HAMA DOOST AND HAMA AZ UST

 
Although God is more accessible to ordinary man through the God-men, yet God also reveals Himself in His impersonal aspect, which is beyond name, form and time. Regardless of whether it is to be through His personal or His impersonal aspect, it is necessary that the aspirant seek Him and surrender to Him in love.

When the aspirant contemplates only God without a second there is no room for love for God or longing for God. The individual has the intellectual conviction that he is God.

Yet in order to experience that state in actuality, the aspirant goes through intense concentration or meditation on the thought "I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am neither this nor that. I am God." In exceptional cases the individual may experience through meditation what he has assumed himself to be. This mode of experiencing God is not only difficult but dry.

Progress is more realistic and enjoyable when there is an ample play of love and devotion to God. This postulates temporary and apparent separateness from God and longing to unite with Him. Such provisional and apparent separateness from God is reflected in the Sufi concepts of the states of "Hama az Ust" or "Everything is from God", and "Hama Doost" or "Everything is for the Beloved God."

In each of these concepts the individual perceives that his separateness from God is only temporary and apparent, and he seeks to restore this lost unity with God through intense love, which consumes all duality.

The only difference between these two is that, whereas the individual who follows the concept of "Hama Doost" rests content with the will of God as the Beloved, in the concept of "Hama az Ust" he longs for nothing but union with God.

Since the individualized soul which is in bondage can be redeemed only through divine love, even Perfect Masters who attain complete unity with God and experience Him as the only reality, apparently step into the domain of duality and talk of love, worship and service of God.

Divine love, as sung by Hindu masters like Tukaram, as taught by Christian masters like Saint Francis, as preached by Zoroastrian masters like Azer Kaivan and as immortalized by Sufi masters like Hafiz, harbors no thought of the self at all. It consumes all frailties which nourish the illusion of duality, and ultimately unites the individual with God. The awakening of this divine love in the heart of the aspirant and the cleansing of his being is one of the functions of the God-man and Perfect Masters.