Your mind can dissect the entire universe — and still never lay a finger on the one who made it. That paradox sits at the heart of this part. Continuing through Shabestari’s Garden of The Secret, we pick up the second great question: which kind of thinking actually leads somewhere? We’ll sit with the strange idea of “Nothingness,” and cut through a lot of the nonsense floating around about chakras and the third eye.
Let’s read the poems where the questioner asks the Master about the nature of thought, then hear Shabestari’s answer in verse, followed by my explanation. You’ll notice I’ve touched on some of these ideas in earlier parts, so you’ll be more ready to take them in now.
Question 2
What kind of thought will lead us to the ultimate Why some thoughts are considered Virtue and some Sin
Answer 2
To dwell in thought on His bounties is the law of the path, but to think your way into the Essence of God is pure sin. All thought concerning the Divine Essence is in vain; To seek to grasp It is to pursue the impossible. His Essence has made Its signs resplendent, Yet His Essence is never made manifest by Its signs. The whole universe shines by His Light— How then could He become known through the universe? The Light of His Essence cannot be confined in forms, For the splendor of His Majesty overpowers every veil. Let go of reason and abide with the Real; The bat's eye cannot endure the blazing sun. Where the Light of Truth alone is the guide, What room remains even for Gabriel's discourse? Though the angel stands near the Divine Presence, He cannot enter the state of "It’s truly all God." If His Light would utterly consume an angel, How much more would it burn away all of reason? The light of intellect before that radiant Essence Is like the eye before the fountain of the sun. When what is seen draws infinitely near, The eye grows dark, unable to perceive it. If you understand, this darkness is the Light of His Essence; Within that darkness flows the Water of Life. Darkness is nothing but the grasping of the eye's own light. Abandon your gaze—for this is no realm for seeing. What kinship has dust with the world of Pure Being? To know is only to know the failure of knowing. What can I say? This mystery is exceedingly subtle: A luminous night within the darkness of day. In this sanctuary where the Lights of Divine Manifestation shine, I have words to speak—but silence is the better way.
Now let’s dive deeper into all of this.
The thinking process can be used to analyze mundane things — to analyze the creation. But thinking cannot grasp the Creator. Thinking about the source of creation is useless. Rumi once said, “Don’t use thinking to understand the creator of thinking!”
The creation is illuminated by the source; the source cannot be illuminated by the creation.
It is His light that illuminates the world — how can the world illuminate Him?
He says: in the state where the divine light illuminates everything, and one sees everything through that light, what need is there for logic? What need is there for an Angel to bring you a message?
Logic is great for understanding the creation, but when you go beyond material creation, logic is useless.
And although the Angels are close to the source (God), they are incapable of realizing God in their own nature the way man can. This is what the poem meant a few lines above: if that Light would burn away even an angel’s wings, it would burn the whole of human reason from head to toe.
The spiritual realm is, in one way, like absolute darkness — how can you see with mundane eyes in the spiritual realm? But that very same darkness is the light of God. To the intellect it is darkness, because the intellect cannot see anything in that dimension.
Again, this is related to that very famous concept of “Nothingness” that we discussed in the earlier parts. Since the spirit realm — Consciousness, or God — is beyond definition and beyond anything that could be used to explain it, and since human eyes cannot see it, it is like absolute darkness, or nothingness, to man.
Since it is the source of creation, it’s called nothingness — because, as many spiritual traditions and religions state, only from nothing can all things come. The manifested creation has come out of something that is not a thing! It’s zero. Everything has come out of zero. And zero is not really nothing — it is the most powerful thing of all, because it is the absolute source of everything!
If you pay close attention, you’ll see that Lao Tzu meant this very same thing when he said, in the Tao Te Ching:
“The Tao gave birth to the One. The One gave birth to the Two. The Two gave birth to the Three. The Three gave birth to the ten thousand things.”
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
This is the same philosophy explained in Hindu cosmology, especially when you study traditions like Kashmir Shaivism. And it takes deep study and contemplation to grasp its deeper meaning.
The limitation of the human intellect
Clearly, all the great masters remind us that we cannot see the ultimate truth the same way we see material things; we cannot use our limited logic to realize the absolute. It is important that everyone understands the limitation of the human intellect. Otherwise, people believe that because they don’t see something, or can’t find the proof they’re looking for, it doesn’t exist.
If you are honest with yourself, just think about this: with thousands of years of medicine behind us, we’re at a point where a person goes to medical school for years just to learn some basics of how the human body works — and even then, that one person only becomes a specialist in a certain part of the body. Someone becomes an orthopedic doctor; then, within that, people specialize even further into one part of the skeleton — a spine expert, say. And with all of that, we still don’t know how to fix many major defects in the human body!
Think about it. Hundreds of specialists are needed just to address the issues of the human body, and still, after thousands of years, we haven’t been able to prevent or fix a very large number of health problems. Millions of people have striven throughout history to understand the physical body; we decided that hundreds of kinds of physicians are needed to look after it — and still, what we know is less than 1% of it.
One person couldn’t even grasp a small part of that 1%. Millions of minds worked together to build it. And if something physical took millions of people and thousands of years just to explain less than 1% of it, isn’t it arrogant to think we already know how the whole universe works — and to reject the things we can’t explain?
We have to come to terms with this: the intellect is a very limited tool for experiencing and understanding the higher, subtler aspects of the universe.
Shabestari continues the poem by saying:
If you want to see the source of light, you will need a different body The eyes on your head can't see the Sun, so you look at its reflection on the water
When he says the eyes on the head can only see the reflection on the water, he means that one’s limited intellect is only able to analyze and think about the qualities of the Divine — the things that masters and scriptures have tried to explain in a very limited way.
In a more mystical way, he is saying that physical eyes are incapable of seeing the spiritual dimension. And when he says you need another body, he might also be pointing to the third eye — also known as the sixth chakra — a very well-known concept described in many spiritual traditions. But please ignore most of what you read on the internet about chakras and the third eye; most of it is heavily polluted information.
An open third eye doesn’t mean you can see ghosts! What it really means, on the higher levels, is seeing and realizing the truth. Your two eyes can only see duality; to see things as One, you need that single eye.
Jesus said the very same thing in his own words: “The light of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light.” That single eye is the same one Shabestari is pointing at.
Now, don’t go and start reading books on how to open your third eye. Most of them are written by people who have very little understanding of the chakras themselves, and many are just fairy tales dressed up to sell their writing. Opening the third eye really means achieving a higher perception.
A few more words on the teachings out there about chakras — and why this is exactly where the discernment we talked about earlier in this series matters so much.
There is an enormous amount of misinformation floating around about chakras, kundalini, and the third eye. I don’t say this to be harsh, but because I’ve watched it mislead sincere, well-meaning people. These are subtle, sacred subjects, and it often takes years of genuine study and practice before you can even begin to see how far off much of the popular material really is.
They say what you don’t know can hurt you — but in my experience, what you think you know, when it is wrong, can hurt you far more. Half-understood ideas about kundalini and the third eye are not harmless; taken the wrong way, they can affect your health, your peace of mind, and your inner growth.
So if these subjects call to you, give them the seriousness they deserve. Go to the source: the original root texts and scriptures where these ideas first appeared, and the living teachings of authentic Gurus who stand in a real lineage — rather than a self-appointed teacher with a big following on social media. Not everyone who teaches these things has actually walked the path themselves.
The intellect, then, has a ceiling. It can point toward God, but it can never arrive. And the moment you stop trying to think your way there, something opens — and that’s exactly where we go next: the vision of everything as One, and the most breathtaking line in the whole book, the universe became man, and man became universe.
📖 Read the Full Series: Garden of The Secret
Introduction · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4 · Part 5 – Thought · Part 6 – The Right Thought · Part 7 – The Universe Became Man · Part 8 – Who am I?