Rule 24: We are Human and Divine

The human being has a unique place amongst God’s creation. “I breathed into him of My Spirit,” God says. Each and every one of us without exception is designed to be God’s delegate on earth. Ask yourself, just how often do you behave like a delegate, if you ever do so? Remember, it falls upon each of us to discover the divine spirit inside and live by it.   

We know the text from the bible where God inhales life to Adam. So the breath serves as transmitter of life force on the beginning of creation. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Gen2) The mystery of life is the same as the mystery of breath. As every human being starts its own life just after birth with a breath, breathing stands in the beginning of the whole of human life.

The bible makes a difference between the beginning of humans and all other acts of creation, by this signifying the uniqueness of humans; he must be respired to be able to live, meaning that he has to take in what has been inhaled into him, must make it his own and let it out after that. This is how the process of human life starts as a process of exchange and metabolism, as communicative process.

In the tradition of the Islam it says even more that at the initial creation of man God had breathed of his spirit into man. This underlines an even more intimate connection between God and humans: God gives to man not just life but also spirit. So we are creation not only in the sense of a sentient being which tries to secure its survival and promotes reproduction, but is additionally impregnated by the spirit of God. Being human means equally being divine, as the divine spirit works inside of us as His breath. So we cannot other than being spiritual, even in the most primitive acts of survival.

Being spiritual means further that man represents divinity in physical form. He walks on earth as body-spirit-unity, as someone who has received the breath and lives by it as he lives by bread and wine. Furthermore, this implies that he did not receive this spirit to only use it for himself but also to pass it on to others, by respiring and inspiring his fellow men. Then he is a messenger of the inspiration of the divine, which is communication, exchange, love.

This is why teachers of wisdom are so sure that they speak to every human being when they proclaim the divinity of man. They want to call upon the memory of this intimate respiration, this initial inspiration. The rediscovery of respiration awakens immediately and inevitably the wish to pass on the power of breath which means the power of the divine spirit, to breath into others and by this to strengthen and increase their divinity.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. www.elifshafak.com