Lectures & Talks
A Universal Perspective
By Peter Young, Principal Beshara School
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
For Man there is a vision possible of One All-encompassing Unique Existence, and it is the possibility of the arrival at this vision that is the sole purpose of the emergence of humanity. Jelaluddin Rumi said that even if a man does many worthy things and yet does not fulfil this one charge, it is as if he has taken a priceless sword of Damascus steel and used it as a coat hook.
To begin the quest for this vision, therefore, is the most important step that each person can take. It is by definition the first step consciously taken in conformity with the intuition that announces itself in the deepest recesses of the human heart, and to our exterior ears and eyes in the words of the hadith qudsi, "I was a hidden treasure, I loved to be known and I created the universes that I might be known".
Each person has a real place in the Unique Existence. This real place is the potentiality of each person; further, it is an eye. It is this eye which alone can perceive the all-encompassing and universal vision of the flow of the One from Its most Interior and Hidden to the most concrete and relative appearance, here, in disguise as the world. This vision sees that there has never been a creation, that matter has no existence, that the creatures, from mineral to animal and to mankind itself, have no existence of their own. Rather that the One Real Being, in a movement of Self-revelation which is Love, existentiated all the fullness of the potentiality present within His own Being with His own Being, in such wise that nothing is created other than Itself nor revealed to other than Itself. Naturally, the condition for the vision of this Essential Unity is that it equally be seen by no-one but Itself.
Therefore in the quest for the vision of the One Reality, the essential is to know the self, in order to know God, according to the hadith, "He who knows himself knows his Lord". To give value and first place to Knowledge, in seeking to know the self, is in conformity with the return to the One, the real ‘I’ who loved to be known.
The Beshara School of Intensive Esoteric Education is founded upon this order of approach to the One Reality, reaching back to the ‘I’, through Knowledge to Love.
It is of the necessity of the present time that the human consciousness evolves beyond the compulsive need to describe itself in terms of limitation – by social, religious or ethnic grouping, by nationality, etc. – but rather to perceive with immediacy that in an approach to the Real these non-essential adjectives must be thrown away, and not put on again or exchanged for different clothing. Rather, to know oneself is to know oneself as never having been at all, and as nothing but that Essential Reality which always was and ever will be, despite the temporary donning of a relative appearance in bodily form.
"I wrapped Myself in flesh and bones
And appeared as Yunus."
Yunus Emre