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Divine Encounter

On Becoming an Angel (Imam):
The Path of Love, Illumination,
and Immortality in the Realm of Light

An article by G.A. Lahood

Abstract:
There is a little known, but pervasive tradition at the heart of ancient Persian mysticism, among some Sufi Saints and schools of early Christian Gnosticism, in which the supreme form of Absolute Being manifests as the Presence of an individual, personified, Angel of Revelation. This mystical encounter with the Imam/Angel occurs at the final station on the Path of Love in a luminous living world of light. According to this prophetic tradition the meeting with the divine intelligence of God can only be met through a personified Angelic presence. Each soul possess a celestial twin who is their Perfect Nature in heavenly estate - the task of human beings on this Path of Love is to purify, liberate and unveil the soul so that it may recognize the face of its unique Angel (with which it will eventually identify). This encounter reveals an astonishing relationship, a mysterious bond between human persons and God. It reveals a profoundly relational cosmos in which the world is redeemed as we relate to it as a divine presence and personality. The following article is an account my encounter with Perfect Nature and initiation into this tradition.

The following article is an autobiographical account of my spiritual awakening within this ancient but living tradition at the hands of the mysterious Khider — the Green Angel of Persian mysticism. These encounters have had an inestimable impact of my personhood and spiritual work with people. For many years I kept this charisma mostly to myself as a matter of prudence (and because there were not too many Sufi saints in my neck of the woods) but now, after 22 years of developmental seasoning, I have decided to 'come out' as a disciple of 'The Verdant One'. In my mid 20s, I had been for several years, undergoing a dramatic mystical opening which culminated in an encounter with a being of light (a twin angel or what is called an 'imam') in a luminous dimension seemingly not of this world. The realm is known by Sufi's and Persian mystics as the alam al mithal a living world of light, luminosity and love. For several years, at certain peak moments in my soul's journey, this world would open to me (and I to it through a process of emotional purification) and I would find myself intimately embraced by what the Sufi's call the Perfect Nature.

I will go into the circumstances surrounding this most Holy Vision a bit further on. For now I will speak only of the vision and my encounter with the Divine Twin. The rapture began with a build-up of tension and pain in my body, I felt sick with fear and wanted to vomit. I could not help myself and my body began to writhe and I had to cry out. Now it was as if my mind's eye opened wide, and I beheld a green light spiraling out of my heart and flying into the Sun. The emerald light poured into the Sun, and, as if it were being impregnated, it seemed to swell and grow. At the same time the universe began to beat like a mighty drum or heart accompanied by a silent chant that seemed to roar "death, death, death"! And I felt a deep unstoppable roar answering the chant from within and something like a fire inside of myself as the Holy Flame Awakened from its long slumber. First it was as if my mind became filled with translucent and luminous light but then I was engulfed in a three dimensional vision of brilliance — a great force burst out of the Sun in the shape of a shimmering Dancing Angel of Destruction. 'I' as the Angel wearing a mask of Death leapt out of the Sun to destroy 'my father' (a negative image of my father inside me but also the image of the 'Father God'). I/he had a snake in one hand and a drum in the other and all of me was laid waste by its dance of death and destruction. The awful being trampled 'my father/myself' into dust and oblivion again and again and again until I was all trod out, all trampled underfoot — all gone, quite dead and I felt at once a great sorrow at the death of 'my father' and a great liberation from his painful constrictions. Then I became slowly aware, after the dust had settled, of a great fullness and peace wherein there was no hint of time or space only an Eternity of Black Light, so vast and deep, so silent and pregnant as to defy all description. My poor keyboard can't handle its weight, its lightness, its luminous darkness. Nothing but a breath blowing across the empty face of an endless Ocean of Night — benign, potent and utterly unfathomable. And 'I' was nothing but nothing yet everything in a Void of Voids. And then from far above, a light of such exquisite gentleness descending upon those still, dark waters and I a quivering music — a sweet note never struck on any earthly instrument was taken up in a rainbow of light. I was drawn up the rainbow in the Green Light as a musical note of such pristine delicacy and as I rose in the air I was knew I was Risen ... and as I climbed or was drawn higher and nearer I became as if mad with a blissful ecstasy The heart of hearts was opening with such joy, gratitude, praise, and peace, a million times beyond anything I had known before and then I was in the Garden of Paradise and my most Beautiful Lord was before me lying against a rock looking at me with a Face of such beauty to shatter the mind. And he came toward me my Brother, my Heavenly Twin , My Father, Myself, my Beloved and as we embraced I was released from every prison, of every past and every future. I saw that we were robed in the same cloth — I wore his clothing and he mine. What happened next is unspeakable and may only be shared between myself and another — Face to Face, Eye to Eye, Heart to Heart.

Everything in that world was transmiting to me love, secret knowledge and eternity. I understood as I looked upon the face of the most beautiful form that I was in the presence of the infinite divine; the abundance of creation; the inexhaustible source; the great peace and sufficiency; a feeling of fullness and utter completeness — I was looking at my eternal immortal beloved and I knew it.

Not only did I encounter this radiant being of unspeakable love with its abundance and creation, its plenitudes and beatitudes but in the process I became so utterly transfigured that I became its twin, a perfect image in its likeness and light (as it was mine) in such a way that we appeared to co-creating or multiplying each other. The being then produced a cup and I then sipped from a cup (our lips touching) of immortality, a wondrous wine; a living water; a nectar that promoted an ecstasy so sublime, so utterly unbridled as to be beyond the reach of my poor keyboard. As the chambers of the mystic 'heart' opened wide so did the prophetic visions... there came 'the secrets of the universe' — among the revelations I was given a sacred mission to bring all persons to their own Angel or Perfect Nature (a task in which I have been relatively diligent). I was shown the exact nature of my earthly suffering to come (in which I have participated), shown the future, and finally the connection between human sexuality and spirit — all of which was transmitted in the light of our heavenly laughter. After drinking from that most blessed cup and tasting of the incomprehensible mightiness of cosmic love we walked to the edge of Paradise and looked down upon the world as if from on high and the lustrous Angel that is my celestial self in Heaven turned to me with a kiss and then parting that Absolute, Bliss-Filled Paradise I 'fell' (or rather dove) into being as this world and all its particulars. This was not a dive into the 'vale of tears' or some misbegotten world of illusion but a joyful, lusty embrace of time and space, those powers that enable God to liberate 'itself' into sacred form — The Ocean of Being poured into the drops. The most ineffable or indescribable aspect of the Holy Vision, the most impossible aspect to communicate with any sense of having imparted anything even resembling the event itself was that of 'coming into being' as the world. It were as if a waterfall of translucent pure knowledge cascaded into the many forms each — one the Face of God. The world of light transmuted onto the world mater — the world made meta-Real.That last page of this visionary book was that of a Holy Bird swooping down and across the ocean; effortlessly flying and in the midst of it all I heard a mighty hallelujah lifted up by what seemed to be the Voice of the whole world — rather the whole universe — broken into the Song of Songs. According to some researchers (e.g. Henry Corbin) this tradition is the underlying mystical reality of the Abrahamic Traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Christ, Muhammad, Elijah, among others, have participated in this same trans-historical, trans-temporal and event; in which they encountered their own version of Twin Soul — The Name of God, our heavenly counterpart, which in turn reveals the cosmos as a sacred dualitude (something different to — but encompassing non-duality). When I looked into the Face of the resplendent Angel in the Garden of Light — that most beautiful and bounteous of visions, I saw in its radiance something hard to describe — multiple Angelic Faces. I felt Christ, Mohamed, Elijah were together in the shimmering Face of the Beloved — I saw myself with them looking back at me with the love that all my life I had both yearned for (and yet paradoxially recognized as already known, already mine) — I was now an Eternal inhabitant of the Garden of Light — I had become, in my turn, the Angel/Person Khider. This vision does not arrest itself in monistic transcendentalism or merging with 'the one' nor should it be conflated with those spiritual movements that are about doing away with the ego and losing personhood (here the ego is flooded with divine energy and becomes servant to spirit) rather it reveals itself also simultaneously as the living world immanent spirit — the green angel of our worlds — sometimes called the Green Man. God, being alone, transmutes into the flesh so that when we finally awaken and behold spirit's most Beautiful Face, it is with divine eyes, we hear manifest spirit with divine ears and we touch with a divine body. The senses are not left out in this mysticism they are transfigured and the sensuous world is revealed as the Angel — not illusion or Maya nor emptiness but the archetypal Person, the sacred Friend, the world as Angel.