Observations placeholder
Muhsin Fayz Kashani
Identifier
010277
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Muhsen Feyz Kashani (Persian: محسن فیض کاشانی) was an Iranian Muslim poet, philosopher and muhaddith (died 1680). He was born in Kashan to a scholarly family renowned for its learning and started his education with his father, Shah Morteza, who owned an extensive library. When he reached the age of twenty, he travelled to Isfahan for further study. However, after a year in Isfahan, he moved to Shiraz to study Hadith and Fiq (Jurisprudence) under Majid Bahrani, one of the leading Shi'ite scholars of his time. Bahrani died a few months later, and Fayz returned to Isfahan where he joined the circles of great scholar Shaikh Bahai and studied philosophy under Mir Damad. After performing the hajj, he stayed a short time before returning to Persia.
Upon his return he found a new master, Qom Molla Sadra who taught him in different disciplines. Sadra taught him for eight years, studying ascetic exercises and learning all of the sciences. Sadra gave Fayz one of his daughters to marry, they later had a son named, Muhammad Alam al-Huda, who followed in his fathers footsteps. Fayz is said to have produced works that mixed Islamic moral concerns with Aristotelian, Platonic philosophy and mysticism- a “rationalist gnostic approach”.
He was not without criticism, but we might regard it as praise “One of Fayz students later blamed him for encouraging his students to listen to music"
Fayz later returned to Kasan where he later died in the year 1680.
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If we now turn to the observatin, he says for every form there is its template in spiritual terms. The physical forms on the earth, on the planets, - in the universe – have a template which mirrors them. There is an exact one to one correspondence between the physical form and its ‘template’ its actual template.
A description of the experience
Muhsin Fayz Kashani – Kalimat Maknuna [translated by Henry Corbin and Nancy Pearson]
There is no existent thing, whether in the intelligible world or in the sensory world, whose image is not recorded in this intermediate universe...........
.... this is an immense world, so vast that it contains not only the forms of the immaterial substances above it, but also the material realities below it. It is the intermediary, the medium through which the connection is effected. The senses and sensory perceptions rise toward it, as the supersensory realities descend toward it. From the place it occupies it continues to gather in the fruits of each thing…………..
This is the world in which the interrogation of the tomb takes place, with its delights and its torments; and it is in this intermediate world that the faithful believer can visit those near to him after death.