How, then, does this strong, separate individuality gradually vanish in the mist? Whence emerges the mystic identification of the divine and the human? Whence the commingling of the One and the Manifold? Whence the Ana al-Haqq of Mansur? Whence the world-soul-am-I of Jalal-ud-din? The latter-day speculations of the old Sufistic theosophy have embodied such foreign concepts of an undifferentiated and impersonal unity, that some even compare the Truth (Haqq) of Persian mysticism to the Sat of the Upanishads; and no wonder, for what is Ana al-Haqq if not an echo, a clear and distinct, though distant, echo of the following words of Shri Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita:—
“Victory I am and Action! and the goodness of the good,
And Vasudeva of Vrishni’s race, and of this Pandu brood
Thyself, yea my Arjuna, thyself; for thou art Mine!”
To the staunch followers of Islam these notes may seem quite out of tune, but to the students of Sufistic lore they simply make one music with their choice melodies. There is in both the systems the same idea of emanation, the same idea of immanence, of incarnation, one might say, though not of re-incarnation, the same identification of the worshipper and the worshipped and the same ultimate absorption. Further, in both Indian and Persian mysticism, besides the I and the non-I we trace a third postulate of existence synthesising both by being in and outside both. Hard it may be to conceive this primal unity, harder still to reconcile it with the idea of separateness that seems to permeate both the systems simultaneously with the idea of oneness. Yet these are the words of Shri Krishna:—“I, who am all, and made it all, abide its separate Lord.” What is true knowledge? Says Shri Krishna in the Bhagavd-Gita:
To see one changeless life in all the lives,
And in the separate one Inseparable.”