Within us, there is this deep-seated wisdom that will be revealed whenever we let the inner sage speak its words. Unfortunately, within the chaotic echoes from the world that we live in, we often neglect our inner sage. This article aims to raise our awareness and understanding of this issue.
The various ladies celebrated by the poets attached to the mysterious organization of the Fedeli d’Amore, from Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, and their contemporaries, to Boccaccio and Petrarch, are not women who actually lived on this earth but are all under different names, one and the same symbolic Lady who represents transcendent Intelligence or Divine Wisdom.
Rene Guenon, The Secret Language of Dante
Path to the Inner Sage
There are several paths in esoterism, which many have chosen to reveal our inner knowing. Whatever the path is, that is the path to our truth. We all have this deep tunnel to hear our inner knowing. Some may say it as conscience, while the mystics may call it Divine Wisdom.
This Inner Sage is a subtle voice within that knows what’s true to ourselves. Yet, the voices from the world’s echo within may confuse us on deciding what’s true to us. To clear our inner world from the echoes of the world, we need to have inner stillness.
Then a question arises: which one will we gain first, the ability to listen to our inner sage or the inner stillness? Frankly, living in this era, to aim the inner stillness or to hear our inner sage may not be the goal in life. Many will raise their eyes when we talk about the inner world. But since you’re reading this article, I assume the concept of accessing our inner sage has caught your interest.
To clear our path of understanding, I will try to lightly explain the path to Inner Knowing from Islamic mysticism through the lens of Sufism. I try to respect the transcendent meaning of Sufism nowadays that has become more generalised as religious mysticism. Yet I am one of those who view Sufism as the Islamic tradition of Ma’rifa or Irfan (the knowledge from God).
The Sufi needs to follow the Syariah, and then the smaller path that few can access, Tariqa, and then Haqiqa, the essence, before the Ma’rifa. It’s important to understand that Ma’rifa is not knowledge that can be learnt (Ilm). It is not from the rationality of the intellect (Aql) either. Ma’rifa is a love gift from Allah the Almighty. There’s no guarantee that we will achieve that.
However, when we choose to travel the path, it is possible for us to get in touch with our inner sage. We need to do what Sufis do by following the syariah and doing the purification of the nafs and the heart. By doing so, we are hoping that Allah will bless us and enlighten our qalb. Hence, Sufism is one of the pathways to clearing the echoes of this noisy world in the hope that we are able to reach our inner sage.
Journaling and Writing
Another way to access our inner sage is through meditation and breath work. For those who want to silence the echoes, they may try to put meditation in their daily schedule. Moreover, try to journal and write your inner experience while meditating. This also helps distinguish the inner voice from the echoes.
By writing, we can read our thoughts and feelings. In this way, we can’read’ our inner sage. Hence, it’s also important to have a deep-seated faith that we all have this inner sage and we all have access to it. And our inner knowing also wants to be heard since deep down inside we want to find and need truth in our lives.
“What you are seeking is also seeking you.”
Rumi
Intuition, and the Inner Sage
When we talk about this inner knowing, perhaps some of us are already familiar with our intuition. A word that may have different meanings to different people. From Jungian perspective and also socionics, intuition is a cognitive function. It is one of the perceiving functions that informs us about the event or even life itself. But for some people, intuition is being interpreted as a gut feeling. Though our gut instinct/feeling may work as our intelligence and send an alarm to our brain when we face danger, still that is not intuition from a cognitive perspective. But we can’t deny that our gut feeling is also a door to our inner knowing.
From intuition and gut feeling, we can understand that both are the door to our inner knowing. By having that understanding, we now need to listen to both of them. We need to respond positively to them even when they try to let us know things that we don’t want to hear. Opening the door of communication with our inner sage also means giving our full ears and attention.
Knowledge comes from learning, cognition from instruction. Cognition comes from instruction by God, knowledge from instruction by one’s fellow men. And the results are what might be expected.
Abū Abdurrahmān Muḥammad al-Sulamī
