From Our Soul to the Horizon of Self

Affirmation Through Self-Annihilation in Hazrat Ali Hajveri's Unveiling the Veiled

Abstract

This research aims to look at the two macro concepts of affirmation and annihilation with reference to Hazrat Ali Hajveri’s Unveiling the Veiled (Kashf ul Mahjub). The basic purpose of the research is to have a glimpse on the subject of sacred psychology in relation to the meaning of existence, inter connecting it to the journey of self-affirmation through self-annihilation. Hazrat Ali Hajveri r.a. unveils the mystery of human self while explicating the hierarchy of the universe, the function of man, his faculties and his qualities, his art and his final ends that is paralleled with his journey towards his own ‘Self’. The sacred psychology unravels the cosmological order as defined like the separation, the distance and the meeting which is closely knitted to the ‘Self’ of human being. Hajveri r.a. has explained the various paradigms of the affirmation that is further presented by the perspective of the finite measure of ‘nafs’, ‘negative attributes’, ‘negative entity’, and to present the ways that how a human being should strip his sub human excrescences and the negation of the ‘nafs’ leading to the affirmation of ‘Self’, ‘the affirmation of the soul’, the positive attributes which will help a traveler to embark upon the journey towards the infinite, the Ultimate Reality. The central theme of the text of the Unveiling the Veiled is man and in present study, the chapter titled as annihilation and affirmation will be centralized. It will also consider the debates of various mystics with reference to the annihilation and the affirmation.