Four Years Old
Muhammad ibn Wasi‘ said: 'I never saw anything without seeing God therein,' i.e. through perfect faith. Shibli said: 'I never saw anything except God,' i.e. in the rapture of love and the fervor of contemplation.
One mystic sees the act with his bodily eye, and, as he looks, beholds the Agent with his spiritual eye; another is rapt by love of the Agent from all things else, so that he sees only the Agent. The one method is demonstrative, the other is ecstatic. In the former case, a manifest proof is derived from the evidences of God; in the latter case, the seer is enraptured and transported by desire: evidences are a veil to him, because he who knows a thing does not care for aught besides, and he who loves a thing does not regard aught besides, but renounces contention with God and interference with Him in His decrees and acts.
When the lover turns his eye away from created things, he will inevitably see the Creator with his heart. God hath said, 'Tell the believers to close their eyes' (Kor. 24.30), i.e. to close their bodily eyes to lusts and their spiritual eyes to created things. He who is most sincere in self-mortification is most firmly grounded in contemplation.
Sahl ibn ‘Abdallah of Tustar said: 'If any one shuts his eye to God for a single moment, he will never be rightly guided all his life long,' because to regard other than God is to be handed over to other than God, and one who is left at the mercy of other than God is lost. Therefore the life of contemplatives is the time during which they enjoy contemplation; time spent in ocular vision they do not reckon as life, for that to them is really death.
Thus, when Bayazid was asked how old he was, he replied, 'Four years.' They said to him, 'How can that be?' He answered, 'I have been veiled from God by this world for seventy years, but I have seen Him during the last four years: the period in which one is veiled does not belong to one's life.'"
R. A. Nicholson - The Mystics Of Islam
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