Remember the immortal number, ‘Hum bekhudi mein tum ko pukare chale gaye,’ sung by Mohammad Rafi from the Hindi film ‘Kala Pani’. No human emotion is confined to a specific belief system or idea. If turiya awastha, ultimate blissful existence, exists in oriental mysticism, bekhudi, a state of self-immersion, exists in Islamic tasawwuf, adhyatm, spirituality.
So, what is bekhudi, transcendental ecstasy?
Read Iqbal’s ‘Rumuz-e-Bekhudi’ – The Secrets of Selflessness, and ‘Asraar-e-Khudi’ – The Secrets of the Self, translated from Persian by the British scholar of Arabic and Persian, A J Arberry, who clubbed both the volumes under the title ‘Asraar-o-Rumuz’.
Allama Iqbal writes, ‘Bekhudi is an experience that cannot be described in words. A seeker has to go through bekhudi to comprehend it in a holistic manner,’ as they say in Urdu: ‘Vajood shagufta hota hai baad-e-bekhudi’ – existence blossoms after the state of self-immersion.
Bekhudi is contemplative bliss, a meditative ecstasy when all search ends. The very enquiry into what is bekhudi will open the door to bekhudi. The enquiry doesn’t lie outside of the mind, but within the movement of the mind itself. In pursuing that enquiry, what becomes all-important is to understand the seeker himself and not what he seeks. What he seeks is the projection of his own craving, of his own compulsions, desires. Then all searching ceases, which in itself is enormously significant. Then the mind is no longer grasping at something beyond itself, there is no outward movement; but when seeking has entirely stopped, there is a movement of the mind that is neither outward nor inward.
Seeking does not come to an end by any act of will, or by a complex process of conclusions. To stop, seeking demands great understanding. The ending of search is the beginning of a still mind. And a still mind is like a Tabula Rasa, Latin for a clean slate, anything can be written on it and can also be expunged whenever one wants to wipe it out, for, only a clean mind has no ripples and is most receptive as well as contemplative. Otherwise, the mind is perpetually in turmoil.
When the mind is absolutely free of turmoil, bliss enters tip-toeing, subsuming, and suffusing the whole existence. One plunges into the ocean of trance called bekhudi.
Urdu poet and lyricist Shakeel Badayuni says, ‘Vajood uss maqaam pe aa pahuncha hai/ Nahin jahaan gham-o-khushi ka andaaza hai’ – The existence has reached that point/ When pain and pleasure lose their significance. He simplified this idea in a famous one-liner in an immortal song, ‘Aaj purani raahon se koi mujhe aawaaz na de’, that has assumed the form of a proverb, ‘Pahuncha hoon wahan nahin door jahan, bhagwan bhi meri nigahon se’, film: Aadmi.
Jalaluddin Rumi defines bekhudi in Ottoman Turkish mixed with Tazaki, ‘Azkaan et loi gin shaad mad fin/ Ba gal fee aan meen az’ kin’ – When the seeker and seeking are one/ Mind finds its destination. That destination is bekhudi, when self is not lost but willingly abnegated by the seeker in preference to a state of pre-civilisational silence, when tranquillity existed unalloyed and unadulterated.
Authored by: Sumit Paul
