EVOLUTIONARY EMERGENT SELF IN THE POETRY OF BULLEH SHAH

This paper affirms the significance of mystic love as a higher mental faculty in human evolutionary process. Man as evolutionary emergent self is the operational definition of mysticism; a process in which individual self of a person gains Unique Self Enlightenment through operational interaction of higher mental faculties and aspires for Love intelligence in order to get one with the Absolute. Emergent evolution is an anti Darwinian view of Evolution which runs quite contrary to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Mystic literature in general and Bulleh Shah’s poetry in particular answers many queries of fundamental importance related to man’s existence and evolution in this universe and the nature of relationship between man and man, man and universe and man and God. Bulleh Shah (1680-1757), a mystic poet of Punjabi language, through his poetry offers a study of human existence and his mental and psychological evolution in this universe affirming that love is the cause of man’s creation and the very Eros of his evolution. The present paper explores how does individual love in mystic literature serve as a mode of evolution to get one with the whole (Deity) to attain the level of mystical union by fusing subject self into the object (Divinity) to complete the process of Emergent Evolution of consciousness with the lens of Morgan’s (1927) Emergent Evolution and Gafni’s (2011) Unique Self in Evolutionary Process. Bulleh Shah’s poetry affirms mysticism as a study of spiritual faculties of human beings which demolishes ethno-cultural and dogmatic boundaries and has a natural tendency towards pluralistic aspect of universalism as a counter narrative to ethno-centric global agenda. The basic theoretical assumption of this paper has been taken from my PhD dissertation in which the same theoretical framework has been applied on the poetry of Shah Hussain and John Keats.