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| Simurgh, by José Pinto Antunes. Much light and love in his soul, in the subtle worlds. |
The beautiful metaphorical poem by Attar, alias Farïd al-dîn ‘Attâr (1142-1221, in Nichapour, Khorassan, Iran, and who was a perfumer, herbalist, healer), entitled Mantiq al-Tayr, the Colloquy or Language of the Birds, or Conference of the Birds, more than four thousand six hundred verses long, was the most successful of all Attar's works over the centuries, and some versions have been known in different languages since those early days. In the West, in France, there were translations in 1819 and 1863, and in the 20th and 21st centuries they were expanded.
One of the abbreviated and bad versions of the work is in circulation in Portugal and Brasil, under the name Conferência dos Pássaros (Conference of the Birds), published by Cultrix. It is a translation of the English version by C. S. Nott, who translated it from Garcin de Tassy's French translation of 1863, carrying out the feat of shredding and substantially altering it in the USA in 1954, removing much of the work's spirituality. A pity. Today there are other versions in Portuguese language of better quality.
After having been a perfume and herb apothecary, impressed by the detachment and command of the body and soul of a dervish, Attar was initiated into the spiritual path by Sheik Mudj al-din of Baghdad, and from his quest we have about a dozen works left, the most valuable of which are Pand-Nama, Book of Advice, Asrar-Nama, The Book of Secrets (his last work, and of which there is an excellent annotated translation by Christiane Tortel), Elahi-Nama, the Divine Book and Tadhkarat al-Auliya, Memoirs of the Saints, the latter containing the stories and teachings of 142 Sufis from Iran, Egypt and Arabia, including Jafar Sadiq, the Iraqi Rabia Basri, Junayd, Hazrat Abdul Jilani, Mansur al-Hallaj, all of whom truly surrendered ardently to Divine Love.
One of the abbreviated and bad versions of the work is in circulation in Portugal and Brasil, under the name Conferência dos Pássaros (Conference of the Birds), published by Cultrix. It is a translation of the English version by C. S. Nott, who translated it from Garcin de Tassy's French translation of 1863, carrying out the feat of shredding and substantially altering it in the USA in 1954, removing much of the work's spirituality. A pity. Today there are other versions in Portuguese language of better quality.
After having been a perfume and herb apothecary, impressed by the detachment and command of the body and soul of a dervish, Attar was initiated into the spiritual path by Sheik Mudj al-din of Baghdad, and from his quest we have about a dozen works left, the most valuable of which are Pand-Nama, Book of Advice, Asrar-Nama, The Book of Secrets (his last work, and of which there is an excellent annotated translation by Christiane Tortel), Elahi-Nama, the Divine Book and Tadhkarat al-Auliya, Memoirs of the Saints, the latter containing the stories and teachings of 142 Sufis from Iran, Egypt and Arabia, including Jafar Sadiq, the Iraqi Rabia Basri, Junayd, Hazrat Abdul Jilani, Mansur al-Hallaj, all of whom truly surrendered ardently to Divine Love.
The great specialist in Islamic and Persian mysticism Louis de Massignon was a scholar and admirer of Attar, and emphasised the statement of the famous Jalâl-ud dîn Rûmî: two centuries after the disincarnation of al-Hallâj, his light (nour), or spiritual soul, manifested itself in Farîd ‘Attar, becoming his spiritual master.
We don't know for sure if this was the case, but the communion of the friends of God, the community of saints or Sufis, the auliya, is known, it is real, all those who meditate more deeply and intensely experience it in one way or another by grace, so naturally Attar was blessed by the High and the Divine, by the Sufis, and Mansur al-Hallaj, a martyr in Islam for the affirmation of non-duality between the human and the divine, was certainly a potential inspiration for him and, who knows, his invisible master or guide. Rumi, who according to some versions would still have met Attar, forty-five years older than him, would also say that Attar was his inner soul, just as Sana'i was his spiritual eye.
Attar, in the Dialogue of the Birds, which is now among us inspiring the painter José Pinto Antunes [and much light and love to him, who died prematurely in the meantime] to illustrate it in more than a hundred drawings, compiles numerous traditional stories and adds some new ones, adding above all comments of a moral and spiritual nature, and proposing the traditional asceticism and renunciation of the world and its pleasures and beings (a methodology that is perhaps debatable in is rigour: ‘Until we die to ourselves and are indifferent to creatures, our soul will not be free. A dead man is worth more than one who is not entirely dead to creatures, because he cannot be admitted to the other side of the curtain"), in exchange for or in favour of an ardent love for the Divine, the only one that deserves and endures.
Love for God (bhakti, prema, in the Indian tradition) is then the ultimate goal and need, and many examples are given of extraordinary or very intense love between human beings, and how we can draw from this impulses for our journey of love towards God, in this 21st century that is less and less prone to devotional love as it once flared up in medieval or even later Christianity and Islam.
Among the weakest parts, for us with the 21st century eye, is the idea of the superiority of Islam, especially over Christianity and also Hinduism, because they worship idols, so there are some amusing stories but warped in that disapproving sense of them, what is not ncessary correct, as God can be felt and worshiped in infinite ways...
There are beautiful stories, there are valuable reflections, and it would be good to better discern what came from the Sufi tradition, what he himself generated, or even what al-Hallaj inspired him, although the final part, being the most unitive, should be the most relatable to him and the one that will deserve the most meditation and deepening, as it deals with our encounter both with our own spirits and with Divinity and Unity.
The Conference of the Birds then brings together thousands of birds in the quest to access the mysterious being, Simurgh, which will lead them, with doubts and enlightening dialogues, along a long and arduous path of individuation and initiation (per aspera ad astra) to Simurgh, where only thirty of them arrive, those who have believed in the master sparrow and in themselves and have kept alive the flame of aspiration and unitive Love strongly.
José Pinto Antunes, appreciating this work, decided to take inspiration from it and draw it in watercolours and oil paintings, and his painting of Simurgh is particularly excellent, and the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada decided to host the exhibition in its bookshop, in partnership with the Hélder Alfaiate Gallery, for there could be no better place than the gallery of a bookshop linked to Psychology, the Logos da Alma, to exhibit and evoke Attar's legendary work. [This revised article in english is a translation from the one published in 21 Marchj, 2018: "A Conferência dos Pássaros", de Attar, desenhada e pintada por José Pinto Antunes. E sua hermenêutica espiritual por Pedro Teixeira da Mota, as I was invited by Helder Alfaiate and José Pinto Antunes to write a text on Attar's work and the paintings].
We don't know for sure if this was the case, but the communion of the friends of God, the community of saints or Sufis, the auliya, is known, it is real, all those who meditate more deeply and intensely experience it in one way or another by grace, so naturally Attar was blessed by the High and the Divine, by the Sufis, and Mansur al-Hallaj, a martyr in Islam for the affirmation of non-duality between the human and the divine, was certainly a potential inspiration for him and, who knows, his invisible master or guide. Rumi, who according to some versions would still have met Attar, forty-five years older than him, would also say that Attar was his inner soul, just as Sana'i was his spiritual eye.
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| Attar in pilgriamge and dialogue with other spiritual master and probably poet... |
Attar, in the Dialogue of the Birds, which is now among us inspiring the painter José Pinto Antunes [and much light and love to him, who died prematurely in the meantime] to illustrate it in more than a hundred drawings, compiles numerous traditional stories and adds some new ones, adding above all comments of a moral and spiritual nature, and proposing the traditional asceticism and renunciation of the world and its pleasures and beings (a methodology that is perhaps debatable in is rigour: ‘Until we die to ourselves and are indifferent to creatures, our soul will not be free. A dead man is worth more than one who is not entirely dead to creatures, because he cannot be admitted to the other side of the curtain"), in exchange for or in favour of an ardent love for the Divine, the only one that deserves and endures.
Love for God (bhakti, prema, in the Indian tradition) is then the ultimate goal and need, and many examples are given of extraordinary or very intense love between human beings, and how we can draw from this impulses for our journey of love towards God, in this 21st century that is less and less prone to devotional love as it once flared up in medieval or even later Christianity and Islam.
Among the weakest parts, for us with the 21st century eye, is the idea of the superiority of Islam, especially over Christianity and also Hinduism, because they worship idols, so there are some amusing stories but warped in that disapproving sense of them, what is not ncessary correct, as God can be felt and worshiped in infinite ways...
There are beautiful stories, there are valuable reflections, and it would be good to better discern what came from the Sufi tradition, what he himself generated, or even what al-Hallaj inspired him, although the final part, being the most unitive, should be the most relatable to him and the one that will deserve the most meditation and deepening, as it deals with our encounter both with our own spirits and with Divinity and Unity.
The Conference of the Birds then brings together thousands of birds in the quest to access the mysterious being, Simurgh, which will lead them, with doubts and enlightening dialogues, along a long and arduous path of individuation and initiation (per aspera ad astra) to Simurgh, where only thirty of them arrive, those who have believed in the master sparrow and in themselves and have kept alive the flame of aspiration and unitive Love strongly.
José Pinto Antunes, appreciating this work, decided to take inspiration from it and draw it in watercolours and oil paintings, and his painting of Simurgh is particularly excellent, and the Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada decided to host the exhibition in its bookshop, in partnership with the Hélder Alfaiate Gallery, for there could be no better place than the gallery of a bookshop linked to Psychology, the Logos da Alma, to exhibit and evoke Attar's legendary work. [This revised article in english is a translation from the one published in 21 Marchj, 2018: "A Conferência dos Pássaros", de Attar, desenhada e pintada por José Pinto Antunes. E sua hermenêutica espiritual por Pedro Teixeira da Mota, as I was invited by Helder Alfaiate and José Pinto Antunes to write a text on Attar's work and the paintings].
The one who guides and advises the thousands of birds in their quest for individuation or fulfilment is the hoopoe, with its almost royal characteristics ("it had on its chest the sign that testified to its entry into the spiritual path and on its head the crown of truth. In fact, she had entered the spiritual path intelligently and discerned good and evil"), and she tells them stories from the Sufi tradition, full of psychology and morality, ethics, asceticism and discernment, which will help them to free themselves from the ignorance, illusions and traps of their nafs or instincts and of the world, and to reach the distant but also intimate Simurgh.
So we're on a pilgrimage, an inner quest for disidentifications, qualities and living realisations, in which patience, detachment, determination, light, truth and unity are unveiled. And so each bird will expose and see its inner specificities and difficulties clarified. Likewise, in this sense, whoever draws them will have to exercise almost the vision of a Hieronimus Bosh in order to discern when one of them is carrying a dog or a snake inside, which ones are more divided and tied up, and which ones reflect more the limitations of humans and their struggles and aspirations, or love, freedom and unity.
The path presented by Attar is simple and pure, or one of the possible etymologies of Sufi would not be the white wool worn by such ascetics and mystics: it is the love of God, of the primordial Source and Unity underlying everything, which is the most important because it is the only one that always lasts and is the final destination or goal; therefore, we must aspire to it, not letting ourselves get too involved in the world and its people and activities, detaching ourselves from them and from our desires and egos and unifying our soul forces in a single will for reintegration or divine union, undoubtedly a Herculean task, even then but especially in the 21st century.
In these senses of the multiple forces that constitute us, José Pinto Antunes also captures and in fine overlays draws in the birds and the stories involved or in symbiosis with the elements of nature, with the environmental conditions, with the mysteries of the subtle soul worlds, in the immense and infinite space of the pilgrimage in the divine manifestation of life, which in the poem is crossed in seven valleys, stages or phases of the Path of souls and birds, called successively Talab, the valley of Demand, Eshq, that of Love, Marifat, that of Gnosis or spiritual Knowledge, Istighnah, that of detachment, Tawhid, knowledge of Unity, Hayrat, admiration, Faqr, denudation and, finally, Fana, extinction or transmutation of the ego and union (more or less...) with Divinity or Primordial Unity.
In many of the drawings (and there were 120 of them), more strongly or more softly traced and watercoloured, or else painted more fleshly or intensely in oils, we feel that they are windows into such valleys and states, common to other traditions although with other names, of the poem's birds-souls and of us, who pilgrimage through them, experience them and aspire to the deepest or highest in them.
Perhaps if we have a good discernment, or even a good intuition, we can discover which bird, valley or soul state is represented in the successive drawings by José Pinto Antunes, when he is questioning, painting and glossing with Attar the marvellous human dialogic pilgrimage of self-realisation, towards the supreme mystery, of the end that is also the beginning, because the Simurgh sought is the Source of which we are a mirror, a bird, a song, a part, metaphors for the mystery of our quest and historical participation in the Divine and Cosmic Unity, so lived and proposed by the Sufi and Persian Islamic tradition and so potentially current today, for example, in the scientifically proven notion of the unified field of energy-information-Consciousness.
Let's focus on some of the best teachings, the first two relating to conscious psycho-spiritual breathing:
End of Ch. XXV: ‘Each of the breaths that measure your existence is a pearl and each of your atoms is a guide for you towards God. The benefits of this Friend of yours cover you from head to toe; they manifest themselves visibly and marvellously in you.’
End of chapter XXIX: ‘He whom his desires subjugate, he cannot breathe for a moment in the company of his soul.’ So, conrol more yourself, and breath deeply....
What the master hoopoe, at the beginning of chapter XXXV, conveys to a questioning bird is very practical and effective, and illustrates the practice common to various religious and spiritual traditions of persistent or repetitive prayer or remembrance of a name, mantra, dikr or phrase:
‘As long as you live, replied the stern one, be content to remember (dikr) God recognisably, and avoid superficial talk and words. If your soul possesses this contentment, worries and sorrows will fade away. In the two worlds of the visible and the invisible, this is what is most appropriate for the contentment of human beings. It is for him that the heavenly vault is in motion. Remain content in the Divinity and move like the sun out of love for it’. So simple and straigt teaching...
Or the beautiful story told in the same chapter: ‘A wise man said: ’For seventy years I have been constantly in an ecstasy of contentment and happiness, and in this state I participate in the sovereign majesty and even unite with the Divinity. As for you, who are preoccupied with finding the faults or mistakes of others, how can you rejoice in the beauty of the invisible world? If you look for faults with a scrutinising eye, how can you ever see invisible things? First rid yourself of your faults so that you can truly be king over invisible things. You split a hair in two to see the faults of others, but you are blind to your own faults. Take care of your own faults: then, even if you have obscurities or faults, you will be honoured by God...
About the valley of Gnosis, of esoteric knowledge, Ma'rifa, or Irfan, chapter XL, Attar advises us to eat and sleep less and wake up more, indeed always fruitful:
‘If you deprive yourself of sleep during the night and if you don't eat during the day, you may find what you are looking for. Search until you lose yourself in the search by refraining from eating during the day and sleeping at night. Don't sleep if you're looking for spiritual things, but if you're content to talk about them, then sleep is good for you. Guard well the way of the heart, for there are thieves all around. The path is surrounded by thieves of the heart, so preserve the jewel of your heart from these bandits.
As soon as you have the virtue of knowing how to guard your heart, your love for spiritual science will readily manifest itself. This knowledge will undoubtedly come to the person who watches in the midst of the ocean of his heart's blood. He who has long endured wakefulness has his heart awake when he approaches God. Since it is necessary to deprive yourself of sleep in order to keep your heart awake, sleep little in order to keep your heart faithful. You must repeat to yourself when your existence is shattered: ‘He who is lost in the ocean of beings must not let out a moan of complaint. True lovers have all gone off to sleep intoxicated with love. Hit the nail on the head, for the excellent beings have done what they had to do. He who really has a taste for spiritual love holds in his hand the key to both worlds’.
And let's end with the final chapter, which encourages us not to fear the mysterious, fana, extinction, and with the beginning of his epilogue, in which he bids us farewell:
‘When the sun of poverty or spiritual nakedness shone on me, it burnt both worlds more easily than if it had been a grain of millet.
When I saw the rays of that sun, I wasn't isolated, the drop of water returned to the ocean. Although in my game I sometimes won and sometimes lost, I ended up throwing everything into the ocean.
I was erased, I disappeared; nothing remained of me; I was no more than a shadow, not the slightest atom remained of me. I was a drop lost in the ocean of mystery and today I can't even find that drop. Although it's not in everyone's nature to disappear like that, I was able to lose myself in annihilation, along with many others who were like me. Is there anyone in the world, from the fish to the moon, who doesn't want to get lost here?
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| Tomb of Attar, in Nihapur, Iran. May he inspire us! |
‘O you who are advancing on the spiritual path, do not read my book as a poetic or magical production, but read it as relating to spiritual love, and judge, by a single sensation of your love, what my hundred love pains might be. Whoever reads this book, enlivened by this love, will throw the ball of happiness to the finish line. Forget abstinence and vulgarity; all that is needed here is love, yes, love and renunciation. Whoever possesses this love has no choice but to renounce his soul’ and move forward in love in order to see or find Simurgh.
Asked by a bird what one could offer, or with what one should reach the divine Simurgh, the master hoope, replied: ‘Take the ardour of the soul and the effort of the spirit, because no one should give anything else.’
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