Get Your Copy The Ball And Polo Stick Or The Book Of Ecstasy: A Parallel Persian-English Text (Bibliotheca Iranica: Intellectual Traditions Series) (English, Persian And Persian Edition) Designed And Illustrated By Arifi Of Herat Available In Online Book

Introduction states that “The most fruitful initial approach to understanding this work, and to profiting from its successive layers of meaning and activation capacity of the human essence, is to

decode the first layer.
. ”. And, “The process of concentration, disturbance and so on, . is referred to in the technical, mystical literature under various names, One is the testing and refining of gold, or its manufacture alchemy, . Other meanings yield the conceptions of unbelief or impiety and even that of madness, For these reasons Sufis have used the statements that they are unbelievers or mad or impious as did for instance Hakim Omar Khayyam as exact renditions of these key terms.
. " Very interesting book. Little is known of the poet Arifi of Herat d,, but his book The Ball and Polo Stick has been popular since its composition in A, H.A. D.at the height of Timurid power, The underlying theme of this work is selfsacrificing love, a conceptualization that was derived from the Sufi ideal of love, This love not only by definition is unrequited but also demands the ultimate death of the lover, In terms of mystical speculative philosophy, the death of the lover is the annihilation of selfhood and selfawareness i, e. , the total absorption of the lover s own consciousness of self into that of the beloved, On the purely mystical level, this represents the annihilation of the individuated soul, the lover, into the godhead, the beloved, When translated into human terms, the hapless lover would have to die in ecstasy at the feet of his beloved, This was the conceptualization of love that was taken up and glorified by Persian poetry,
The Ball and Polo Stick is the third volume in Intellectual Traditions, a series aimed to provide scholars and students of Iranian heritage with new source materials on philosophy, mysticism, irfan, intellectual history, and literature.
.