We need exaltation, as I said, in order to live; and, as a matter of fact, you may meditate for hours and hours and days and days and months and months and. months, and years and years, doing all the things that were prescribed, and nothing happens. Then all of a sudden you come in contact with a being who is intoxicated himself, and you are carried beyond yourself and in that moment you have done more progress than in all those years of hard work practicing. And that is the reason for the gurus, if they are gurus. The guru is the one who sweeps you off your feet — I mean your personal feet — into Divine Consciousness, who lifts you upon wings of ecstacy. He is the one who performs the fana’ – that is, the annihilation — of your opinion, and the baqa’, which means the eternalization of Divine understanding. I’ll say that again: the fana’ of opinion — it is zikr, actually — the fana’ of opinion in the baqa’ of Divine realization. His being can act so powerfully upon you that, as I say, you are shattered in everything that you ever thought and everything that you ever knew and everything that you ever felt. There’s no emotion that can come anywhere near the emotion of ecstacy. You might have experienced extremes of despair and tremendous joy, and yet this is something different, something unexplainable in words. You may find that his presence is such that it burns you. Shams Tabriz, when he was in a state of incandescence, said, “Don’t come near me, don’t come near me. You will burn, you will burn. Keep away, keep away!” And the others are so completely peaceful that you feel as though you were at the source of all life, in that snow countryside that I’ve often talked about.
Of course, there are many things that give you ecstasy. Apart from a being, you can have ecstasy looking at the immensity of space, by the fact that your consciousness is free from the tyranny of your ego, just looking into a clear sky or into moonlight, or looking at that wonderful array of colors at dawn that you see sometimes — all those different shades of colors and the brilliance of the light. Something that gives you a feeling of splendor, the splendor of the heavenly realms. You can experience it by the vertigo that you experience at the top of the mountain, when you feel annihilated by the greatness of the mountain; because exaltation always has to do with fana’ — it always has to do with annihilation — and with baqa’, which means to survive the annihilation, but transformed.
Sometimes you may experience exaltation by watching the beautiful smile of a child; or, if you have humbled yourself before someone, perhaps someone whom you’ve asked forgiveness, you have been able to overcome your ego; or perhaps someone asks forgiveness of you. The other day we spoke of when you feel gratitude to someone who has acted so beautifully towards you, or when your heart goes out to someone in his suffering, or when you fall in love, or when you feel the power of the Divine Perfection in you working in human limitation. For example, well, I always think of Christ captured by the Roman soldiers, experiencing exaltation. Christ experiencing exaltation on the cross, which is perhaps the greatest exaltation there is, experiencing the disintegration of the body. When Al Hallaj was crucified, his friend Shibl said, “Had we not warned you not to welcome a friend?” And that friend was God. He was crucified for having revealed the secret of his lover. And then his friend Shibl asked him what is the highest degree of exaltation? And he said, “You will see it tomorrow.” And the next day he was crucified. He had said, on the night before, “I have engaged myself from the wild seas I and my boat is shipwrecked. I shall die in the religion of the cross.” And then when he was on the cross, do you know what he said? Well, he quoted, of course — it was a verse of the Qur’an, and it said: “The one who dies may wish for this terrible test to be over soon, but the one who knows the meaning of death wishes for it to come slowly because it is the moment of truth!” So he was experiencing fana’ of the destruction of his body, and this was at the same time the exaltation of the spirit that is freed from all the travails and limitations of the earth.
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