The Witness Within: Recent Episodes
Musa Muhaiyaddeen
Sufism is one of the paths that explains and guides us towards our inner spiritual being, to that part of us that is beyond the senses. It brings us to a place where there is the possibility of experiencing an entirely different way of existence. This is an inner journey that opens our hearts to the treasures found within the qualities of God. Sufism explains that to do this we need to change our focus from an elemental existence to a spiritual existence.The Sufi path teaches us that there is a place that is not part of the elemental nature we are born with, there is another place that comes from the Eternal where the qualities that exist there are kindness, love, mercy, compassion, truthfulness, and justice. Sufism is a path of love.May it come to pass that these words resonate to break the shell of illusion that covers our hearts. May these words help take us to the Eternal where truth exists, and where love and kindness exist as reality. May our path towards God be straight, and true, and easy.Musa Muhaiyaddeen
In the late sixties and early seventies, there was a consciousness movement in the United States. Consciousness became a major topic of discussion among young people. One of the famous phrases in that area started by a man whose name was Timothy Leary out of Harvard was, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” There was this acknowledgement by much of the young people in society with some assistance by older people in the same movement that the behavioral patterns of our society had somehow gone awry and that we needed all to begin a new way of encountering our existence and our attitude towards our existence.
And that was the time of a slew of Eastern gurus coming to the United States, bringing Eastern thought which really had been not much seen in this part of the world, not much practiced in this part of the world because it was separated by oceans. And actual practitioners didn’t come over that often, and all of a sudden they came in hoards. And also the cult figures, the iconic figures of the generation were going overseas to places like India and Nepal to find teachers of Eastern philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc., to try to get a new grasp on what life meant. So, questions of existence came to the forefront of what was going on amongst young people in America.
And this was fueled by a couple of different things. One of the things it was fueled by was all of a sudden there was a draft in America, and by draft, I mean people were being taken into the army, not necessarily willingly. They were being told they had to serve. So, there was a large reaction to this, and it was the anti-war movement. And this is of course the Vietnam war in the late sixties, early seventies. And when people began to question the war, they then began to question the morality of the people bringing on the war, the ethos of the people bringing on the war, and why did old people think it was ok to send young people to die? Why didn’t the old people go by themselves, and what would have happened if the old people would have to be the ones who would have to fight? Questions like these were beginning to be asked.
But then as soon as you begin to question the authority of leadership, you then begin to question the standards that the society who these leaders belong to have set up.
What is the natural state of man, and where should we set expectations for ourselves? And what should we expect of our fellow beings? What should the standards be that we have for ourselves? In religious services in various religious institutions there are those who minister the flock, and then there’s the flock. So you have the one who leads the service and the ones who partake in the service. But in different areas different things happen. In a small Arab village where there is no hired imam, the people in the village may take turns leading the prayer. So, each one becomes a prayer leader. In the Jewish communities in Brooklyn, ten people are required to have a sufficient amount to have formal prayers; and very often they take turns in leading the prayers. In the Quaker community, if you’ve ever been to a Quaker service, nobody leads the service. People speak when they have the inclination or the call to do so, and there’s no formal hierarchical ministry. The Catholic church on the other hand has a very formal hierarchical ministry, where congregants are even told that you have to go through the priest or the minister to reach the point you’re trying to reach.
So, what is the expectation that’s placed on us? Are we supposed to be good congregants and show up to a congregational service once a week or every morning, and then we’ve fulfilled our obligation? Is our obligation a passive sort of showing up, and then somebody else takes care of the rest of it for us. Well, it’s been made pretty clear that we are supposed to be involved in what we’re doing. We are supposed to be as involved as any congregation leader. We are supposed to be involved in direct communication or at least an attempt at direct communication with our Lord. We need to be involved in our salvation. We cannot depend on anybody else to do it for us.
This means that there has to a certain committent in our relationship with God, a certain committent in our relationship with our way, a certain surrender to the way that we do things, a certain surrender to our obligations. And somehow we have to get into that mode.
When Bawa came he taught us about a monastic life outside of the monastery. There was no monastery except for his home. We lived in the world, we married and had children, but he spoke to us and he petitioned us and he implored us to live as if we were within a monastic setting in the world. And that’s the interesting aspect of entering reality in the way that we were taught. The monastery is something you carry with you. It’s not some place that you go. You are the monastery. Your body is the home of the monastery, and your actions within that are those of a monk, monk meaning either female or male.
The story of Jesus according to the Christian tradition was that he taught until he was 33 years old, and then he was sentenced to be crucified by the Romans. And they in fact made him carry his own cross and then crucified him. And he died on the cross. And in that death he healed the world. Now, that’s a very interesting concept. The man considered the son of God by the Christians passed from this world no different than any other man. And that passing had an effect quite other than passing. That passing healed the population of the world who took on the understanding of what he did and how he meant it. Now, that didn’t stop people from passing, but it healed them of something else. It healed them of their burdens. It healed them of their sins. It healed them of their impurities. It healed them of their connection to the world.
Now, Jesus did not have a connection to the world. He was already healed from that. But he went through the agony that he went through on behalf of the rest of the world. It says something about agony and the fact that we have to go through some of that. But it also puts in perspective what healing actually means. Healing is the healing of the inner part of us. Healing is doing away with the diseases of the heart. Healing is resurrecting the qualities that belong to Allah. And Allah is the ultimate healthy One. Allah is the One without sickness, without death. And to join that place of no sickness and no death, we need to be healed, healed of our attachments to the world.
Psychologists talk about the influence of genetics and the influence of environment. And all of us live in some kind of an environment, and that environment has some kind of influence on us. When they say environment, they’re not talking about the temperature. They’re talking about the parent, the parental units and their influence on us and the cultural biases and those influences on us. So, each of us are born into some sort of culture. We’re born to a set of parents. We go to certain schools. We have all of this input that is constantly thrown at us from the time that we are babies, and we have to deal with it. In other words we are constantly in the midst of circumstances, one kind or another, but we’re constantly in the midst of circumstances. And we have to somehow react to these circumstances in order to go on with our daily existence in this world.
The interesting thing about circumstances is they can be real or imaginary. We can create circumstances for us that have nothing to do with the intention of the people around us. We just imagine them. Some people call this the inability to communicate appropriately. But we’ve also been taught that this life is an illusion and that only Allah is real. So, here we are in the midst of all kinds of circumstances, some real, some imagined; yet, we’re told that in our belief system that even the ones that are real are in fact imagined. So it puts us in a sort of dilemma as to how to react to things and how to find an equilibrium in our being. First and foremost is to be grounded in the understanding that circumstances should not affect our being.
When Rumi met Shams and Shams took all of Rumi’s books that he was carrying with him and threw them in the river, at that time Rumi was considered the penultimate scholar of his region. He knew more than anyone at that time or at least that was how the people viewed him. And he was the one that people came to as the authority on things, yet he was now confronted with this semi-mad-appearing Afghani who indicated to him that his knowledge was without a lot of value and that the extent of it was extremely limited.
So, what are we to take from that? We need to understand that all the stories and all the examples are for us. So, here’s a man who is an authority on things, not a kid anymore. He’s aged. He’s been through marriage, children, titles. He’s been through being in charge of things. He’s been through being the one who puts the stamp on the finality of decisions and things. And all of a sudden he is put in a place where he doesn’t know anything. And within a short period of time, he understands that. And he accepts that he doesn’t know anything or at least doesn’t know certain things and has to move forward.
When a baby is born into this world, it has this incredibly soft skin and this amazing newborn smell, other than anything else that exists. You might even say it’s other worldly. And the experience with that baby becomes other worldly. And a baby is capable of taking you to other worlds, other spheres, and other consciousnesses. Whatever state you’re in, if somebody puts a newborn into your arms, that state will change to something higher. But as the baby grows, that softness of skin fades away, that smell of the newborn fades away, and something happens to that child. It’s like being placed in brine does something to whatever you place into brine. It creates a hardness to it.
Recently, I was travelling in the East, and I saw a young couple whom I knew and I was seeing them again. I was actually at their marriage, and about five years had passed since their marriage. And I looked at them, and it was evident to me they were a real couple. This was not people who were just hanging out together. These were people who were truly married to each other. And I said that to the young lady. I said, “It’s so good that you’ve become a real couple.”
And her response to me was, “It’s because of the way you see. Your eyes make it that way.”
If we go back into the spools of our memories and think to when we first discovered that there existed within us a yearning to know reality, a yearning to know who we are, an understanding that that which surrounded us and that which we were told was normative was in fact just an accepted script that was put in place because the people putting it in place knew nothing more than what that was, that they were limited in so many ways and tried to make a world built out of their limitations. And all of a sudden it came to us that this limited understanding of things is not reality and that this limited understanding of things doesn’t have to be accepted by us as our life. There can be something more. There can be something else. There can be a much deeper understanding of things and a different analysis of what existence is about and different conclusions can be drawn than the conclusions drawn by the world.
In different phases of our lives, we have different possessions and certain of these possessions become very important to us. When we are a child, we might have a favorite blanket or a favorite toy. As we grow we gather different things, things we need, things we like, things we don’t need, things that are popular, things we think we should have. Now, imagine if you accumulated all of the things that you had since you were a child and kept them with you and never let any of them go. Soon, things would fill whatever your residence was to the point where you would not have the room to walk around your house.
Once I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled, and they shot me up with Novocain. And my tongue also became numb. Unbeknownst to myself while I was under the Novocain, I had bit a hole in my tongue, not a big one but enough so that when the Novocain wore off, my tongue was throbbing in pain. And that pain sort of disrupted everything I was doing to the point that it overwhelmed my consciousness and overwhelmed my ability to get things done or to move around or to do anything. Fortunately, Allah has made things in such a way that your tongue heals quickly. And within a day or a day and a half or two days the pain was gone, and I was like a different person. Well, you should probably say a Fatiha after that kind of a recovery at least for the consciousness of understanding how close we are to being inoperable as beings at any moment and how there can be this amazing turn around so quickly that you go from inoperable to functioning as if that part of you that was inoperable is forgotten.
Well, we don’t just deal with physical pain. We also deal with psychic pain and with mental difficulties or with difficulties in our own consciousness because of certain weaknesses in our personal being to the point where circumstances overwhelm us. And sometimes these kinds of situations are more difficult to overcome than the situations dealing with a physical bruise.
Bawa has told us that the world is full of hypnotisms and magnetisms, and what does that mean? What are these hypnotisms and magnetisms. Essentially, when you are going on this path, there are things that pull you off, things that take you away from the straight route, from the straight path. And they do it because of your inclinations. Now, your inclination is attracted to something that gives you access to that inclination. So, those points which give you access to the inclinations of your lower self are your hypnotisms and magnetisms.
Somewhere in the progress of civilization, man came to the conclusion that he couldn’t trust other men. And to assist with that understanding, they established police forces. And the purpose of these police forces was to monitor the activities of people to make sure that they didn’t do things that they weren’t supposed to do. Soon after police forces were developed, jails were developed because they had to figure out something to do with the people who did what they weren’t supposed to do and became sort of a menace to organized society.
We’re going to do something different today. I’m going to read a song by Bawa Muhaiyaddeen from his new book called “Life is a Dream.”
It’s called “I Had a Dream,” and it was written in 1946.
I had a dream
I had a dream about casting off my cares
Closing my eyes
And sleeping without sleeping
As one travels throughout the world, one runs into different political systems, different religious systems, different cultures. One of the things that people notice as they travel throughout the world is that religions change in different parts of the world. People view their relationship with God within a certain framework that is different from one place to another. In addition, there are differences between the extent of the coersion of the political system and the religious system. Some places allow you to believe as you wish. Some places don’t.
The mind is our closest and most constant companion. We have lots of friends who know a little bit about us and who spend time with us and have known us for different portions of our lives, but our mind has known us since we were born. And depending on the acuity of our memory, it remembers all that we’ve been through or at least a pretty good portion of what we’ve been through. And it highlights certain portions of our existence. It’s so close to us and has spent so much time with us and knows so much about us that sometimes that’s who we think we are. And we begin to believe that we are in direct relation to what we think. We are what we think; we are our memories as if they somehow comprise us. And this of course has certain consequences on our being.
We live in a world of form, and each of us is encased in form. Yet we are told that reality exists in a formless state, that He is beyond form and description. The Quran prohibits the use of images. The Torah prohibits the use of images. And many of the Protestant churches don’t use images. Why the prohibition against images, and what’s the meaning of this prohibition? Our attachment to form is so great and so overwhelming that we need to be commanded directly from Allah not to create images. Is it the creation of the image or the attachment to the image? The hypnotic pull, the magnetism that exists between ourselves and form is such that we, in order to have faith in reality, to have faith in the truth as opposed to hallucinations, have to somehow break our reliance and attachment to form.
Interestingly enough, as people become wealthier, they build bigger homes, more grandiose forms to exist in. But if you travel the world, what are the most grandiose forms that we witness? I just came back from Turkey, and I can tell you the most grandiose forms in Turkey are mosques. The most grandiose forms in Rome are churches. With all these prohibitions, religions still create form for the sake of the majesty of form to give forth somehow the majesty of the One who is being worshiped, as if form can instill majesty in you. Well, maybe it can. But I’ve witnessed the Kabba, and the Kabba is as simple a form as is possible. And this was the first house of prayer, and all it is essentially is a bunch of blocks made into a small rectangular building. This connection to form and this attachment to form influences us on many levels.
I grew up in a small town, a farming community. And while I lived there, that little place to me was the center of the universe. I thought that’s the way things were, and all examples of everything could be found within the confines of the small town that I grew up in. Travelling was something we didn’t do very often. And when we did, what today is considered a short excursion, at that time was a major event. But since we did it so infrequently, the impact of wherever we went never really moved me all that much, and it was almost as if it went in and out of my consciousness very quickly as I returned to the center of the world, which was where I lived. In my consciousness there was really no place for anywhere else at that time. And there was an inability to even recognize or need to recognize the existance of other places.
As time went on, I began to see more and more places. And then, I began to travel frequently. And now I do travel frequently to far flung places around the world hours from here – ten, twelve hours from here by airplane. And when I arrive there, there’s a perfectly orderly civilization going on, speaking an entirely different language than we speak, having an entirely different set of ideas about things than we have here. And to these people in this other place, all of it makes particular sense. And the centrality of the focus that goes on back home for me sort of disappears and its relevance sort of becomes questionable.
The great saint Rabia said, “I don’t desire heaven, and I don’t fear hell,” a well-known iconic statement. What’s it mean? In the understanding of things at the end of times, people are going to be doing things for two reasons and two reasons only. They are going to be looking for rewards, a desire for reward, and in response to fear of punishment. So, the motivations for people’s acts are going to be getting what they want and not being punished. Well, what Rabia is saying is that she doesn’t care about reward or punishment. She’s not afraid of hell, and she doesn’t desire heaven.
We speak of this life and the next life. We speak of the time before this earthly body occurred and the time after. This body as we know it disappears. Well, if we are talking about times before, during, and after this body; we must consider what is the function of this body in our existence and who or what were we before this body and who or what are we after this body because we are all very conscious of the fact that people die. Even though we may not truly cognate that fact, especially when it comes to ouselves, we do see it. Whether or not it impacts us and has an effect on us to make us realize that the same thing is going to happen to us is another question. But the point is, we’ve all seen it, and we all know it happens.
At the center, at the core, at the apex of religious belief in Islam is the statement of faith, also known as the kalimah. And it is “La illaha il Allah; Muhammadur Rasul-Allah.” What’s interesting is that there are two sections to this, and the second part, “Muhammadur Rasul-Allah” means Muhammad is His Rasul, is His Prophet, is His Messenger, is the one who brings the understanding of the way. And that part is usually easily understood. And the translation is accepted in one way. But the beginning part, “La illaha il Allah” is translated in a lot of different ways. And it’s interesting that it’s translated in a lot of different ways because the different translations give you an insight into the state of the people doing the translating.
Recently in Camodia during the reign of someone called Pol Pot in something called the Khmer Rouge…Khmer is an ancient name for Cambodia, and rouge means red. That was to signify the new coming of the new ideas they were bringing into Cambodia which were essentially Communist or at least their idea of communism. There was a group who felt very strongly about their ideas. And they felt that they needed to impose their ideas on everybody else. And then they saw that not everybody accepted their ideas. And so they determined that the reason they didn’t or weren’t capable of accepting their ideas is they were too old or too educated in another way or too polluted to accept their ideas. So the solution was to kill everybody who had different ideas and reeducate an entire new generation of people, young people so that these ideas, which were of course the truth, would be able to be implemented, and then, there would be a perfect society.
We live in a world where we understand things through our perceptions. Our perceptions are limited, so the understanding that we can have through our perceptions is a limited understanding. However, we have other faculties besides our senses. In addition to our senses, we have the ability to have faith, to believe things that we don’t see, hear, taste that we sense in an entirely different way. And the strength of our belief system is very critical as to who we are. So, we are what we believe and how strong we believe it. Are we aware of what we believe, and are we aware that we can strengthen our belief system? And how do we chose a belief system?
In the world there are information sources, institutions, individuals, media types, various forms of media, that claim to give you information. And when we’re born, we’re born into all of the existing media outputs that exist in the area where we grow up, where we’re born, where we live. We’re taught to accept these information outputs as legitamate. For instance, as a child you’re sent to school, and you’re taught that you’re sent to school to learn. Now, you may not think that that’s such a critical moment. But just the fact that as a child, you think you’re going to learn in school and that you’re going to learn things that are important to you in school is an incredible imprinting on you at a very early age. You are led to believe that this place that you’re going to be sent to every morning except for a few weeks in the summer is going to teach you things that are going to be valuable to you.
There are a lot of phases in life. We start out as absolutely dependent infants, and we move on. Some of us change phases as we move on. Some of us get stuck in phases as we go along. It’s been said that you can’t really begin to study and/or understand mysticism until you’re about 40. It’s also been said that if you don’t start when you’re young, you’re never going to be agile enough to begin when you’re 40. So, it appears that right from the beginning, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. We come from the world of souls, and then we spend our first few years forgetting where we came from. And then we get attracted to what we’re in the midst of. And it begins to overwhelm us, and it becomes our world. Then, we’re told this isn’t really your world. You have to find a way to get out of this world so that you can begin to find the truth.
A lot of people spend their time studying scripture, and they become experts at scripture and what’s involved in scripture. Some even get to the point where they memorize scripture and can repeat the words in the books. However, those words have to be applied. Those words have to be used for some end. Even though those words of their own are holy, that holiness has to be taken and used by humanity somehow.
Some people use those words to help them study themselves and to find out about themselves and to understand themselves. So, the study of scripture for those people transmutes into a study of themselves because it’s in the self that you find the truths that the scripture talks about, you find the truths that the holy books talk about. Because what is it that the holy books talk about? They talk about the relationship between you and Allah. They talk about the relationship between you and God. And if that isn’t the point of what you’re studying, then what is it that you’re studying?
Imagine if you had a job, and your boss sent you somewhere to accomplish a specific task. And when you got there, you got involved in about ninteen other things and came back and then told the boss, “Well, I did this…this…and this, but I didn’t do what you had asked me to do. If the boss wanted that one thing done and that was the most important thing to him, what’s the use of the other things that you’d have accomplished? What was the reason that you did those other things as opposed to what you had been asked to do? What was it that put you in the direction to do what came to you as opposed to what you were told to do?
All of us who have read mystical tracts and who’ve been around Sufism know that Allah created man so that He could be known. Now, that’s a direct imperative. We were created so that He could be known, yet what is it that we’re doing here?
In this world we make a lot of assumptions. A lot of these assumptions are based on what we are taught and the way our culture views certain things. Essentially what the culture does is it prioritizes things. It considers certain things good and certain things bad, certain things high and certain things low, certain things successful and certain things unsuccessful. And we as individuals, because we live in the culture, are raised with these assumptions, and we buy into them. Now, the interesting thing about the word “culture” is, if you turn it around, it becomes “ure cult.” So, all of us throughout the world live in small cults, and each of these cults have their own rules and regulations and assumptions. In our culture — and when I say our culture, I’m talking about the Western culture, particularily in America — there are certain assumptions that are preeminent within the society. It’s better to be rich than to be poor. That’s probably one of the major assumptions within the society. It’s better to have things than not to have them. It’s better to be powerful than not to be powerful. It’s better to have titles than not to have titles. In other words, it’s a society which has, at least recently, been drenched with the position that accumulation is good.
It’s very difficult to conceptualize what we can’t see. It’s very difficult to imagine what we’ve never encountered. Even though people explain things to us and tell us that this is the way things are, it’s difficult for us to incorporate ideas into our being as if they were real until we somehow are able to fully grasp them and integrate their meaning into ourselves. For instance, when people say, “We’re all the same,” and when we look around, and we don’t look the same…We can’t walk through each other because we bump into each other and knock each other over. So what does this, “We’re all the same,” mean? How are we all the same?
When teachers tell us it’s necessary for us to feel the pain of others in order for us to become advanced because that’s the true state of our nature is that we’re all combined. And when we separate ourselves from others’ feelings, we separate ourselves from the truth — it’s hard to conceptualize that. It’s hard to truly understand what that means because we have an external nature and an internal nature. And as we walk through the world, we see the external nature.
Now, imagine ice cubes, and imagine if I took a large number of ice cubes and put them in some water. And the water was cold and we were churning the water somehow. Now, these ice cubes would be constantly bumping into each other. They also float because ice weighs less than water. So, these ice cubes are above the water floating in something that’s exactly the same as them. Yet, there’s all this turmoil between the ice cubes, and there’s no turmoil in the water below them. Yet, somebody tells the ice cubes, “You’re all the same! And the fact that you’re bumping into each other and banging into each other doesn’t really mean anything! It’s false! It’s an illusion! That’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is what’s underneath of you that you really can’t see where it’s all the same.”
In religion there is often a difficulty between the form and the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the form. And the ones who believe very very strongly in the form see those in the spirit as apostates or heretics. They see them as a danger to their well thought out world that they’ve put together and that they’ve described and that they’ve given rules and regulations to.
I was recently in Turkey giving a series of talks. And in talking privately to a number of people, their concern was that they wanted a return to the time of the Prophet. They wanted to be able to do things the way they were done at the time of the Prophet, and they were trying to figure out how to do that. And they were trying to imitate what went on then in the best way that they could. However, it was problematic for them. They saw all the difficulties in Islam right now and they were quick to blame it on the fact that people were no longer following the way of the Prophet, but they didn’t seem to be able to grasp what the way of the Prophet was. They didn’t seem to be able to grasp what it was that was different about that time and this time and how to integrate that time into this time. And most of their efforts to do that involved formulistic sorts of things.
“Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there — heaven.” Those are the words that start an old spiritual. There are more words to it, but that is the refrain. It’s an interesting refrain because talking about it isn’t the same as doing something about it. There are lots of implications from the refrain, but I’m going to choose to use that implication. “Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there — heaven.” Essentially, if you’re going to take a trip, you have to make some sort of preparation. And if you’re going to heaven or if you intend to go to heaven, if you intend to go towards that which you imagine as heaven — let’s call it enlightenment — there has to be some sort of preparation that has to go on in the effort to accomplish that goal. And we have to ask ourselves what is the effort that we’re involved in. What do we do to make it possible for us to be in an appropriate state to touch that thing we call heaven, to touch that thing we call enlightenment, to touch that thing we call reality? What have we done for ourselves to put ourselves in a place where that’s feasible? Or do we just talk about it? Do we just give it lip-service? Do we just sit around and discuss it?
If you have a very good friend, you would be spending time with that friend because you like being in that friend’s presence. If you want to make God your friend, you need to spend time with Him. You need to put yourself in His presence. And how do you put yourself in His presence? There are the prescribed ways, which are prayer. And prayer is, at the very least, if you trying to do some kind of formalist prayer…prayer is, at the very least, the setting forth of an intention that during certain times of the day, I am setting my being aside for God, for Allah, for the position that I’m taking that in my life, this is important enough for me to stop whatever I’m doing in order to have some sort of relationship with God.
Now, that relationship is at different levels of depth because if the relationship is merely showing up at a place and that is considered a sufficient action by you, then that will get you one set of accomplishments. It will be an accomplishment that you’ve formed a habit that you stop during the day and you go somewhere to establish a relationship with God. How far does that relationship go? What happens besides showing up? What happens when you’re actually there?
Among young people, videos games is something that a lot of them do. And there are different types of video games. But one of the consistent genres is the war game where you are the shooter, and your perspective in this game is essentially looking through the barrel of a gun or rather over the sight of a gun. And you keep going through rooms with this perspective. So, you’re constantly seeing everything as if you’re looking through a scope, and it’s a wide scope so you see quite a bit. But that’s you’re perspective, and then when you come upon things, you react to them. Now, when I saw this perspective, I found it very interesting because you had a full scope of what was in front of you, but of course, you didn’t see yourself. And actually you were put into a really narrow focus of the perspective that the sight of the gun had.
However, we walk around that way when we look at the world. Our perspective comes from the scope that is our eyes. We see the entire world in front of us as we walk around, and the peripheral view of our perspective is a little bit wider than a gun scope. But essentially, that’s the kind of perspective that we have. Everything is in our sights except us. We see everything outside of us. We don’t see us. And it’s interesting because in our reaction to ourself, we don’t react to our visual presence because we’re not seeing our visual presence. We’re reacting to ourself through whatever’s inside our head and the entire amalgam of emotions that we carry that watches this perspective in front of us. So, it should be very evident that we see everybody very differently than we see ourself. And it’s been set up that way.
We see everybody entirely differently than we see ourself. Whenever we look at somebody, we look at their face. We never look at our face unless we’re looking in a mirror or through pictures, etc. The point is in our normal conversations, we’re looking at somebody. They’re looking at us. But none of us is looking at ourself. This is part of what causes this major disconnect between ourself and everybody else.
Freud is generally considered the father of psychology. What is psychology? Well, when Freud came along, all of a sudden people in the medical circles began to think about the psychological makeup of their patients and what they could do to help people who had no apparent physical ailments but had really difficult psychological ailments. They locked a lot of these people up. Of course, in the beginning a lot of this dealt with people on the severe end of these psychological problems. But as time progressed and as psychology progressed, they found that they could work with people to try and resolve some of their own internal conflicts and to make them more normal within the definition of normal that the society had. And now we have analysts and psychologists and all kinds of people for people to go to in order to get some kind of help with their own personal problems and situations.
I did a little looking into Freud because I was interested…I had an inkling of where he got his basic information from, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and verify what I had thought. And what I found was that his parents were Hasidic, which means, for those of you who don’t know, they belonged to a Jewish mystical sect. And there is literature that Hasidism joined with Sufism some time in the eleventh century in Spain when the Jews and the Arabs lived in Spain together. And the Hasidic thought came out of a milieu of mystical Sufistic thought. So, if he came from a Hasidic background, that meant that he had access to Hasidic ideas and Hasidic philosophy. He also was in touch with some other people who gave him some of this insight and some of this philosophy. What’s the point?
What he did was he took what had been existent for a long time and known for a long time and turned it into a Western science. And what happens when you turn things into science? You take God out of them. Now let’s go back to what is Sufism about. And this is really what’s interesting. One of the major understandings in Sufism is that to know your Lord, you must know yourself. Psychology is trying to get you to know yourself. But what’s the end of knowing yourself? To know yourself! What’s the end of knowing yourself in Sufism? To know God. So, what’s going on in Sufism is really a kind of psychology or an understanding of your own psychological makeup in order that you can go from the state that you are in now to the state of insan kamil or true human being.
There are still Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museums in the world, and a few days ago I passed one. There was a loudspeaker in front of it trying to draw you in. It was talking about the lizard-man, who had had his entire body tatooed as a lizard, and he only had a little bit left to go. And he would be a lizard entirely. I thought this was interesting. If you tatoo yourself in a certain way, you become the picture of what you want to be, and then somehow you become that or at least they were indicating that he would become a lizard-man. There are tatoo parlors all over the place. People put on themselves pictures which sort of signify who they are. And that goes into this whole understanding in our society of trying to identify who we are.
From the time you’re a little kid in America, people come up to you and ask you, “Well, what are you going be when you grow up?” And usually kids answer something like a fireman or a policeman or a doctor or a lawyer or president or a thousand and one other things. Somehow we have gotten into our heads that you are what you do or you are what you look like. You are something that’s visible, that can be seen, that somehow you portray yourself as something. Imagine what it must be like for somebody who came from a culture far from this one like any immigrant who came from a culture that’s very distinct from the American culture. And they brought with them all their identity clues and identity fixations and identity parameters that they covered themselves in and they identified themselves with. Then, they came here and they had a kid. And they sent their kid to public school. And this thousand years of culture that they came from, where everybody was like their parents, was like their parents, was like their parents, all of a sudden had a child who’s nothing like them, who speaks a different language than them, who doesn’t accept what they tell them, who has no loyalty to all of the things that they knew, that are now, by the way, shadows in their own head because they can’t even see them anymore because they’ve left that place, but it’s as if they carried it with them here.
There are people who come from other cultures and when there is a group of them, they all gather together in small places, and they continue the culture. And some of them never leave the area because that’s reality for them. And to step outside of that is to step outside of reality. In other words, this place that they’ve moved to isn’t real. Everything that’s going on here isn’t real. They just happen to live here. But they’ve created a reality on their block and a half in Queens that’s entirely as close as they could get it to where they came from. We need to think about identity because one of the first questions on this spiritual path is, “Who are you?” And if you can’t get a handle on “Who are you?” or “Who am I,” if you can’t get a handle on all of the various influences that impact you in that understanding, you’re never going to get a handle on the reality of who you are.
Someone was sitting with bawa, and they asked him, “Will there ever come the time when I will be able to see through my eyes what I see when I’m looking at your eyes?” And Bawa responded, “When the day comes when the “I” in you becomes a “we,” you’ll be able to do that.”
Now the fact that Bawa could pun in English like that is quite extraordinary. But more extraordinary is that understanding. The essence of that question is “Will I be able to see the way you see? Will I see through my eyes what I see when I look at you?” And the answer is yes, it can happen. And it can happen for all of us when we no longer differentiate ourselves from others, when others’ happiness becomes our happiness, when others’ pain becomes our pain, when others’ joy becomes our joy, and when all of the qualities of separation disappear and the qualities that belong to Allah become the ones that are the essence of our being.
Different religions and different sects and different teachers approach things in different ways. Some teachers teach a religion of exclusivity. They say that in order for you to be among those who are with God, you must do things not only in a certain way, but you must belong to this sect. You must belong to this group. You must belong to this denomination. And you must believe exactly in the way of the denomination. Other teachers teach that we have found a way, we have been given a way and you can come join our way. And if you adhere to our way, Allah, God has promised that this way will take you to Him. Some groups are interested in the group and the expansion of the group. Some groups are interested in the individual and the relationship between the individual and God. It appears to me that different groups when they make these determinations as to how to act, set different standards for what their religion is about. Some groups only have compassion for people with their own group. Some groups will tell you that God only has compassion for people in their group. Some people will tell you that in order to be saved, you must join. And they run around the world trying to get everybody to sign up so they can be saved as if the act of joining the group were the act of salvation, as if the act of coming into the group were the act of salvation, as if that act was what made your life all of a sudden transform into a life that is saved.
In the physical world, consequences are readily apparent. If you throw a rock at a glass, there’s a crash and the glass will shatter. Like that, physical consequences are not difficult to see. They are not only apparent in the sense of the reality of the physical world, they are apparent to all of your senses. Sounds cause disturbances. Various physical manifestations cause other things to happen. In the spiritual realm, there are also consequences, but the consequences are not as readily apparent. But there are consequences. And we as individuals, in order to fulfill our knowledge, have to know what these consequences are and how these consequences are caused. We need to know the cause and effect of things, not only in the physical realm but in the spiritual realm. You know that when you’re driving a car, you have to stay on your side of the road because if you don’t stay on your side of the road, there’s going to be a crash. And that crash is going to have consequences.
You’ve all watched sports, and some have participated in sports. Sports is an industry. And in the industry, you have lots of different people involved in it doing lots of different things. It starts out with the people who go to work to build the stadium. Then, you have the people who own the teams. Then, you have the people who buy the tickets to watch. Then, you have the people who broadcast the games on the television or on the radio, you have the broadcasters who actually sit and talk about it. Then, you have the writers who write about it. People talk about it all day long on the radio. But how many people actually play?
When people ask you, “Where do you live,” the response is usually something like “America” or “Turkey” or “Philadelphia” or “Istanbul” or “Canada” or “Toronto.” In other words, it’s a place. We all identify ourselves with living in a place. Some people might say, “I live on the planet Earth,” which would cover most of the countries. But still, people identify themselves with a specific spot somewhere. And as you twirl the map and if you travel around the world, there are lots of different spots where people live. I’ve been to lots of them. And these spots come with different languages, different cultures, different colors of people, different ideas. Now, there are literally hundreds of place names in the world. There’s a place called Morocco, there’s a place called Tunisia, there’s a place called Africa, there’s a place called Ghana, there’s a placed called Asia. People identify themselves with these places. — All of this is a lie. You don’t live in a place. There are only two kingdoms that exist in this world, the kingdom of the mind and the kingdom of the heart. And you live in one or the other.
When humans are born, they are incredibly vulnerable and they have to be taken care of for a long time before they can fend for themselves. A baby is really without the capability of making it in this world without somebody nurturing it and raising it and teaching it. Now slowly that baby, over the course of time, goes from vulnerability to being able to take care of itself. And there is a change in that being. It learns that not everybody is its mother and not everybody is going to be nurturing towards it. So, slowly defense mechanisms are built up in that baby. It learns to defend itself in the world.
In ancient cultures, especially in Africa and South America, we describe certain parts of those cultures as taboos. In other words, things these people won’t go near, things these people won’t do, things these tribal ancient cultures are afraid of. They have had ingrained in them since they were very very young, the fact that in addition to what they see, there are other things going on that they need to have respect for and/or fear for. So when these people become adults, you cannot speak to them as a rational Westerner and try to convince them that the things that they believe in aren’t so and the things that they think will happen to them won’t in fact happen to them.
Shakespeare told us that the world is a stage, and we are all players. Now, the concept of being an actor in this world is an interesting one. But if you’re an actor in this world, there are times when you are also an audience in this world. We participate as actors, and we participate as audiences. We should ask ourselves, in our act, who are we playing to? And as an audience, who are we listening to? These two questions and the answers to these two questions can tell us a lot about ourselves. They can tell us a lot about our attitudes, a lot about what we consider important, a lot about what we are trying to accomplish, and a lot about where we are going to in this world…
It’s been said that this world is a farm for the next world. In other words the seeds are planted here, but you don’t see what grows until the next world. Now, in order to understand that and in order to understand the consequences of that, you have to be able to see what you can’t see with these physical eyes. You have to be able to comprehend things that are only available to you through faith. And if you don’t have faith, you can’t breach that gap of not seeing. You can’t breach the gap of not having things shown to you in the physical form…
The way we’ve been taught sufism in this century and in the past century in America is different than the way it was done in the past. In the past groups were hidden. Tariqats were hidden orders where people didn’t live as out in the open in society as they do now. The orders werern’t monastic in the understanding of Christian monastism because marriage was permitted. But there was a certain monastic flavor to the way the orders were established. Now, sufism is taught right in the midst of society, and we live right in the midst of society while following the sufi path. Now, if you think about monasteries an
At the beginning of the French Revolution, people were screaming, “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” and shortly thereafter came the guillotine. In Cambodia they were talking about an entire new generation of people and a society that was equal to all, and then came the killing fields. In Russia Stalin talked about, “From each according to his abilty to each according to his needs,” and then came the Gulags and twenty million dead people. Hitler told the Germans he was going to create the perfect society for them, but in order to do that he needed the ovens and a war that killed an enormous number of Germans. It appears that if we look at our history and we look at attempts by various countries to right their situation, in order for that to occur, it seems there is an enormous amount of destruction that goes on in this phase of righting their situation. Now, we as individuals also try to right our situations…
Many different people can be looking at the same thing and see entirely different scenarios. Someone looking at an engine of a car who is a mechanic, can look at it and through his various senses of sight and sound, can diagnose if there is a problem. While someone who doesn’t understand the mechanics of an automobile, it means absolutely nothing because to him it is a black box. To somebody else it’s a functioning mechanism that he understands.
We also in our general daily routines will get things in quite different ways. Psychologists and psychiatrists use something called the inkblot test or the Rorschach test, to be able to figure out what the deeper inner psyches of people are influencing their being. They’ll show them the Rorschach test and they will say something and through what they see in this inkblot, they can sort of determine what’s going on inside of someone.
Now, Ibn ‘Arabī told us that the world is a translator for Allah, which means as you look around you see things depending on your state or station, what you see is different. For instance the great American poet who wrote about the glory of God in a long poem that he entitled, A Blade of Grass, certainly saw more than a blade of grass in a blade of grass, it meant much more to him.
There is a story of a dervish who was walking down the street and there was a man selling cucumbers and pumpkins and screaming at the top of his lungs, “The sweetest there is, the sweetest there is.” And the dervish fainted in ecstasy, because when he heard, “The sweetest there is,” it meant God to him, it meant Allah to him, and here he was in the middle of a street with vendors selling vegetables and God was being talked about.
What a glorious thing, some people saw cucumbers, some people saw pumpkins, he saw halos and angels wings, and he fainted! We see different things in front of us dependent on the state or station that we’re at. We experience different things from what’s in front of us dependent on the station that we’re at. We have different interactions dependent on the station that we’re at. And we have different reactions to different phenomenon dependent upon what our insides are truly like.
There was once an arranged marriage between a student at a madrassa, a religious school, who was a brilliant student, and the daughter of the director of the school. This was a very prominent school, and the director of the school was a very prominent man, he was of a very high genealogy and his lineage was the best in the entire area. And it was the custom in this town to announce the genealogy of the people who are getting married prior to the wedding. So at the engagement they announced the genealogy of the daughter and she was the daughter of the head of the madrassa and he was the son of the so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so. All incredibly important people.
Then it came time for the boy to announce his genealogy and he said, “I am an orphan, and I have never met my mother and father, my parents died when I was very young. But the man who raised me told me that my father was a tailor and he told this man to give me one piece of advice and my father gave me the following advice before he passed, and that was, try to fix what needs to be mended and don’t destroy what doesn’t need to be mended.
This is very simple advice and when the head of the madrassa heard this, it stunned him, because this was at the root of all understanding and he said, “I approve the marriage.”
The point being that the truth, reality, the path, is not complicated, it is simple. It just takes you being in an appropriate place in order to accomplish it. If you can understand a simple rule like leave things alone that are okay, and try to help situations that need help, you will go very far on this path. We need to understand the simplicity of our relationship with Allah. We need to understand the simplicity of reality and our connection to it. We don’t need to constantly be making things complex and impossible.
Allah has told us that he has given us a straight path, a middle way, without the need for us to be overly taxed, and to go to places beyond our capabilities. What we need to do is be able to find the peace and contentment within ourselves to be able to do that which is correct and appropriate. To be able to do what is correct and appropriate means to keep ourselves within certain bounds. We have to protect ourselves from actions that are inappropriate. This protection is what keeps us from going astray. Now, what is it that we have to protect ourselves from? It is amazing how simple these things are. If we can stay away from becoming involved unnecessarily in the lives of others, from staying away from judging the people who come into our purview, who we associate ourselves with, if we can stay clean of the need to push the things around us into certain directions, we can go extremely far on the spiritual path. Why? Because we don’t soil ourselves.
I want to say first, welcome everybody here, it’s so good to see you all again.
Al-hamdu lillāh. It’s a great joy to be among lovers. And I can see the love in the faces that I am looking at. And when lovers come together love grows. May we have fertile ground today.
The path of Sufism is a path of maturity. We are all born into this world and we all age, but we don’t necessarily become mature. Maturity and growing older unfortunately are not directly correlated. I wish they were, it would make it much easier for all of us. But Allah has not made it automatic. He’s made it necessary for work to occur in order for this maturity to occur.
Now, what kind of work is it that brings about this maturity? What is it that causes maturity? Even more essential, what is maturity? In the world we are constantly in situations where there is conflict. And within us we have needs and desires and these needs and desires constantly push themselves to the forefront of our existence. Inside of us, we have a lower self, within this lower self there is a lawyer. And this lawyer is constantly rationalizing why it’s appropriate for us to go for the things that we want, why it’s appropriate for us to put our own self interest in front of any other interest, why it’s appropriate for us to fulfill our desire. And this lawyer is very clever and he can convince us of almost anything. He’s almost as clever as the lawyers who argued in front of the Supreme Court of the United States and said that pornography is reasonable! He’s that clever. Lawyers can be very clever. Unless we are mature we can’t be clever enough to respond to this lawyer. So when our self interest moves forward and comes and says, “Get this, I want this, do this,” and we say, “Well I can’t because I don’t think it’s appropriate.” Then the lawyer begins to argue. And he says, “Well of course it’s appropriate, look what he did to you, look what they did to you, you need this not only for yourself you will be able to help others with it later.” There’s a thousand and one different scenarios that this lawyer can create.
The only one who can adequately respond to this rationalization is wisdom. Wisdom doesn’t come without maturity. So not only is asking the question, how do we become mature, an interesting question, it is important for our life, because if we don’t understand how it happens we can’t understand how to defend ourselves against our lower self. We can’t respond to all the rationalizations that pour up from our depths to tell us why what we are doing is okay and we don’t need to change.
As we go through our life, we are either going towards the path of reality or moving backwards from reality and getting more and more involved in the world. The idea of purification is essential for ridding ourselves of attachment to the world, so that we can get closer to reality.
It has been said that if the entire world was worth as much as one wing of a mosquito, then the wicked would not have a thing in this world. But they do, and they do because there is no value to it. And Allah allows it because there is no value to it. Now, as we look at the world and as we value things in the world correspondingly that is how we react towards it. So, if we give things value, we react as if they are valuable. So, if we think something is important we protect it, we fight for it, we give it our attention, we give it all that we have because of its importance. If we don’t think it’s important we let it go. We treat it without respect. We treat is shabbily. So in order to figure out where we are on this path towards reality we need to examine where we are and how we treat different things in the world. What do we respect? Do we respect money? Do we respect power? Do we respect things? Do we respect prayer? Do we respect solitude? Do we respect our quietude? When we walk into a city and there is not a lot of excitement do we say, there is nothing to do here?
You could go to places in the desert where prophets have had revelations and you could walk around and say, “There’s nothing to do here.” Yet there have been prophets who sat in those same places in the desert and the entire universe was revealed to them. Understand what nothing means. Understand the importance of nothing. When the world becomes nothing it’s at that point that we begin to fathom all that’s unseen.
In our walk through this world one thing that we need to know is that the nafs will always vote on satan’s side. The nafs will always proclaim whatever is inappropriate and whatever is wrong as the truth. And they do it consistently. Also, never underestimate the quality and the depth of the arrogance of the nafs.
As we go through our life, we are either going towards the path of reality or moving backwards from reality and getting more and more involved in the world. The idea of purification is essential for ridding ourselves of attachment to the world, so that we can get closer to reality.
It has been said that if the entire world was worth as much as one wing of a mosquito, then the wicked would not have a thing in this world. But they do, and they do because there is no value to it. And Allah allows it because there is no value to it. Now, as we look at the world and as we value things in the world correspondingly that is how we react towards it. So, if we give things value, we react as if they are valuable. So, if we think something is important we protect it, we fight for it, we give it our attention, we give it all that we have because of its importance. If we don’t think it’s important we let it go. We treat it without respect. We treat is shabbily. So in order to figure out where we are on this path towards reality we need to examine where we are and how we treat different things in the world. What do we respect? Do we respect money? Do we respect power? Do we respect things? Do we respect prayer? Do we respect solitude? Do we respect our quietude? When we walk into a city and there is not a lot of excitement do we say, there is nothing to do here?
You could go to places in the desert where prophets have had revelations and you could walk around and say, “There’s nothing to do here.” Yet there have been prophets who sat in those same places in the desert and the entire universe was revealed to them. Understand what nothing means. Understand the importance of nothing. When the world becomes nothing it’s at that point that we begin to fathom all that’s unseen.
In our walk through this world one thing that we need to know is that the nafs will always vote on satan’s side. The nafs will always proclaim whatever is inappropriate and whatever is wrong as the truth. And they do it consistently. Also, never underestimate the quality and the depth of the arrogance of the nafs.
This world is full of oppositions. And we are constantly in situations where we have opinions. And we run into people who have different opinions than we have. This creates a situation where one person opposes another and difficulties arise from these oppositions. Anytime you get two or more people together these things happen. In the west we have formalized this, we call it politics. It’s a nice way to say people are vying for control. Vying for supremacy. And it occurs on the smallest level to the highest level. It occurs between two, between three, between five, between millions. And as the groups get larger than two, it’s no longer an ideology of one verses an ideology of another, groups form around the ones that for some reason, somehow fulfill the needs that they have.
Now, the Sufis are known not to be opposers to things. They somehow slide through without getting involved in real opposition. How do they do this? And how can we do this in our own lives so that all the trauma, all the anxiety, all of the difficulties of oppositions and conflict that comes from oppositions somehow is removed from us? Imagine if we could remove all of the conflict from our being, if we could remove all the opposition in our being, if we could remove all of the trauma that comes from that. How do we do that?
Well, everyone talks about love, but love is truly misunderstood. Bawa used to say romantic love was the creation of the twelfth century Italians. Now, romantic love is one kind of love, but people love many things. They love their country, they love their language, they love their society, they love their caste, they love their wife, they love their horse, they love their car, they love their dog. Love is all over the place. However this kind of love is a lot like magnetism. A magnet draws things to it or pushes things away from it. When we want something, we are made up of the elements just like the rest of the world, so when we want to draw things to us we love them. We want them to somehow be attached to us, we want to be identified with them, we love them. What do we really need? Somehow, our elemental self is connected with that in an elemental way and we want these elements to be attracted to each other and we call that love.
Allah is not elemental. Allah is not made up of the elements. Allah is without elements. He is without form. Now, imagine a love that is not elemental. A love that is not magnetic, that doesn’t draw things, a love that infiltrates things in such a way that it brings mercy and compassion to that which it infiltrates without opposition. It infiltrates without opposition because it is not elemental. Because it is not elemental that doesn’t happen. There is no conflict. The non-elemental isn’t in conflict with the elemental. Because the elemental doesn’t even know it’s there. The elemental can’t even recognize it, the elemental can’t see it, the elemental can’t understand it. And the people who live in the world of the elements don’t know what’s happening. They become confused. Something is altered and they don’t know why, because something non-elemental is working on their elements.
We all know the Ten Commandments. And the Ten Commandments are the basis for morality and for the sharī‘at or the cannon law or the chalacha of the monotheistic religions. However, the Ten Commandments don’t say, thou shalt love. It is not a commandment. In various religions when a child reaches a certain age, they become accountable for adherence to the laws. There is a huge controversy in Christianity about when this happened and there are the ones who were baptized at birth and then there were the Anabaptists who were against baptism at birth because a child had to have the mental capacity to make a decision on their own, that they were going to accept the religion and accept the rules and regulations. So some began to baptize children when they were eighteen years old, when they had the opportunity to actually know what they were doing. Jews do it when kids are around thirteen years old. Boys in Islam in most of the Middle East countries aren’t circumcised until the age of eight to twelve.
The point being that there comes a time in your life when you’ve matured to a certain extent so that now you become responsible for your actions, you become responsible to God, and you become responsible for following the law. But the law doesn’t include, thou shalt love. You see loving takes more than being able to know what is right and what is wrong. And love changes the equation because now only don’t you understand or you do understand what is right and what is wrong, you also have the discretion to act appropriately in situations using the law as a guideline, but using also compassion and mercy and love in order to do what is right for that situation. It gives you the ability to differentiate between each moment. It gives you the ability to know what is right for the moment.
In Islam we have different prayers for different times, a different prayer is appropriate for a different moment. You don’t do fajr in the evening, and you don’t do the evening prayer in the afternoon. You do what is appropriate for the moment. Now, all of you know that I was with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen for an extended period of time. And people would ask me what is it that Bawa Muhaiyaddeen did and the answer is in three simple words. The right thing. He always did the right thing. In the moment he did what was correct for that moment. Whoever came before him, he did what was correct for that person. He was able to differentiate and to bring forth that which was appropriate for the exact situation that we were in. The problem with the law is, lawyers. The reality is that clerics of all religions are lawyers. And the law can be changed to fit the situation as you want it to be. In other words the political necessities that you find at the moment, the personal motives that you have at the moment, the real estate inclinations that you wish to have at the moment, the real estate inclinations that you wish to gather, whatever inclinations you may have you can interpret the law the way you want it to be. And that can lead to some very, very severe consequences. And it has. All of the atrocities that have happened in the world in the name of religion have come because of various interpretations of the laws which were considered appropriate interpretations at that moment. And the entire society accepted those specific regulations as if they had to be adhered to. And if they weren’t adhered to, consequences came. And consequences were severe.
To know yourself is a daunting enterprise. It’s been said that if you can accomplish this you will know your Lord. The reason for existence has been something that men have thought about for ages. Many have concluded that the reason for existence is to actually come to know the Lord of creation, our Lord, the one who created us. And we’ve been told that the path towards this knowing, towards this knowledge is to come to know who you are. The exact phrase is, “That to know your Lord you must know yourself.”
So, how does one come to know oneself? How does one come to know the answers to the question who am I? What’s the process that one must undertake on the path towards the understanding of who am I? Well, it’s evident that in order to begin to know ourselves we have to watch ourselves, we have to develop a witness within that comes to know us. For witnessing is a tricky business. One of the commandments is that thou shalt not bear false witness. So the question is are we capable of witnessing ourselves honestly. Are we capable of looking at ourselves in an objective nonprejudicial, nonfavoritism way in the way we would look at something else in the world? If there is nepotism in the world towards those close to us, how strong is that nepotism towards the way we see ourselves? How strong is that prejudice to make that which we do or that which we say or that which we think, how strong is that inclination within us to assume that that’s appropriate? Can we create a witness who watches our actions without judgment and is then able to report to ourselves as to what actually occurred? And then are we capable of creating an analytic mechanism within ourselves that can actually gauge or accurately gauge where we are, where we are going, how we approach things, how we do things? All of this is complex, subtle, complicated. But if we are going to get to know who we are, if we are going to get to know the reality of our existence, somewhere along the line we have to start being honest with ourselves as to who we are and the way we are.
Recently, very recently I was dealing with a client who has been a client of mine for over thirty-five years. And he’s one of the brightest men I have ever met. However, he’s eighty-four years old and his memory isn’t what it used to be. Here’s a man who is used to being always right and never making mistakes. And being incredibly methodical in the way he went over things, over and over and over and over to make sure he was right. And when he came to me and told me something was so and so I could pretty well rely on it, because I knew of the way that he approached things. Recently he’s had a situation where his memory is faulty, his logic is faulty, but his stubbornness as to being right hasn’t altered one bit. And it’s a very interesting thing to watch because you see this deterioration of faculties and the inability to come to appropriate conclusions. But you also see the absolute insistence that the conclusions are correct.
Really interesting because that’s what all of us do, no matter what stage of life we are in. And no matter what the situation is unless we have somehow changed into someone or something that understands the foibles of this worldly existence. As long as we give that kind of credence to that which is visible and we believe that it’s a non-shifting, non-eroding thing we can’t fully understand reality, because that which we look at changes and goes through different forms and loses its sameness over time. In other words it can’t remain as it is in the future, something happens to it, something erodes it, it somehow begins to dissipate.
Now, in Sufism, we talk about the haqq, the haqīqat, the level of reality. The level where things are not changing, the level where things remain and are real, as opposed to illusory, as opposed to losing their form, as opposed to altering, as opposed to dissipating.
To change our focus from the temporal to the eternal is the point of this path and as long as we keep our focus on the worldly, what happened to my client is going to happen to each of us. We are going to keep insisting that things are a certain way when everybody around us sees that they are not, in a real scenario actually involving the temporal. We are going to lose touch. When you see people who’ve lost touch and you realize that that’s the path we’re slowly traveling to, you begin to also realize simultaneously the relevance and irrelevance of being in touch with certain things. So the question is, what is it that we want to be in touch with and what is going to sustain us as the world leaves us and as our ability to manipulate the world leaves us, what is it that can stay with us then?
Wise men often explain situations through allegories, stories that when told depict a certain situation and then bring your own awareness of certain things to a different level. Sometimes you don’t get it. Sometimes you hear the allegory and you really don’t have any idea what they are talking about. And then the teacher will explain the allegory and then you can get more insight into the situation.
Our life is like that. It is one story situation, scenario, set of facts after the other. And there are lots of different ways to deal with it. There’s what appears on the surface, there’s what’s under the surface, there’s what’s much deeper under the surface, and then there’s the message about reality that exists within the scenario, and either distance from reality or a closeness to reality in the situation.
Ibn ‘Arabī said that the world is a translator for Allah. The world is a translator for God. The point being that the things that we see and the things that we interact with are learning lessons from us indicating to us what it is we have to do in order to become closer to reality. For instance, a simple one, if Allah wants you to learn patience, He may give you a situation that requires patience. Now, if you’re sitting with yourself and you’re in the midst of frustration and anger, do you think it’s going to naturally come to you, ah ha, this is the situation that needs patience and it’s my time to learn patience? Or is this one of the allegories that we didn’t get?
The point is that we have to learn to become diagnosticians of ourselves and of each of our situations. There are ten trillion, one hundred million, ten thousand, hypnotic illusions that attach us to them, and that we follow around or choose not to follow around. However, if we consider everything that goes on as normative and capable of becoming involved with, we’re not looking below the surface of what we see. Somehow, we have to start looking at the deeper level of things in order to figure out what is actually going on. And until we do that we are never going to know what happens with the depths because we are swimming on the surface of illusion, and being very interactive with it. And that interaction consumes all of our thought, all of our time, and all of our energy. So if we are constantly in process with illusion trying to resolve illusion, and trying to resolve what it throws at us, what can be the end result?
Anyone who studies the cultures on this planet will notice very quickly that there are many different religions, there are many different religions throughout the world and they don’t even predominate in particular areas. There may be areas where there are many different religions. There may be areas where there is just one religion that predominates and doesn’t allow any others. There are some areas that allow a predominance of religions and everyone is allowed to worship the way they wish.
However, what you have to notice if you begin studying religions is that there are differences among them, and often profound differences. Also quite often within these differences there is direct accusation at other religions that they are incorrect and that the truth is only found within one religion, being the one that that religion is. If one is trying to learn about the truth and learn about reality, one of the things that comes on this plate of knowledge is attempting to understand God, and attempting to understand the relationship between man and God.
Now, all of these religions offer an understanding as to what God is, who God is, an explanation of God and the relationship between man and God. But the scriptures tell us that a people are governed in a way that reflects who they are. In other words their national situation has to do with who they are as people. In other words there is an influence on the surrounding country of the way people are and that comes back on them in the way they are governed. Well, this goes a little further, in reality, in the way people are influenced the way they see God, and the way they define God, and the way they worship God. For instance a cool, harsh, barbaric people see a cool, harsh, barbaric God. And that God allows them to do cruel, harsh and barbaric things in His name. A gentle people with appropriate behavior towards each other and kindness towards each other, see a gentle, kind God, who expects people to be gentle and kind towards each other and have tolerance towards each other.
So, is God defining Himself for us or are we as people defining God based on our own proclivities, the way we want to see things and the way we want to do things? And do we as peoples define God, so that He fits our idea of society so that we can do what we want, as opposed to doing what is correct and what is appropriate?
We have all seen westerns and we have all seen the situation where the guys with the black hats are running the town, and then the lawman arrives. The man with the white hat rides into town and all of a sudden the black hats either become very confrontational or begin to scurry around or hide or develop new strategies to handle the white hat. Before the white hat came into town they sort of ran free, they had their way with things and there was no confrontation, there was just their aggression. Now, all of a sudden aggression has to be answered for. This creates tension, because aggression has to be answered for.
Well, similarly we have within us a level of conscience called judgment, which sometimes enters into our being and takes a look at what we have been doing. And when that happens it creates internal conflict within us, because all of a sudden there is a dilemma, a confrontation, who’s in charge? Is judgment in charge, or is the aggression that has been going on and the lower self that’s been running wild, in charge?
Since we are the ones in the midst of this aggression and we are the ones who are the aggressor, there is a real dilemma here, and it’s a dilemma that we face constantly. The dilemma is do we hide from judgment? Do we essentially do what the cat does when it thinks it’s being seen and it closes it’s eyes and it makes believe there’s nobody watching. Or do what the ostrich does, which puts it’s head in the sand and makes believe it can’t be seen.
We are told that we need to act as if we are constantly being watched, whether we know we are or not. The truth is that we are capable of watching ourselves in addition to acknowledging that we are being watched by God. The question is do we acknowledge that we are being watched and do we actually interact inside ourselves as if we are being watched, and as if we are being controlled through the watching so that our higher self is the one that is in control?
This has to do with the witness that exists in each of our beings, and the ability that we have to bring that witness forth. The explanation is that this witness comes after sense, awareness and intellect, as the fourth level of consciousness, which is the level of judgment, which is the level that looks at our acts and is able to make a dispassionate, non-involved, non-arbitrary decision based on God’s laws as to whether our acting, our acts, our actions, our demeanor, our thoughts are appropriate or not.
What happens when that witness comes into being in our selves, what happens between ourselves and ourselves is the key to who we become. It is the key to our progress on the path. It is the key to our transformation.
The body of divine instruction in Islam comes not only from the Qur’an but also from the hadīth. The hadīth are the sayings of the Prophet, but in addition there are also the stories of what the Prophet did in certain circumstances. In other words how the Prophet acted. There is a story of the man who was asked why he went to see the great shaikh. And his response was, “I went to see how he puts his shirt on.” The point being he wanted to see how somebody at that status acted.
Knowledge is the first level of understanding, however if knowledge doesn’t turn into action then nothing much has been accomplished. Many people don’t know how to turn knowledge into action. They don’t know how to do. They know how to talk but they don’t know how to do. They can talk about the path, they can talk about everything that they have learned on the path. And that’s not hard. If you take a discourse of a wise man and you memorize it, you can talk. And you can even talk in a sensible way. However, if action isn’t combined with that knowledge then something is missing.
Now, when people go on this path they expect all kinds of different things. Part of the problem is based right in that expectation. Because since they don’t know what they are venturing into, to begin expecting things is a form of hallucination. In other words a predetermination of what’s going to occur later, when you have no idea what’s going to occur later. And since you set up a predetermined image when the real thing comes along you don’t recognize it. Which has a lot to do with the story about the Khidr Nabī, the Eternal Prophet who walked the earth. A man had decided he wanted to meet him, so he sat and meditated on him for weeks. And then finally it came to him, what this prophet looked like and he drew a picture of him on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket and then he went searching for him. For years he went door to door, village to village, town to town, country to country, trying to find him, never getting any response.
Finally, ten years into his journey somebody said, “He’s in the next village.” He went to the next village and he said, “I’ve heard the Khidr Nabī is here can you tell me where he is?” And they said, “Yes he’s in that house right now giving a talk.” And he walked in there and he asked the man during the break, “Are you the Khidr Nabī?” He said, “Yes.” He pulled the piece of paper out of his pocket with the picture on it, looked at it and said, “No you’re not,” and left.
We can create these kinds of situations for ourselves by pre-imagining what’s going to occur. Now, action is without pre-imagination. Because if we sit and imagine what’s going to occur, it also stops us from action. What’s interesting is that the kind of action that is required to put you on this path is considered incredibly mundane by some people. It’s too simple. This can’t be the elevated state of the righteous path. It’s too simple to be nice to people. It’s too simple to be courteous. It’s too simple to have appropriate behavior in the presence of others. It must be something loftier.
What we fail to realize that what is loftier than being appropriate, what is loftier than helping our fellow man. What is loftier than doing your work as an assist to God’s work? What is God’s work? He is the creator, the sustainer and the nourisher. And if we help with the sustenance and the nourishment of others, we are doing His work. So we have to find a kind of peace and exaltation within that work.
Questioner: Thank you Musa for that talk and as a follow up question to that, can you tell us why so many people miss their birthright and why we are so unaware of what is available to us and we go about our lives without fully taking advantage of our birthright and understanding what is available to us?
Musa: There are lots of reasons. And the reasons are similar yet different for each of us. They have to do with where we were born, who our parents are, how we were raised, and they also have to do with the overwhelming nature of the hypnotism and the magnetism of the world.
In order to find peace within yourself and in order to go on this path of looking for yourself, somewhere along the line you have to get tired of looking for stuff in the world. Somewhere along the line you have to become somehow jaded with what is available in the world. Somehow you have to become aware of the fact that what was available out there is not what you wanted, that what is available out there didn’t exactly suit your taste.
Now, as long as you are satisfied with what is available in the world why would you turn away? As long as you are satisfied with what is available in the world why would you go looking for something else? It doesn’t occur to somebody until they begin to examine their own existence and begin to ask questions of themselves like, what am I really looking for, and what am I accomplishing by all of the things that I am doing in the world? Somewhere along the line people who truly examine themselves will understand the fleeting nature of the rewards of the world. They will begin to understand that there is no depth to them, that they can all disappear in an instant. That everything that we get in the world is subject to destruction and subject to disappointment.
This may freak people out. It may terribly disappoint some people. It may make them, when they discover this, emotional wrecks. It may stop them from functioning. It may send them to insane asylums. And that is why you need a strong basis in knowledge. And that is why you need some sort of guidance while you are going through this. But once those realizations hit home and once that taste for the world begins to dissipate and once the static of all of the advertisements of the world no longer affect you, you can begin to see more clearly.
May the peace of God be with you, may His grace envelop you and embrace you, may His peace integrate into your being and may you know that peace.
As with most things, the path begins with knowledge. Knowledge is the light that sets you on a path. And like a light that knowledge needs to be used. Used on your own being. A candle can light the way for you or a candle can be kept in one place. You can’t go anywhere in the night if you don’t have some light. And allegorically, this world is in the midst of darkness, it’s in the night. And knowledge is the light that takes us on a path towards understanding. But knowledge has to be used, the fruit of knowledge is action. And action means doing what you have learned through knowledge.
In Sufism, there is a teacher who imparts knowledge to the student. But the knowledge that is imparted is not just words and instructions, it is also the demeanor and the actions of the teacher. It is an understanding of the nature of a being that has gone on the path and has gotten somewhere. Incorporating the action of the knowledge that you have learned into your own life is what transformation is about. And what is this transformation? What does it do to you? It changes your state, it develops a state for you.
So, everyone is looking for peace in their existence. Well, peace is available, but it needs to be worked for. We need to know how to obtain peace. We need to know the actions that we have to do to obtain peace. And what are these actions? They begin with moral code that underlies what we do. In other words we begin to truly understand the difference between right and wrong, and we do what’s right in an appropriate way and we stay away from what’s wrong. All of the religions have this moral code. In Islam it is called the sharī‘at. In Catholicism it’s called the cannon law. In Judaism it is called chalacha. But it is a set of rules and regulations that you need to follow, that you need to incorporate.
The teacher teaches something else besides just the rules and regulations. The rules and regulations can be taught and untaught at the earliest phases. The next phase is to begin to understand what love is and to incorporate love into your being so that you become a being who loves. Now, this is a big step because now we go on an intellectual knowledge of things to actually acting out. But acting out what? Acting out certain qualities.
In Islam, there are ninety-nine names for God. These ninety-names represent the qualities of God. These ninety-nine names represent the space that you can go into, a state of compassion, a state of mercy, a state of gratitude, a state of patience. One needs to understand these ninety-nine names and what they represent. There is a book called, The Asmā’ul Husnā, by M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, which lists the ninety-nine names, one needs to obtain this book and read it and find out what those qualities are. Then one needs to begin to practice being those qualities. To practice integrating those qualities into your life, slowly at first, until they actually become the qualities that you are.
Now, these things can’t be measured, they can’t be weighed, but they can be assessed just by looking at somebody that has them. They show up in a person’s face, they show up in a person’s voice, they show up in a person’s temperament, and they change states. An angry person stops being angry and becomes patient. A hateful person becomes forgiving. There is an alteration in the chemistry of our being, so knowledge leads to action. Action leads to a state. And it is a state that we can be peaceful with. It is a state that we can be kind with. It is a state that loves. And we can develop these states. But to do that we have to control our being until these states become our norm.
In society if our behavior becomes inappropriate, things occur that put us outside of society. For instance, if you break the laws they put you in jail. You’re not allowed to be with the rest of society. On the spiritual path it’s also like this, only it’s not visible. And people don’t understand the separation. In the physical society if somebody gets put into jail, they are behind bars, they are in a different location, but the spiritual path is intermingled without physical being, and intermingled with our physical path. So others can’t see whether we’re allowed into the spiritual realms or not. And we ourselves aren’t so aware of whether we are allowed into the spiritual realms or not. But in the same way that there are laws which if they are broken you are put outside of society, in the same way there are laws on the spiritual path, which if you don’t follow them you can’t get it. You can’t be allowed, you are restricted.
These are things that we do ourselves that restrict ourselves from entry into what is known as haqīqat, reality. Some basic terminology: sharī‘at is the rule of law, tarīqat is the beginning of the path and haqīqat is where the path takes you, the entrance into reality. Now, a candle is like tarīqat and sharī‘at, it is involved with the two of them. You take a candle and light it. Now you can either keep it in front of you and look at it, change its wick, add wax and play with the candle or you can go outside in the night and it can take you somewhere in the darkness. It becomes a guide. So for a candle, a light to be used in the night appropriately you have to take it somewhere, it has to take you somewhere. The sharī‘at, the law, is this candle. The law puts you in an appropriate state and then you have to go on a path with the law, in other words you have to incorporate it into action. You have to put it into your life. You have to understand what it is, and you have to learn it, and then you have to adhere to it, and then you have to move with it. And then it will take you to the places that are available on the path.
Now, the interesting thing is that one of the things that holds us back is our own preconception of where we are going. We have this incredible imagination that goes wild and begins to tell us things. If we listen to our imagination then what happens is we limit our reality. The two words sort of indicate what’s going on, imagination and reality. If we are overwhelmed by imagination we are not going to be able to see reality when it’s shown to us, because we have imagined reality.
The Khidr Nabī, which is the Eternal Prophet, is supposed to wander the earth and assist people in certain situations. Well there was this man who wanted with the depths of his being to meet the Khidr Nabī, and he sat and he meditated day after day on him. And then after a couple of months of meditating, he took out a piece of paper and drew a picture of the man who he imagined was the Khidr Nabī, he folded the piece of paper and he put into his pocket. And then he made the intention to go on a search to find him. He walked for months, for years, he went from village to village, town to town, country to country looking for him.
Finally one day as he is asking if anybody had seen or known of the Khidr Nabī, somebody said, “He was just here, he is in the next village.” He immediately hurried over to the next village and asked, “Is he here?” And they said, “Yes, he’s over there.” And he went into the house and he said, “Is the Khidr Nabī here?” And a man stood up and said, “I am the Khidr Nabī.” And he took the piece of paper out of his pocket and looked at it and the face didn’t match the face he had drawn and he said, “No you’re not.” He put the piece of paper back in his pocket and went looking again!
This is a path for lovers. The question though often is how does one become a lover? And how do you know whether you are in that state, or you are in some other state? Well, self love is the love that most of us know. The ego centric self and it’s total involvement with the self and the constant attempt to raise up and satisfy the desires of the self. But to be a lover is not so much about your interaction with yourself. It’s about your interaction with others, how you see others, how you approach others, how you deal with others, what your attitude is towards the other.
The point being that the other needs to become no different than the self and the attitude needs to become the same as the self. And in order to do this we need to understand a little bit how we view other people, how we see others, our reaction to others and the kind of attitudes we have towards other people.
It’s said that one bad quality can hide a thousand good qualities. It’s also said that one good quality can hide a thousand bad qualities. Now, the point is that most people in the world today are a combination of qualities, good and bad.
Out in the yard we have some grasses, some are green and some are what they call variegated, they have multiple colors, they have stripes of yellow and stripes of green running through them. The people in the world today are like that, they are variegated, they are a combination of good and bad. The question is what is it that we see? Do we see the good? Do we see the positive? Do we see the bad? The next question is, do we comment on it, especially with others? Do we talk about people? Do we spend an excessive amount of time talking about the bad qualities? Have we taken a snapshot of somebody while they are in the midst of an inappropriate comment or an inappropriate quality, and have we categorized them within that snapshot?
Now, when I was talking about attitudes, towards ourself we believe, for the most part, in free will. In other words, if we go through a series of time when our actions are inappropriate we recognize it, we think, well, we’ll change. We certainly have the opportunity to change, we’re given the opportunity to change. But we should notice our speech patterns, when we begin to describe others and we talk about their bad qualities.
We’ve given up on free will for others. For others we believe in predestination. We believe, this is who they are, this is who they’re destined to be, and this is their destiny and their fate, and we’ve spotted it. All of a sudden this ability for change, this ability for free will that we grant to ourselves, never mind who God grants it to, we don’t grant it to other people. We don’t grant it the same way that we grant it to ourselves. So when we think about what’s going on when we are interacting with other people, what is our attitude towards other people, what is the way that we see that and how do we categorize them differently than we categorize ourselves? And this is one of the supreme ways that we get involved with other people and don’t even realize what we are doing, because we don’t see others as we see ourselves. We don’t give unto others the same kind of breaks, attitudes, understandings that we give ourselves. We give ourselves the possibility to change, we don’t give others the possibility to change. We give ourselves the free will to alter the way things are going. We don’t give to others the free will to alter the way things are going for them.
One of the five requisite duties of Islam is pilgrimage, the hajj. However, the other religions also have pilgrimage. And besides the hajj in Islam people also do smaller pilgrimages known as umrah, which is a pilgrimage to Mecca not during the month of hajj, but at other times during the year.
For about ten years I took people on this smaller pilgrimage called umrah every year. And found a lot of interesting things. One was when everyone went to Mecca it was a place very much outside of their normal experience to the point where they didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t know what was going to happen next and it altered their daily routine to not a small extent, to a huge extent. It made their physical surroundings so entirely unfamiliar and so entirely different that that part of them that was automatic in their reaction turned off for a while. It turned off to such an extent that they began to view things in an entirely different way. All of a sudden people who went through their lives as if it was normative were now going through their lives as if astonishing events were occurring to them on a regular basis. Monumental events that had consequences on their existence were happening to them regularly, events that they could recognize as having impact on their being and impact on the status of their life, and the degree of their consciousness.
About the third or fourth trip that I took I really understood that this was a regular occurrence for people and I expected it to happen. I knew from previous experience that it happened to me, but now I expected it to happen to other people. And one of the things that also happened to them simultaneously was their absolute need to share this with other people. So I created a space for the ability to share and in the evening we would have a meeting with the people and they would then describe what they had gone through and the impact it had on them. And it was really interesting because nothing was normative anymore, everything had consequence. And each action within the day had some sort of purpose and some sort of meaning.
In German there is an expression, “man ist was er isst,” which means — it’s a pun — translated in English, “You are what you eat.” But in German, “ist, i-s-t,” means “are,” and “isst, i-s-s-t,” means “eat.” So you eat what you eat, you are what you are, you eat what you are, you are what you eat! And we translate it into, “You are what you eat.” So, the point is, essentially, that which you put into your being is what you become.
Let’s take that a few steps further. We are the entire amalgam of our cognition. We become what we think we are. Now, this makes it very, very important that you’re aware of what you think you are. Because if you don’t know what you think you are, you don’t know what you think. If you’re not aware of your imaginations about yourself, you may be becoming something that you don’t necessarily want to become. You have been given an active part in what happens to you, and you take an active role in what happens to you. So what you think you are has a lot to do with what you are. Now, do we really know what we think we are? Are we aware of the driving forces deep inside of us that create what we think we are?
Now, the kalimah says, Lā ilāha illallāhu, nothing exists but God. The Hebrew version is Adoshem Elohenu Adoshem Echud, God is God, God is one — essentially the same meaning. The second commandment is you shall create no graven images. There shall be no idols. Now, let’s understand what idols are. If God is all that exists, what are idols? Non-existence. So, if you worship something other than God, what are you worshiping? Non-existence. Therefore, why did God tell you not to have idols? To save your soul from non-existence because you are creating your own non-existence. You’re dooming your being. You shall have no graven images before you. What is the existence of images? They don’t exist. When you walk into a holy place, you’re not supposed to have images. Why? Because you’re not supposed to be involved in things that don’t exist. If images don’t exist, if you are giving your attention to images, you’re worshiping what doesn’t exist. You’re creating your own non-existence through the creation of idols. Therefore, you shall have no graven images. You shall have no imaginations. If your imagination begins to run amok, to run crazy with all kinds of thoughts and ideas, what happens to you if you pay attention to them, if you associate with them, if you see yourself as them? You force non-existence on yourself.
So, we have this situation that we are in. We are constantly in between the world of illusion and the world of reality. And we have to choose where we want to be. Do we want to be in illusion or do we want to be in reality? And if we choose idols, we choose illusion. If we choose non-form, we are choosing reality. So we have to be very careful about the way we walk through the world and the things that we pick up as we walk through the world. The more that we pick up, the more that we hold sacred, the more that we treasure the things of the world; the more we put ourself into the world of illusion, the more we disappear from reality. The more we let go of these things, the more we are able to disassociate ourself from idols, from images, from treasures, from desires; the more we begin to appear in reality.
The word kalimah, as in the first kalimah, means affirmation of the faith. It’s very similar to the word shahādah, witnessing. And the first kalimah in Islam, the first affirmation is Lā ilāha illallāhu Muhammadur-Rasūlullāh. The typical Islamic translation is, there is no deity but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. I’m going to deal with the first part of the kalimah, Lā ilāha illallāhu. The standard Islamic translation is, there is no God, but God, or there is no God but Allah. There is no deity but Allah. Essentially making the statement that there is no other God than Allah. The Sufi interpretation, translation, meaning, is different. It says, nothing exists but God, or I do not exist, only God exists.
It takes the level of understanding to a different place. There is no deity but Allah, begins a competition, your God doesn’t exist, only my God exists. Anybody else who worships any other God is not worshiping God appropriately. Well, within the monotheistic understanding, if there is only one God, then in fact there can be no other God. And if anybody worships God, they are worshiping that one God because there is nothing else to worship. Now, unless you have a fixation about your language and you want everybody to call God by the same name you call God, you should be able to assume immediately that everybody is worshiping the same God, especially if they are also monotheists.
It’s astonishing that people think that Allah is somehow a different God than Jehovah, the Jewish God, or the Christian God or the Muslim God, that they are somehow different. All of them believe that there is but one God. So why does culture, language and the way we name Him, the words we use for it, have so much to do with our emotional attachment and a reaction to that? Within that understanding is a big part of the religious problems that exist in the world. The need for your language, your culture, to be predominant in the understanding of God and that everyone sees God through your culture’s eyes, your language’s eyes, has a lot more to do with personal ego and the sustenance sustaining of one’s own culture, one’s own language, one’s own way of seeing things, one’s own pride, that it has to do with belief in God. And we have to come to grips with that understanding.
As we walk through the world we are constantly influenced by everything that we interact with. We bring outside influences into our being, consciously or unconsciously. We allow them to enter into our being and they have an effect on us. For instance, the mere act of opening a newspaper in the morning is allowing outside influence into your consciousness. How often have you opened up the newspaper and responded to the headline with, “O my God?” Turning on the television in the morning and watching the news or whatever it is that you watch, is allowing an outside influence to enter into your being and to influence you. As you walk down the street in a large city, the occurrences that happen on that street are going to influence you. The things you see in stores, the marques from the movie theaters that you pass by, the advertisements that are stuck on the walls that you pass by, the billboards that you see are all going to have influences upon you.
The mode of the people that you interact with and their opinions and their points of view and the way they interact with you are going to have influence on you. Everything that we see, hear, eat, smell, influences us somehow. The sugar in a candy bar may taste sweet to us, but the influence twenty years from now of too many of these candy bars is going to be something other than sweet.
We need to know that we as a being are physically, mentally, and spiritually being constantly influenced by what our senses interact with. So, what do we do and how do we protect ourselves? Recently I was away and where I was there was no television, there were no telephones, and there were no newspapers. And within two days I noticed an enormous change in my being. There was a calmness in the morning when I woke up that I really wasn’t used to. There was a difference in my thought patterns as I walked through the day than I had been used to. Two days without newspapers, telephones, and television. The question comes, why can’t we learn to be on retreat in our everyday life? What is it that stops us from doing what’s right for ourselves while we are in the midst of our everyday life? Why do we allow ourselves to be susceptible to everything that influences us? When we can choose, just as if we chose to go away, to be not involved with all of these things. What’s to stop you from not reading the newspaper in the morning? What’s to stop you from not turning on the television? What’s to stop you from not engaging in things that distress you? What’s to stop you from doing that?
There is a story that I like a lot, that I’ve probably told before, but I’m going to tell it now. It’s about group of boys who were working at a hazel nut farm. And they were gathering hazel nuts for the farmer and at the end of the day he paid them with a large bag of hazel nuts. And they were talking amongst each other as to how to divide this bag of hazelnuts. And one of them said, “Let’s go to Mullah Nasradeen and he’ll divide them for us. So they went to the Mullah and they asked him to divide the nuts for them. And he asked them, “Do you want me to divide them according to God’s law or according to man’s law?” And the boys said, “Well in that case, divide them according to God’s law.” So he said, “Fine, why don’t you all sit down.” And the five boys sat in a circle and Nasradeen took the hazelnuts and poured them out of the bag into the middle of the circle and he took half of the hazelnuts and slid them over to the first boy. Then he took the half that was left and cut it in half again and gave half to the second boy. Then he took the portion that was left which was now a quarter, cut it in half and gave it to the third and fourth boy, and gave nothing to the fifth.
And the first boy was really quite pleased. The second boy also was not complaining. The third and fourth boys figured that they gotten a little more than a fifth which would have been more than they would have gotten anyway or around what they would have gotten. But the last boy was really bitter. And the word that came out of his mouth constantly was, “Why? Why? Why?” And Mullah sat back and he said, “You know you asked me to divide it according to God’s law, not according to man’s law. Now, if I were going to divide it according to man’s law, I would have asked you each how much work you did. Then I would have asked you how much each of you were responsible for what was collected that day and I would have given it out proportionately to the amount of work that you have done. But you said I should divide it according to God’s law. And God does as He wills. And it is our responsibility to be able to accept what He does”.
Now, here we are in this world living according to the laws of man, trying to understand the laws of God, of Allah. We have been ingrained with certain ideas of what we call fairness. Those ideas of fairness come from the way we view things. However trust in God is different than fairness. And to make that leap is a very difficult thing, because here we are in a situation where there are many things that we don’t know the answers to. There are hundreds of questions that we can come up with where things appear in the world to be inequitable. Where things appear to be more difficult for some, and less difficult for others. Where some seem to have an easy ride and some seem to have the most difficult of circumstances. And we lament, why, why, why. Not only do we lament, why, why, why, we come up with theories like communism, where we say, everybody should give according to their ability to everybody as to their need. Something like, we are going to decide what’s fair in this world, what’s equitable in this world, and we are going to decide how to distribute Allah’s wealth in the world.
Unless you could do addition and subtraction, it’s unlikely you’d be able to do multiplication. There’s a certain progression to things. And if we don’t understand that, we move forward not because of understanding things but because of ignorance and arrogance. Ignorance and arrogance combined take you to places where angels fear to tread. We need to be able to see the limitations of where the actual knowledge that we have at a certain point in time takes us. And one of the most important things for us to understand is what we don’t know. If we are constantly content with what we think we know, then there’s no impetus to take us any further.
This past week I turned on the television and I saw a vision on the TV of people appearing to be standing on water, a lot of them. In fact they weren’t standing on water, they were standing on the wing of an airplane, that was partially submerged and it just looked like they were standing on water. But it didn’t make it any less of a miracle. Of course everybody knows what I am talking about, and that’s the plane that lost its engines flying out of LaGuardia and the pilot was able to glide it into the Hudson River without any power.
This morning people were being interviewed who had survived the crash, all of them survived, and they were asked questions like, “What were you thinking as the plane was landing?” And this one woman said, “I was thinking I didn’t tell enough people that I loved them.” And then she thought, “I was going to die but then I looked up and we were alive, now I’m thinking there must be something else I have to do in my life and I’ve been given time and grace in order to accomplish that.”
Every once in a while God, Allah, chooses to show the entire world that He can do as He wills. And that miracles are not difficult for Him. And when we see that we have a moment of understanding and a moment of recognition. These moments are very important in life. They are the moments when we realize the majesty of our existence and simultaneously the wonder of it. And at the same time how all of it is held together by a filament as thin as a hair. And that our life is something like a bubble and it floats and then it bursts. And when it bursts it’s done. Yet as fragile as that bubble is it can exist through amazing, incredible difficulties, and difficult situations.
These moments when we are at a sort of peak recognition of the temporary nature of our existence and at a peak recognition of the fact that our lives are suspended like a thread and may be taken from us at any second, these moments of peak recognition throw us into another state. Because all of a sudden all of the things that we’ve been thinking about that are really very temporary in nature and will have very little meaning to us, fall away from us as if they weren’t there, and the important things stream to the forefront, like I didn’t tell enough people that I love them, I didn’t get to say goodbye to the most important people in my life, that I didn’t express my inner gratitude for all that certain people have done for me. Or more directly, taken the opportunity to express my gratitude to my Lord for my existence and I haven’t had the time in my life to get to know who it is that I am so grateful to, who it is that has held me up, who it is that has taken me safely through this journey through existence, who has pulled me out of the fire so many times and who has let me start over and over and over each time that we fall away from the truth, fallen away from reality, fallen away from what’s appropriate.
Our life becomes very pointed in these moments, very centered. And our state changes. Now we have to ask ourselves this question, why does it take momentous occasions like that for us to be able to see clearly? Why can’t we sustain that point of view and that sight throughout our day, throughout our weeks, throughout our years? Why do we lose the instantaneous nature of the moment? That moment when those people who were descending into the water, they weren’t thinking about the past and they weren’t thinking about the future, they were right there, what’s happening now. Well the only place that we are is right here with what’s happening now.