Ghalib on Love ...
Third in our series of mystical poetry from across the Hindu, Sufi, and Muslim traditions is Ghalib, an Agra-born poet who began writing classical poetry at age 11, composing work in both Urdu and Persian. He lived from 1797 to 1869 during the decline of the Mughal Empire, only a few centuries removed from the present. Continuing our excursion into the love poems of Indic poets, much of Ghalib's poetry also revolves around the theme of mystic love.
Indeed, for Ghalib, what lies hidden and veiled is a primordial love without beginning nor end. Showing both Sufi tendencies as well as Islamic influence, Ghalib cultivated a refined understanding of God's innateness within himself. Similar to Sanai's belief in an infinite inner force, Ghalib also felt that God is a divine power not separate from us, but arises from within our own consciousness as a reflection of our inherent (though often untapped) wellspring of love and compassion.
Here we inquire along with Ghalib, whose poetry asks us: how do we manifest love despite the challenges it poses?
My Religion is Breaking Rules
I believe in one God only; and my religion is breaking rules: (48)
When all sects go to pieces, they’ll become one part of true religion. (48)
Much like Kabir and Sanai who were similarly influenced by Hindu and Muslim teachings yet consciously broke free from established religion, Ghalib was also an independent thinker unbound by the trappings of religious norms and rituals. Knowing religion can be a binding force, Ghalib drew inspiration from those in religious circles yet held himself free from the regimented rules that restricted and constrained much of society.
When one blindly follows traditional practices without understanding the universal principles behind them, this only confines the practitioner to dogmatic religious ideologies, including a rote, abstract concept of love divorced from direct experience. Ghalib frames his religion with the reflection "my religion is breaking rules," believing that such rules stood in the way between man and God, obstructing their union.
Rather than submit to such rules as a means toward union with God, Ghalib remained a skeptic. He felt that union with God could be found not through rote performance of ritual obeisance, but through the wholehearted expression of boundless love for the infinite that is God himself.
Challenges of Love
Such reflections inspired Ghalib to chart his own path of love while grounding himself in a purposeful lived experience. However, such an undertaking by no means unfurled in perfect ease and comfort. In fact, Ghalib’s poems often reflect the painstaking, heart-breaking challenges of love. In the pursuit of his beloved, Ghalib is often at a complete and utter loss. He nevertheless endures the challenges of love, believing that to live out his full potential, he must transform and transcend his self-centeredness. In one poem, he writes:
The blood of my heart has not completely exited through my eyes. O death, let me stay a whole, the work we have is abundant enough. (43)
Given his plea to be spared from death in order to complete and fulfill the expression of his heart's yearnings, Ghalib appears to have unfinished business. Perhaps the poet has not yet exhausted his blood and vital energy into his work. Implied here is the poet’s unencumbered striving to remain in union with his beloved. The path of love requires one to exhaust one’s life breath into the object of desire, which for Ghalib is Allah, God.
Pursuit of the Beloved
Despite his committed, unrelenting pursuit of the beloved, Ghalib consistently faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, he reflects that the path of love is a training ground of sorts for one’s determination, capacity for experimentation, and response to failures.
She has a habit of torture, but doesn’t mean to end the love.
Such oppression is only teasing; we don’t imagine it as a test. (33)
To truly engage and understand such torture and teasing, one must come to embrace that the path is full of obstacles and that such obstacles are no less the path than moments of ecstatic union with the infinite, divine principle. Yet if one pushes too hard against such obstacles or feels it necessary to subject oneself to pain, such pressure can keep one from the goal. For instance, Ghalib writes:
God, I want to know why my desires bring the opposite effect.
The more I try to attract the Great One, the farther away she moves. (37)
Clearly the poet’s love affair is not a case of utter bliss. The beloved or Allah, depicted in feminine form, does not show Ghalib what we typically perceive as loving compassion, but rather, an abrasive dynamic insofar as She retreats from the mind that seeks for something to attain. For Ghalib, Allah by definition is "nothingness," ungraspable and thus unattainable. Despite knowing this, Ghalib continues to pursue Her.
During his pursuit of the beloved, Ghalib reflects that love’s full emergence and consummation requires immense patience:
Love requires waiting, but desire doesn’t want to wait.
The heart has no patience; it would rather bleed to death. (15)
Such patience is a theme he gives ample time and space for reflection.
The spiritual seekers are tired, two or three at each stage of the path.
The rest—who have given up—never knew your address at all. (35)
Only those who have patience will emerge out of their repeated failures and struggles and unravel the secrets of unity, reflects Ghalib.
Macrocosmic and Microcosmic
Ultimately, Ghalib reminds us that we are not separate from everything else, but intimately part of a dynamic process, deeply interrelated with the entire cosmos. Separation or duality is a consequence of ignorance:
If you can’t see the Ganges in a drop and the planet in a grain of sand,
Then your eyes are not adult but the eyes of infants. (31)
The drop grows happy by losing itself in the river.
A pain when beyond human range becomes something else. (45)
In these two couplets, we find images of the macrocosmic and microcosmic seamlessly intermingling. In a single drop can be seen the entire Ganges, while in but one grain of sand the planet spins. By becoming indistinguishable from the river, the droplet is fulfilled, consummated, restored to the innate wholeness it never, in actuality, lacked.
Such reflections imply that perhaps the solitary, separate, selfish ego that perceives itself always in contrast is the ultimate enemy to be vanquished in order for divine love to be sustained. To manifest love, Ghalib demands that the heart must be broken wide-open. Only then may the infinite pour in.
If your heart is still in one piece, cut your chest with a dagger.
If eyelashes are not soaked with blood, put a knife in your heart. (33)
While such imagery is certainly intense, it conveys the painstaking efforts Ghalib invested into reunion with his beloved. As we open our hearts, we gradually empty out the egoic self responsible for erecting prison-like boundaries, thereby limiting our freedom. Similar to Kabir who probed the tendency toward self-centeredness, Ghalib also highlights that our individual, mundane existence symbolically manifests its limitations in the form of playthings with little control over their destinies, guided instead by forces unbeknownst to it.
The world I see looks to me like a game of children.
Strange performances and plays go on night and day. (22)
Unable to see the futility of our grasping immaturity, we become part of a performance or play, enacting every petty thought that arises, not realizing them to be figments of our mind, games of our own creation. Our energy becomes scattered as we follow habituations unquestioningly rather than carefully observing the mind's activity. Thus is our conditioning:
The horse of life is galloping; we’ll never know the stopping place.
Our hands are not touching the reins, nor our feet the stirrups. (19)
In this sense, we lose the goal and life grows meaningless. However, taking back the reins, we have full control of the direction of our mind, thus opening the space for love to manifest. Therefore, resembling the approach of Kabir and Sanai, Ghalib emphasizes that the finite, limited self must die in order to become aware of its undifferentiated essence. He states that death is the cure to the terrible danger of existence:
Oh Ghalib, the sorrows of existence, what can cure them but death? (15)
Death inclines the lover towards everlasting union with the beloved. God is the only purpose that gives him a way out of his deadened, woeful state.
When I see God, color comes into my cheeks. (14)
Reconnection with the loved one (Allah) brings one back to life, which constitutes the very essence of humanity.
Coming Full Circle
Coming full circle, the whole journey towards God brings Ghalib back to the loving, nurturing womb-like vessel of God, from which we emerge and to which we return by following the footsteps of love. Thus, love is not a place to go but a process of continuous unfolding of one’s heart, the embodiment of devotion. The capacity to transform our habit energies based on the embodiment of love lies within the potential for witnessing something greater and bigger.
For the Sufi poets, union with God is the transcendent destination, but most importantly, the dynamic process of love is what kept them deeply interconnected, embodied, and committed to witnessing the unwavering love that lies hidden. Without subject or object, there is no existence and no separate identity, only pure love.
Thus the bond of love is the creative power, the womb of life that binds and holds the wholeness of creation together. In other words, it is the primordial glue that allows for the cohesion of the cosmos, the dynamic dance of unity.
The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib. Ecco Press, 1999.
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