New Essay for August. Do hope you and your loved one’s ae healthy and happy.
Love and blessings,
Jelal
While peeling an orange for lunch the other day, it came to mind that everything organic appears to have a skin of some kind – a covering that encloses and hides what is inside. Certainly, every fruit and vegetable I could think of has a skin. How about lettuce and radishes? All nuts have a skin called a shell. Trees have bark as their skin. Do leaves have a skin? Earth surely has a skin called dirt and other types of skin that covers an iron core. Naturally us humans have a skin that encloses and protects us. Clothing, too, is a sort of skin, isn’t it? Even houses have a skin – paint, stucco or siding. And this planet also has a skin of sorts called “the atmosphere”, the layers of which hold in the breathable air and protect us from the lethal rays of the sun.
It appears, too, that every organ in our bodies is encapsulated by a skin of some kind, and surely every cell in our body is enclosed in a skin.
Skins enclose and protect the inside of things. They also hide things from our gaze, from our being able to see and understand the internal substance of a thing. In fruit, it is the softer, juicier, flavor and color of a particular fruit. In our cells, their skin hides all the wonder of their intricate parts, and their internal chemistry and functioning. Skins, veils, covering of some kind also differentiate, separate, individuate and make distinct things, both organic and non-organic from each other. Thus, skins create to a great extent the material reality that we perceive and function in.
What of the reality that we perceive through our limited senses of sight, hearing, touch and smell? We certainly do not perceive all that is there before us in this material existence, as all our senses are limited. Too, the Sufi mystic, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan has a saying, “… seeing that which transpires behind that which appears.” So, is there a skin, a veil, over the assumed reality before us as well that hides a grander, meaningful truth? Is this skin a kind of protection that hides a reality that perhaps would sunder all our beliefs and understanding? A protective skin hiding that which would overwhelm our reason and the capacity of our limited brains to fathom and make sense of?
Surely there is a mental skin over our individual, internal thoughts and feelings that is kept hidden from others. For Feud there is also the unconscious, a covering that even hides thoughts and feelings from ourselves that effect our every thought and behavior. Could that be referred to as a skin of some kind. A skin of the mind? And what of our individual words that we express? Are words a kind of skin over our thoughts hiding a more substantive truth, a more in-depth, meaningfulness than the outer simple, words reveal?
Our souls also appear to be veiled in some manner that hide its presence and our awareness of it from most, except for those that believe in its existence, and seek it through spiritual practice.
For the mystic, too, this material plane is a skin, a covering that hides the different other planes of existence. For the Sufi, there is the Jinn and Angelic planes – the planes where the foundation of mind and feeling exist - hidden from us by this skin of material reality, and perhaps many more planes that exist beyond our knowing.
For those who seek the Beloved, a Hadith in the Quran states “God has seventy thousand veils of light and darkness (is covered by); if He were to remove them, the radiant splendors of His Face would burn up whoever (or ‘whatever creature’) was reached by His Gaze.” A multitude of skins, hiding and protecting.
Lastly, how fascinating it is that our very ignorance acts as a cover, a veil, a skin over the true meaningfulness and our understanding of life, love, power, knowledge, happiness, peace… and God.