The Garden of Truth Quotes

“A famous poem of Sa‘dī states: The children of Adam are members of a single body, For from the moment of creation they were made of one substance. When fate causes pain in any member, The other members cannot remain still. O thou who hath no sorrow in seeing the sorrow of others, Thou art not worthy of being called a human being.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: Knowledge, Love, and Action

“The word 'ishq, according to traditional sources, is derived from the name of a vine that twists itself around a tree and presses so hard upon its trunk that the tree dies.This poetic etymology refers to the profound truth that intense love involves death. It is said that for every man there is a woman-and vice versa-who is such a perfect complement that if the two were to meet here on earth the intensity of their love would cause them to die. Human love even below this extreme stage is always combined with some degree of dying-dying to one's ego, to one's desires, to one's preferences for the sake of the other. And this is so because human love is itself a reflection of Divine Love, which we can experience only after the death of our ego, and can lead to the Divine those souls who are fortunate enough to have experienced this love.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“Now this process, which requires death to our "selves" and the piercing of the walls of our ego to penetrate into our heart, is not possible without the spiritual master, who already knows what it means to be fully human and who has realized this knowledge himself or herself through journeying across the mountains and valleys of microcosmic existence to reach the One.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“In a battle ‘Alī confronted a powerful enemy and after a fierce fight was able to throw the enemy to the ground and sit on his chest with his sword drawn. At this moment the enemy warrior spat in ‘Alī’s face, whereupon ‘Alī immediately disengaged himself and abstained from delivering a blow with his sword. The enemy warrior, who was an idol worshipper, had never seen such an event. He became agitated and asked ‘Alī why he had not killed him. The response of ‘Alī, which in the verses of the Mathnawī constitutes one of the masterpieces of Sufi poetry, was that ‘Alī was fighting at first for the preservation of the Truth, but once the enemy warrior spat in his face ‘Alī became angry, and he would never react on the basis of anger and certainly not get into a battle or slay someone for personal or selfish reasons. In Rūmī’s words, ‘Alī responded: Said he, “I wield the sword for the sake of the Truth, I am the servant of the Truth not the functionary of the body. I am the lion of the Truth, not the lion of passions, My action does witness bear to my religion.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: Knowledge, Love, and Action

“All spiritual journeys for fallen humanity must begin with contrition (iniibah) and repentance (tawbah). Tawbah is Arabic meaning literally "turning around." We must change the direction of our souls, turn around and face the Divine Reality with our backs to the world. But those who wish to progress upon the path must make this turn- about permanent. Turning one's back to this world means overcoming the vice of the soul's attachment to the multiplicity that surrounds it externally, and therefore the practice of the virtues of detachment, mindfulness, piety, chasteness, and scrupulousness in matters of religion. It means asceticism in the inward and spiritual sense...
But in order to advance to higher stations it is necessary to possess the ascetic virtues. It was from the ground of asceticism and fear of God prepared by the early Mesopotamian Sufis that the trees of Sufi love and gnosis grew in later centuries. Likewise, in the case of individuals it is necessary to gain the virtues associated with the station of zuhd and wara' in order to be able to drink the wine of Divine Love and to bathe in the light of illuminative knowledge.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“The first steps on the path to the Garden of Truth consist of detachment from the world and surrender to God, which means attachment to Him. The roots of our fallen human soul are sunk deeply in the soil of this world. The first action to take is to pluck these roots out of that which is transient and evanescent and sink them into the Divine Reality. At first this Divine Reality appears as unreal since our soul has become externalized and scattered, depending only on the outer senses for its awareness of what is real and what is illusory. Awakening from the sleep of forgetfulness, which is the necessary condition for following the path, brings about the realization that the world that we usually take as being the sole reality is itself a dream. The Prophet once said, "Man is asleep and when he dies he awakens." Spiritual discipline in Sufism commences with what is called "initiatic death" followed by awakening. Through the rite of initiation into a Sufi order, the disciple is supposed to die to his or her old self to be born anew. It is this transformation that is called initiatic death.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“The sexual dimension of love is itself impregnated with spiritual significance. Sexual union is an earthly reflection of a paradisal prototype. The male experiences the Infinite and the female the Absolute in this earthly union, which returns, albeit for a moment, the human being to his or her androgynic wholeness. The bliss of sexual union is also a foretaste of the bliss of the union of the soul with the Spirit. From the Sufi point of view, the urge for sexual union, which is the most powerful sensuous urge within most human beings, is in reality the search of the soul for union with God, especially when human union is combined with love.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“As already mentioned, the power of love is transformative. It has an alchemical effect upon the soul and can transmute its very substance... Real and authentic love in the romantic sense, and not merely sexual attraction, is a form of grace and a gift from Heaven. It rips through our soul like a powerful hurricane, uprooting our usual attachments and habits. It yanks the roots of our soul from the soil of complacency and self-centeredness. It causes joy as well as pain, ecstasy as well as longing. It detaches the soul from other entanglements and attaches it to the object of one's love, even overcoming the mind's scattered thoughts and concentrating the mind on that single object. Something of the absoluteness of the love for God becomes reflected in such a human love that requires utter selflessness and unlimited giving.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“What most of us are doing here in this world is living in a daydream called ordinary life, in the state of forgetting what Christ called the one thing necessary, that is, the Divine Reality. And we are in such a state because we have forgotten who we are. All we need to do is to wake up and realize our primordial nature, which is always there although buried deeply within many layers of the dross of forgetful- ness. The Prophet said, "Man is asleep and when he dies he awakens." Sufism is meant for those who want to wake up, who accept dying to the ego here and now in order to discover the Self of all selves and to be consumed in the process in the fire ofDivine Love.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“That is why mystics have also spoken of "unknowing," and more specifically, Sufis have stated explicitly that in order to reach the Truth one has to "tear the veil of thinking." This deeper level is the heart/intellect, the heart being the center of the human microcosm and also the organ of unitive knowledge associated with the intellect (in the medieval sense of intellectus, or the Greek nous, not in its current sense of reason). The heart is also where the Divine Reality resides in men and women, for as the sacred hadith asserts, "The Heavens and the earth cannot contain Me, but the heart of my faithful servant does contain Me." Sufism seeks to lead adepts to the heart, where they find both their true self and their Beloved, and for that reason Sufis are some- times called "the people of the heart". Who am I? I am the I that, having traversed all the stages of limited existence from the physical to the mental to the noumenal, has realized its own "nonexistence" and by virtue of this annihilation of the false self has returned to its roots in the Divine Reality and has become a star proximate to the Supernal Sun, which is ultimately the only I.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

“We gain a new perspective concerning every kind of reality with which we had identified at the beginning of our journey. We come to realize that although we are male or female, that attribute does not really define us. There is a deeper reality, one might say an androgynic reality, transcending the male-female dichotomy so that our identity is not determined simply by our gender. Nor are we simply our body and the senses although we often identify ourselves with them. As we travel upon the Sufi path, it also becomes more and more evident that what we call "I" has its existence independent of sense perceptions and the body as a whole although the soul continues to have a consciousness of the body while being also aware through spiritual practice of the possibility of leaving it for higher realms.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition