Melisa H’s Reviews > The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi > Status Update

within Sufism, spiritual practices or methods—such as invocation, meditation, music, and dance—are not seen as inherently powerful in and of themselves. Instead, these practices are considered effective only because of God’s grace and permission (tayid) that make them meaningful pathways to spiritual realization

"I am God": This statement, paradoxically, expresses the speaker’s realization that their individual self (ego) does not truly exist independently. In saying “I am God,” they mean “I have dissolved my ego completely; only God exists.” In other words, they’ve “naughted” themselves, removing any sense of a separate self. They see themselves as an expression of God’s reality, not as an independent being.

man does not "achieve" anything by realizing union with God; rather he becomes what he had always been in his inmost nature. God is the Real and nothing can be outside of His Reality.

Union with God is complete absorption in Him, such that:


the one absorbed is no longer there; he can make no more effort;
he ceases to act and to move; he is immersed in the water. Any
action that proceeds from him is not his action, it is the action
of the water

Man's self-existence is not real, since he is not God; therefore the illusion that it is real must be annihilated.

There is no reality but the Reality. Since God alone is real, man's real Self is God.

The mission of the prophets and saints is to remind
man of his original nature and to show him the way through
which it may once again be actualized

. Iblis denied Adam because this
tendency towards separation and spiritual blindness does
in fact exist within the universe.

If there had not been desire and hope of the fruit, how
should the gardener have planted the root of the tree?

Therefore in reality the tree was born of the fruit, (even)
if in appearance it (the fruit) was generated by the tree.

Universal Man has another aspect when seen from the
point of view of the spiritual path: he is the perfect human
model who has attained all of the possibilities inherent in the
human state - the universal man was muhammed

"From the point of view of God," all creation is performing but one task {Discourses, p. 221), i.e., that of revealing the
"Hidden Treasure"; thus, by the very fact that a being exists,
whether it does good or evil, it is worshipping God: