In a world threatened by religious wars, depleting natural resources, a crumbling ecosystem, and alienation and isolation, what has happened to our humanity? Who are we and what are we doing here? The Sufi path offers a journey toward truth, to a knowledge that transcends our mundane concerns, selfish desires, and fears. We find a wisdom that brings peace and a relationship with God that nurtures the best in us and in others. Universal or Perfect Man (al-insān al-Kāmil) is the prototype of both the microcosm and the macrocosm, the human being and the cosmos. This is to say that Universal or Perfect Man is “the perfect human model who has attained all the possibilities inherent in the human state.” For Universal or Perfect Man the misidentification with the empirical ego has relinquished itself, “the human ego with which most men identify themselves is no more than his outer shell”. The need for consciousness to be in ceaseless contemplation of the Real in order to remedy the forgetfulness of the Divine: “the maintenance of the world depends on the balance between the contemplative who has realized the state of Universal Man, and fallen man, who lives in a state of forgetfulness.” The theomorphic identity of all human beings is the Universal or Perfect Man as Rūmī instructs: The owner of the Heart [Universal or Perfect Man] becomes a six-faced mirror: through him God looks upon (all) the six directions. Whosoever hath his dwelling place in (the world of) the six directions, God doth not look upon him except through the mediation of him (the owner of the Heart)…. Without him God does not bestow bounty on any one. Rūmī reminds readers that the original function of every human being is to be the Universal or Perfect Man in order to act as a channel of grace in the world. In fact, not to do so, is to forfeit what it means to be human:
There is one thing in this world which must never be forgotten. If you were to forget everything else, but did not forget that, then there would be no cause to worry; whereas if you performed and remembered and did not forget every single thing, but forgot that one thing, then you would have done nothing whatsoever.
The saints and sages of the world’s religions remind the human collectivity of his or her original or theomorphic nature and provide methods of realizing this transpersonal identity: In the composition of man all sciences were originally commingled, so that his spirit might show forth all hidden things, as limpid water shows forth all that is under it—pebbles, broken shards, and the like—and all that is above it, reflecting in the substance of the water. Such is its nature, without treatment or training. But when it was mingled with earth or other colors [when Adam fell], that property and that knowledge was parted from it and forgotten by it. Then God most High sent forth prophets and saints, like a great, limpid water such as delivers out of darkness and accidental coloration every mean and dark water that enters into it. Then it remembers; when the soul of man sees itself unsullied, it knows for sure that so it was in the beginning, pure, and it knows that those shadows and colors were mere accidents.
