What is love? [Even] if you love, it is very difficult to define that love. Then just imagine how impossible it is to define infinite love! Vedanta says that the sun and the fiery planets are merely the seventh shadow of that Light, which is God. A shadow itself is nothing. Therefore, the seventh shadow of that shadow means not even nothing.
God's Voice is not what we use when we speak. Imagine God as this Voice — they call it voice merely to try to explain it. Vedantists cannot explain it. Sufis explain it differently — not as shadow but as a "veil." They describe it like this: Say that you are God. You look into a mirror. What you first see in the mirror is on the sixth plane (the first reflection). Then, you see the reflection behind a veil in the mirror and that is on the fifth plane (the second reflection). The reflection behind another veil, behind the first veil, is on the fourth plane (the third reflection), and so on; veil after veil until the seventh. These are the "seven veils."
Continuing, Baba spelled out from the alphabet board, which Mani read:
Take another example: Say consciousness is God. You, Elizabeth, are conscious of holding Kippy in your lap. Then you imagine you have a tiger in your lap. This imagination is the first shadow of this consciousness. Then comes the shadow of this shadow, the sixth plane, and so on.
Another example: In India, they make bells by hand, not by machinery. First, they mold a bell of earth, then pour melted metal on top, and make a metal bell. After the process is over, they remove the earthen bell. Now, this earthen bell is the first shadow of the real bell. Although it is the exact replica of the real bell, it is only earth and cannot ring. Therefore, if the difference between the bell and its first shadow (earthen bell) is so vast, what must the seventh shadow be? Just nothing!
If in the first shadow there is no metal, but earth, what would they find in the seventh shadow? I who explain this more clearly than anyone in the world; even I cannot explain clearly enough in words!
Once a man who never had a headache went to a hakim [unani doctor], and asked him, "What is a headache?"1
Footnotes
- 1.Unani is the traditional herbal medical system of Muslims.