Whom Love Addresses
On the path from non-being into being, the Sufis called the Creator’s longing to be discovered Absolute Love (Aşk-ı Mutlak). The Creator, who is Absolute Beauty (Cemâl-i Mutlak) and Absolute Perfection (Kemâl-i Mutlak), was a hidden treasure who loved to be known. Desiring to behold and reveal His own beauty, He gave form to existence as a mirror through which He might be manifested and known. They held that everything, animate and inanimate alike, sustains its existence through this love, and that no manifestation of love in the realm of being is separate from that primordial Love.
Although love may appear, in the human world, to be something that takes place between two people, in essence it is an act that unfolds within one person. The hormonal and physiological processes through which it finds expression in the body may be part of this experience, but they are not sufficient to explain love in its entirety. For human beings experience love not merely as physical attraction, but at times as a state that erodes the very boundaries of the self. Love must be something more transcendent if it has been capable of turning some into Mecnun, mad with love, and others into meczup, rapt in ecstatic attraction!..
Beyond the legendary force of attraction that extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm, from the smallest particle to the celestial sphere, there must be a state of transcendence that, in the Sufi tradition, has appeared as the lovers’ state of cezbe, ecstatic attraction, and has come to life among the Mevlevis as semâ. The beloved is not a means to an end, for the beloved too is a mazhar, a locus in which the divine manifests.
Even when one cannot be certain of the other person’s love, one knows, through the awareness of what cannot be contained within one’s own heart, that both the affliction and its remedy lie hidden within this solitary act of love.
The mutuality of love depends upon two people, but the act of loving takes place within one’s own being. The beloved need not be the cause of love, yet the beloved is the one to whom that love is addressed.
If love is an act that belongs to one person, then who is the one before you? Merely an occasion? A mirror? If so, would that not reduce the beloved to a mere step in your own spiritual maturation?
When you look into the mirror, do you see yourself, or are you being seen by the one within the mirror?
Do you look at the beloved, or do you look back at yourself through the eyes of the love you claim to possess all on your own?
Do you long to be loved, or do you long for love to take you by the hands and surrender you to its bewilderment?
And what, then, is the state of “being in love with love itself”? Is it the admiration felt for the very essence of love from the position of an “observer”?
Can there be a measure, a unit, a scale for loving the act of loving itself? Does transcending love have a mountain, a road, a summit?
Bezm-i şevkün içre devr eyler felek bir câmdur
Câmda bir cür’adur aşkun şarâbından şafakBâkî
(O beloved! The firmament is a goblet circling in the gathering of longing for you. And the crimson of dawn is but a single sip remaining at the bottom of that goblet from the wine of your love.)