world and life, despite its renunciatory ethic or asceticism characterizes Kashmiri mysticism. If Shiva is all or God is the only existent then by affirming life we affirm God. The body too is a temple of God and thus its needs can not be ignored. There is no escapism but positive acceptance of Immanent existence. “Don’t torment your body with the pangs of thirst and hunger/Whenever it feels exhausted take care of it.” For a non-dualist Reshi like Lalla there is no difference between “I” and the “other”(par te pan); immanence and transcendence, universal and individual; consciousness, subjective and objective reality being but aspects of the  ultimate reality  which is indivisible.
Reshiyyat is not dead or history; it continues to live as it has always been living in the unconscuious or preconscious of Kashmiris. It continues to inform our movement forward in history and every aspect of Kashmiri culture and spirituality. “Shiekh Nuruddin’s verse dominates preacher’s sermon at pulpit, it has been lulled on the strings of Sufiana musician, it along with Lal waakh devises the introductory tunes of light  music Chakri, it is quoted by the house wife  when the souring prices exhaust has small purse and it is usually quoted by common voters against the monkeys of such ruling cheques which misrule the country. The piercing sarcasm against Mulla retains its freshness.”  He is living in the language that he helped to shape.  One could well transpose the words of French president de Gaul about Sartre on him and assert, “Shiekh is Kashmir.”
Eco-conscious earthly “matriarchal” socially conscious world-view of Reshiyyat is presently being advocated as a remedy of so many ills that affect not only Kashmir but also the whole globe. The need is to interpret Reshi message in contemporary language. This contemporary language that postmodern man can understand is not the language of moralism or theology but the wordless language of mysticism. Only the religion of the heart, whose language is silence, is experiential and existential and is synonymous with selfless service of man could be the religion of (post)modern man and in the context of Kashmir what else besides Reshiyyat, which after Nuruddin is an adaptation of Islamic esoteric kernel, could provide it.  Sufism of which Reshiyyat now is a tested historical manifestation has the best resources to address our post-Nietzschean postmodern ages that claims to be posttheological.
Notes
1    The emotional element nowhere plays a bigger part than in the “mystical” form of religious thought. Contrary to the prevalent opinion he declares that mysticism, from the very fact that it is inconceivable apart from the religious point of view, is quite unknown in the East. (Guenon, 1945:124) “The influence of sentimental element obviously impairs the intellectual purity of the doctrine. This falling away from the standpoint of metaphysical thought occurred generally and extensively in the Western world because there feeling was stronger than intelligence and this has reached its climax in modern times.” (Guenon, 1945:125) Modern theistic appropriations of mystical experience by choosing to remain at the level of theology and not cognizing the metaphysical point of view (that brilliantly and convincingly appropriates such apparently divergent varieties of mystical and metaphysical realization as that of Buddhism and Christianity) cannot claim total truth as theology itself cannot do so.  And it is not always possible to fully translate metaphysical doctrines in terms of theological dogmas. Antimetaphysical anthropomorphism  comes to the fore in this realm of individual variations. Reshiyyat is thus misdescribed as mystical. However it has been almost universally used to describe it by scholars. So we may follow the accepted though inaccurate description while at the same time qualify it by foregrounding the metaphysical content of it and its supraindividual and intellectual character
References
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Published as theme paper by the Institute of Kashmir Studies, Kashmir University (2010)