SOUND, SIGHT AND SMELL

 
Our physical organs of hearing, seeing and smelling are useless for experiencing and enjoying the higher planes. Therein it is a different eye that sees, a different ear that hears, and a different nose that smells. You know already that there are inner senses, a counterpart of the external senses in man, and it is the former that experiences the higher planes.

Avoiding the mistake of likening the sound of the higher planes as something differing in intensity and frequency of vibrations to the sound of the physical plane, know it for certainty that there is actually what may be called "sound" in the first three planes. The form, beauty, music and bliss of this sound is beyond description.

The nad or celestial music (sound) is peculiar to the first plane and can be experienced or induced by the mantric force. It is on account of this that even an unintelligent repetition or reading of scriptures is encouraged and advocated.... Although there is sound in all the seven planes, it is smell that is peculiar to the second and third planes; and sight belongs to the fifth and sixth planes.

In the fourth plane the bliss of sound, smell and sight are all subdued and repressed. The fourth plane connotes the darkest night of the spiritual journey wherein even Jesus could not but cry out: "My God, My God, why has Thou forsaken me?" It is for this reason the wayfarer traversing the Path all alone, unaided by a master, finding himself benighted and forlorn in the fourth plane, is very strongly tempted to make wrong use of his psychic powers of the three lower planes, culminating in the fourth as "siddhis" (kashf-o-karmat). And what a fall this means! It means once again going through the chain of evolution right from the beginning — the stone state.

The seventh plane stands unique. The sound, sight and smell here is divine in essence and has no comparison to that emanating from the lower planes. In this plane one does not hear, smell or see, but becomes sound, smell and sight simultaneously and is divinely conscious about it.

The different religious practices and the yogas, after establishing contact with the higher planes, induce experiences peculiar to those planes. For instance, contacting the first plane (sound) engenders inspiration; the second and third planes (smell) begets intuition; the fifth and sixth (sight) gives illumination. The experience of the fifth and sixth, the Sufis term as "maarefat" (gnosis). The seventh plane stand for revelation and this, according to Sufis, is "Haqiqat" (Reality).