208 No god but God
Of the thousands of birds who began the journey with the
hoopoe, only thirty make it to the end. With “hopeless hearts and tat-
tered, trailing wings,” these thirty birds are led into the presence of
the Simurgh. Yet when they finally set their eyes upon him, they are
astonished to see not the King of Birds they had expected, but rather
themselves. Simurgh is the Persian word for “thirty birds”; and it is
here, at the end of the Way, that the birds are confronted with the
reality that although they have “struggled, wandered, traveled far,” it
is “themselves they sought” and “themselves they are.” “I am the mir-
ror set before your eyes,” the Simurgh says. “And all who come before
my splendor see / Themselves, their own unique reality.”
Attar was a Sufi master who developed through his poetry and teach-
ings the concept of “spiritual alchemy,” in which the soul was treated
like a transmutable base metal that must be rid of impurities before it
can be restored to its original, pristine—one could say golden—state.
Like most Sufis, Attar considered all souls to be receptacles for God’s
message. At the same time, he believed there exist varying degrees of
receptivity in every individual depending on where he or she is on
t h e Wa y.
During the first stages of the Way (where the great majority of
humanity find themselves), the nafs, which is the self, the ego, the psy-
che, the “I”—however one chooses to define the “sum of individual
egocentric tendencies”—remains the sole reality. As the disciple
moves along the Way, he encounters the ruh, or Universal Spirit. The
Quran refers to the ruh as “the breath of God” blown into Adam to
give life to his body (15:29). In this sense, the ruh is equated with the
divine, eternal, animating spirit that permeates creation—that is itself
the essence of creation. The ruh is Pure Being. It is that which Hindus
call prana and Taoists call ch’i; it is the ethereal force underlying
the universe that Christian mystics refer to when they speak of the
Holy Spirit.
In traditional Sufi doctrine, the ruh is locked in an eternal battle
with the nafs for possession of the heart—the qalb—which is not the
seat of emotion (emotions, in most Muslim cultures, reside in the
belly), but rather the vital center of human existence—“the seat of an
essence that transcends individual form,” in the words of Titus Burck-