Work in Harmony

The Lotus Flower and the Honeybee

2011-12-26T05:44:00.000-08:00

Look at the pond. In a large pond, there are fish and frogs and crabs and water snakes and insects and water bugs and oysters and crocodiles and hippopotamuses and otters. Many things live in a pond. Lotus flowers also live in a pond. They are beautiful flowers, with gorgeous colors and a natural honey. But the fish and frogs and other things that live in the pond do not drink that honey. They do not search for that honey. They do not even realize that the lotus has honey. The frogs may sit or jump on the leaves of the lotus, but they do not know that there is honey in its flower. They do not have that understanding.

But, a honey bee that lives far away on a mountaintop, or a honey bee that loves far away in the jungle, can smell the honey of the lotus flower. It will fly straight toward the flower, making the sound, “Keeee, keeee, keeee.” It will fly very fast until it finds the honey. As soon as it comes to the flower, it buzzes around, then sits upon it, and stops moving its wings. Its sound ceases. Then it puts its nose down into the flower, extracts the honey, and rubs the pollen on its legs. The bee does not hurt the flower, does it? It only takes the honey and the pollen and then flies away. It flies back to the original place, depositing the pollen on other flowers and storing the honey. That is what a bee does. Every honey bee does this. There are millions and millions of honey bees, and each one does its duty like this.

Similarly, God has created people in the world. We live in the pond of illusion, the pond of maya. We live in the huge pond of forms that come from the earth, fire, water, air and ether. These forms are the pond of illusion, and we with our mind and desire swim in this pond. Even though we are swimming in illusion, the lotus of the heart also lives there, naturally. Within that lotus flower of the heart there are natural, beautiful qualities, beautiful actions, beautiful conduct, patience, compassion, tolerance, peace, unity, and tranquility. This fill the lotus and make it beautiful. When these qualities blossom within, the flower of the lotus opens. Then its beauty is known and its beauty speaks. It becomes indescribably beautiful, with so many colors and hues. And deeper within that beauty is the true natural honey which is God. God, His power and His truth have such a beautiful taste! That taste is the honey of knowledge, the honey of wisdom and the honey of light. It is the taste of the honey of God and the honey of god’s justice.

In the pond of illusion there are bad thoughts, satan’s qualities, drugs, lions, tigers, crocodiles, frogs, scorpion, fish, donkey – everything. They do not gather the honey which is the power of God, God’s light, and God’s truth. They do not gather the honey of knowledge and the honey of wisdom. They live near the flower of the heart, they live all around it, but they do not accept the honey of truth. Blood-ties, our relationships, religions, and races all live around that flower. Arrogance, karma, maya, lust, anger, greed, miserliness, fanaticism, envy, obsession, intoxicants, theft, murder, and falesehood all encircle the flower. In that pond, there are the four hundred trillion, ten thousand ‘spiritual miracles’ of the mind – things that people claim to be miracles. They all fly around and around this flower. It is possible that they might sit on the flower of the heart, but they do not know about the honey inside. Only the honey bee which comes from the mountaintop knows the taste of the honey.

God is our original Father. He is the One who made us, the One who protects us. He is our Father. When God sees the beauty of the honey of the heart, the honey of knowledge, He comes with the buzzing sound of “Rrrrr”, and He comes with the resonating sound of “Hoooooo.” When He sits upon our heart, it does not hurt. He does not hurt our life, and He does not hurt our existence. He gives beauty to beauty. He gives love to love. He comforts us, makes our heart happy, makes our flower of our heart blossom, and then extracts the honey. He extracts the honey of love, the honey of compassion, the honey of good qualities. He extracts that taste and takes it to His paradise, to His judgment to His place of justice. He stores the honey there, and then tomorrow, when we go to the kingdom of God, He will give that honey back to us. The He will make us peaceful, and He will keep us in paradise. This is what God does.

Think about this a little. The heart of grace must contain good qualities. You must have good thoughts, you must have peace and tolerance, and you must realize this explanation in your life. You must attain patience, tolerance, peace, and justice. If you fill your heart with good things, your heart will be beautiful, and God will make you the leader of His kingdom. God, the greatest father of all, will take you unto Himself. You will gain victory, peace, tranquility and serenity here, as well as there. []

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. My Love You My Children. The Fellowship Press, Philadelphia. 2006. p. 63-65)

The Originality of Sufism

2011-12-11T01:57:00.000-08:00

The great Andalusian Sufi, Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi used to pray a prayer which begins: ‘Enter me, O Lordm into the deep of the Ocean of Thine Infinite Oneness’, and in the treatises of the Sufis this ‘Ocean’ is mentioned again and again, likewise by way of symbolic reference to the End towards which their path is directed. Let us therefore begin by saying, on the basis of this symbol, in answer to the question ‘What is Sufism?’: From time to time a Revelation ‘flows’ like a great tidal wave from the Ocean of Infinitude to the shores of our finite world; and Sufism is the vocation and the discipline and the science of plunging into the ebb of one of these waves and being drawn back with it to its Eternal and Infinite Source.

‘From time to time’: this is a simplification which calls for a commentary; for since there is no common measure between the origin of such a wave and its destination, its temporality is bound to partake, mysteriously, of the Eternal, just as its finiteness is bound to partake of the Infinite. Being temporal, it must first reach this world at a certain moment in history; but that moment will in a sense escape from time. Better than a thousand months (Qur’an XCVII:3) is how the Islamic Revelation describes the night of its own advent. There must also be an end which corresponds to the beginning; but that end will be too remote to be humanly foreseeable. Divine institutions are made forever. Another imprint of the Eternal Present upon it will be that it is always flowing and always ebbing in the sense that it has, virtually, both a flow and an ebb for every individual that comes within its scope.

There is only one water, but no two Revelations are outwardly the same. Each wave has its own characteristics according to its destination, that is, the particular needs of time and place towrads which and in response to which it has providentially been made to flow. These needs, which include all kinds of ethnic receptivities and aptitudes such as vary from people to people, may be likened to the cavities and hollows which lie in the path of the wave. The vast majority of believers are exclusively concerned with the water which the wave deposits in these receptacles and which constitutes the formal aspect of the religion.

Mystics on the other hand – ans Sufism is a kind of mysticism – are by definition concerned above all with ‘the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven’; and it would therefore be true to say, in pursuance of our image, that the mystic is one who is incomparably more preoccupied by the ebbing wave than by the water which it has left behind. He has none the less need of this residue like the rest of his community – need, that is, of the outward formd of his religion which concern the human individual as such. For if it be asked what is it in the mystic that can ebb with the ebbing wave, part of the answer will be: not his body and not his soul. The body cannot ebb until the Resurrection, which is the first stage of the reabsorption of the body – and with it the whole material state – into the higher states of being. As to the soul, it has to wait until the death of the body. Until then, though immortal, it is imprisoned in the world of mortality. At the death of Ghazali, the great eleventh-century Sufi, a poem which he had written in his last illness was found beneath his head. In it are the lines:

A bird I am, this body was my cage
But i have flown leaving it as a token.

Other great Sufis also have said what amounts to the same: but they have also made it clear in their writing of speaking or living – and this is, for us, the measure of their greatness – that something in them had already ebbed before death despite the ‘cage’, something incomparably more important than anything that has to wait for death to set it free.

What is drawn back by spiritual realisation towards the Source might be called the center of consciousness. The Ocean is within as well as without; and the path of the mystics is a gradual awakening as it were ‘backwards’ in the direction if the root of one’s being, a remembrance of the Supreme Self which infinitely transcends the human ego and which is none other than the Deep towards which the wave ebbs.

To use a very different image which will help to complete the first, let us liken this world to a garden – or more precisely, to a nursery garden, for there is nothing in it that has not been planted there with a view to its being eventually transplanted elsewhere. The central part of the garden is alloted to trees of a particularly noble kind, though relatively small and growing in earthenware pots; but as we look at them, all our attention is caught by one that is incomparably finer than any of the others, which it far excels in luxuriance and vigour of growth. The cause is not naked to the eye, but we know at once what has happened, without the need for any investigation: the tree has somehow been able to strike root deep into the earth through the base of its receptacle.

The trees are souls, and that tree is one who, as the Hindus say, has been ‘liberated in life’, one who has realised what the Sufis term ‘the Supreme Station;’ and Sufism is a way and a means of striking a root through the ‘narrow gate’ in the depth of the soul out into the domain of the pure and unimprisonable Spirit which itself opens out on the Divinity. The full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a prisoner in the world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious of being free, with a freedom which incomparably outweighs his imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now from one and now from the other, which accounts for certain apparent contradictions.

Sufism is nothing other than Islamic mysticism, which means that it is central and most powerful current of that tidal wave which constitutes the Revelation of Islam; and it will be clear from what has just been said that to affirm this is in no sense a depreciation, as some appear to think. It is on the contrary an affirmation that Sufism is both authentic and effectual.

As to the thousands of men and women in the modern Western world who, while claiming to be ‘Sufis’, maintain that Sufism is independently of any particular religion and that is has always existed, they unwittingly reduce it – if we may use the same elemental image – to a network of artificial inland waterways. They fail to notice that by robbing it of its particularity and therefore of its originality, they also deprive it of all impetus. Needless to say, the waterways exist. For example, ever since Islam established itself in the subcontinent of India, there have been intellectual exchanges between Sufis and Brahmins; and Sufism eventually came to adopt certain terms and notions from Neoplatonism. But the foundations of Sufism were laid and its subsequent course irrevocably fixed long before it would have been possible for extraneous and parallel mystical influences to have introduced non-Islamic elements, and when such influences were finally felt, they thouched only the surface.

In other words, by being totally dependent upon one particular Revelation, Sufism is totally independent of everything else. But while being self-sufficient it can, if time and place concur, pluck flowers from gardens other than its own. The Prophet of Islam said: ‘Seek knowledge even it be in China’.

(Martin Lings. What is Sufism? University of California Press, 1975. p.11-16)

Women in Sufism

2011-12-09T03:56:00.000-08:00

God has made dear to me from your world women and fragrance,
And the joy of my eyes is in prayer.

This saying of the Prophet Muhammad has been quoted a number of times now – so how is it possible that Islam should have come to be known as a religion with a negative view of women? And yet, over the centuries and under the influence of growing legalistic and ascetic movements, the woman in Islam has been relegated to a position far removed from the one she knew and enjoyed during the times of the Prophet and his successors.

This is why it is impossible to overestimate the role the Prophet’s first wife, Khadija, played in defining the woman’s place in Islam. This widowed merchant woman was already the mother of several children when she proposed marriage to her significantly younger co-worker Muhammad and subsequently bore his children. She was also the one who consoled and supported him after his first visions and auditions and who convinced him that the revelations he experienced in the cave at Mount Hira during his meditations were not of demonic but rather of divine origin. Khadija rightfully bears the honorary titles Mother of believers and The Best of Women, khair un-nisa (the latter still a favorite name for women). Modern Muslims, including a mojority of women Muslims, repeatedly stress her essential contribution to the early history of Islam. She loved Muhammad deeply, and it was only after her death in 619 and after more than a quarter of a century together, that Muhammad gradually and over the course of time married a number of other women. Among his later wives was the very young ‘Aisha, the daughter of his loyal friend Abu Bakr. The other women were widows or divorcees, some even former slaves.

In the early days of Islam women were actively involved in all aspects of social life and communal affairs. ‘Aisha used to discuss problems arising from tradition with the Prophet’s companions, and not only with them. In 656 she actually rode to battle herself in order to fight against ‘Ali bin Abi Talib and his partisans.

Even if the woman’s position has deteriorated in many respects since the days of the Prophet, she continues to play a very important role in Sufism. This mystical branch of Islam came into being in the early eighth century, about a century after the Prophet’s death. It was initially a purely ascetic movement that strove to counteract or work against the Muslims’ increasing worldliness and to remind them of their religious duties. Sufism gained in strength and number during the expansionist period of the Islamic empire. By 711 the Muslims had not only crossed the Straits of Gibraltar (which still bears the name of its conqueror, Jabal Tariq) but had also penetrated into Sind, the lower Indus Valley (today the southern part of Pakistan) and had crossed into Transoxiana as well, all on their way to Centra Asia.

The ascetics, however, were more interested in conquering the kingdoms of the heart and the soul, and it is of no small significance that a central role in this endeavor fell to a woman. The name Rabi’a al-Adawiyya or Rabi’a of basra heralds the beginning of the actual mystical movement in Islam. She is the one credited with having transformed somber asceticism into genuine love mysticism. Everyone knows the story of how the pious ascetic ran through basra with a mucket of water in one hand and a burning torch in other, and when asked about the reason behind her action, she replied: “I want to pour water into hell and set paradise on fire, so that these two veils disappear and nobody shall any longer worship God out of a fear of hell or a hope of heaven, but solely for the sake of His eternal beauty.”

This popular legend found its way into the Christian world as well. It was intoduced to the West by Joinville, the representative of Louis IX, and was retold by the Quietist Camus in his book Carite ou la Vraie Charitee, which appeared in 1640. the illustrations show a woman in oriental dress with a torch and a bucket, over whose head a sun beams with the Hebrew inscription YHWH. After that she turns up in every cenceivable variation in European literature.

Rabi’a was not the only pious ascetic to devote herself completely to the love of God. A female relative of the Prophet, Umm Haram, was already supposed to have participated with ardent enthusiasm in the first Muslim expedition against Cypress and is said to have fallen in battle as a “martyr” in the Holy War.

We also know Bahriyya al-Mausuliyya, who wept herself blind. This is a common motif, for it was felt that physical blindness enables a person to see the Divine Beloved all the better, especially because, as it was later believed, the eye is no longer a veil between the person looking and the one being looked at.

Sha’wana is another interesting figure among the early ascetics; she is also famous for her incessant weeping. Even the great ascetic Fudayl ibn ‘Iyad (d.803) is supposed to have asked her to pray for him. The pious Sufi Bishr al-Hafi, known as “The Barefooted One” (d.841) as well as the great traditionist Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) approached Amina ar-Ramliyya to ask for her intercession, and it was through her that they learned of their reprieve from hell.

Ghazali tells how Sha’wana appeared to one of her friends in a dream after she (Sha’wana) had died and been highly honored by the inhabitants of paradise. She gave the dreaming woman the following advice: “Let your heart be very sad and let the love of God override your desires. Then nothing will harm you to your dying day.”

Thoughts about death and the afterworld are characteristic of the early women ascetics. Another woman who tradition says also came from Basra was Mu’adha. She deprived herself of as much rest as was humanly possible, for the very thought of the long sleep of the grave was enough to keep her awake.

Ibn ‘Arabi’s attitude toward women is particularly interesting. His memories of the great women ascetics of Seville, whom he had met while still a youth, were very vivid. One, for instance, was Fatima bint al-Muthanna, a woman who lived in extreme poverty. She had been married for many years before her husband died of leprosy. “She was a consolation for the inhabitants of the earth” are the words the Andalusian master used to describe her and to report of her strange miracles. The Sura al-Fatiha, the first chapter of the Quran, served her and fulfilled all her desires. So much so, in fact, that she once even restored an unfaithful husband to the wife who had turned to the saint with her pleas for help. Despite her poverty, Fatima, who described herself as Ibn ‘Arabi’s “spiritual mother” (and whom the biological mother of the great theosophist actually visited on occassion) was possessed of an unflappable cheerfulness. She would sometimes play the tambourine and joyfully praise the glory of God:

I rejoice in Him. Who was turned toward me and claimed me as one of His Friends. Who has used me for His own purposes. Who am I that He should have chosen me among all of mankind? He is jealous of me, and if I look to others, He loosens afflictions against me.

(Annemarie Schimmel. My soul is a woman: the feminine in Islam. p.26-46)

Poverty (Faqr)

2011-12-04T23:15:00.001-08:00

The central attitude in Sufi life is that of faqr, “poverty.” The Qur’an (Sura 35:16) has contrasted man in need of God with God, the ever Rich, the Self-sufficient, and here lies one of the roots od the Sufi concept of poverty. In fact, the main names under which the mystics have been known in the West – though often in distorted images – are faqir, “poor,” and dervish, “poor, mendicant.” Poverty was an attribute of the Prophet, who claimed, according to the tradition, faqri fakhri, “poverty is my pride.” There are numerous legends about the destitute state and the poverty of his household and the members of his family.

The Sufis considered outward poverty a necessary station at the beginning of the Path, and they tried to preserve it as long as possible, often throughout their lives. There is no reason to doubt the validity of the stories in which the utter destitution of some of the great mystics is dramatically described. The reed mat on which the mystic slept, and which often constituted his only worldy possession, became in later Persian poetry a symbol of spiritual wealth, since it gives its owner a rank higher than that of Solomon on his air-borne throne:

Everyone who has to write the manuscript of the etiquette of Poverty
Puts a ruler from the strips of the reed-mat on the pages of his body.

Poverty interpreted in a spiritual sense means the absence of desire for wealth, which includes the absence of desire for the blessings of the otherworld. One of the aspects of true faqr is that the mystic must not ask anything of anyone – Ansari, though utterly poor, never asked his wealthy friends even for a blanket, though he knew that they would have wanted to give him one, but “since they did not perceive my misery, why ask them?” For to ask would mean to rely upon a created being, and to receive would burden the soul with gratitude toward the giver, a burden that was considered most embarassing and heavy; both in poetry and in everyday speech this feeling of minnat, “gratitude,” has a negative value for the faithful.

If man has no wish for himself in this world and the next, then he may be called a genuine faqir. To possess anything means to be possessed by it – the world enthralls those who possess some of its good, whereas “ the true faqir should not possess anything and thus not be possessed by anything”. He needs God, nothing else.

Hujwiri spoke, correctly, about the form and the essence of poverty: “Its form is destitution and indigence, but its essence is fortune and free choice”. The dervish, the Sufi, may be rich if he has the right attitude, which means that his outward wealth and power are of no interest to him and that he would be willing to give them up at any moment. The final consequence – after quitting this world and the next – is to “quit quitting” (tark at-tark), to completely surrender and forget poverty, surrender, and quitting. About the year 900, there was discussion in Baghdad and elsewhere about the superiority of the poor or the rich. Most of the Sufis agreed that faqr was superior and preferable to wealth, provided that it was combined with contentment – and this is the general solution found in later medieval Sufism, as in Abu Najib as-Suhrawardi’s Adab al-muridin.

Many of the early sources are filled with the praise for the true faqir and sometimes equate him with the genuine Sufi. Yet Jami, following Abu Hafs ‘Umar as-Suhrawardi’s distinction among “ascetic,” “poor,” and “Sufi,” as explained in the ‘Awarif al-ma’arif, regarded the faqir, in the technical sense, as inferior to the real Sufi, for whom faqr is nothing but a station on the Path. If he makes poverty a goal in itself, the faqir is veiled from God by his very “will to be poor”. That is basically an elaboration of a saying by Ibn Khafif: “The Sufi is he whom God has chosen (istafa) for Himself, out of love, and the faqir is he who purifies himself in his poverty in the hope of drawing near [to God]”.

Others have praised faqr as the central quality of the mystic, as Rumi says in an
Interesting comparison:

It is like the highest sheikh, and all the hearts are murids, the hearts of the lovers turn
Around it. (D 890)

Hujwiri has described this kind of poverty very beautifully:
Dervishhood in all its meaning is a metaphorical poverty, and amidst all its
subordinate aspects there is a transcendent principle. The Divine mysteries come and
go over the dervish, so that his affairs are acquired by himself, his actions attributed to
himself, his actions attributed to himself, and his ideas attached to himself. But when his affairs are freed from the bonds of acquisition, his actions are no more attributed to himself. Then he is the Way, not the wayfarer, i.e., the dervish is a place over which something is passing, not a wayfarer following his own will.

Faqr here, is almost equated with fana, “annihilation in God,” which is the goal of the mystic, as Rumi said once in the Mathnawi. For Atter poverty and annihilation constitute the seventh and last vale on the Path leading to God, after the traveler has traversed the valleys of search, love, gnosis, independence, tauhid and bewilderment.

The equation of faqr with annihilation, and the emphasis on the negative, nonexistent aspect of things is expressed, in Islamic art, by the large empty hall of the mosque, which inspires the visitor with numinous grandeur. It is also reflected in the negative space in the arabesques or in calligraphy. Only by absolute faqr can the created world become a vessel for the manifestations of God, the eternally rich.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.120-123)

Complete Trust in God (Tawakkul)

2011-12-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

One of the most important stations on the Path is tawakkul, complete trust in God and self-surrender to Him. The definition of tawakkul is of central importance for an understanding of classical Sufi thought. Darani, the spiritual descendant of Hasan al-Basri, defined it as the apex of zuhd, “renunciation.” Muhasibi, representative of orthodox views, holds that the degree of tawakkul can very in accordance with the degree of faith a person has. Throughout the ninth century – probably beginning with Shaqiq al-Balkhi – the pious discussed the different aspects of this attitude, which Dhu’n-Nun defined as “complete certitude.” According to these definitions, real tauhid demands tawakkul: God, in His absoluteness, is the only actor, and therefore man has to rely completely upon Him. Or, to define it differently: since the divine power is all-embracing, man must have complete trust in his power.

Tawakkul in its interiorized sense means to realize tauhid; for it would be shirk khafi, “hidden associationism,” to rely upon or be afraid of any created being. This aspect to tawakkul is one of the basic truths in Sufi psychology: as soon as every feeling and thought is directed in perfect sincerity toward God, without any secondary causes, neither humans nor animals can any longer harm the mystic. Thus tawakkul results in perfect inner peace. The numerous stories about Sufis who wandered “in tawakkul” through the desert without fear of lions or highway robbers, without any provisions, reflect this attitude in a somewhat romantic fashion.

But exaggerated tawakkul might induce man into perfect passivity. Then it might produce strange figures like the dervish who fell into the Tigris; asked whether he wanted to be saved, he said “no,” and asked whether he would rather die, he again said “no” – “for what have I to do with willing?” God had decreed at the time of creation whether he was to be drowned or saved. Another story that deals with the exaggeration of tawakkul is told about Ibrahim ibn al-Khawass, an Iranian Sufi who used to wander in the deserts without any provisions (‘ala’t-tawakkul). But a colleague of his thought even this too lax, since “his Sufi dress begged for him”; he made him wear luxurious attire and then sent him to the desert to practice real trust in God. This same wayfarer would refuse the company of Khidr, the patron of pious travelers, because his graceful company seemed to negate his perfect trust in God alone – had not Abraham, after all, refused help even from Gabriel when Nimrod cast him onto the blazing pyre? And he was rewarded for this act of tawakkul by God’s changing the fire into a cool rose garden. How, then, could the Sufi ascetic even think of danger if everything was in the hands of God? And why should he get involved in a profession to gain his livelihood if God would send him his food in any case, if there was food predestined for him?

The ascetic regarded everything worldly as contaminated; nothing was ritually clean enough for him to occupy himself with. He would rather spend his days and nights in worship than pollute himself by “practical” work. And even if he did work, why should he try to gain more than was needed just for one day? To store money or goods was regarded as a major sin – did the pious know whether he would still be alive within an hour, or by the next morning?

Extension of hope (tul al-amal), is one of the most disliked attitudes in Sufism; Ghazzali’s chapter on “Fear and Hope,” in his Ihya ‘ulum ad-diin, echoes these feelings and gives a lucid picture of th austere outlook of early Sufism. Even mystics who cannot be regarded as typical representatives of strict tawakkul often distributed all their money in the evening or gave away everything they had on Friday.

However, neither strict Hanbalite orthodoxy nor the moderate Sufis accepted the notion of tawakkul in an overstressed form; exaggerations like those just mentioned were criticized by many of the leading pious. They considered this exaggerated attitude a violation of the Prophetic tradition – did not Muhammad himself advise a bedouin: “First tie your camel’s knee, and then trust in God”? Sahl at-Tustari is the perfect example of a mystic who tried to combine a life in the “world” with complete tawakkul, and his contemporary Junayd taught his disciples how to regard earning: “The proper method of earning...is to engage in works which bring one nearer to God, and to occupy oneself with them in the same spirit as with works of supererogation commended to one, not with the idea that they are a means of sustenance of advantage”

In the course of the time, tawakkul came to be regarded more as a spiritual attitude than as an external practice. If everybody had lived according to the ideals promoted by some of the early ascetics, the whole economic and social fabric of the Muslim Empire would have collapsed. However, as a basic station on the mystical Path and as a spiritual force, an unshakable trust in divine wisdom and power, tawakkul is still an important element of Muslim piety.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.116-120)

The Aim of Life

2011-11-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

Beloved ones of God,
I ask your indulgence to my subject of this evening which is the Aim of Life. As to the main object of life there cannot be but one object; and as to the external object of life, there are as many objects as many beings. There is one object of life for the reason that there is one life. In spite of many apparently appearing, in spite of many lives outwardly appearing, there exists one and only life. It is in this thought that we can combine and it is from this thought that true wisdom is learned. No doubt that main object of life cannot be at once understood and therefore the best thing for every person is to pursue his object in life first, and in the accomplishment of his personal object some day he will arrive to accomplish that inner object. When man does not understand this he thinks there is something else to accomplish and all this is before him that is not accomplished and therefore he remains at a failure. The person who is not definite about his object has not yet begun his journey in the path of life. The first thing therefore is for a person to definitely determine his object before himself. However small that object is, when he has determined it he has begun his life.

We find in the lives of many people sometimes all through their life, they do not happen to find their vocation of their life and what happens? In the end they consider their life a failure. All through their life they go in one thing or another; yet not knowing their life's object they can accomplish so little.

When people say: Why I do not succeed? In answer to that I always say: Because you have not yet found your object. As soon as a person has found his life's object he begins to feel in this world at home. Before that he feels in a strange world. No sooner a person has found his way, he proves to be fortunate, because all things he shall want to accomplish, they come to him by themselves. If the whole world was against him, he gets, got such a power that he can stand on his object against the whole world. He gets such a patience then, when he has, he is on the way to his object that whatever unfortunate happens, it does not discourage him. No doubt as long as one has not found it, then one goes in one thing and then in a second and he thinks that life is against him. Then he begins to find faults with individuals, conditions, planets, climate; with all things. Therefore what is called fortunate, what is called succesful, that is to have the right object. When a person is not wearing the clothes made for himself, then he says it is loose or too short. When they are his clothes he feels comfortable, they are his. Real thing therefore is to give freedom to every soul, to choose his object in life and if he finds in his object at home, to know that he is on the right path.

When a person is on the path, then also there are certain things to be considered. When a person has a knot to unravel, to loosen, in the meantime a person gives him a knife to cut it, he has lost a great deal in his life. It is a small thing, but by not accomplishing it a person has gone back. It is a kind of taking a back step. This is a little example I have given, but in everything one does, if one has not that patience and confidence to go forward, then one loses a great deal. However small a work a person has undertaken, if he accomplishes it, he has accomplished something great. It is not what work a person has accomplished, it is the very fact of accomplishing which gives him the power.

And now coming to the question of this object, which is the object of every soul; that object may be called the spiritual attainment. A person may go all his life without it, but there will come a time in his life when he may not admit, but he will begin to look for it. Because spiritual attainment is not only an acquired knowledge, it is the soul's appetite. And there will come some day in life that a person will feel the soul's appetite more than any appetite. No doubt every soul has an unconscious yearning to satisfy this soul's appetite, but at the same time one's absorption in everyday life that keeps one so occupied that one has no time to pay attention to the soul's appetite.

Now, the definition of spiritual attainment can be found in studying human nature, for the nature of man is one and the same, might he be spiritual or material. There are five things that man yearns for: life, knowledge, power, happiness and peace. Now the continual appetite which is felt in the deepest self yearns for either of these five things.

Now in order to answer his appetite what does man do? In order to answer the desire to live, one eats and drinks and protects one's self from all dangers of life. And yet the appetite is not fully satisfied because all danger he may escape, but the last danger he cannot escape, which man calls death. In order to answer the next thing which is called power, a man does everything in order to gain the physical strength; power by influence; rank; every kind of power he seeks in order to be powerful. And he always knocks against disappointments, because he always sees that if there is a power of ten degrees, there is another power of twenty degrees to knock against it. Just think of the great nations, ones whose military powers so great, one could not have thought that in one moment they will fall down. One could have thought that if they will fall down it will take thousands of years for them to fall down, so great was their power. We do not need to look for it in their history, we have just seen in these past few years; we have but to look at the map.

Then the third kind of appetite is the happiness. Man tries to answer it by pleasures, not knowing that pleasures of this world do not answer for that happiness which his soul really seeks after. Man attempts are in vain. He finds in the end that every effort he made for pleasure, he made with a greater loss than gain. Besides that which is not enduring, that which is not real in its nature is not satisfactory.

Then that desire of knowledge. That knowledge gives a tendency to study. And man might study and study all through his life. If he read all the great libraries, all the books, there will still remain that question, "why?" That "why" will not be answered by books he will study, by exploring the facts which are outside the life. In the first place the depth of nature is so profound that man's limited life is not long enough to probe the depths of life. Yes, comparatively or relatively you might say one is more studied than another, but no one by the outer study of life comes to the satisfaction of life.

And then there is the appetite for peace. In order to find peace one leaves one's environments which trouble him. One wants to go away for people. One wants to sit quiet and rest. But even a person not ready for this peace, even if he went in the caves of Himalaya, away from the whole world, even there he would not find peace.

By the explanation of these five aspects of appetite, the deepest appetite of man, one finds that all efforts of man made to satisfy these appetite seem to be in vain. And how can these five desires be satisfied? They can be satisfied by spiritual attainment, for that is the only thing which answers these five different appetites.

And to explain how these five appetites are answered by spiritual attainment. The desire to live can only be satisfied when the soul realizes its eternal life. For mortality exists rather in conception than in reality from a spiritual point of view. Mortality is the lack of soul's understanding of its own self. For instance, a person always thought that his coat was himself; he lived all his life in that conception and when that coat was torn he thought that he died. The same one experiences in life. It is a kind of illusion that the soul gets from this physical body and identifies itself with this mortal being. It is just like identifying oneself with one's overcoat. And by the loss of the coat one thinks that: I am lost.

Nevertheless an intellectual knowledge of this is but of a little use. Because when the inner self has identified itself with the body and when in imagination the person thinks: No, no, the body is but my overcoat. It is therefore that the meditations are done by the wise people of all times in order to give a chance to the soul to find itself independent of the physical body. Once the soul has begun to feel itself, its own life independently of its outer garb, it is beginning to have confidence of its life, it is no longer afraid of what is called death. No sooner these phenomena once vouchsafed, a person no longer calls death a death, he calls death a change.

And now coming to the idea of the power. The true power is not in trying to gain the power. The true power is in becoming power. But how to become it? It requires an attempt to make a definite change in oneself and that change is a kind of struggle with one's false self and when that false self is crucified, then the true self is resurrected. Apparently before the world that crucifixion is the lack of power; in truth, all power is attained by that resurrection.

As to the knowledge, there are two aspects. One knowledge is that which one learns by knowing the names and forms of this life, what we call learning. This cannot be the answer of that appetite. This is only a step-stone to that appetite, it cannot satisfy this appetite.

This, only the outer learning helps one to go to the inner learning, but this inner learning is quite different from the outer learning, and how is it learned? It is learned by studying self. One finds that all the knowledge that one strives to learn and all that exists to study, it is all in oneself. Therefore one finds a kind of universe in one's self and by the study of the self one comes to that spiritual knowledge which is the soul's appetite.

And then comes the question of happiness. One thinks, that: If my friend is very kind to me then I will be very happy; when people respond to me, or when I will get my money I will be happy. But that is not the way to become happy. It is a mistake, because the lack of happiness makes one blame others, because they are in the way of that person to be happy. But really speaking, that is not so. True happiness is not gained; it is discovered. Man's soul himself is happiness. That is why he longs for happiness. What keeps happiness out from one's life is the closing of the doors of the heart. When the heart is not fully living, then the happiness is not living there. Sometimes the heart is not fully living, but a little living. And it expects the life from the other heart. And that is gained by spiritual attainment. The person who has found his peace within himself, that person may be in a cave of the mountains or amidst the crowd; in every place he will experience his peace.

The question is how these five things can be gained. As I have said, the first necessary thing is for the person to accomplish the object which is immediately standing before him. However small, it does not matter. It is by accomplishing it that one gains the power. As one goes on further through this way in this life, always seeking for the real, one will come to reality. Truth is attained by the love of truth.

The person who runs away from truth, truth runs away from him. If not, truth is more near to the person than what is without truth. There is nothing more precious in life than truth itself, and in loving truth and in attaining to the truth, one attains to that religion which is the religion of all people and all churches. It does not matter then what church he belongs, what religion he professes, what race or nation he belongs; when once he realizes the truth, he is with all, all because he is with all. It is the disagreement and misunderstanding which is before a person has attained the truth. When once a person has attained to the truth there is no misunderstanding. It is those who have learned the outer knowledge, the disputes come among them. But those who have attained to the truth, whether he comes from north pole or the south pole, what country, it does not matter. When they have it understood, the truth, they are atonement. And it is this object that we should keep before us in order to unite the divided section of humanity. For the real happiness of humanity is in that unity which can be gained by rising above barriers which divide man.

Thank you all for the most sympathetic and patient response. May God bless you.

(Hazrat Inayat Khan. Rue de Loxum, 22 May 1924)

The Horoscope

2011-11-23T05:28:00.000-08:00

There is a thing called a horoscope. But it does not suit Wisdom. Horoscope will agree with only earth, fire, water, air and ether. But horoscopes will not suit the faculties of Perception or Feeling, Awareness or Cognition, Practical Understanding or Knowledge, Wisdom and Divine Luminous Wisdom.

The horoscope is for the body, not for the Grace of God. Everything comes within the control of Divine Grace. The twelve signs of the zodiac fall under the four categories of earth, fire, water and air. With the aid of these you can predict the state of the physical body. But you can’t predict the actions of the soul. The horoscope can predict the state of the physical body of only ignorant souls. But these predictions will not hold good for people with wisdom or knowledge. It is where earth, fire, water, and air disappear that the light of wisdom appears. As long as one is controlled by the four elements of earth, fire, water and air, then egoism, sex, jealousy, illusion and the hypnotic torpor caused by illusion will exist. These effects are indicated in the horoscope. But horoscopes will not suit a person in a state of Divine Wisdom. As far as Wisdom and Truth are concerned, horoscopes are useless.

The horoscope only covers the physical world of illusion (maya). If you submit yourself to a belief in horoscopes, you will be traversing only the physical world and the sense world. You cannot go beyond. Believing horoscopes will not allow you to traverse the world of Truth and Divine Grace and Divine Wisdom.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The divine luminous wisdom that dispels the darkness. The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. Philadelphia, 2004. p. 201)

A Man’s Duty

2011-11-23T05:06:00.001-08:00

You are living in a town. The town is in imminent danger. It has become necessary for you to escape to the next town. There is a sea between your town and the next town. You have to get hold of a boat or ship and sail across the sea to the next town. You have no time to think of your house and your property at this time of grave danger. All your attention is devoted to escaping from that town, somehow or other, leaving behind your house and your property to fate.

The physical body in which you dwell cannot indicate to you when death will overtake it. It swerves between the two extremes of joy and sorrow. The body gets fatigued. The limbs become powerless at the approach of death. Before the great calamity of death overtakes your body, you should leave it and get into the boat of Wisdom, sail across the sea of Ignorance and settle on the shore of True Knowledge. You should do this with the same speed with which you will get into the boat and escape from the city which is doomed to destruction. Only then will you obtain Spiritual Liberation in this birth itself. Otherwise, you, your wisdom, and your soul will be destroyed. As a result, you have to take several births and meet with spiritual loss. It would be better for you to understand this and act accordingly. This is man’s duty, his inescapable duty.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The divine luminous wisdom that dispels the darkness. The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. Philadelphia, 2004. p 185-186)

To Know the Self

2011-11-23T04:53:00.000-08:00

The soul is God’s Grace. It depends on Him. This body is made of five elements: earth, fire, water, air and ether. These five elements are inimical to one another. But they all have faith in God (Allah). From the day they developed faith in God, their enmity disappeared and they started dwelling together. Since they have faith (iman) in God, they are indestructible. Their power is never destroyed. They exist forever.

In the same way as a house is built of five elements, God has built a house for the soul out of the five elements on an agreement. When the period of agreement is over, the soul must get out of the house.

At the end of one’s life, when the body is interred in the earth, the five elements in the body return to the respective five elements in the earth. When that happens, the soul has to return to the Creator as it is His property. If you understand this, you can understand your self.

If one knows that this is a rented house, he will know himself. You will know that this body is not your house; this is not your property! In that state you will know soul. The Creator (Allah) has explained this clearly to Noor Muhammad, the Effulgent Divine Luminous Wisdom.

God has told Muhammad, “O Muhammad! I have not created anything without you.” Muhammad is God’s Effulgence, His Beauty. Muhammad is in the Divine Luminous Wisdom of soul.

The soul is God’s property. It is sacred and pure; it is Effulgence. It is that light that has come from Him that is living in this rented house. After it has studied the world and come to understand what it is, it sees its Lord, and reaches God. In that state one who has known his self knows his Creator. Understand this clearly.

Without understanding this, as long as you identify yourself with the physical body, there is death. If you realize that this body is a rented house, and know yourself, you will know that this is not your house or your property. In that state, you will come to know the soul, the Creator.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The divine luminous wisdom that dispels the darkness. The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. Philadelphia, 2004. p 181-182)

Detachment

2011-11-23T04:29:00.001-08:00

Man in his upward Divine ascent, although living in this world, should for all practical purposes concentrate his consciousness in his higher self.

Like an aluminum pot and spoon, for example, provide the means towards the preparation of say 32 different kinds of food dishes, each of them with a particular and peculiar taste. People who taste these delicacies relish the particular taste of each delicacy according to their likes and dislikes, but the aluminum pot and spoon, although they conjointly provide the means and preparation of the 32 dishes, did not register any particular reaction in respect of any particular dish or for that matter even the 32 dishes cumulatively provided no reaction whatever on the aluminum pot and spoon.

Similarly, man treading on the path of righteousness should react exactly like the aluminum pot and spoon to things of joy and sorrow in this world.

It is also inevitable for man in the course of his existence on this earth to be involved in innumerable manifestations generated in the world of illusion (maya) in the discharge of his duties and obligations.

But he should perform his duties in the same spirit of detachment evidenced in the illustration of the aluminum pot and spoon.

Such a person would find his ascent on the path of Divine Wisdom, free from the encumbrances generated by the world of illusion.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. The divine luminous wisdom that dispels the darkness. The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. Philadelphia, 2004)

Rizq (Our ‘Daily Bread’)

2011-11-22T05:41:00.000-08:00

Rizq (our daily bread) has been guaranteed from preeternity. Why worry, then? Is not one of God’s names ar-Razzaq, “He who bestows sustenance”? And He has shown His kindness to every being from his birth, even from the moment of conception, by nourishing him first with blood, then with milk. Since everything is created by and belongs to God, man possesses absolutely nothing of his own; therefore it would be vain to strive to attract or refuse anything. The Muslim creed expressly states that “what has been destined for man cannot possibly miss him,” be it food, happiness, or death.

The overwhelming feeling of God’s all-encompassing wisdom, power, and loving-kindness is reflected in the Muslim tradition as fully as in some of the Psalms and in Christian tradition. The word ascribed to the Prophet, “if ye had trust in God as ye ought He would feed you even as He feeds the birds,” sounds almost evangelical. This deep trust in God’s promise to feed man and bring him up, as it developed out of the Qur’anic teaching, has permeated Muslim life. Sana’i said about 1120:

If your daily bread is in China,
The horse of acquisition is already saddled,
And either brings you hurriedly to it,
Or brings it to you, while you are asleep.

And even today Muslim intellectuals may say: “Wherever your riz is, there you will find it, and it will find you.”

The Muslim mystics often use the expression husn az-zann, “to think well of God,” which may sound strange to modern ears, but which means once more the absolute, hopeful trust in God’s kindness. God definetely knows what is good for man and gives bread and death, punishment and forgiveness according to His eternal wisdom. This attitude has been a source of strength for millions of Muslims, but it is not to be confused with the stoic acceptance of a blind fate, as it is usually understood in terms of predestinarian ideas. The faith in the rizq that will reach man was certainly carried too far by an early mystic who forbade his disciple to stretch out his hand to grasp a dried-up melon skin.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.117-118)

The Struggle Againts the Nafs

2011-11-20T17:08:00.001-08:00

The struggle against the nafs has always been a favorite topic of the Sufis, and they have never tired of warning their disciples of its ruses, not only in the crude forms of sensual appetites but in the guises of hypocrisy and false piety, which must be carefully observed and obliterated.

The nafs has a rosary and a Koran in its right hand, and a scimitar and a dagger in the sleeve (M 3:2554)

Says Rumi, taking up a warning formulated four hundred years earlier by Dhu’n-Nun. Even to indulge in constant acts of worship or prayer can become a pleasure for the nafs; the mystic, therefore, has to break every kind of habit, for otherwise his nafs will overcome him in a subtler way. The “pleasure derived from works of obedience” should be avoided, for that is fatal poison.

One of the great dangers for the wayfarer is laziness or leisure; as long as he has not yet reached his goal, it would be better for him to occupy himself with seemingly useless things, like digging one pit after the other, than to spend a moment in leisure, for “leisure (faragh) is an affliction”.

The chief means for taming and training the nafs were, and still are, fasting and sleeplessness. The first ascetics have often been described as qa’im al-lail wa sa’im ad-dahr, “spending their nights upright in prayer and maintaining a perpetual fast by day.” The old saying that the three elements of Sufi conduct are qillat at-ta’am, qillat al-manam wa qillat al-kalam, “little food, little sleep, little talk” (to which often “loneliness, keeping away from men,” was added) is still as valid as it was a thousand years ago.

Lack of sleep was considered one of the most effective means on the mystical Path – “the eye is weeping instead of sleeping”.
The ascetic spent his nights at prayers recommended in the Qur’an, which gave him time to enjoy blessed conversation with his Lord through prayer. Many of the mystics would avoid stretching out their legs or lying down when slumber overcame them, for all of them hoped for some revelation after the long nights of sleeplessness, which extended over years. The most beautiful story pertaining to this attitude has been told and retold for centuries: Shah Kirmani did not sleep for forty years, but eventually he was overwhelmed by sleep – and he saw God. Then he exclaimed: “O Lord, I was seeking Thee in nightly vigils, but I have found Thee in sleep.” God answered: “O Shah, you have found Me by means of those nightly vigils, if you had not sought Me there, you would not have found Me here.”

For practical purposes, however, “to eat little,” is even more important than to avoid sleep. The Sufis would fast frequently, if not constantly. Many of them extended the fasting in Ramadan observed by every Muslim; but in order to make fasting more difficult, they invented the so-called saum da’udi, which meant that they would eat one day and fast one day, so that their bodies would not become accustomed to either of the two states. “Fasting is really abstinence, and this includes the whole method of Sufism”.

“Hunger is God’s food by which He quickens the bodies of the upright”, says rumi, who also argues that, just as the host brings better food when the guest eats little, God brings better, i.e., spiritual foor to those who fast.

Like the early Christian monks who lived exclusively on the host, the Muslim saints considered hunger the best way to reach spirituality. To be empty of worldly food is the precondition for enlightenment. “Could the reedflute sing if its stomach were filled?” Rumi asks repeatedly. Man can receive the divine breath of inspiration only when he keeps himself hungry and empty.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.114-116)

Nafs (The Soul)

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The forward movement on the Path, as initiated by repentance and renunciation, consists of a constant struggle against the nafs, the “soul” – the lower self, the base instincts. The faithful had been admonished in the Qur’an (Sura 79:40) to “fear the place of his Lord and hinder the nafs from lust.” For the nafs is the cause of blameworthy actions, sins, and base qualities; and the struggle with it has been called by the Sufis “the greater Holy War,” for the worst enemy you have is [the nafs] between your sides,” as the hadith says.

The Qur’anic expression an-nafs al-ammara bi’s-su’, “the soul commanding to evil” (Sura 12:53) forms the starting point for the Sufi way of purification. The holy book contains also the expression an-nafs al-lawwama, “the blaming soul” (Sura 75:2), which corresponds approximately to the conscience that watches over man’s actions and controls him. Eventually, once purification is achieved, the nafs become mutma’inna (Sura 89:27), “at peace”; in this state, according to the Qur’an, it is called the home to its Lord.

The main duty of the adept is to act exactly contrary to the nafs’s appetites and wishes. There is nothing more dangerous for the disciple than to treat the nafs lightly by allowing indulgences and accepting (facilitating) interpretations, says Ibn Khafif. It is incumbent upon every traveler on the Path to purge the nafs of its evil attributes in order to replace these by the opposite, praiseworthy qualities. Sufi hagiography is full of stories about the ways in which the masters of the past tamed their appetites and, if they failed, the manner of their punishment.

The nafs is something very real, and many stories tell of its having been outside the body. Sometimes it took the form of a black dog that wanted food but had to be trained and sent away; other mystics saw their nafs coming out of their throats in the form of young fox or a mouse. The nafs can also be compared to a disobedient woman who tries to seduce and cheat the poor wayfarer (the noun nafs is feminine in Arabic!). A recurrent image is that of the restive horse or mule that has to be kept hungry and has to undergo constant mortification and training so that, eventually, it serves the purpose of bringing the rider to his goal. Sometimes it is likened to a disobedient camel – Rumi compares the struggle of the intellect with the nafs to the attempt of majnun to turn his camel in the right direction, toward the tent of his beloved. Even comparison of the nafs to a pig is not rare. It is found mainly in ‘Attar’s poetry; like Sana’i before him, he felt that those who obeyed their piglike nature would themselves be changed into pigs.

Sometimes the nafs has been likened to Pharaoh, the self-centered ruler who did not listen to the call to faith uttered by Moses but claimed a divine rank for himself and consequently was drowned in the Red Sea; or to Abraha, who intruded in the holy city of Mecca and should be scared away with stones.

Old, popular beliefs were revived when the nafs was said to take the form of a snake; but this serpent can turned into a useful rod, just as Moses transformed serpents into rods. More frequent, however, is the idea that power of the spiritual master can blind the snake; according to folk belief, the snake is blinded by the sight of an emerald (the connection of the pir’s spiritual power with the green color of the emerald is significant). Thus, his influence renders the nafs-snake harmless.

The image of training the horse or the dog conveys the most nearly accurate impression of the activity of the Sufi: the lower faculties are not to be killed, but trained so that even they may serve on the way to God. A story told about the Prophet Muhammad well expresses his faith in the training of the base soul; the expression used here for the “lower qualities, instincts,” is shaytan (satan): “When asked how his shaytan behaved, he answered: ‘Aslama shaytani; my shaytan has become a Muslim and does whatever I order him,” i.e., all his lower soul will obey its master, as everything in the world will obey the one who has completely surrender his will to the will of God.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.112-113)

Tauba (Repentance)

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The first station on the Path, or rather its very beginning, is tauba (repentance); tauba means to turn away from sins, to abjure every wordly concern. As the poet says:

Repentance is a strange mount –
It jumps towards heaven in a single moment from the lowest place.

Tauba can be awakened in the soul by an outward event, be it a profane world, which is suddenly understood in a religious sense, a piece of paper on which a relevant sentence is written, the recitation of the Qur’an, a dream, or a meeting with a saintly person. One of the several stories about Ibrahim ibn Adham’s conversion is particularly well known:

One night, he heard a strange sound on the roof of his palace in Balkh. The servants found a man who claimed, in Ibrahim presence, to be looking for his lost camel on the palace roof. Blamed by the prince for having undertaken such an impossible task, the man answered that his, Ibrahim’s, attempt at attaining hevenly peace and true religious life in the midst of luxury was absurd as the search for a camel on top of a roof. Ibrahim repented and repudiated all his possessions.

The “world” was considered a dangerous snare on the way to God, and particularly in the time of the old ascetic harsh, crude words were uttered to describe the character of this miserable place, which was compared to a latrine – a place to be visited only in case of need – to a rotting carcass, or to a dunghill: “The world is a dunghill and a gathering place of dogs; and meaner than a dog is that person who does not stay away from it. For the dog takes his own need from it and goes away, but he who loves it is no way separated from it”. Most of the Sufis, however, would speak of the transitoriness of the world rather than of its perfect evil; for it was created by God, but it is perishable since nothing but God is everlasting. Why should the ascetic bother about it at all, since compared to the glory of God, the world is nothing more than a gnat’s wing?

The Sufis knew how often “repentance was broken” – an expression connected, in later Persian poetry, with the breaking of the wine bottle, which induced people to sin again and required renewed repentance. But the mystical leaders were sure that the door of repentance remains open, it is

A door from the West until the day
When the sun rises in the West

i.e., until Doomsday, says Rumi, on whose mausoleum in Konya the famous lines are written:

Come back, come back, even if you have broken your repentance a thousand times.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.109-110)

Ikhlas (Absolute Sincerity)

2011-11-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

The adept should turn with his whole being toward God – ikhlas, and giving up selfish thoughts in the service of God are the basic duties of every mystic. A prayer without ikhlas is of no avail; a religious thought that is born out of this sincerity is meaningless, even dangerous. Praise and blame of the crowd do not mean anything to one who has turned wholly and without any qualification to the Lord; and though he will constantly be acting virtuously, he will forget his good and pious actions in his attempt to act solely for God. He forgets, of necessity, the thought of recompense for his works in this world and the world to come.

An act of perfect sincerity, done for God’s sake, might result in spiritual progress even though it might appear outwardly foolish.

Typical is the story of a not very bright murid whom some mischievous people teased, telling him that he would gain spiritual enlightenment by hanging himself by his feet from the roof and repeating some meaningless words they taught him. He followed their advice in sincerity and found himself illuminated the next morning.

An overstressing of the ideal of ikhlas has led to the attitude of the malamatiyya, “those who are blamed,” those who conceal their virtuous deeds in order to perform their religious duties without ostentation. For the greatest sin is riya (hypocrisy) or ostentation, and the master of psychological analysis in early Sufism, Muhasibi, dealt extensively with this danger. Sufi texts tell many stories about people whose hypocrisy was revealed, and they were put to shame. A famous example is this:

A man ostentatiously prayed the whole night through a mosque he had entered at dusk and where he had heard a sound that seemed to indicate the presence of a human being. But when the call for morning prayer was heard, he discovered that his companion in the mosque was a dog, thus rendering all his prayers invalid and himself impure.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.108)

The Pilgrimage to Mecca

2011-11-19T06:52:00.001-08:00

One should not forget that the shari’a, as proclaimed in the Qur’an and exemplified by the Prophet, together with a firm belief in the Day of Judgment, was the soil out of which the piety grew. The Sufis did not abolish the rites but rather interiorized them, as it was said, “The people who know God best are those who struggle most for His commands and follow closest the tradition of His Prophet”.

The performance of ritual prayer, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca constituted, for the majority of the early Sufis, the minimal religious obligation without which all possible mystical training would be useless and meaningless. Many of them performed the pilgrimage to Mecca frequently – up to seventy times, if we can believe the hagiographers. They knew that the true seat of the divine spirit was not the Kaaba made of stone but the Kaab of the faithful worshiper’s heart, in which God might reveal Himself to those who completed the Path.

When you seek God, seek Him in your heart –
He is not in Jerusalem, nor in Mecca not in the hajj,

Says Yunus Emre, voicing the conviction of many of his contemporaries and followers. Yet the pilgrimage remained a central point in the Sufi lfe, and Mecca was not only a place where the Sufis would meet and join in discussion, but where many of them were blessed with revelations and illuminations.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.106-107)

The Importance of a Sheikh

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The novice who has entered a master’s group becomes “like the son of the sheikh”; he is considered part of him according to the tradition, “the son is part of the father.” The sheikh helps him to give birth to a true “heart” and nourishes him with spiritual milk like a mother, as it is often repeated.

The Sufis have always been well aware of the dangers of the spiritual path and therefore attributed to the sheikh almost unlimited authority: “When someone has no sheikh, Satan becomes his sheikh,” says a tradition, for the satanic insinuations are manifold; the murid may even feel uplifted and consoled by certain experiences that are, in reality, insinuations of his lower self or of a misguiding power. Here the sheikh has to control him and lead him back on the correct path, for

Whoever travels without a guide
Needs two hundred years for a two days journey.
(M. 3:588)

One might real all the books of instruction for a thousand years, but without a guide nothing would be achieved.

The master watches every moment of the disciple’s spiritual growth; he watches him particularly during the forty-day period of meditation (arba’in, chilla) that became, very early, a regular institution in the Sufi path (derived, as Hujwiri says, from the forty-day fast of Moses, when he hoped for a vision from God, as related in Sura 7:138). The sheikh interprets the murid’s dreams and visions, read his thoughts, and thus follows every movement of his conscious and subconscious life.

Visiting his master is a religious duty of the disciple, for he will find from him what he will not find elsewhere. And to serve a master is the highest honor of which a disciple can boast – even if it were only that he “cleaned Junayd’s latrines for thirty years”. Even to have met a leading sheikh at once endows a man with a higher rank.

Under the guidance of such a trusted master, the murid could hope to proceed in the stations on the Path. The sheikh would teach him how to behave in each mental state and prescribe periods of seclusion, if he deemed it necessary. It was well known that the methods could not be alike for everybody, and the genuine mystical leader had to have a great deal of psychological understanding in order to recognize the different talents and characters of his murids and train them accordingly. He might exempt a disciple for a time from the forty-day seclusion, for instance, because he was spiritually too weak, or because his spiritual ecstasy might overwhelm him. If the murid were to concentrate too much upon himself rather than upon God, or if passions might overcome him and make him nervous and angry, it might be better to have him live in the company of other people for his spiritual training because of the mutual influence and good example.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.103-104)

The Stations (Maqamat)

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Once the mystics had identified three main parts of religious life (shari’a, tariqa, haqiqa), they began to analyze the different stages and stations that the wayfarer has to pass on his way. They distinguished between maqam (station), and hal (state). “State is something that descends from God into a man’s heart, without his being able to repel it when it comes, or to attract it when it goes, by his own effort.” Or, as Rumi puts it more poetically:

The hal is like the unveiling of the beauteous bride,
While the maqam is the [king’s] being alone with the bride.
(M 1:1435)

The maqam is a lasting stage, which man reaches, to a certain extent, by hiw own striving. It belongs to the category of acts, whereas the states are gifts of grace. The maqamat (stations) define the different stages the wayfarer has attained in his ascetic and moral discipline. He is expected to fulfill completely the obligations pertaining to the respective stations, e.g. he must not act in the station of respect as if he were still in the station of repentance; he also must not leave the station in which he dwells before having completed all its requirements. The states that come over him will vary according to the station in which he is presently living: thus the qabd (contraction) of someone in the station of poverty is different from the qabd of someone in the station of longing.

The mystical theoreticians were not certain whether a state could be appropriated and kept for a while or whether it was a passing experience; they also differ in their classification of the stations and in their description of certain experiences that are seen sometimes as stations, sometimes as states. Even the sequence of the stations is not always clear; it varies according to the capacity of the adept, and God’s activity can change stations or grant the wayfarer a state without apparent reason.

Three of the early classifications show the variability of the sequence.
Dhun-Nun speaks of faith, fear, reverence, obedience, hope, love, suffering, and intimacy; he classifies the last three stations as confusion, poverty, and union.
His younger contemporary in Iran, Yahya ibn Mu’adh, gives a spiritual chain closer to the generally accepted form – repentance, asceticism, peace in God’s will, fear, longing, love and gnosis.
And the Iraqian Sahl at-Tustari, again a few years younger, defines the sequence as follows: response to God’s call, turning toward Him, repentance, forgiveness of sins, loneliness, steadfastness, meditation, gnosis, discourse, election, and friendship.

The manuals of Sufism enumerate still other stations; but the main steps are always repentance, trust in God, and poverty, which may lead to contentment, to the different degrees of love, or to gnosis, according to the mental predilection of the wayfarer. In order to enter the spiritual path, the adept – called murid, “he who has made up his will” (to enter the Path) – is in need of a guide to lead him through the different stations and to point the way toward the goal. Ad-din nasiha, “religion consists of giving good advice,” was a Prophetic tradition dear to the mystics, who saw in the constant supervision of the disciple’s way by the mystical guide a conditio sine qua non for true progress, though the image of the sheikh at-tarbiya, who acutely supervised every breath of the murid has developed only in the course of time.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.99-101)

The Qur’an & Arabic Language

2011-11-17T04:25:00.000-08:00

The Qur’an is a book that God revealed to Muhammad by means of the angel Gabriel. Notice that we make a distinction between the Qur’an and a translation of the Qur’an. This is normal procedure in the Muslim view of things, in marked contrast with the Christian view, according to which the Bible is the Bible, no matter what language it may be written in. For Muslims, the divine Word assumed a specific, Arabic form, and that form is as essential as the meaning that the words convey. Hence only the Arabic Qur’an is the Qur’an, and translations are simply interpretations.

The Arabic form of the Qur’an is in many ways more important than the text’s meaning. After all, Muslims have disagreed over the exact interpretation of Qur’anic verses as much as followers of other religions have disagreed over their own scriptures. One of the sources of the richness of Islamic intellectual history is the variety of interpretations provided for the same verses. Muslim thinkers often quote the Prophet to the effect that every verse of the Qur’an has seven meanings, beginning with the literal sense, and as for the seventh and deepest meaning, God alone knows that. (The Prophet’s point is obvious to anyone who has studied the text carefully.) The language of the Qur’an is synthetic and imagistic – each word has a richness having to do with the special genius of the Arabic language. People naturally understand different meanings from the same verses.

The richness of Qur’anic language and its receptivity toward different interpretations help explain how this single book could have given shape to one of the world’s great civilizations. If everyone had understood exactly the same thing from the text, the religion would never have spread as widely as it has. The Book had to address both the simple and the sophisticated, the shepherd and the philosopher, the scientist and the artist.

The Qur’an says that God never sends a message except in the language of the people to whom it is addressed: Revelation conforms to the needs of its recipients. The Qur’an also tells us that Muhammad was sent to all the world’s inhabitants. In order to present a message understandable to everyone in the world, the Qur’an had to speak a language that everyone could understand. And Islam did in fact spread very quickly to most of the civilizations of the world, from Chine and Southeast Asia to Africa and Europe. These people spoke a great diversity of languages – and we mean not only languages of the tongue, but also languages of the heart and mind. The Qur’an has been able to speak to all of them because of the peculiarities of its own mode of discourse.

Far from being a hindrance to the spread of Islam, as some have imagined, the Arabic language has been an aid. Although the form of the text was fixed, the meaning was left with fluidity and adaptability. People who did not know Arabic were forced to learn the Arabic text and then understand it in terms of their own cultural and linguistic heritage. But no one’s interpretation could be final. The next generation could not depend exclusively upon the previous generation’s translation and commentary any more that it could ignore the understanding of the text established by the tradition. Each Muslim needs to establish his or her own connection with the scripture. All serious Muslims were forced to enter into this Arabic universe of discourse – a universe, indeed, which they considered divine.

If, on the one hand, the Arabic Qur’an encouraged diversity of understanding, on the other, it encouraged unity in form. All Muslims recite the same scripture in the same language. They recite their daily required prayers more or less identically. Indeed, given the basic importance of God’s revealed Word, recitation is the major way of participating in the Word. Understanding is secondary, because no one can fathom the meaning of God’s Word completely. The most important task is to receive and preserve the divine Word. Its Arabic form is all-important. What one does with the form that one receives follows after receiving it.

A translation of the Qur’an is not the Qur’an, but an interpretation of its meaning. The Qur’an has been translated dozens of times into English. Each translation represents one person’s understanding of the text, each is significantly different from the others, and none is the Qur’an itself. There is but one Word, but there are as many interpretations of that Word as there are readers.

This is not to say that Islam is a cacophony of divergent interpretations – far from it. By and large there is much less diversity of opinion on the fundamentals of faith and practice than, for example, in Christianity. Those who try their hand at interpretation have to undergo a great deal of training to enter into the Qur’an’s world of discourse. Moreover, this training is accompanied by the embodiment of the Qur’an through recitation and ritual. The Qur’an possesses an obvious power to transform those who try to approach it on its own terms. This is precisely what Islam is all about – submission to the will of God as revealed in the Qur’an – but this is not simply a voluntary submission. The Qur’an establishes an existential submission in people so that they come to express its fundamental message through their mode of being, no matter how “original” their interpretations may be.

Of course, we are speaking of Qur’anic interpretation in the context of Islamic faith and practice. Many Westerners who have not been sympathetic toward Islam have offered their interpretations of the Qur’anic text. There is no reason to suppose that such interpretations will help non-Muslims understand the text that reveals itself to Muslims.

The Arabic book that goes by the name Qur’an is about as long as the New Testament. In most editions it is between 200 and 400 pages in length. In contrast to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the Qur’an issued from the mouth of a single person, who recited what he heard from the angel Gabriel. Both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures are collections of many books that were written down by a large number of human beings, and opinions differ as to their status as revelation. Even if we say that the book of the Bible were all revealed, they were revealed to different people who did not live at the same time or in the same place.

The Qur’an is divided into chapters of unequal length, each of which is called a sura, a word that means literally “a fence, enclosure, or any part of a structure.” The shortest of the suras has ten words, and the longest sure, which is placed second in the text, has 6,100 words. The suras are divided into short passages, each of which is called an aya. Some of the longer ayas are much longer than the shortest suras. The word aya is often translated as “verse”, but literally it means “sign.”

The Qur’an elaborates on the ways in which the followers of the prophets, specifically the Jews and the Christians, have or have not lived up to the prophetic messages. It issues instructions on how to love a life pleasing to God. It tells people that they should pray, fast and take care of the needy. It goes into great detail concerning human interrelationships – such as laws of inheritance and marriage – in a manner reminiscent of parts of the Hebrew Bible but foreign to the New Testament. It tells people that they should observe God’s instructions purely for God’s sake, not for any wordly aims. It warns those who deny God’s messages that they will be thrown into the fire of hell, and it promises those who accept the messages that they will be given the bliss of paradise. Much more than the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Qur’an talks specifically about God. No matter what the topic may be, it finds occasion to refer the discussion back to God, if only by the device or attaching clauses mentioning God by one or more of his names, such as “And God is the Mighty, the Knowing.”

For Westerners, the Qur’an is an extremely difficult text to appreciate, especially in translation. Even for those who have spent enough years studying the Arabic language to read the original, the Qur’an may appear as disorderly, inaccurate, and illogical. However, there is enough evidence provided by Islamic civilization itself, and by the great philosophers, theologians, and poets who have commented on the text, to be sure that the problem lies on the side of the reader, not the book. The text is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary ever put down on paper. Precisely because it is extraordinary, it does not follow people’s expectations as to what a book should be.

The Qur’anic world view is closely tied to the Arabic language, which like Hebrew and Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus), belongs to the Semitic family. The internal logic of Semitic languages is very different from that Indo-European languages such as English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Persian. To begin with, each word derives from a root that is typically made up of three letters. From the three letter root, many hundreds of derived forms can be constructed, though usually only a few score of these are actually used. We should often discuss Arabic words in explaining the meaning of concepts. Without such discussion it would be impossible to suggest the richness of the associated meanings, the difficulty of translating words into English, and the interrelationships among Arabic words that are obvious in the original.

(Sachiko Murata, William C. Chittick. The Vision of Islam. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London. 2006. p xiv-xix)

The Example of Muhammad

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The way of Sufism is secured on the foundation of the spiritual virtues and practices of the Prophet Muhammad. This Way has had its interpreters in every age, and yet it was complete from the time of Muhammad. The Sufi way actualized and fulfilled certain qualities that had been latent in what was revealed through Muhammad, and the literary, musical, aesthetic, and interpersonal refinement of the Mevlevi Way, in particular, testify to the inexhaustible treasure of Muhammadan spirituality.

Most Westerners who are drawn to Sufism were first attracted by its qualities and were only gradually led to understand how the qualities of Sufism are the fruit of the Qur’anic revelation and the example of Muhammad. Sufism is a wide and universal door that leads out of the prison of human vanity and conjecture to an expansive spiritual reality. After this reality has been tasted through experience, it is possible to grasp how completely it is testified to by the revelation of the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad.

Without the character of Muhammad, who was called “the living Qur’an”, the early Muslim community would not have possessed the magnetic and inspired qualities that gave birth to a high level of culture. Within a few generations, this impulse of Islam spread from the backwater of Arabia to become a vast civilization – a civilization based on a universal ideology of human equality, social justice, and divine remembrance.

Without character of Muhammad, the whole spirit of Sufism is inconceivable. The study of the Prophet’s sayings and actions has always been central to the curriculum of Sufism.

‘Ali, one of the Prophet’s closest companions, preserved this saying:

Meditation in God is my capital.
Reason and sound logic are the root of my action.
Love is the foundation of my existence.
Enthusiasm is the vehicle of my life.
Contemplation of Allah is my companion.
Faith is the source of my power.
Sorrow is my friend.
Knowledge is my weapon.
Patience is my clothing and virtue.
Submission to the Divine Will is my pride.
Truth is my salvation.
Worship is my practice.
And in prayer lies the coolness of my eye
And my peace of mind.
Muhammad’s character exemplified a life of love and became a model for all who were called Sufis. These Sufis in their turn continued this impulse into an ever more explicit expression of love.

Human history has no greater example of a figure who was both a contemplative and a social revolutionary. On the one hand Muhammad devoted himself to meditation, vigils, and fasts; he opened his heart to the Invisible and there he heard Gabriel’s voice; he listened to the guidance that was given for the various circumstances he encountered; and he transmitted a revelation and way of life for the benefit of humanity. After that revelation began, he also found himself responsible for a growing community, and eventually a nation, which in an unbelievably short period of time became a unified and energized culture that swept across the world. For someone even cursorily acquainted with the facts, it would be difficult to deny that any other single human being has affected so great a number of people so deeply and in so many aspects of their lives. The way revealed through Muhammad and the Qur’an enlists from its more than one billion faithful a remarkable degree of commitment and energy: prayer and ablutions five times a day, a month-long fast, a universal pilgrimage, a single ritual prayer and Holy Book accepted by all Muslims, a practical and specific rule of social law governing business, social life, the family, and the individual.

What stands out in the prophet’s life are a combination of qualities that include sanctity, wisdom, faith, integrity, strength, justice, generosity, magnanimity, nobility, humanity, and modesty. It was these qualities that shaped the spiritual climate of Islam. Because Muhammad’s speech and actions were remembered and preserved more exactly than perhaps any other historical personality, in the hearts of Muslims his life became a norm for all of human life.
And yet Muhammad could not be confused with God. He listened to what the Divine revealed even when it criticized his own actions.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P. 174-176)

The School of Love

2011-11-16T17:15:00.000-08:00

We are all students in the school of love, although it may take us a long time and much suffering to admit this fact. Something obstinately refuses to see the obvious. It is amazing how stubborn and slow we are, and how often we still forget. We forget whenever we think ourselves more important than others, whenever we see our own desires and goals as more important than the feelings and well-being of those we love. We forget whenever we blame others for what we ourselves have been guilty of. We forget whenever we lose sight of the fact that in this school of love it is love that we all are trying to learn.

Yunus Emre, the first and greatest Turkish Sufi poet, says, “Let us master this science and read this book of love. God instructs, Love is His school.”

We have all been failures in love. This is our conscious starting point. Only a saint is an expert and complete lover, because only a saint has been freed by God from what stands in the way of love.

We can practice medication and seek spiritual knowledge for years and still overlook the central importance of love. One of the subtlest forms of egoism is when we engage ourselves in a practice to be more spiritual than others, when we turn spiritually into an arena for our ambition. But Love eventually forgives even that.

We are not merely Love’s passive instruments; we are its servants. In order to know how to serve, our love needs to be grounded in knowledge.

Love without knowledge is dangerous. With love alone we could burn ourselves and others. With love alone we could become lunatics. In ancient tradition they warn us of the person who is unconsciously “in love”. Such people, it is said in Central Asia, should wear bells on their ankles to warn others of their state.

Love is such an extraordinary and complex power, and the human being has such a great capacity for love, that to dismiss it as an unknowable mystery is like standing in awe before a fire and saying we don’t know what this is, how it started, or what to do with it.

Love is both mystery and knowledge. Furthermore, it is a mystery that has spoken to us about itself in the form of those revelations that have profoundly altered the course and quality of human history. The lives and teachings of Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad have influenced and transformed so many billions of people because they are essentially teachings of love.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.39-40)

Relationship, Humility, and Interdependence

2011-11-16T04:37:00.000-08:00

We do not reach love completely on our own. If we are loveless in and of ourselves, it is because we are living with our center of gravity in the false self. The false self is created from the desires and compulsions of our own separateness. This false self believes strongly in its own existence as separate from the rest of life, and it recruits the intellect to help defend this illusion at the expense of the whole of the mind.

There is nothing more difficult than to make two minds one; that is, to help them to love each other. If two or more people are in love, there is harmony, a unity of purpose without the loss of individuality. When we are thinking only of our own desires and needs, there is disharmony with others and we feel at cross-purposes. We live in a culture that emphasizes the individual at the expense of relationship. More and more people and alone and lonely.

Can the ego overcome its own separation? Most probably not, because it will still be playing the ego’s games, trying to become better than others or to attain its own desires and security at the expense of others. Only Love can tame the ego and bring it into service of Love. It is the nature of Love to create relationships. You might say it is Unity expressing itself. The lover, the beloved, and love itself are all one in reality.

In order to really love, our ego structure has to dissolve and re-form on a new basis. Our hearts may have to be broken, our false pride humbled. Love then re-creates the self.

Sometimes we feel that we want to love others but we cannot; we just don’t have the capacity for it. Just as the cause can produce the effect, the effect can also produce the cause. The tree produces the fruit; and the fruit can produce the tree. Love has many fruits; kindness, patience, generosity, courage, self-sacrifice. Love will produce these fruits; and these fruits will engender love. This is a two-way street. The effect can produce the cause. An apple contains the seed of a tree.

One of the greatest Sufi I have known, a man whose love was so tangible it was barely possible for us to be in his presence without tears, used to say: May my imitation become real. By practicing the fruits of love, by showing kindness, patience, and generosity to others, especially when it doesn’t come easily, we may summon the cause of these fruits, namely, real love. The tree bears fruit,and the fruit can also produce the tree.

Love is conscious relationship in presence. With presence we are in conscious relationship; our essences are present to each other. If we love without presence, we are merely projecting our neediness, lack of fulfillment, or desire onto another person. The higher Love is the welcoming of otherness into ourselves as ourselves, recognizing the stranger as a friend.

Love is the absence of defenses; it is emotional nakedness. “Only one whose garment has been stripped by love is free of desire and defect.” In the presence of love we find acceptance. Our self-disclosure, our emotional nakedness, helps to open the space for love. With presence we hold no image of ourselves that separates us from others. Love accepts imperfection; it loves the actuality and recognizes the potentiality.

Sometimes it is not until we know our helplessness and our failure at love that we can come under the grace of love. This is the great value of humiliation of sin and failure, because our ego, the shell that keeps love out, has broken open. Love is not the attribute of the self-righteous and the perfect. It is the attribute of the humble, those who have realized their own nothingness, those who have failed in love.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.49-50)

The Spectrum of Love

2011-11-16T03:13:00.000-08:00

People mean so many different things when they refer to love. For some it means desire or lust, for others compassion, for some need, for others compassion, for some need, for others generosity, for some an impersonal ideal, for others devotion or yearning. Love is one power that is reflected on many levels of our being: physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and cosmic.

Love is not primarily an emotion. Sometimes the greatest enemy of love is sentimentality, the cheapening or trivializing of the greatest power in the universe. Once a certain sheikh, someone who had given a lifetime to the path, was visiting us. He spoke about the efforts and sacrifices that are needed if we truly want to know the Truth. There was a guest in our circle that day, someone who was filled with a sentimental enthusiasm. “But what about Love?” she asked with her dreamy eyes.

“Love?” I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” our foxy mentor replied.

“Well, love is wonderful, love is incredible, love is what spirituality is all about. You mean you don’t know about love?” An excruciatingly long pause followed.

“My dear,” he said to her, “should one use a word unless in the moment that one uses it, one is that love?” There are dangers in talking about love without being love. The dangers of not talking about love are also great. Worst of all may be convincing ourselves that love is far removed from ourselves.

The most elementary and limited form of love is desire, or eros, to use a more suggestive term. We all have desire, or passion. At the most basic level it is animal desire – desire of the desirable, love of the lovable. Eros is attracted to what it finds desirable or beautiful. Its power is valuable as long as we are not enslaved by it, but often eros knows no limit in its desire.

The domain of eros is attraction and pleasure. Eros is the power of the universe as it is reflected at the level of our natural, animal self. From the spiritual point of view, eros is a derivative, metaphoric love. It searches without satisfaction through many objects of desire but never reaches full satisfaction. Sufis refer to it as “donkey love,” because the donkey brays – not a very pleasant sound – when it is aroused.

Philos is a form of love characterized by sharing or participation. It is a more comprehensive form of love, wider, less self-centered than desire. It brings people into relationships. Philos engenders all forms of sharing: family life, social clubs and political organizations, brotherhoods, sisterhoods, cultural bonds.

The highest, most comprehensive level of love is agape – a spiritual objective, unconditional love. Immature love needs to be loved; mature love simply loves. Agape, or unconditional love, can dissolve the false self. By removing the obstacles we put in the way of agape, by grounding ourselves in the principles and knowledge of love, and by being with those who love Spirit, we may come to live within the reality of agape. Eventually agape will refine and expand our sense of who we are to infinite dimensions. It will dissolve our separate existence. Then, instead of seeking the security and consolation of the ego, instead of seeking to be loved, we will be love itself.

I once asked someone whose spiritual maturity I trusted, “Is there ever a time when you no longer need other’s love?”
“Yes, when you love.” When you are love. When there is no difference between you and what you love.

Once a certain man knocked at a friend’s door. His friend asked him, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” he answered.
“Go away. This is not the time. There’s no room for two at this table.”

Only the fire of separation can cook the raw. Only loneliness can heal hypocrisy. The poor man went away and for a whole year burned with longing to be with his friend. Eventually his rawness was cooked, and he returned to the door of his friend, but no longer as he had been. He walked back and forth, in humility and respect, cautious lest the wrong word should fall from his mouth. Finally, he knocked.

“Who is there?” the friend called.
“It’s only you here at this door.”
“At last, since you are I, come right in, O myself, since there isn’t room for two I’s in this house. The double end of the thread is not for the needle. If you are single, come through the eye of the needle.”

Intimate conversation is one of the most important practices of the way of Love. Without a spiritual friend/teacher/guide our possibilities of advancement are very limited. The spiritual friend should be a humble human being who has melted in God. The implicit call of such a person is: “Fall in love with me, just as I fall in love with you; then in our mutual nonexistence we will be complete.” The phrase “to fall in love” is not to be confused with romance or any form of possessiveness, but it strongly suggests a kind of intimacy and mutual devotion that is necessary in this spiritual relationship. A Sufi of the twentieth century, Ishmael Emre, has said, “The compassionate and perfect human beings kill the secret of Truth with humility and the sword of love.”

Yet despite these high-minded thoughts on love, we must acknowledge that we have all failed in love. This is our starting point. We have all been broken and disappointed in love because our love has been identified with our egoism, when it was meant to dissolve that egoism. We can love when we expect to get something. We can love when we have the perfect person to love. But there is no such perfect person, and even if there were, we would not know it unless we too were perfect, because we would inevitably project our own imperfection onto the others, as the masses have always done to the prophets. God’s messengers were not loved; they were more often hated. Hatred is frustrated love, the shadow of love. It implies the presence of love corrupted by egoism. Egoism can turn beauty into ugliness, generosity into selfishness, love into hatred.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.46-49)

The Kingdom of the “I”

2011-11-15T06:14:00.000-08:00

What is it that we are searching for? Our situation as human beings is that we live in a world of pain and death. No amount of pleasure can negate this reality. Our means of pleasure is the body, and the body is subject to satiation, sickness, and death.

Even if we no longer fear the punishment of hell, we have to somehow deal with our own animal self. We try to know which of our desires can lead to a real and perhaps lasting well-being. We try to know when and how much is enough; and yet this animal self has endless desires. Repression, or at least self-discipline, is an evitable condition of our situation. Our very identity, our ego-self, is a complex of psychological manifestations arising from the body and related to its pleasure and survival. There is a terror in living with a body that is irrational, fallible, and finally, mortal.

We have no cultural and spiritual value systems to reconcile us with the body. We serve the body but we do not teach it how to serve. We worship the body, but we do not sanctify it. Our cultural value systems today are among the least spiritual ever offered to a human community. Basically, the meaning of life has been reduced to an unconscious operating mode: get a job that will enable us to buy what we want, pass through life with a minimum of pain and discomfort. The fulfillment offered to us is the fulfillment of being good and intelligent consumers, effective seekers of pleasure. We will have to repress many of our desires in order to eventually satisfy a few of them.

Yet there is still problem of our existence. Even if we are free to fulfill our desires, we still lack something to fulfill and give meaning to our lives. Even if we have removed God the Judge, we have a feeling of existential contraction, unworthiness, guilt, and sin.

This existential contraction is the “I” itself, cut off from the spiritual dimensions of Reality. Effectively, in our everyday waking existence, this is all we know and are. We become this “I” that seeks pleasures and avoids pain. Our capacity of pleasure is, however, limited and our confrontation with pain is inevitable. To protect ourselves we unconsciously try to make ourselves the Absolute Ruler of our own psychological and material realm. We create a kingdom with boundaries and defenses. We strive to consolidate our powers so that we can acquire what we want and keep out what we don’t want. This is the business and strategy of the “I”. And yet even from a materialist perspective, this kingdom has all the substantiality of a spider’s web. Despite our pride and careful efforts to spin this web, fate can brush it away without resistance. It is no wonder that we who depend on the material world for our sense of security and well-being live in a perpetual state of fear and contraction. Even when we are attaining our desires, and so have experienced what we call “happiness,” we cannot help but question whether this is real, and how long it will last.

What are we to do with our consciousness, our will, our love? These are the choices that variously confuse, distract, and oppress human beings.

This human face is a shape
Tethered in the stall of pain:
Part god, part angel, part beast...
A secret charm, rarely released.
- Rumi, D 568

Our “I” is our relationship to the world; and as long as this relationship is characterized by a self and world, we are in duality. This is our relationship with reality. Our resistance, expectations, complaints, and desires fly off at a tangent from what actually is.

The vast majority of human beings are living in a state of alienation from spiritual reality and from their own essence. Instead of living life directly and knowing themselves directly, all experience is filtered through layers of mental and emotional conditioning in the form of subjective distortions, defense mechanisms, cultural prejudices. This total mechanism of distortion we take to be ourselves. We are living in a “virtual reality” of our own creation, but because we have always been in costume, always wired to the program, always turned toward the screen of fantasy, we have not known ourselves. In the best of these times people’s minds are filled with everything but the truth: images from consumer culture, manufactured desires, superstitions, hallucinations, beliefs, allergies to beliefs, the clichés of neurotic individualism. In the worst of times, human minds may be occupied with mass psychoses of nationalism, fanaticism, racism, tribalism, or religious fundamentalism.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.6-8)

A Lover’s Tale

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One day, one of God’s lovers goes to the home of his shaikh. The shaikh begins to speak to him about love. Little by little, as the shaikh speaks, the lover begins to melt, becoming more and more subtle until he just flows like a trickling stream. His whole physical being dissolved in front of the shaikh, until there was nothing but some water on the floor.

Just then a friend of the shaikh enters the room and asks, “Where is that fellow who just arrived?” The shaikh points to the water on the floor and says, “That man is that water.”

This kind of melting is an astonishing transformation of state. The man lost his destiny is such a way that he became what he originally was: a drop of liquid. Originally he had arrived at human form from water, for as God has said: “We created all of life from water.”

This lover merely returned to his original essence, the water that is the source of life. And so we may draw the following conclusion: A lover is that being by whom everything is brought to life.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.3)

The Sacredness of Everyday Life

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A spirituality adequate to our times would have to establish the sacredness of everyday life in the face of increasing challenges to our humanness. The acceleration of time, the coercion of mass media, the commercialization of human relationships, and the artificial environment that technology is creating – all serve to create conditions that present new and unforeseen challenges to the human soul. While we seem to be advancing technologically, the capacities for sustained attention, for spiritual aspiration, for deeper relationships, and for spiritual presence seem to be diminishing.

Amid all this noise, are we becoming deaf to the overtones of transcendence? With so much entertainment at our fingertips, is humanity’s range of experience actually shrinking? Are we becoming trapped in appearances, oblivious to the essential ground of Being?

Sufism is a path formed from the cumulative experience and wisdom of generations of human beings who have attempted to live according to what they consider a divine way of life and to empirically resolve the conflicts of existence. Sufism aims at the highest spiritual attainment within the context of everyday life. Sufism has been called “the path of return”. It is fundamentally a movement of consciousness from the state of separation, or exile, to a reunion with our Source. In essence, if we trace our own consciousness back to its Source, we will find that we have never been separate. We will experience the dissolving of what which never was in that which has always been.

There is a Hadith Qudsi that aptly expresses the intimate union of the self and its Source:

As My servant continues to draw near to Me through voluntary practices,
I become the Hearing with which he or she hears,
The Seeing with which he or she sees,
The hand with which he or she touches,
The feet with which he or she walks.

It should be clear from this saying that a mysterious cooperation is acknowledged between the human and the Divine. It is less a matter of the human knowing God than of God being discovered in all the sensibilities of the human. From the perspective of Truth, I cannot know God, but God is both the knower and the known. Only God knows God.

Practically speaking, what are the human capacities required to experience the sacredness of everyday life?

We have a heart, by which is meant an organ of perception through which the reality of Spirit can be apprehended. We cannot begin the spiritual journey unless the “eye of the heart” is at least slightly open. It is for the heart to know that Reality which is not immediately apparent to the intellect or the senses. Every other organ of perception discerns through its own limited window; only the heart sees from all sides at once and can perceive Oneness.

It is necessary to distinguish the heart from our common emotions that are rooted in our egoism and that mostly obscure the knowing of the heart. The spiritual process from this point of view is removing the distorting factors of egoism that veil the heart. This is often described as “polishing the mirror of the heart.” Muhammad p.b.u.h said, “There is a polish for everything, and the polish for the heart is the remembrance of God.”

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P.181-182)

The Role of a Sufi Teacher in Modern Culture

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The role of a sufi teacher in modern culture is analogous to an athletic coach who would like to train people to develop their abilities to an Olympic level. He would have been educated for this and have the appropriate degree. Without necessarily being the greatest athlete himself, he would be in a position to train others who have particular talents that he may not have. He would have the general knowledge and the principles, and he would have some decades of experience in training others, as well as himself.

What if, however, we lived in a society that was ignorant of Olympic-level training and performance? What if most people had a lack of interest in or resistance toward any notion of training, their attitudes having been formed by a fast-food culture? What little they gave experienced of athletics might have come from elementary school gym teachers and the coarse and sweaty environments of locker rooms. What if, in addition, their physical health were weak and their emotional health characterized by a legacy of shame and abuse? They would have no love of their body since it had been associated with pain and defilement rather than freedom and joy. Such people would need to learn to work out, to learn about their bodies and what they are capable of. Our culture’s preparation for and receptivity to spiritual training may be no better.

It would be foolish if a horse trainer were to receive a half-wild starving and crippled horse and insist that it put on a saddle and prepare itself for the rigors of dressage. It would be equally foolish if a medical doctor were to receive patients in critical condition from starvation and lecture them about the benefits of organic versus processed food. We live in a culture that is starved for spiritual reality. The immediate need is to save people from starvation. Anyone who is insists that starving people pledge loyalty to the brand name of the food that saves them from starvation is not in service but is self-serving. There are distinctions to be made among both earthly and spiritual foods – whether these are synthetic, natural, or organic, for instance – and under the best circumstances, in the normative human condition, these are important distinctions.

The immediate need, however, is to help people in a state of starvation. Later we may consider what is a suitable diet, what are appropriate calisthenics, and which specific skills to concentrate on.

(Kabir Helminski. The Knowing Heart: A Sufi Path to Transformation. Shambala Publications, Inc. Boston, 1999. P. 30-31)

The Four Pillars of Knowledge (Ibn ‘Arabi)

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Ibn ‘Arabi describes silence, seclusion, hunger and vigilance as the four pillars of spiritual knowledge (arkan al-ma’rifa). In describing them as ‘pillars’, Ibn ‘Arabi is implying a direct equivalent or correspondence to the five Pillars of the Islamic religion (arkan al-islam), that is, the practices of the testimony of faith (shahada), ritual prayer (salat), alms-giving (zakat), fasting (sawm) and pilgrimage (hajj), the first equating to spiritual knowledge (ma’rifa). It is also in correspondence with his notion of “the pillars of the religion” (arkan al-din), which he mentions as faith (iman), sainthood (wilaya), prophethood (nubuwwa) and envoyship (risala).
He mentions these four as some of the things to be practiced so that one “becomes firmly established in the affirmation/realization of Unity (tawhid)”. He describes two actions of commission (hunger and seclusion) and two as actions of omission (vigilance and silence), and as in this treatise, points out that “hunger includes vigilance, and seclusion includes silence”. Interestingly, he specifies that according to the people of God, seclusion is the “chief of the four”.

Other chapters in the Futuhat provide more detail on the individual principles. Chapter 80, for example, discusses the nature of seclusion, stressing the internal meaning and therefore more universal nature of the principle.

“None is in seclusion except one who knows himself, and he who knows himself knows his Lord. He has no object of contemplation except God, by virtue of His Most Beautiful Names, and he is characterized by them in both his interior and exterior.”

Referring particularly to Divine Names that can have a negative connotation, e.g. the Proud (mutakabbir) and the One who enforces or compels (jabbar), “he secludes himself from the likeness of these Divine Names due to what they contain in terms of negative attribute if someone is named by them or manifests with their properties in the world. Man’s reality is to be totally indigent, and one who is indigent cannot be self-important or proud.”

Yet further than this is the one who secludes himself from all the Divine Names, since they belong to God alone. Even though he may be dressed in the likeness of all the Names, yet he prefers to rest in poverty and indigence. Such a one returns to his native land, which is absolute servanthood, and this Ibn ‘Arabi considers to be the real place of Man. He continues:

“The servant returns to his own special quality, which is utter servanthood (‘ubuda) in which Lordship does not compete. He is adorned (tahalla) by that, seated in the house of his potential reality, not his existence in Being. He observes the dispensation of God within him, and he is secluded from spiritual directorship (tadbir) in that.”

Here again one may note how he makes a passing reference to what really constitutes the description of servanthood, i.e. adornment (tahalli) – the use of such quite deliberate terminology provides links between apparently disparate texts.

In the Hilyat al-abdal Ibn ‘Arabi presents his teachings in a most succinct way. Describing the four pillars or rules in terms of how they are understood by the aspirant (murid) and the verifier (muhaqqiq), he speaks of them as a spiritual state (hal) and a spiritual station (maqam) and as bearing fruit in a particular domain of spiritual knowledge (ma’rifa).

Were we to take them simply at face value, as practices, “things to be done”, we would clearly miss the essential point which Ibn ‘Arabi is making. All that is physical has its root in that which is spiritual: all our practice is preparation, to bring us to a point where one allows the acknowledgement of the Divine in all His fundamental and rightful height and glory, remaining in pure servanthood while He remains in full sovereignty.

What is absolutely remarkable about this masterwork is how precise and all-encompassing Ibn ‘Arabi’s descriptions of spiritual practice are: he gives us, in the space of a few pages, enough material to contemplate and act on for a lifetime. Whatever forms of spiritual practice we may come across, they are forms or effects of these four, if they have real validity, and every spiritual tradition knows of their efficacy.

Finally, it is worth noting that the number four plays a significant role in Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought. Elsewhere he refers to it as the most perfect number, and associates it with the earthly, receptive principle (as opposed to the heavenly, active principle): for example, the four sub-lunar spheres, the four qualities of Universal Nature or the four categories of existence. In the Hilyat al-abdal the four pillars of exterior principles are the prerequisites for spiritual ascension. The pillars correspond, then, in a certain sense, to the isra, the overland nocturnal journey from Mecca to Jerusalem accomplished by the Prophet prior to his ascension into heaven (mi’raj), an Abrahamic spiritual journey from the “place of Ishmael” to the “placeof Isaac”, a purification process that takes the seeker to a place beyond the four exterior dimensions. Only through the accomplishment of these four, says Ibn ‘Arabi, will the reality of the abdal be known, the seven representatives of Heaven who are described in the final poem as “those of pure virtue and noble eminence”.

(Translated by Stephen Hirtenstein. The Four Pillars of Spiritual Transformation. Anqa Publishing. Oxford. p.20-24)

Being Muslim

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The duty of human beings is to surrender to this unique, omnipotent God, the Merciful, the Compassionate (as He is called at the beginning of each chapter of the Qur'an and also at the beginning of every human activity); to surrender from the bottom of one’s heart, with one’s whole soul and one’s entire mind. The word “Islam” means this complete surrender to the Divine will; and the one who practices such surrender is a Muslim (active participle of the fourth stem of the root s.l.m., which has also the connotation of salam, “peace”). Muslims do not like the term “Muhammedan,” as it suggests an incorrect parallel to the way Christians call themselves after Christ. Only members of some late mystical currents called themselves Muhammadi to express their absolute loyalty to the Prophet as their spiritual and temporal leader.

The Muslim, who recognizes the One God as both Creator and Judge, feels responsible to Him: he believes in His books (the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Qur’an) and in His prophets from Adam through the patriarchs, Moses, and Jesus up to Muhammad, the last lawgiving messenger. Further, he believes in God’s angels and in the Last Judgment, and “that good and evil come equally from God.” He tries to lead his life according to the revealed law, well aware that God’s presence is experienced in every place and every time, and that there is no really profane sphere in life. Fulfillment of cultic duties and the practice of mercy and justice are commanded side by side in the Qur’an: the ritual prayer, salat, is in almost every instance combined with zakat, the alms tax. But the worldlings who are embroiled in caring for their wealth, and who neglect religious duties, are threatened by Divine punishment.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Islam: an introduction. State University of New York Press. 1992. P. 14-15)

The Spirit

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The universal Spirit (ar-Ruh), which is also called the “first intellect” (al-‘Aql al-awwal), is described sometimes as created, sometimes as uncreated. According to the saying of the Prophet, “the first thing which God created is the Spirit (ar-Ruh)”; it is created, and, according to the passage in the Qur’an where God says of Adam: “And I breathed into him My Spirit”, it is uncreated, because directly united with the Divine Nature. As for the verse in the Qur’an which describes the nature of the Spirit in these words: “They will question you about the Spirit; say to them: The Spirit (proceeds) from the Command (al-Amr) of my Lord…”(17:85), this can be interpreted in either sense – that the Spirit is of the same nature as the Divine Command – or Order – which is of necessity uncreated since it is It which creates all things, or that the Spirit proceeds from the Order and is itself at an ontological level immediately below that Order.

If there are both these aspects of the Spirit it is because it is the mediator between the Divine Being and the conditioned universe. Uncreated in its immutable essence it is yet created inasmuch as it is the first Cosmic entity. It is compared to the supreme Pen (al Qalam al-a’la) with which God inscribes all destinies on the guarded Tablet (al-Lawh al-Mahfuzh) which itself corresponds to the universal Soul (an-Nafs al-kulliyah). For the Prophet said that the “first thing God created is the Pen; He created the (guarded) Tablet and said to the Pen: Write! And the Pen replied: and what shall I write? (God) said to it: Write My knowledge of My creation till the day of resurrection; then the Pen traced what had been ordained.” So the Spirit includes all the Divine Knowledge concerning created beings, and this means that it is the Truth of truths of the Reality of realities (Haqiqat al-Haqaiq) or – according to the aspect in which is envisaged – the direct and immediate manifestation of this Reality of realities.

Certain Sufi writers, such as ‘Abd al-Karim al-Jili, give the name Holy Spirit (Ruh al-Quddus) to the uncreated essence of the Spirit and compare it to the face of God (Wajh Allah); this is what is here to be understood bu the divine Intellect.

The uncreated essence of the Spirit corresponds to what Hindus call Purusa or Purusottama; its created capture corresponds to what they call Buddhi, the “Intellectual Light”. Now Buddhi is the first product of Prakrti, the universal “plastic” Substance, and this amounts to saying that Buddhi, through supra-individual in its nature, is ‘created’, for every ‘creature’ participates in the passivity of Substance.

The Sufi term for universal Substance or the Materia Prima is al Haba. This designation of it goes back to the Caliph ‘Ali the Prophet’s spiritual successor, and signifies literally the “fine dust” suspended in the air which becomes visible only by the rays of light it refracts. The symbolism of al-Haba illustrates the double nature of the Spirit, for it is the Spirit which illumines al-Haba and thus corresponds to the ray of light refracted by the fine dust. Since the dust becomes visible only to the extent that it refracts light, the ray only shows as such on the screen of the dust.

Undifferentiated light symbolizes the uncreated Spirit while the light determined as a ray on the other hand symbolizes the created Spirit, which is in a sense “directed” like a ray. As for the fine dust which is the symbol of al-Haba this is a principle of differentiation which is invisible as such. This means – and it conforms to the symbolism of the light – that Substance has no true existence and can he grasped only through its effects. The most “gross” of its effects is precisely manifestation in quantitative more, the picture of which is given as clearly as possible by the multitude of the dust particles. As for the dust lit up by the ray of light it is nothing other than the world.

Al-Haba is to the uncreated Intellect as the universal Soul (an-Nafs al-kulliyah) is to the created Intellect. On the other hand the uncreated pair is in a sense the equivalent of universal Nature (at-Tabi’ah) and the Divine Command (al-Amr), since universal Nature, itself principally identified with the Divine “Exhalation” (an-Nafas ar-Rahmani), is as the “maternal” aspect of substance (al-Haba). Thus we have, theoretically, three cosmogonic pairs the terms of which are related to one another as masculine and feminine principles. But from the cosmological point of view it is only implicitly that the Spirit or Intellect is uncreated, for it is only the created Spirit which represents a reality distinct from God.

Again, the Materia Prima or Substance (al-Haba) can be envisaged at different levels: as for its purely principal nature, which Ibn ‘Arabi names the “Supreme Element” (al-‘Unsur al-a’zam), this is necessarily outside the scope of cosmology since it is only a non-manifested divine possibility. Such applications of the same terms to different degrees in the hierarchy of existence explain some of the seeming contradictions between one Sufi writer and another or even between different expositions by the same author.

As the mediator par excellence the Spirit is also the prototype of prophetic manifestations, and in this aspect is to be identified with the archangel Gabriel (Jibril) who announced the Word to the Virgin Mary and transmitted the Qur’an to the Prophet.

The Divine Command (al-Amr)
Universal Nature (at-Tabiah) or the Divine Exhalation (Nafas ar-Rahmani)

The Divine Intellect or the Holy Spirit (Ruh al Quddus)
The Supreme Element (al-‘Unsur al-a’zam) or principal Substance (al-Haba)

The First Intellect (al-‘Aql al awwal) or the Spirit (ar-Ruh) or the Supreme Pen (al Qalam al-a’la)
Materia Prima or cosmic substance (al Haba or al Hayula)

The most “central” image of the Spirit on this earth is Man. But every form necessarily omits certain aspects of its prototype and so the Spirit reveals complementary and less “central” aspects of Itself in other terrestrial forms. For example it is revealed in the form of a tree of which the trunk symbolizes the axis of the Spirit passing through the whole hierarchy of worlds while its branches and leaves correspond to the differentiation of the Spirit in the many states of existence.

A Sufi legend, probably of Persian origin, tells that God created the Spirit in the form of a peacock and showed it in the mirror of the Divine Essence its own image. The peacock was seized with reverential dread (al-haybah) and let fall drops of sweat, and from these all other beings were created. The peacock’s outspread tail imitates the cosmic deployment of the Spirit.

Another symbol of the Spirit is to be seen in the eagle which soars above the creatures of the earth, observes them from on high, and drops vertically on to its prey like a flash of lightning, for it is thus that intellectual intuition seizes its objects.

The white doves is also an image of the Spirit by reason of its color, its innocence, and the softness of its flight.

At the extreme limits of the sensory world the shining nature of the stars, and the transparence and incorruptibility of precious stones also recall aspects of the Universal Spirit.

(Titus Burckhardt. Introduction to Sufi Doctrine. World Wisdom Inc. Canada, 2008. p.59-62)

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 9

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75. The ebst that you can seek from Him is that which He seeks from you.

76. One of the signs of delusion is sadness over the loss of obedience coupled with an absence of resolve to bring it back to life.

77. The Gnostic is not one who, when making a symbolic allusion, finds God nearer to himself than his symbolic allusion. Rather, the Gnostic is the one who, because of his self-extinction in His being and self-absorption in contemplating Him, has no symbolic allusion.

78. Hope goes hand in hand with deeds; otherwise, it is just wishful thinking.

79. That which the Gnostics seek from God is sincerity in servanthood and performance of the rights of Lordship.

80. He expanded you so as not to keep you in contraction;
He contracted you so as not to keep you in expansion; and He took you out of both so that you not belong to anything apart from Him.

81. It is more dreadful for Gnostics to be expanded than to be contracted, for only a few can stay within the limits of proper conduct in expansion.

82. Through the existence of joy the soul gets its share in expansion, but there is no share for the soul in contraction.

83. Sometimes He gives while depriving you, and sometimes He deprives you in giving.

84. When he opens up your understanding of deprivation, deprivation becomes the same as giving.

85. Outwardly, creatures are an illusion; but inwardly, they are an admonition.
Thus, the soul looks at the illusory exterior while the heart looks at the admonitory interior.

86. If you want a glory that does not vanish, then do not glory in a glory that vanishes.

87. The real journey is when the world’s dimensions are rolled away from you so that you see the Hereafter closer to you than yourself.

88. A gift from man is deprivation; but deprivation from God is beneficence.

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 8

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69. It is rare that divine inspirations come except suddenly, and this, so that they be protected from servant’s claiming them by virtue of the existence of receptivity on their part.

70. Infer the presence of ignorance in anyone whom you see answering all that he is asked or giving expression to all that he witnesses or mentioning all that he knows.

71. He made the Hereafter an abode to reward his believing servants only because this world cannot contain what He wishes to bestow upon them and because He deemed their worth too high to reward them in a world without permanence.

72. Whoever finds the fruit of his deeds coming quickly has proof of the fact of acceptance.

73. If you want to know your standing with Him, look at the state He has put you in now.

74. When He gives you obedience, making you unaware of it because of Him, then know that He has showered you liberally with His graces both inwardly and outwardly.

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 7

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60. Were it not for the seeds of ambitious desire, the branches of disgrace would not be lofty.

61. Nothing leads you so much like suspicion.

62. In your despairing, you are a free man;
But in your coveting, you are a slave.

63. Whoever does not draw near to God as a result of the caresses of love is shackled to Him with the chains of misfortune.

64. Whoever is not thankful for graces runs the risk of losing them;
And whoever is thankful, fetters them with their own cords.

65. Be fearful lest the existence of His generosity toward you and the persistence of your bad behavior toward Him not lead you step by step to ruin.
“We shall lead them to ruin step by step from whence they know not.”

66. It is ignorance on the part of the novice to act improperly, and then, his punishment having been delayed, to say, “If this had been improper conduct, He would have shut off help and imposed exile.”
Help could be withdrawn from him without his being aware of it, if only by blocking its increase. And it could be that you are made to abide at a distance without your knowing it, if only by His leaving you to do as you like.

67. If you see a servant whom God has made to abide in the recitation of litanies and prolonged His help therein, do not disdain what his Lord has given him on the score that you do not detect the signs of Gnostics on him nor the splendor of God’s lovers. For had there been no inspiration, there would have been no litany.

68. God makes some people remain in the service of Him, and He singles out others to love Him. “All do we aid – these as well as those – out of the bounty of thy Lord, and the bounty of thy Lord is not limited.”

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 6

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48. A sign of the heart’s death is the absence of sadness over the acts of obedience you have neglected and the abandonment of regret over the mistakes you have made.

49. Let no sin reach such proportions in your eyes that it cuts you off from having a good opinion of God, for, indeed, whoever knows his Lord considers his sin as paltry next to His generosity.

50. There is no minor sin when His justice confronts you;
And there is no major sin when His grace confronts you.

51. No deed is more fruitful for the heart than the one you are not aware of and which is deemed paltry by you.

52. He only made an inspiration come upon you so that you would go to him.

53. He made an inspiration come upon you so as to get you out of the grip of alterities and free you from bondage to created things.

54. He made an inspiration come upon you so as to take you out of the prison of your existence into the unlimited space of your contemplation.

55. Lights are the riding-mounts of hearts and of their innermost centers.

56. Light is the army of the heart, just as darkness is the army of the soul.
So when God wishes to come to help of His servant, He furnishes him with armies of lights and cuts off from him the reinforcements of darkness and alterities.

57. Insight belongs to the Light, discernment to the Intellect, and both progression and retrogression belong to the heart.

58. Let not obedience make you joyous because it comes from you; but rather, be joyous over it because it comes from God to you.
“Say: In the grace of God and in His mercy, in that they should rejoice. It is better than that which they hoard.”

59. He prevents those who are voyaging to Him from witnessing their deeds and those who are united with Him from contemplating their states.
He does that for the voyagers because they have not realized sincerity toward God in those works; and He does that for those united with Him because He makes them absent from contemplating those states by contemplating Him.

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 5

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43. Do not keep company with anyone whose state does not inspire you and whose speech does not lead you to God.

44. You might be in a bad state; then, associating with one who is in a worse state, you see virtue in yourself.

45. No need arising from a renouncing heart is small, and no need arising from an avaricious heart is fruitful.

46. Good works are the results of good states.
Good states arise from the stations wherein abide those who have spiritual realization.

47. Do not abandon the Invocation because you do not feel the Presence of God therein. For your forgetfulness of the Invocation of Him is worse than your forgetfulness in the Invocation of Him. Perhaps He will take you from an Invocation with forgetfulness to one with vigilance, and from one with the Presence of God to one wherein everything but the Invoked is absent. “And that is not difficult for God.”

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 4

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38. Let not the intention of your aspiration shift to what is other than He, for one’s hopes cannot outstrip the Generous.

39. Appeal to no one but Him to relieve you of a pressing need that He Himself has brought upon you. For how can someone else remove what He has imposed? And how can he who is unable to free himself of a pressing need free someone else of one?

40. If you have not improved your thinking of Him because of His ineffable nature, improve it because of His treatment of you. For has He accustomed you to anything but what is good? And has He conferred upon you anything but His favors?

41. How astonishing is he who flees from what is inescapable and searches for what is evanescent! “For surely it is not the eyes that are blind, but blind are the hearts which are in the breasts.”

42. Travel not from creature to creature, otherwise you will be like a donkey at the mill: Roundabout he turns, his goal the same as his departure. Rather, go from creatures to the Creator: “And that the final end is unto thy Lord.”
Consider the Prophet’s words (God bless him and grant him peace!):
“Therefore, he whose flight is for God and His Messenger, then his flight is for God and His Messenger; and he whose flight is for worldly gain or marriage with a woman, then his flight is for that which he flees to.”
So understand his words (upon him peace!) and ponder this matter, if you can. And peace on you!

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 3

2011-11-13T22:48:00.000-08:00

32. Your being on the lookout for the vices hidden within you is better than your being on the lookout for the invisible realities veiled from you.

33. The Real is not veiled from you. Rather, it is you who are veiled from seeing It; for, were anything to veil It, then that which veils It would cover It.
But if there were a covering to It, then that would be a limitation to Its Being:
Every limitation to anything has power over it. “And He is the Omnipotent, above His servants.”

34. Among the attributes of your human nature, draw away from every one that is incompatible with your servanthood, so that you may be responsive to the call of God and near His Presence.

35. The source of every disobedience, indifference, and passion is self-satisfaction.
The source of every obedience, vigilance, and virtue is dissatisfaction with one’s self.
It is better for you to keep company with an ignorant man dissatisfied with himself than to keep company with a learned man satisfied with himself.
For what knowledge is there in a self-satisfied scholar? And what ignorance is there in an unlearned man dissatisfied with himself?

36. The ray of light of the intellect makes you witness His nearness to you. The eye of the intellect makes you witness your nonbeing as due to His Being. The Truth of the intellect makes you witness His Being, not your nonbeing, nor your being.

37. “God was, and there was nothing with Him, and He is now as He was.”

The Book of Wisdom - Chapter 2

2011-11-13T22:38:00.000-08:00

17. He who wishes that there appear, at a given moment, other than what God has manifested in it, has not left ignorance behind at all!

18. Your postponement of deeds till the time when you are free is one of the frivolities of the ego.

19. Do not request Him to get you out of a state so as to make use of you in a different one; for, were He desire so, He could make use of you as you are, without taking you out!

20. Hardly does the intention of the initiate want to stop at what has been revealed to him, than the voices of Reality call out to him:
“That which you are looking for is still ahead of you!”
And hardly do the exterior aspects of created beings display their charms, than their inner realities call out to him: “We are only a trial, so disbelieve not!”

21. Your requesting Him is suspecting Him.
Your seeking Him is due to your absence from Him.
Your seeking someone else is because of your immodesty toward Him.
Your requesting someone else is on account of your distance from Him.

22. Not a breath do you expire but a Decree of Destiny makes it go forth.

23. Do not look forward to being free of alterities, for that is indeed what cuts you off from vigilant attention to Him in that very state He has assigned to you.

24. So long as you are in this world, be not surprised at the existence of sorrows. For, truly, it manifests nothing but what is in keeping with its character or its inevitable nature.

25. No search pursued with the help of your Lord remains at a standstill, but any search pursued by yourself will not be fruitful.

26. Among the signs of success at the end is the turning to God at the beginning.

27. He who is illumined at the beginning is illumined at the end.

28. Whatever is deposited in the invisible world of innermost hearts is manifested in the visible world of phenomena.

29. What a difference between one who proceeds from God in his argumentation and one who proceeds inferentially to Him! He who has Him as his starting-point knows the Real as It is, and proves any matter by reference to the Being of its Origin.
But inferential argumentation comes from the absence of union with Him.
Otherwise, when was it that he became absent that one has to proceed inferentially to Him? Or when was it that He became distant that created things themselves will unite us to Him?

30. Those who are united with Him:
“Let him who has abundance spend out his abundance.”
Those who are voyaging toward Him:
“And whoever has his means of subsistence straitened…”

31. Those who are voyaging to Him are guided by the lights of their orientation, whereas those who are united to Him have the lights of face-to-face confrontation. The former belong to the latter, for they belong to God and to nothing apart from Him. “Say: Allah! Then leave them prattling in their vain talk.”

The Book of Wisdom (Kitab Al Hikam) Chapter 1

2011-11-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

1.One of the signs of relying on one’s own deeds is the loss of hope when a downfall occurs.

2.Your desire for isolation, even though God has put you in the world to gain a living, is a hidden passion. And your desire to gain a living in the world, even though God has put you in isolation, is a comedown from a lofty aspiration.

3.Antecedent intentions cannot pierce the walls of predestined Decrees.

4.Rest yourself from self-direction, for what Someone Else has carrie dout on your behalf you must not yourself undertake to do it.

5.Your striving for what has already been guaranteed to you, and your remissness in what is demanded of you, are signs of the blurring of your intellect.

6.In spite of intense supplication, there is delay in the timing of the Gift, let that not be the cause for your despairing. For He has guaranteed you a response in what He chooses for you, not in what you choose for yourself, and at the time He desires, not the time you desire.

7.If what has promised does not occur, even though the time for its occurence had been fixed, then that must not make you doubt the promise. Otherwise your intellect will be obscured and the light of your innermost heart extinguished.

8.If He opens a door for you, thereby making Himself known, pay no heed if your deeds do not measure up to this. For, in truth, He has not opened it for you but out of a desire to make Himself known to you. Do you not know that He is the One who presented the knowledge of Himself to you, whereas you are the one who presented Him with deeds? What a difference between what He brings to you and what you present to Him!?

9.Actions differ because the inspirations of the states of being differ.

10.Actions are lifeless forms, but the presence of an inner reality of sincerity withing them is what endows them with life-giving Spirit.

11.Bury your existence in the earth of obscurity, for whatever sprouts forth, without having first been buried, flowers imperfectly.

12.Nothing benefits the heart more than a spiritual retreat wherein it enters the domain of meditation.

13.How can the heart be illumined while the forms of creatures are reflected in its mirror? Or how can it journey to God while shackled by its passions? Or how can it desire to enter the Presence of God while it has not yet purified itself of the stain of forgetfulness? Or how can it understand the subtle points of mysteries while it has not yet repented of its offenses?

14.The Cosmos is all darkness. It is illumined only by the manifestation of God in it. Whoever sees the Cosmos and does not contemplate Him in it or by it or before it or after it is in need of light and is veiled from the sun of gnosis by the clouds of created things.

15.That which shows you the existence of His Omnipotence is that He veiled you from Himself by what has no existence alongside of Him.

16.How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One who manifests everything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the one who is manifest through everything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One who is manifest in everything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the Manifest to everything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He was the Manifest before the existence of anything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is more manifest than anything?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is the One alongside of whom there is nothing?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since He is nearer to you than anything else?
How can it be conceived that something veils Him, since were it not for Him, the existence of everything would not have been manifest?
It is a marvel how Being has been manifested in nonbeing, and how the contingent has been established alongside of Him who possesses the attribute of Eternity!

(Ibn 'Athaillah. The Book of Wisdom. Paulist Press, New York, 1978. p.47-50)

The Secret of the Creation of Adam

2011-11-10T03:49:00.000-08:00

In the kneading of the clay of Adam, all the attributes of satans, predators, beasts, plants, and inanimate objects were actualized. However, that clay was singled out for the attribution of “My two hands.” Hence each of these blameworthy attributes was a shell. Within each was placed the pearl of a divine attribute. You know that the sun’s gaze turns granite into a shell that contains pearls, garnets, rubies, emeralds, turquoises, and agates.

Adam was singled out for “I kneaded the clay of Adam with My two hands” for the period of ‘forty days,’ and according to one tradition, each day was equivalent to one thousand years. Consider then – for which pearl was Adam’s clay the shell? And this honoring of Adam was before the spirit was blown into him. This was the good fortune of the bodily frame, which was to be the palace of the vicegerent. For forty thousand years He labored through His own Lordship. Who knows what treasures He prepared there?

(Sachiko Murata. The Tao of Islam. State University of New York Press, Albany. 1992 P.40-41)

“Ye are the nearest to Him…”

2011-11-10T03:10:00.000-08:00

Jesus passed by three men. Their bodies were lean and their faces pale. He asked them, saying, “What hath brought you to this plight?”
They answered, “Fear of the Fire.”
Jesus said, “Ye fear a thing created, and it behooves God that He should save those who fear.”

Then he left them and passed by three others, whose faces were paler and their bodies leaner, and asked them, saying, “What hath brought you to this plight?”
They answered, “Longing for Paradise.”
He said, “Ye desire a thing created, and it behooves God that He should give you that which ye hope for.”

Then he went on and passed by three others of exceeding paleness and leanness, so that their faces were as mirrors of light, and he said, “What hath brought you to this?”
They answered, “Our love of God.”
Jesus said, “Ye are the nearest to Him, ye are the nearest to Him…”

(Sufism: The Mysticism of Islam. Reynold A. Nicholson. IndoEuropean Publishing, California 2009. p. 9-10)

When We Seek for a Better Situation

2011-10-30T03:44:00.000-07:00

It’s sheer stupidity to seek to introduce in a given time what Allah has not manifested in it.

Only Allah does know what is better for the servant. Since the servant cannot predict what is good and what is bad for him, it is not fair for him to seek for a better situation. He is requested to make better use of whatever situation given to him rather than asking for a better situation. The servant becomes more sincere and honest if he works for the master in whatever situation he was asked to work without asking for a change in the situation of the work. If he believes that he can become more productive and efficient in a different situation, it is tantamount to believing that he knows better than Allah what situation is better for him.

(Ibn 'Athaillah. The Book of Aphorisms. Islamic Book Trust, Kualalumpur, 2010. p.11)

The Story of the Visit of the Devil, the Accursed

2011-10-29T06:42:00.000-07:00

Mu’adh ibn Jabal relates from Hadrat Ibn ‘Abbas (may Allah be pleased with them):

One day, at the home of one of the Companions, a congregation was gathered around the Prophet. In the middle of a wonderful discourse, an ugly voice from the outside was heard. “O people inside, would you permit me to enter? I have business with you!” it said.

Everyone looked at the Prophet. He said to the ones present, “Do you recognize the owner of this voice?”
The Companions answered, “Allah and His Messenger know best.”
The Prophet said, “It is Satan the Accursed.”

On hearing that, Hadrat ‘Umar (may Allah be pleased with him), who was present, drew his sword. “O Messenger of Allah, permit me to go and cut off his head!” he said.

The Prophet replied, “No, ‘Umar, don’t you know that you cannot kill him? He has permission to exist until Doomsday.” Then he added, “Open the door and admit him, as he did not come on his own but on Allah’s orders. Listen to what he says, and try to understand.”

They opened the door, and he appeared in front of us as an old man, cross-eyed [or blind in one eye] and scant of beard, with only six or seven long hairs hanging from his chin. He had a very big head, his crossed eyes close to the top of his head, high on his forehead, with big thick hanging lips like those of a water buffalo. He saluted the Prophet and the Companions, to which the Prophet responded, “O Accursed, the salam and salutations belong to Allah Most High.” Then he said, “I heard you are here on business. What is it?”

Satan said, “I did not wish to come here, I was forced to. An angel came to me from your Lord, who honors whom He wishes, and said, “Allah Most High orders you to go to Muhammad, but you will go to him in humility and abasement, and be submissive and tractable. You will tell him how you seduce and mislead humankind. You are going to answer all his questions truthfully, without a single lie.” And Allah said that if I lied to you He would turn me into ashes and blow me away in the wind, and my enemies would laugh at me. I come with such orders, O Muhammad.”

Then the Prophet asked the Devil, “Tell me, who in the creation do you hate most?”
The Devil answered, “You, O Muhammad! There is no one in the whole creation that I hate more. There is none other like you.”

The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, confirmed that the Devil was his own and all the prophet’s greatest foe. He asked, “Whom else do you detest, beside me?”

Satan said, “The young ones who have given up their pleasures and themselves for Allah’s sake; the people of knowledge who act upon their knowledge and who decline all that is doubtful; and the ones who are clean, so clean that they wash three times that which they wish to cleanse. After that the patient poor, who neither ask from others the things they need, nor complain. After that the thankful rich, who guve alms lawfully and spend lawfully.” [Hadrat Anas lists fourteen enemies after the prophets: the knowledgeable who act on what they know; readers of the Qur’an who pattern themselves on it; those who call to prayer for Allah’s sake; the satisfied poor; the compassionate; the generous; those who perform the morning prayer on time; advisors and reformers; abstainers from lawful food and sexual relations; those who are always in ablution; the modest; those who place their trust in Allah; benefiters of the poor; the devout who are busy in Allah’s service.]

Then the Prophet asked: “What happens to you, O Accursed One, when my people perform their prayers?”
“I shake and tremble as if stricken with malaria because I see your people raised in blessing and power each time they prostrate.”

“What happens to you, O Accursed, when my people fast?”
“I have my hands and feet tied until they break their fast.”

“What happens when they all meet on the Pilgrimage at the house of their Lord?”
“I lose my wits, I go mad.”

“What happens to you when they recite the Holy Qur’an?”
“I melt like lead turning to hot liquid in the fire.”

“And when they pay alms?”
“I am torn to pieces, as if the generous donor took a saw and sawed me into four pieces, because there are four blessings that the donor receives – the blessings of abundance, love and respect from Allah’s creatures, a shield from Hellfire, and relief from distress and troubles.”

Then the Messenger of Allah asked the Devil what he thought of his beloved Companions. About Hadrat Abu Bakr he said, “I hate him. Even before Islam he refused to obey, nay, even to hear me. How can he know listen to me? About Hadrat Umar ibn al-Khattab he said, “I run away whenever I see him!” About Hadrat ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan he said, “I am ashamed in front of him. Even the angels of mercy are ashamed in front of him.” And about Hadrat ‘Ali ibn Abi Thalib he said, “Oh, if I could just be safe from him, if he would just let me be, I would let him be. But he will not leave me alone!”

Having heard the answers of the accursed Satan, the Prophet thanked Allah and said, “Praise be to Allah who has blessed my people with such felicity and cursed you with such negativity until that appointed time.”

When the Devil hear that, he said, “Alas, alas for you, what felicity for your people? How can you feel there is safety for them as long as I exist? I enter their very veins, their very flesh, and they cannot even suspect, let alone see or feel me. I swear by Allah who has given me time until Doomsday that I will seduce them all, the intelligent and the simple-minded, the learned as well as the ignorant, the devout as well as the sinner. None will be safe from me except the true servants of Allah.”

The Prophet asked, “Who are the true servants of Allah, according to you?”
The Devil said, “You know well, O Muhammad, that whoever loves his money and his property Allah does not count among His servants. Whenever I see someone who does not say “mine” and “me”, who does not love either money or flattery, I know he is truly a servant of Allah and I run away from him. As long as aperson loves money, property, flattery, he obeys me: he is my servant. I need many servants and I have many servants. I am not alone. I have 70,000 children, each of them with his assigned duties. Each of my 70,000 children has 70,000 satans serving under him, all assigned to different posts. Many are with the young, and the older women, and with the theologians and preachers and shaykhs. There are almost no differences of opinion between your young people and my devils, and your children play happily with my children. And some of the devout and some of the pious get along very well with my people! My devils lead the imagination of the pious from one height to another. Arrogant, they leave the sincerity of their devotions. Soon they fight with each other, and they don’t even know what is happening to them. Then I whisper to them, “Disbelieve!”, but when they disbelieve, I say

I am free of you. Surely I fear Allah, the Lord of the Worlds.
(Surah Hashr, 16)

Then the accursed Devil told how he profited from human habits that he liked. About lying he said, “Do you know, O Muhammad, that lying is from me, and that I am the first liar? Whoever lies is my best friend; whoever swears to the truth of his lie is my beloved. You know, O Muhammad, that I swore by Allah and lied to Adam and Eve. I swore to them both.

Surely I am a sincere adviser to you.
(Surah ‘Araf, 21)

“I also love rejection and gossip. They are my delightful fruits. I detest loving families. If they think of rejecting each other, separating from each other, and talk about divorce, even if just once, the marriage bond in Allah’s view is dissolved. The wife will be unlawful to the husband. When they sleep together, they will be adulterers. If they have a child he will be a bastard. I love all that.”

“O Muhammad, let me tell you about my friends who abandon prayers or delay them. When it is time for prayer I make them imagine that there is still time, that they are busy. They should enjoy what they are doing, they can always pray later! I hope they will die before doing their next prayer, and some of them do. Even when they do their prayers late, their devotions are thrown in their faces. If I cannot succeed myself, I send them a human satan who will prevent them from their devotions. If I don’t succeed again. In enter into their prayers. I tell them, “Look to the right, look to the left! Think of the past, plan your future!” And when they do, I caress their cheeks and kiss their foreheads and take the peace from their hearts. You know, O Muhammad, that the prayers of those whose attention is outside of them or who are imagining things that do not belong in the presence of Allah are also rejected and thrown in their faces.”

“And if I am not successful in that, I order them to do their prayers fast; they look like hens picking at grain. If I still don’t succeed, I follow them to the congregational prayers and put bridles on their heads. I pull, and lift their heads from the prostration before the imam, and I push their heads down before the imam touches his head to the ground, and I am overjoyed to remember that Allah will turn those unruly heads into donkey’s heads on the Day of Judgment. If I am still not successful, I try at least to make them crack their fingers while they are making prayers! Then they will be among those who offer me praise instead of Allah. Or at least I will blow into their noses and make them yawn: if they open their mouths, a little devil will enter into them through their mouths and increase their love and ambition for this world. The one who loves and is ambitious fro this world becomes my soldier; he obeys me and does as he is ordered.”

“O Muhammad, how can you hope and be serene about your people’s salvation and felicity? I have a trap at every corner for them. I go to the poor and tell them, “What has Allah done for you? Why do you pray to Him? Prayer is for those to whom He has given in abundance.” Then I go to those who are sick and tell them to stop praying, and remind them that even Allah said

There is no blame on the sick.
(Surah Nur, 61)

I hope that they will die having abandoned their prayers, so that Allah will meet them with anger in the Hereafter.

“O Muhammad, if I have told a single lie, may scorpions bite me, and ask from Allah that He turn me into ashes! O Muhammad, do not be sure of your people. I have already converted a sixth of them, who have left their religion.”

Then the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him asked, “O Accursed One, with whom do you most like to spend your time?”
“The usurer.”
“And your best friend?”
“The adulterer.”
“With whom do you share your bed?”
“The drunkard.”
“Who are your guests?”
“The thieves.”
“Who are your representatives?”
“The magicians and soothsayers.”
“What pleases you most?”
“Divorce.”
“Whom do you love most?”
“Those who abandon their Friday prayers; tyrants and oppressors; the arrogant; servile scholars who hide the truth for the benefit of tyrants; dishonest tradesmen; dealers in fraud; slanderers; those who stir up trouble among friends.”

Then the Prophet asked, “What breaks your heart, O Accursed One?”
“The determination and the firm footsteps of those who march against the enemies of Allah for Allah’s sake.”
“What gives you pain?”
“The repentance of the penitent.”
“What makes you grimace?”
“The alms given in secret.”
“What makes your eyes blind?”
“The extra prayer in the middle of the night.”
“What makes you bow your head?”
“Prayer done in congregation.”
“O Satan, according to you, who are the happiest among people?”
“The ones who purposefully abandon their prayers.”
“And the best among people?”
“The misers.”
“What prevents you from doing your job?”
“The gathering of people of knowledge and their discourses.”
“How do you eat your food?”
“With my left hand and the tips of my fingers.”
“When the sun is hot, where do you seek shade?”
“Under people’s dirty fingernails.”
“What did you ask from my Lord on the day you were rejected from His presence?”
“I had ten requests that were accorded.”
“What were they, O Accursed One?”
“I asked Allah to make me a partner in the properties and children of the children of Adam. He gave that to me, and He said

And incite whom thou canst with thy voice, and collect against them thy horse and thy foot, and share with them in wealth and children, and promise them. And the Devil promises them only to deceive.
(Surah Bani Isra’il, 64)

“I eat from the meat of animals killed without invoking the name of Allah, and from the food bought with money gained through interest, injustice, and tyranny. I am the shareholder of the property whose owner does not take refuge in Allah from me. I am part father of the child that comes from intercourse performed without invoking the name of Allah. I am the traveling companion of whoever rides in a vehicle that goes to an unlawful destination.”

“I asked Allah to give me a house, and He gave me public baths. I asked Allah to give me a temple, and He gave me the marketplaces as my temple. I asked Allah to give me a book. He gave me the books of poetry as my book. I asked for a call to prayer, and He gave me dance music. I asked for someone to share my bed, and He gave me the drunkard. I asked Allah for helpers. Allah gave me those who believe in free will. I asked Allah to give me brothers and sisters, and Allah gave me the squanderers who spend their money on evil things. Allah said

Surely the squanderers are the Devil’s brethren
(Surah Bani Isra’il, 27)

“Then I asked Allah to be able to see the children of Adam while they are unable to see me, and He accorded that to me. I wished that the very veins of the children of Adam be my routes, and it was given to me. So I flow in their veins as I wish, and I enter their flesh.”

“All these were given to me, and I am proud of what I have received. And let me add, O Muhammad, that there are more with me than there are with you, and until Doomsday there will be more with me than there are with you.”

Then the Prophet said, “If you had not proven what you said with the verses of Allah’s book, it would have been hard for me to confirm what you say.”

The Devil continued, “Do you know, O Muhammad, that I have a son whose name is ‘Atam [the first third of the night]? He pisses in the ear of the people who go to sleep without performing their night prayers. His urine puts them to sleep; otherwise no one could have gone to bed without finishing their prayers. Then I have a son whose name is Mutaqadi [one who presses for payment]. His duty is to publicize tha prayers, the devotions, the good deeds that are done in secret for Allah’s sake, because promises to reward the good deed done secretly a hundredfold. When deeds are publicized and received credit and praise from the creatures of Allah, Allah takes away 99 of the promised 100 rewards. Then I have a son whose name is Kuhayl [kohl]. His duty is to put kohl on the eyes of people who are in the presence of the wise or preachers. The ones whose eyes he has touched start falling asleep. They are thus prevented from hearing the words of Allah or receiving any benefit from them.”

The Devil talked about women. He said, “Whenever a woman leaves her seat, a devil sits in her place. On the lap of every woman sits a satan who makes her desirable to whoever looks at her. Then he orders the woman to open and show her arms, her legs, and her breasts, and with his claws tears her veil of shame and decency.”

The the Devil started to complain. He said, “O Muhammad, in spite of all this I have no strength to take away the faith of the faithful. I only take away their faith when they throw it away. If I were able, there would be no one on the face of this world who could say laa ilaaha illallah, Muhammad rasulullah. I would not leave a single one to pray or fast. All I can do is to give the children of Adam imaginations, illusions, and delusions – make the ugly appear beautiful, the wrong, right and the bad, good. Neither do you have the power to give faith. You are only a proof of the truth, because I know if you were given the power to give true faith you would not leave a single nonbeliever on the face of this world.

“The fortunate one who is a believer is fortunate in his mother’s womb, and the rebellious sinner is a rebel in his mother’s womb. As you are the guide of the fortunate, I am only the cause of sin for the ones who are destined to sin. Allah is He who renders one fortunate and another rebellious.” Then he recited

And if thy Lord had pleased He would have made people a single nation, and they cease not to differ, except those upon whom thy Lord has mercy, and for this did He create them. And the word of thy Lord is fulfilled: I shall fill Hell with jinn and men altogether.
(Surah Hud, 118-119)

And he recited:

And the command of Allah is a decree absolute.
(Surah Ahzab, 38)

The the Mercy upon the Universe told the Devil, “O Father of All Bitterness, I wonder if it is at all possible for you to repent and return to your Lord. I promise I would intercede for you.”

The Accursed One answered, “O Messenger of Allah, it is Allah’s justice. The ink on the pen that wrote the judgment is dry. What will happen will happen until Doomsday. The One who made you the master of all prophets, the speaker of for the inhabitants of Paradise, the One who chose you to be the Beloved among all His creation, chose me to be the master of sinners and the speaker for the inhabitants of Hell. He is Allah, devoid of all lack. O Muhammad, this which I have told you is my last word to you, and I have told nothing but the truth.”

*

We take refuge in Allah, the Lord of all the worlds visible and invisible, who existed before and will exist after, from the accursed Devil.

The Three Pillars of Religion (Ad Diin)

2011-10-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab said: One day when we were with God’s messenger, a man with a very white clothing and very black hair came up to us. No mark of travel was visible on him, and none of us recognized him. Sitting down before the Prophet, leaning his knees against him, and placing his hands on his thighs, he said, “Tell me, Muhammad, about Islam (submission)”

He replied, “Islam means that you should bear witness that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger (shahada), that you should perform the ritual prayer (shalat), pay the alms tax (zakat), fast during Ramadan (shaum), and make the pilgrimage to the House (hajj) if you are able to go there.”

The man said, “You have spoken the truth.” We were surprised at his questioning him and then declaring that he had spoken the truth. He said, “Now tell me about iman (faith)”

He replied, “Faith means that you have faith in God, His angels, His books, His messengers, and the Last Day, and that you have faith in the measuring out, both its good and its evil.”

Remarking that he had spoken the truth, he then said, “Now tell me about ihsan.”

He replied, “Ihsan means that you shouls worship God as if you see Him, for even if you do not see Him, He sees you.”

Then the man said, “Tell me about the Hour”
The Prophet replied, “About that he who is questioned knows no more than the questioner.”
The man said, “Then tell me about its marks.”
He said, “The slave girl will give birth to her mistress, and you will see the barefoot, the naked, the destitute, and the shepherds vying with each other in building.”

Then the man went away. After I had waited for a long time, the Prophet said to me, “Do you know who the questioner was, ‘Umar?” I replied, “God and His messenger know best.”
He said, “He was Gabriel. He came to teach you your Ad Diin (religion)”

***

Try to imagine the situation. The Messenger of God, at the time the greatest human being on the face of the earth (as far as his companions were concerned – and the historical record bears them out), is sitting at the edge of an oasis in Medina with a group of his companions, that is, people who have accepted that he is the mouthpiece of God. Suddenly a man appears whom no one recognizes.

Medina, at the time, is a tiny community in the midst of the desert (with a population of a several hundred or perhaps a few thousand). Everyone knows everyone. If a traveler arrives, it is no small event, given the difficulty of travel and the small population. Everyone learns about new arrivals within hours. The system of personal relationships established by familial, tribal, and other bonds ensures that news is spread around much more efficiently than can ever be accomplished by today’s six o’clock news. A man appears whom no one knows, but no one has arrived in town for several days, except the uncle of so and so, whom several of them have already seen.

Not only do the companions fail to recognize the man, but he also shows no signs of travel, which is very strange. If they do not know him, then he must be a newly arrived traveler. Someone would not be able to freshen up that quickly after several days of travel in the desert, even if he had traveled only by night on the back of a camel.

As soon as the man arrives, everyone is all ears. Who can this person be, and how did he get there without our knowing about it? Next strange fact: The man is obviously on familiar terms with the Prophet of God. He comes right up to him and kneels down in front of him, his knees against the Prophet’s knees. Notice that the Prophet himself is kneeling, not in prayer as modern Westerners might kneel, but simply because kneeling is, for most Orientals, the simplest and at the same time the most respectful way to sit. Remember that, even in houses, chairs were unheard of. People sat on the ground, as they still do in much of the world – and this includes some of the richest and most sophisticated parts of the world, such as Japan. For most of the ancient world, chairs were the prerogative of kings.

You would not go right up to a person and kneel with your knees touching his unless he were, for example, your brother or a very close friend. The normal procedure, even if the person sitting there was just an ordinary person, would be to greet him from a respectful distance and keep the distance. But the stranger from the desert obviously knows Muhammad very well. He even places his hands upon Muhammad’s thighs, which would be an unheard of piece of effrontery if the man were a stranger. Then the man addresses Muhammad by his name, whereas people always address him by his title, Messenger of God. The man begins talking without introduction as if he had been part of the conversation all along.

Once Muhammad answers the man’s first question, the man says, “You have spoken the truth.” Umar remarks, “We were surprised at his questioning him and then declaring that he had spoken the truth.” This is an enormous understatement. More likely, the companions were flabbergasted. What kind of insolence is this? To come up to God’s own messenger and begin to grill him, and then to pat him on the head as if he were a school boy! This is inconceivable. But then again, the companions took their clues from Muhammad. He was acting as if all this were perfectly normal and natural. What could they do but follow his example?

After the man leaves, Muhammad waits awhile, allowing his companions to think about this strange event. Finally, he tells them what had happened. They would not soon forget, and you can be sure that by that night, everyone in Medina had heard about Gabriel’s appearance. No one was supposed to forget about this visit, for the Prophet had just presented them with their religion in a nutshell. If they ever wanted to know what was essential in Islam, all they had to do was remember the strange events of this day.

(Sachiko Murata & William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. I.B. Tauris & Co. London, 1994. P xxvi-xxvii)

The Continual Re-Creation

2011-10-27T05:06:00.000-07:00

The concept of the continual re-creation of the cosmos became a mainstay of Islamic cosmological thinking. Many authorities interpreted this constant change and transmutation in terms of the interplay of the diverse divine names. Thus, at each instant, the divine mercy and gentleness create all things in the universe. In other words, at each instant God reaffirms His similarity with things and His presence in the cosmos. But God is also incomparable and other. Hence, just as His mercy creates, his wrath destroys. His unique and absolute reality displays “jealousy” (ghayra): it does not allow any “others” (ghayr) to exist alongside it.

At each instant, the divine gentleness brings the world into existence, and at each instant the divine severity destroys it. Every succeeding moment represents a new universe, similar to the preceding universe, but also different. Each new universe represents a new self-disclosure of God. According to the cosmological axiom, “God’s self disclosure never repeats itself,” since God is infinite.

The cosmos is a constantly shifting and changing pattern of relationships among God’s signs, which are the loci of manifestation for His names. The universe is created and maintained through the activity of opposite divine attributes that display the activity of the single Principle. Hence duality can be perceived at every level. However, if we look more closely, we should be able to see the opposing forces not as absolutely opposed, but rather as complementary or polar. Yin and yang are working together everywhere, producing transmutation and constant change.

The Qur’an quotes God as saying, “And of everything We created a pair” (51:49). Or again, “God himself created the pair, male and female” (53:45). All things in the universe are paired with other things. Several of the pairs mentioned in the Qur’an take on special importance as the fundamental principles of creation. These include the Pen (al-qalam) and the Tablet (al-lawh), which are specifically Islamic symbols, and heaven and earth, which find deep parallels in the Chinese tradition and elsewhere.

(Sachiko Murata. The Tao of Islam. State University of New York Press, Albany. 1992 P.11-12)

Shari’a – Tariqa – Haqiqa – Ma’rifa

2011-10-27T04:09:00.000-07:00

Mystics in every religious tradition have tended to describe the different steps on the way that leads toward God by the image of the Path. The Christian tripartite division of the “via purgativa”, the “via contemplativa”, and the “via illuminative” is, to some extent, the same as the Islamic definition of “shari’a”, “tariqa”, and “haqiqa”.

The “tariqa”, the ‘path’ on which the mystics walk, has been defined as the path which comes out of the “shari’a”, for the main road is called “shar”, the path “tariq”. This derivation shows that the Sufis considered the path of mystical education a branch of that highway that consists of the God-given law, on which every Muslim is supposed to walk. No path can exist without a main road from which it branches out; no mystical experience can be realized if the binding injunctions of the “shari’a” are not followed faithfully first. The path, “tariqa”, however, is narrower and more difficult to walk and leads the adept- called “salik”, “wayfarer”- in his “suluk”, “wandering”, through different stations (maqam) until he perhaps reaches his goal, the perfect “tauhid”, the existential confession that God is One.

The tripartite way to God is explained by a tradition attributed to the Prophet: “The shari’a are my words [aqwali], the tariqa are my actions [a’mali], and the haqiqa is my interior states [ahwali].”

Shari’a, tariqa, and haqiqa are mutually interdependent:
The law without truth is ostentation, and the truth without the law is hypocrisy. Their mutual relation may be compared to that of body and spirit: when the spirit departs from the body, the living body becomes a corpse, and the spirit vanishes like wind. The Muslim’s profession of faith includes both: the words “There is no god but Allah” are th Truth, and the words “Muhammad is the apostle of God” are the Law. Anyone who denies the Truth is an infidel, and anyone who rejects the Law is a heretic.

“To kiss the threshold of the shari’a” was the first duty of anyone who wanted to enter the mystical path. The poets have often spoken in verses, and the mystics in poignant sentences, of the different aspects of these three levels (sometimes ma’rifa, “gnosis” would be substituted for haqiqa, “truth”). Thus it is said in Turkey:

Shari’a: yours is yours, mine is mine
Tariqa : yours is yours, mine is yours too.
Ma’rifa : there is neither mine nor thine.

(Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. The University of North Carolina Press, 1975. P.98-99)

When God Does Not Seem to Answer Prayer

2011-10-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

"Don’t let the delay in getting the gift (answer), despite your persistent appeal, fall in your despair. For, He has offered to reply to (your appeals) in a way He chooses for you rather than what you choose for you and at a time He desires rather than the time you desire."

If you insist on getting instant responses for your prayers, it shows your impatience and your incapability to understand the way, manner and method of His responses. He may be delaying the answer to give it in an appropriate way and at an appropriate time. Since you do not know what is good for you today and what will be good for you tomorrow and even what was good for you in the past, let Him decide on the time and manner of the answer. By showing frustration and impatience over not getting what you aspired, you are really doing an injustice to yourself.

(Ibn 'Ata'illah. The Book of Aphorisms. Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur. 2010. p.4-5)

The Human Being and The Cosmos

2011-10-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

The human being and the cosmos are similar in that each was created in the form of God. However, the cosmos manifests the divine names in differentiated mode (tafsil). As a result, each and every divine name displays its properties and effects in the cosmos singly or in various combinations with other names or groups of names. Hence, in its spatial and temporal totality, the cosmos represents an infinitely vast panorama of existential possibilities. In contrast, human beings display the properties and effects of all the names in a relatively undifferentiated mode (ijmal). The properties of all the divine names are drawn together and concentrated within each of them. God created the cosmos in respect of the multiplicity of His names, but He created human beings in respect of the unity of His names, the fact that each and every name refers to a single Reality. Ibn ‘Arabi often expresses these ideas by employing the terms “small world” and “great world” – that is, microcosm and macrocosm. More commonly, he uses the expression “small human being” or “microanthropos” for human being and “great human being” or “macroanthropos” for the universe.

Since human beings are a part of the cosmos, the cosmos is not a complete divine form without them. Nevertheless, microcosm and macrocosm stand at opposite poles. The macrocosm, in its indefinite dispersion, is unconscious and passive. But the microcosm, through its intense concentration of all the divine attibutes, is conscious and active. Human beings know the cosmos and can shape it to their own ends, but the cosmos does not know human beings and cannot shape them except to the extent that it is a passive instrument in the hand of God.

The fact that the microcosm dominates over the macrocosm leads the Shaykh (Ibn ‘Arabi) to write at the beginning of the ‘Fusus al-hikam’ that the human being is the spirit of the cosmos, while the cosmos without the human being is like a proportioned and well-balanced body, ready and waiting for God to blow His spirit into it, but lifeless as long as the human being has not appeared. Similarly, he writes as follows in the ‘Futuhat’:

The whole cosmos is the differentiation of Adam, while Adam is the all-comprehensive book. In relation to the cosmos he is like the spirit in relation to the body. Hence the human being is the spirit of the cosmos, and the cosmos is the body. Through bringing together all of this the cosmos is the “great human being,” so long as the human being is within it. But if you look at the cosmos alone, without the human being, you will find it like a proportioned body without a spirit. The perfection of the cosmos through the human being is like the perfection of the body through the spirit. The human being is “blown into” the body of the cosmos, so he is the goal of the cosmos.(II 67.28)

In the same way, the Shaykh explains that the human being is the non-manifest reality of the cosmos, while the cosmos is the manifest form of the human being: “Distinguish yourself from the cosmos and distinguish the cosmos from yourself. Distinguish the manifest from the nonmanifest and the nonmanifest from the manifest. For within the cosmos, you are the spirit of the cosmos, and the cosmos is your manifest form. The form has no meaning without a spirit. Hence the cosmos has no meaning without you.”(III.363.2)

Because of the organic relationship between human beings and the cosmos, Ibn al-‘Arabi calls perfect human beings the “Pillar” of the cosmos. Without them, the cosmos would collapse and die, which is precisely what will happen at the end of time when the last perfect human being departs from this world. Cosmologically speaking, the corruption and decay of the natural and social environments in modern times is one of the outward signs of the diminishing number of perfect human beings on the face of the earth.

(William C. Chittick. Imaginal worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the problem of religious diversity. State University of New York, Albany. 1994. P. 33-34)

The Originality of Sufism

2011-10-26T05:23:00.001-07:00

Sufism is nothing other than Islamic mysticism, which means that it is central and most powerful current of a tidal wave which constitutes the Revelation of Islam.

As to the thousands of men and women in the modern Western world who, while claiming to be ‘Sufis’, maintain that Sufism is independent of any particular religion and that it has always existed, they fail to notice that by robbing it of its particularity and therefore of its originality, the also deprive it of all impetus.

Being totally dependent upon one particular Revelation, Sufism is totally independent of everything else. But while being self-sufficient it can, if time and place concur, pluck flowers from gardens other than its own. The Prophet of Islam said: ‘Seek knowledge even it be in China’.

(Martin Lings. The Originality of Sufism. In: What Is Sufism? University California Press, California. 1975. p. 15-16)

Sufism in the West

2011-10-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

In contrast to the fields of theology, philosophy, and the sciences, there were no translations of Sufi texts into Latin during the Middle Ages. The knowledge received about Sufism in the West by such men as Dante and, somewhat later, St. John of the Cross came from vernacular languages, oral transmission, and personal contact.

The first work to use the term “Sufism,” as tashawwuf has come to be known in the West, was in fact written in 1821 by a German scholar by the name of August Tholuck, who wrote a study of the subject entitled Sufismus:'sive Theosophia Persarum pantheistica'. The later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were also witness to the translations of Sufi texts from both Persia and Arabic into English, German, French, and some other European languages. The works of such translators as Sir William Jones, von Hammer Purgstall, and Rückert began to read in literary and even philosophical circles and attracted major figures such as Goethe and Emerson.

At the beginning of the last century the Swedish painter and esoterist Ivan Aguéli traveled to the Islamic world, was initiated into Sufism, and began to write seriously on the doctrines of Ibn ‘Arabi and other Sufi masters. ‘Abdul Hadi, as Aguéli was known in the Islamic world and later in Europe, must be given his due as a pioneer in the serious introduction of Sufism to the West. It must also be recalled that by the early twentieth century René Guénon had already come into contact with this current and that after 1930, when he migrated to Cairo, he lived openly as a Shadhili faqir.

The traditionalist or perennialist school that Guénon, known in the Islamic world as Shaykh ‘Abd al-Wahid Yahya, “inaugurated” was to be of the utmost importance to the West in the presentation of authentic Sufism, in both doctrine and practice, his theoretical works being complemented by the operative teachings and spiritual practices issuing from the Algerian Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi.

In the 1930s the appearance of the colossal figure of Frithjof Schuon (Shaykh ‘Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad) brought about the serious presence of the Shadhiliyya Order in the West. His works were complemented by those of several of his companions such as Titus Burckhardt (Sidi Ibrahim ‘Izz al-Din), and Martin Lings (Shaykh Abu Bakr Siraj al-Din), and many others.

Meanwhile, from the 1920s onward a number of Western academic scholars began to see the Quranic origin of Sufism and wrote serious work on it. This trend began with Louis Massignon, followed by such notable figures as Henry Corbin and Annemarie Schimmel. Today there are a number of academic scholars of Islam, following the example of these illustrious figures, who are making important contributions to the study of Sufism in European languages. Some of them also belong to various Sufi orders. After the Second World War other Sufi orders began to spread to the West and their Western followers, even if not academic scholars, have produced a number of valuable studies of Sufism.

(Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In : Sufism Love and Wisdom. Edited by Jean-Louis Michon and Roger Gaetani. World Wisdom Inc. Canada. 2006)

The Struggle of Life

2011-09-08T07:17:00.001-07:00

Hazrat Inayat Khan
Paris, 12th December 1922

No one can deny the fact that life in the world is one continual struggle. The one who does not know the struggle of life is either an unmatured soul, or a soul who has risen above the life of this world. The object of human being in this world is to attain to the perfection of humanity, and therefore it is necessary that man must go through this, what we call struggle of life.

Now there are two different attitudes that one shows while going through that struggle of life. One struggle along bravely through life, the other becomes disappointed, heart-broken, before arriving at his destination. No sooner man gives up his courage to go through the struggle of life, the burden of the whole world falls upon his head. But the one who goes along struggling through it, he alone makes his way. The one whose patience is exhausted, the one who has fallen in that struggle, he is trodden upon by those who walk through life. Even bravery and courage is not sufficient to go through the struggle of life. There is something else which must be studied and understood.

One must study the nature of life, one must understand the psychology of that struggle. In order to understand this struggle, one must see how many sides there are to this struggle. There are three sides to this struggle: struggle with oneself, struggle with the others, and struggle with circumstances. There is perhaps one person who is capable of struggling with himself, but that is not sufficient. There is another person, who is able to struggle with others, but even that is not sufficient. There is a thrid person who answers the demand of circmstances, but even that is not sufficient. The thing is that all these three things must be studied and known, and one must be able to manage the struggle in all these three directions.

And now the question is where should one begin, and where should one end? Generally one starts by struggling with others, and he struggles alng all his life, and he never comes to an end. And if the person is wise, he struggles with conditions, and perhaps he accomplishes things a little better. But the one who struggles with himself first, is the wisest, because once he has struggled with himself, which is the most difficult struggle, the other struggle will become easy for him. It might seem i in the beginning and in its outward appearance that it is cruel to have to struggle with oneself, especially when one is in the right. But the one who has reached deeper into life, will find that the struggle with oneself is the most profitable in the end.

Now coming to the question, what is the nature of the struggle with oneself? There are three aspects: to make our thought, speech and action answer the demand of our own ideal, while at the same time to give expression to all the impulses and all desires which are there as one’s natural being. The next aspect of the struggle with oneself is to fit in with others, with their various ideas and with their various demands. For in this, one has to make oneself as narrow as the accommodation, and as wide as the accomodation that demands one to be, which is a delicate manner, difficulty for everybody, even to comprehend, to practise it. And the third aspect of the struggle with self, is to give accommodation to others in one’s own life, in one’s own heart, large or small, as the demand may be.

When we consider the question of the struggle with the others, there are three things to think about: how to control and govern people and activities which happen to be our duty, our responsibility. Another aspect is how to allow ourselves to be used by the others under different situations and positions in life. To what extent or where comes the line of limit where one should allow others to make use of our time, our energy, our work or patience, and where to draw a line. And the third aspect is to fit in with the different forms of conception that different personalities have, who are of various stages of evolution.

Now coming to this third aspect of that struggle, which is conditions: there are conditions which can be helped, and there are conditions which cannot be helped, before which one is helpless. And again there are conditions that can be helped, and yet one does not find in oneself that capability, that power and that means to change the condition.

The Sufi looks upon the struggle as an unavoidable struggle, and a struggle which must be gone through. His work therefore, is to engage in the struggle of others, to console them, to strengthen them, to give them a hand, and through that his own struggle becomes easier and that makes him free to go forward.

Now the question is, how does he struggle? He struggle with power, with understanding, with open eyes and patience. He does not look at the loss; that which is lost, is lost. He does not think of the pain of yesterday; yesterday is gone for him. Yes, if there is a pleasant remembrance, he keeps it before him, for it is helpful on his way. He takes the admiration and the hatred coming from those around him both, with smiles. He only thinks that these both things from rythm in the rythm of a certain time of music; there is one and two, strong accent and weak accent. Praise cannot be without blame, nor blame can be without praise.
Every thought comes to his mind, every impulse, every word he speaks, to him is like a seed, a seed which falls in this soil of life and takes root. And in this way he finds that nothing is lost; every little good deed, every little act of kindness, of love, done to anybody, it will someday rise as a plant and bear fruit.

The Sufi does not consider life any different from a business, but he sees in the best manner how the real business can be achieved.

The symbol of the mystics of China was a branch of fruit in their hand. What does it mean? It means the purpose of life is to arrive to that stage when every moment of life becomes fruitful. And what does fruitful mean? Does it means fruits for oneself? No, the trees do dnot bear fruit for themselves, but for others. True profit is not that profit which one makes for oneself. True profit is that which one makes for others.[]

The Sufi Symbol

2011-09-08T04:45:00.000-07:00

By Hazrat Inayat Khan

"A symbol is the ocean in a drop"

The symbol of the Sufi Movement is a heart with wings. It explains that the heart is between soul and body, a medium between spirit and matter. When the soul is covered by its love for matter, it is naturally attracted to matter. This is the law of gravitation in abstract form, as it is said in the Bible, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." When man treasures the things of the earth, his heart is drawn to the earth. But the heart is subject not only to gravitation, but also to attraction from on high, and as in the Egyptian symbology wings are the symbol of spiritual progress, so the heart with wings expresses that the heart reaches upward towards heaven.

The crescent in the heart suggests the responsiveness of the heart. The crescent represents the responsiveness of the crescent moon to the light of the sun, for naturally it receives the light, which develops it until it becomes the full moon. The principal teaching of Sufism is that of learning to become a pupil, for it is the pupil who has the chance of becoming a teacher, and once a person considers that he is a teacher, his responsiveness is gone. It is this principle which is represented by the crescent: the cresecent in the heart signifies that the heart which is responsive to the light of God is illuminated.

The explanation of the five-pointed star is that it represents the divine light. For when light comes it has five points; when it returns, it has four, the former suggesting creation, the latter annihilation. The five-pointed star also represents the natural figure of man, though that with four points represents all forms of the world. But the form with five points is a development of the four-pinted form. For instance, if a man is standing with his legs joined and arms extended he makes a four-pointed form, but when a man shows activity-dancing, jumping or moving one leg - he forms a five pointed star, which represents a beginning of activity; in other words, a beginning of life.

It is the divine light which is represented by the five-pointed star, and the star is reflected in the heart which is responsive to the divine light. The heart which by its response has received the divine light is liberated, as the wings show.

In brief, the meaning of the symbol is that the heart responsive to the light of God is liberated.[]

When I Die...

2011-08-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

When I die
when my coffin
is being taken out
you must never think
i am missing this world

don't shed any tears
don't lament or
feel sorry
i'm not falling
into a monster's abyss

when you see
my corpse is being carried
don't cry for my leaving
i'm not leaving
i'm arriving at eternal love

when you leave me
in the grave
don't say goodbye
remember a grave is
only a curtain
for the paradise behind

you'll only see me
descending into a grave
now watch me rise
how can there be an end
when the sun sets or
the moon goes down

it looks like the end
it seems like a sunset
but in reality it is a dawn
when the grave locks you up
that is when your soul is freed

have you ever seen
a seed fallen to earth
not rise with a new life
why should you doubt the rise
of a seed named human

have you ever seen
a bucket lowered into a well
coming back empty
why lament for a soul
when it can come back
like Joseph from the well

when for the last time
you close your mouth
your words and soul
will belong to the world of
no place no time

~RUMI, ghazal number 911,
translated May 18, 1992,
by Nader Khalili.

In Memoriam of my beloved Mursheed Suprapto Kadis (April 13th 1929 - August 13th 2011)
I can't thank you enough for showing me the 'Light'...
I am embracing this pain and burn it as fuel in this long arduous journey, insya Allah T_T

The Story of the Sorcerer, the Monk, the Boy and Those Who were forced to enter the Ditch

2011-07-21T04:11:00.000-07:00

Imam Ahmad recorded from Suhayb that the Messenger of Allah said,

Among the people who came before you, there was a king who had a sorcerer, and when that sorcerer became old, he said to the king, "I have become old and my time is nearly over, so please send me a boy whom I can teach magic.'' So, he sent him a boy and the sorcerer taught him magic. Whenever the boy went to the sorcerer, he sat with a monk who was on the way and listened to his speech and admired them. So, when he went to the sorcerer, he passed by the monk and sat there with him; and on visiting the sorcerer the latter would thrash him. So, the boy complained about this to the monk. The monk said to him, "Whenever you are afraid of the sorcerer, say to him: `My people kept me busy.' And whenever you are afraid of your people, say to them: `The sorcerer kept me busy.''' So the boy carried on like that (for some time). Then a huge terrible creature appeared on the road and the people were unable to pass by. The boy said, "Today I shall know whether the sorcerer is better or the monk is better.'' So, he took a stone and said, "O Allah! If the deeds and actions of the monk are liked by You better than those of the sorcerer, then kill this creature so that the people can cross (the road).'' Then he struck it with a stone killing it and the people passed by on the road.

The boy came to the monk and informed him about it. The monk said to him, "O my son! Today you are better than I, and you have achieved what I see! You will be put to trial. And in case you are put to trial, do not inform (them) about me.'' The boy used to treat the people suffering from congenital blindness, leprosy, and other diseases. There was a courtier of the king who had become blind and he heard about the boy. He came and brought a number of gifts for the boy and said, "All these gifts are for you on the condition that you cure me.'' The boy said, "I do not cure anybody; it is only Allah who cures people. So, if you believe in Allah and supplicate to Him, He will cure you.'' So, he believed in and supplicated to Allah, and Allah cured him.

Later, the courtier came to the king and sat at the place where he used to sit before. The king said, "Who gave you back your sight'' The courtier replied, "My Lord.'' The king then said, "I did'' The courtier said, "No, my Lord and your Lord - Allah'' The king said, "Do you have another Lord beside me'' The courtier said, "Yes, your Lord and my Lord is Allah.'' The king tortured him and did not stop until he told him about the boy. So, the boy was brought to the king and he said to him, "O boy! Has your magic reached to the extent that you cure congenital blindness, leprosy and other diseases'' He said, "I do not cure anyone. Only Allah can cure.'' The king said, "Me'' The boy replied, "No.'' The king asked, "Do you have another Lord besides me'' The boy answered, "My Lord and your Lord is Allah.'' So, he tortured him also until he told about the monk. Then the monk was brought to him and the king said to him, "Abandon your religion.'' The monk refused and so the king ordered a saw to be brought which was placed in the middle of his head and he fell, sawn in two. Then it was said to the man who used to be blind, "Abandon your religion.'' He refused to do so, and so a saw was brought and placed in the middle of his head and he fell, sawn in two. Then the boy was brought and it was said to him, "Abandon your religion.'' He refused and so the king sent him to the top of such and such mountain with some people. He told the people, "Ascend up the mountain with him till you reach its peak, then see if he abandons his religion; otherwise throw him from the top.'' They took him and when they ascended to the top, he said, "O Allah! Save me from them by any means that You wish.'' So, the mountain shook and they all fell down and the boy came back walking to the king. The king said, "What did your companions (the people I sent with you) do'' The boy said, "Allah saved me from them.'' So, the king ordered some people to take the boy on a boat to the middle of the sea, saying, "If he renounces his religion (well and good), but if he refuses, drown him.'' So, they took him out to sea and he said, "O Allah! Save me from them by any means that you wish.'' So they were all drowned in the sea.

Then the boy returned to the king and the king said, "What did your companions do'' The boy replied, "Allah, saved me from them.'' Then he said to the king, "You will not be able to kill me until you do as I order you. And if you do as I order you, you will be able to kill me.'' The king asked, "And what is that'' The boy said, "Gather the people in one elevated place and tie me to the trunk of a tree; then take an arrow from my quiver and say: `In the Name of Allah, the Lord of the boy.' If you do this, you will be able to kill me.'' So he did this, and placing an arrow in the bow, he shot it, saying, "In the Name of Allah, the Lord of the boy.'' The arrow hit the boy in the temple, and the boy placed his hand over the arrow wound and died. The people proclaimed, "We believe in the Lord of the boy!'' Then it was said to the king, "Do you see what has happened That which you feared has taken place. By Allah, all the people have believed (in the Lord of the boy).'' So he ordered that ditches be dug at the entrances to the roads and it was done, and fires were kindled in them. Then the king said, "Whoever abandons his religion, let him go, and whoever does not, throw him into the fire.'' They were struggling and scuffling in the fire, until a woman and her baby whom she was breast feeding came and it was as if she was being somewhat hesitant of falling into the fire, so her baby said to her, "Be patient mother! For verily, you are following the truth!'') Muslim also recorded this Hadith at the end of the Sahih. Muhammad bin Ishaq bin Yasar related this story in his book of Sirah in another way that has some differences from that which has just been related. Then, after Ibn Ishaq explained that the people of Najran began following the religion of the boy after his murder, which was the religion of Christianity, he said, "Then (the king) Dhu Nuwas came to them with his army and called them to Judaism. He gave them a choice to either accept Judaism or be killed, so they chose death. Thus, he had a ditch dug and burned (some of them) in the fire (in the ditch), while others he killed with the sword. He made an example of them (by slaughtering them) until he had killed almost twenty thousand of them. It was about Dhu Nuwas and his army that Allah revealed to His Messenger :

(Cursed were the People of the Ditch. Of fire fed with fuel. When they sat by it. And they witnessed what they were doing against the believers. And they had no fault except that they believed in Allah, the Almighty, Worthy of all praise! To Whom belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth! And Allah is Witness over everything.) (85:4-9)'' This is what Muhammad bin Ishaq said in his book of Sirah -- that the one who killed the People of the Ditch was Dhu Nuwas, and his name was Zur`ah. In the time of his kingdom he was called Yusuf. He was the son of Tuban As`ad Abi Karib, who was the Tubba` who invaded Al-Madinah and put the covering over the Ka`bah. He kept two rabbis with him from the Jews of Al-Madinah. After this some of the people of Yemen accepted Judaism at the hands of these two rabbis, as Ibn Ishaq mentions at length. So Dhu Nuwas killed twenty thousand people in one morning in the Ditch. Only one man among them escaped. He was known as Daws Dhu Tha`laban. He escaped on a horse and they set out after him, but they were unable to catch him. He went to Caesar, the emperor of Ash-Sham. So, Caesar wrote to An-Najashi, the King of Abyssinia. So, he sent with him an army of Abyssinian Christians, who were lead by Aryat and Abrahah. They rescued Yemen from the hands of the Jews. Dhu Nuwas tried to flee but eventually fell into the sea and drowned. After this, the kingdom of Abyssinia remained under Christian power for seventy years. Then the power was divested from the Christians by Sayf bin Dhi Yazin Al-Himyari when Kisra, the king of Persia sent an army there (to Yemen). He (the king) sent with him (Sayf Al-Himyari) those people who were in the prisons, and they were close to seven hundred in number. So, he (Sayf Al-Himyari) conquered Yemen with them and returned the kingdom back to the people of Himyar (Yemenis)

(From Tafsir Ibn Katsir)

A Life or Death Fight

2011-07-20T04:46:00.000-07:00

This is no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish against the Devil and all his angels. Ephesians 6:12

The battle to live by our new nature is important, and we must learn how to fight with weapons of the Spirit if we want to live in freedom.

God places weapons of righteousness at our disposal. These weapons require us to work with him, relying on him when we come up against the enemy. Our strength is dependent upon him, a paradox of the faith where he comes in strong through our weakness.

Our objective is to use everything God gives us: We must learn to utilize these weapons of the Spirit; what they are, how to use them, and when to use them.
Weapons of the Spirit include such things as honesty, humility, authenticity, grace, love, prayer, obedience, community, healthy dependence, God’s Word, and allowing the Holy Spirit to guide us.

In contrast, weapons of the flesh include such things as excessive anger, manipulation, blame, shame, hatred, pride, sneaky-hiding, self-centeredness, defensiveness, and an unhealthy I-don’t-need-you attitude.

The spiritual battle in which we’re engaged is “no afternoon athletic contest that we’ll walk away from and forget about in a couple of hours. This is for keeps, a life-or-death fight to the finish . . .” (Ephesians 6:12 MSG).

It’s a cataclysmic, brutal, bloody war of eternal significance; yet, in this war we have God-with-us, God-in-us, and God-for-us.

(Jon Walker in Purpose Driven Mailing Group)

What is Strategy?

2011-07-20T00:44:00.000-07:00

It is therefore essential, when one has fourteen armies, that each wages a kind of war relative to the overall plan for the war (strategy), and to the strength and circumstances – whether topographical or political – of the opposing state.
Napoleon Bonaparte

The word strategy has become one of the most commonly (and badly) used words in business writing. Everywhere we look we see terms such as business strategy, corporate strategy, marketing strategy etc. We are not helped by the original, flexible use of the Greek word ‘strategos’ from which our word strategy derives. In its original form, it meant the art of the General or Commander of the armies. The first time the word ‘strategy’ was used in a business context was by William Newman, in a book published as recently as 1951. Now the word ‘strategy’ is almost synonymous with ‘important’.

Overworking the word in this way helps nobody. It simply serves to confuse. Strategy in its strictest sense refers to means and not ends. Strategy is all about how an organization will achieve its objectives. Best described as ‘business strategy’, the original meaning concentrated on how the key-decision making unit of the organization or the board was going to marshall its resources in order to achieve its stated ‘business objective’. The use of the word strategy in the business literature arose when it became apparent to management researchers that, in sharp contrast to economic models of perfect competition, companies engaged in the same activity and using the same technology often performed differently. Closer inspection suggested that firms in the same industry adopted different approaches to products, distribution and organizational structures. These differences, within similar market environments, came to be known as ‘strategies’. The concept was readily absorbed into Harvard Business School’s Business Policy curriculum in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some simple ‘rules’ about strategy:

1. Strategy is longer term : As strategy is about marshalling the gross resources of the organization to match the needs of the marketplace and achieve the business objective, this cannot be a short-term activity. Every organization is complex and any change takes time to accomplish. Strategic decisions, like the General choosing his battleground, will have long-term implications. Strategic decisions, such as which business areas to enter, cannot be revesed at a moment’s notice – momentum has to built over a planned period.

2. Strategy is not changed every Friday : Constant change produces uncertainty, confusion, misdirection and wastage – not results. Tactics are designed to change on a weekly or even a daily basis in response to changes in the marketplace caused by customer needs or competitive response. Tactical change causes no problems of uncertainty because the strategy, the broad overall direction of the organization, remains constant.

3. Strategy is not another word for important tactics : Tactics can be likened to maneuvers on the field of battle and can be changed as often as required in response to the changing situation faced by the organization in its markets. But, no matter how important or critical the tactic under review, this does not make it a strategy. For want of a nail the horseshoe, the horse, the knight, the battle and the war were lost – I Agree, but once 1000 soldiers have found a nail each they should all know that the reason why they are there is to win the war, not to search for nails.

4. Strategy is not top management’s secret: Strategy is undoubtedly top management’s responsibility to define and agree but not to keep as one of the organization’s most closely guarded secrets. Strategy is most effective when those that have to implement it not only understand it but also believe it and can see their own role in carrying it out. As Mintzberg (The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliff, 1996) states, Every failure of implementation is, by definition, also a failure of formulation. If people are to implement, they must know why, how and what. Despite management’s traditional reluctance, communication and active involvement will often be the key to success.

5. Strategy is not just a public relations exercise : One of the first rules of strategy formulation, is that it must be capable of implementation. Strategy is about action, not words. It is about implementation, not just planning.

6. Strategy is based on analysis and understanding, not straws in the wind : Strategy is about the long term. Rapid ‘summings up’ and reaction are unlikely, of themselves, to be sufficient to build a robust strategy. To build a sound strategy for the future, we will need a deeper degree of analysis – at least beginning to understand why things are happening as well as just knowing what is happening. An analysis of the macro and market environments is essential even for the more ‘emergent’ strategic routes that the organization may favour.

7. Strategy is essential to an organization’s survival : A well thought-out strategy will allow managers to test actions and propose tactics against that strategy and the overall business objective to ensure the consistency which is essential to continued success. Without a clear guiding strategy, managers will continue to spend time and money agonizing over decisions that could be made in minutes if only they knew what their organization was trying to do. A well communicated and understood strategy brings the organization together and provides a common purpose. It involves everyone in the organization and challenges them to relate what they do to what the whole organization is trying to achieve.

(From : Marketing Strategy: the difference between marketing and markets. By Paul Fifield. Elsevier, Oxford UK. 2007)

Tough Time Never Last, But Tough People Do!

2011-03-15T00:48:00.001-07:00

Knute Rockne said it: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” When the roads are rough, the tough rise to the occasion. They win. They survive. They come out on top!

People are like potatoes. After potatoes have been harvested they have to be spread out and sorted in order to get the maximum market dollar. They are divided according to size – big, medium and small. It is only after potatoes have been sorted and bagged that they are loaded onto trucks. This is the method that all Idaho potato farmers use – all but one.

One farmer never bothered to sort the potatoes at all. Yet he seemed to be making the most money. A puzzled neighbor finally asked him, “What is your secret?” He said, “It’s simple. I just load up the wagon with potatoes and take the roughest road to town. During the eight-mile trip, the little potatoes always fall to the bottom. The medium potatoes land in the middle, while the big potatoes rise to top.” That’s not only true of potatoes. It is a law of life. Big potatoes rise to the top on rough roads, and tough people rise to the top in rough times.

Tough times never last, but tough people do.

(Robert H. Schuller)

A Spiritual Perspective

2011-03-14T08:50:00.001-07:00

Study shows that the message of mystics of all times and places is in essence the same, irrespective of language, culture or religion. A mystic is someone who finds answers to the big questions of life by research within his or her consciousness. Through their research mystics have discovered that that there is a ‘spiritual’ world that lies behind and animates the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ worlds. While for most of us things spiritual are no more than concepts, for the mystic they are facts of life, constantly experienced.

It is as if mystics are telling us that the human being is highly sophisticated hardware that comes with three software programs, the senses, mind and spirit. Most of us know of and use only two programs, the senses and the mind. The mystic shows us how to activate the spiritual program and make human life complete. To follow mysticism is therefore not like adopting a new religion or philosophy, which is a re-programming of our mental and physical software. Mysticism activates our spiritual software, our innate spiritual capacity, which benefits us regardless of what teaching we follow. Every human being has equal potential in this respect.

When we try to answer ultimate questions about our existence using only two of our natural software programs, we become confused and, due to our differing cultures and backgrounds, come into conflict. If anyone, whether a mystic or a priest, tells us profound truths about who or what we are, those words alone do not make us understand or feel those truths. We need, by developing the third software program through spiritual practice, to experience these truths for ourselves, to make them a lived reality. When we see the spiritual reality, our conflicts over religious dogmas evaporate. On the platform of spiritual life human beings can come together as one.

THE MYSTIC COSMOLOGY

In recent centuries we have developed many complex material sciences generating
impressive bodies of knowledge about the world and human beings. But this research has been confined to the mental and physical realms. How far along is our research and knowledge about spirituality? For example, particle physics now recognizes the intricate interconnectedness of the entire universe. Mystics share this understanding, teaching that there is one divine wellspring of life, a vibrant and positive energy, a single source of all being, namely spirit. Scientists, in their search for the theory of everything, may have already reached the limits of the power of the mind to capture and describe reality using words, concepts, symbols and images. Mystics explain that for us to know about spirit we must go beyond mind and physical senses. One must use the method, the software, that is compatible
with discovering spiritual truth, which is by developing our spiritual capacity within.

THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

Mystics describe the quest for spiritual truth as a journey we make within our own bodies, within our consciousness. To understand this journey we need first to understand where we start from, our present spiritual condition. The life of each of us, mystics teach, is projected in its perfect whole from a single source beyond time. But on planes of mind and matter, we live our lives under the illusion of time and the law of cause and effect or action and reaction.

Everything we do we have to pay for. The soul, coupled to mind and body, must reap the harvests of these sowings, and moves from life to life, form to form, living and dying over and over again. We are now caught in this cycle, called the wheel of life, the cycle of reincarnation, or the law of karma, which many of the world’s peoples have long understood as a basic fact of life.

Given this situation, how should we choose to act? Mystics urge us to wake up, ask ourselves what it is that makes us suffer and where our real happiness lies, and then make the appropriate choices. They advise us to turn our consciousness away from the pain-filled material life of ceaseless change, the spinning rim of the wheel of life, and toward the stability of life’s unmoving centre.

They explain that at the centre of life is spirit, one and indivisible. Spirit is perfection, imperturbable, the origin of all. From the one emerges all diversity, all forms from the most subtle to the most gross, all activity and complexity, the entire creation. Spirit is love. Spirit is energy. Spirit is life. Mind, matter and senses have no life of their own—they are the means by which spirit expresses and manages itself in material dimensions. Spirit comes from a source beyond mind and matter, and beyond the law of cause and effect. Soul, a drop of spirit that allows a being to be defined apart from the ocean of spirit, is the energy or power that sustains individualized life. When soul, the life force, leaves a body or living
being, that body dies, disintegrates, and reverts to its original matter, dust to dust. If spirit leaves the creation, the creation disintegrates and reverts to an earlier, less-formed reality. The mystic journey of enlightenment, then, is the expansion and deepening of consciousness from life's most transient material manifestations to the permanence of its spirit-filled heart.

MAKING THE JOURNEY

For the practice of mysticism to be successful, a person works both on the inside and on the outside to create conditions favorable to the expansion of consciousness. On the outside, he or she minimizes the binding force of cause and effect through compassionate and mindful living: a vegetarian diet, no intoxicating or mind-altering substances, and a code of conduct that shapes positive and spiritually supportive relations with others. On the inside, time is given daily to the practice of meditation to re-orient the mind inwards. Meditation techniques engage the dominant faculties of speech, sight and hearing to focus the attention and shift it
away from the senses and towards the spirit—and from this arises a state of concentration, heightened awareness and perfect stillness. When concentration becomes perfect, dedication absolute, and yearning so intense it can no longer be supported, consciousness passes naturally into another dimension. Wisdom literature from all traditions describes this experience as blissful beyond imagination, filled with the experience of spirit as captivating sound and radiant light. Look to the writings of any mystic to learn about this ecstatic state of being!

Meditation is thus the path leading to the depths, breadths and heights of spiritual experience. Meditation enables contact with spirit, the one continuum that holds creation together, the thread of life on which creation's pearls are strung. Spirit has been referred to in the writings of religions by many names—Logos, Word, Nam, Shabd, Holy Spirit, Tao, Kalima, Akash Bani, and many other names. Once contacted consciously within, this spirit draws our consciousness, our soul, upward through ever more subtle realms to the luminous tranquility of ultimate reality. Meditation is the journey of attuning oneself with the spiritual ocean of pure being.

Only as human beings can we make this journey. Only a human being has the ability to direct consciousness to its advantage. To meditate is to install the complete human software, to awaken the spiritual capacity. Through this practice we embark on the path, the ‘middle way’of balanced living, that takes us to our ultimate destination.

Mystics down through the ages have left teachings that make us aware, inform us, about this path. But living mystics, if we can find them, perform a still more fundamental role. Because they have walked the path themselves, they can guide us personally along the way, just as they were themselves guided by their own teacher. And, because they have realized the spiritual dimension, living mystics manifest its reality even on our plane of existence, giving us immense inspiration and a powerful example to follow. Mystics explain to us that it is part of the natural order that true masters are always living on earth to guide spiritual seekers. In the Sufi tradition of Islam these teachers are called murshid or pir, in the bhakti traditions of India guru or satguru, in the hasidic tradition of Judaism, the zaddik.

To travel the path back to our divine source is the true purpose of life in the human form.Whether this divine source is referred to as spirit, God, Lord, Allah, Wahiguru, Adonai,Buddha, the One, any other name, or no name at all, is a matter of individual preference. How to describe one’s spiritual life, what outward practices to follow in support of one’s inner life, whether to belong to any religion and which one, are all equally individual choices. What is of importance is to cultivate the experience of spirit.

CLAIMING OUR INHERITANCE

Mystics say that each one of us is the rightful heir to a treasure of inestimable value. We are all of one lineage and one family. But, because we have lost sight of who we are, we feel that something is missing in our lives and we suffer from confusion and conflict. The infinite wealth of spirituality is our birthright, and will be ours when we develop our spiritual capacity as human beings, awaken to our true identity and return to our spiritual source. To achieve this we need only right conduct and right spiritual practice under the guidance of a living mystic teacher.

© 2008 Radha Soami Satsang Beas. All right reserved.

Characteristics of Succesful People

2011-03-09T00:38:00.000-08:00

What makes a person successful? What makes them motivated, prosperous, a great leader? The following is only a brief and partial list, but it may whet your appetite to discover for yourself some of the principles of success.

OPTIMISM

Optimism is power. This is a secret discovered by all who succeed against great odds. The successful ones all admitted that what got them through tough times was an ability to focus on the positive. They understood what they called “the magic of believing.” Yet great leaders also have an unusual ability to face up to stark reality, so creating single powerful attribute: tough-minded optimism.

Optimistic people tend to succed not simply because they believe that everything will turn out right, but because the expectation of success makes them work harder. If you expect little, you will not be motivated even to try.

A DEFINITE AIM, PURPOSE, OR VISION

Success requires a concentration of effort. Most people disperse their energies over too many things and so fail to be outstanding in anything. In the words of Orison Swett Marden:

“The world does not demand that you be a lawyer, minister, doctor, farmerm scientist, or merchant; it does not dictate what you shall do, but it does require that you be a master in whatever you undertake.”

So to be successful, you must have higher aims and goals and doggedly pursue their realization.

WILLINGNESS TO WORK

Successful people are willing to engage in drudgery in the cause of something marvelous. The greater part of genius is the years of effort invested to solve a problem or find the perfect expression of an idea. With hard work you acquire knowledge about yourself that idleness never reveals.

A law of success is that, once first achieved, it can create a momentum that makes it easier to sustain. As the saying goes, “Nothing succeeds like success.”

DISCIPLINE

Enduring success is built on discipline, an appreciation that you must give yourself orders and obey them. Like compound interest, this subject may be boring, but its results in the long term can be spectacular.

Great achievers know that while the universe is built by atoms, success is built by minutes; they are masters when it comes to their use of time.

AN INTEGRATED MIND

Successful people have a good relationship with their unconscious or subconscious mind. They trust their intuition, and because intuitions are usually right, they seem to enjoy more luck than others. They have discovered one of the great success secrets: When trusted to do so, the nonrational mind solves problems and creates solutions.

PROLIFIC READING

Look into the habits of the successful and you will find that they are usually great readers. If you can read about the accomplishments of those you admire, you cannot help but lift your own sights. Anthony Robbins remarked that “success leaves clues,” and reading is one of the best means of absorbing such clues.

RISK TAKING

The greater the risk, the greater the potential success. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Be action oriented.

REALIZING THE POWER OF EXPECTATION

Successful people expect the best and they generally get it, because expectations have a way of attracting to you their material equivalent.

Since your life corresponds pretty much to the expectations you have of it, the achiever will argue, why not think big instead of small?

MASTERY

Advanced beings can turn any situation to their advantage. They are “masters of their souls, captains of their fate.”

When other parties are involved, they will seek solutions in which gains are maximized for all. In the words of Catherine Ponder:

“You do not have to compromise in life, if you are willing to let go of the idea of compromise.”

WELL-ROUNDEDNESS

Achievements mean little if we are not a success as a person. The capacities to love, listen, and learn are vital for our own well-being, and without them it is difficult to have the fulfilling relationships that we need to both renew us and inspire achievement.

(From : 50 Success Classics: Winning Wisdom for Work and Life from 50 Landmarks Books. By Tom Butler-Bowdon)

Sufism

2011-03-05T07:13:00.000-08:00

Among the persons who have developed an interest in “comparative religion” many will have discovered that between the vast array of myths, dogmas, and rituals characterizing the various religions there exists a common denominator, a deep affinity resulting from the central point toward which all the sacred paths aim at leading their followers. And these same persons may also have recognized that, within the framework of Islam, Sufism represents this inner dimension, the way opened to those who aspire to reach the realm of the Divine Presence. This is why a good number of contemporary thinkers who are “seekers of Truth” – and all the contributors to the present anthology belong to that category – recognize Sufism as being not only the very heart of Islam, but also a key that gives access to the deepest meaning of other sacred traditions (specific references to this recognition may be found, inter alia, in the articles by Geoffroy, Lings, Macnab, Nasr, Shah-Kazemi, and Schuon).

To avoid any misinterpretation of what is implied by the words “Sufi” and “Sufism”, it is important to note that both terms have been used since the first century of the Hijra (eighth century C.E.), when “Sufism” (in Arabic: tasawwuf, the fact of wearing a garment made of wool – suf – as an emblem of purity) was adopted to designate the quest for spiritual illumination, while “sufi” was applied to characterized the person who had attained an obvious degree of proximity to God. This indicates that Sufism has always been embedded in the texture of Islamic creed, representing an ideal mode of worship derived from the Quranic Revelation and from the customs and sayings (sunna and hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad, and then transmitted without interruption throughout the centuries.

As a way of access to the divine love and wisdom, which are the universal components of mysticism, Sufism has given abundant proofs of its authenticity and its supernatural efficiency and fecundity. This is so from the very beginning of the Revelation, when Muhammad’s Companions sat with him during night-watches filled with the recitation of the holy verses and the invocation of the divine Names, up to the present time when thousands and thousands of devotees affiliated with Sufi brotherhoods throughout all corners of the Islamic world aspire to the purification of their souls and follow the way of their saintly ancestors under the guidance of a spiritual master.

Sufism, then, has nothing to do with sectarian movements which, mostly in the Western world, have used its name, fame, and even some of its psycho-spiritual practices to attract a naïve clientele with the promise of quick spiritual advancement without any religious obligation. It is gratifying to note that many publications now exist, notably translations of treatises on Sufism written in Arabic or Persian by the most eminent Sufi masters, which may constitute a counterweight to the fallacious hopes nurtured by those who would, according to a phrase appearing several times in the Quran (e.g. 2:86), “purchase the life of this world at the cost of the Hereafter”

(Cited from : Sufism: love & wisdom. Edited by Jean-Louis Michon, Roger Gaetani)

The Best 'City' In The World

2011-02-15T19:48:00.000-08:00

I used to have dreams of living in New York, California or London someday. Something about those cities has really enchanted me. But now i realize that it's not a matter of where you are, but it's a matter of who you live with, cause in the end you will realize that all you really need is to be with your beloved, no matter where you are!

Rumi have expressed it beautifully in his poem:

ONCE a beloved asked her lover: "Friend,
You have seen many places in the world!
Now - which of all these cities was the best?
He said: "The city where my sweetheart lives!"

I also believe that the term 'city' does not necessarily only the physical city with all the tall buildings and it habitants and attractions. As we are now moving from one city to the other by now. The city of dream to the city of sorrow to the city of madness to the city of joy to the city of fun and so on and so forth.

The city exist within is, through our daily life.
Then it came to my senses that it doesn't matter what condition or situation that we are involving with, as long as our heart is with our Beloved. Then we absolutely are going to be okay... :)

Pekanbaru, 16 February 2011
To my beloved Kanda, thank you for being my inspiration
love xxx
Dinda

This Life is Not All There is

2010-11-24T05:46:00.000-08:00

This life is not all there is.
Life on earth is just the dress rehearsal before the real production. You will spend far more time on the other side of death – in eternity – than you will here. Earth is the staging area, the preschool, the tryout for your life in eternity. It is the practice workout before the actual game; the warm-up lap before the race begins. This life is preparation for the next.

At most, you will live a hundred years on earth, but you will spend forever in eternity. Your time on earth is, as Sir Thomas Browne said, “but a small parenthesis in eternity.” You were made to last forever.

If your time on earth were all there is to your life, I would suggest you start living it up immediately. You could forget being good and ethical, and you wouldn’t have to worry about any consequences of your actions. You could indulge yourself in total self-centeredness because your actions would have no long-term repercussions. But – and this makes all the difference – death is not the end of you! Death is not your termination, but your transition into eternity, so there are eternal consequences to everything you do on earth. Every act of our lives strikes some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

What is it going to be like in eternity with God? Frankly, the capacity of our brains cannot handle the wonder and greatness of heaven. It would be like trying to describe the Internet to an ant. It’s futile. Words have not been invented that could possibly convey the experience of eternity. The Holy Books says, “No mere man has ever seen, heard or even imagined what wonderful things God has ready for those who love the Lord.”[]

(Rick Warren)

The Best Investment

2010-11-24T04:34:00.000-08:00

Many people are driven by materialism. Their desire to acquire becomes the whole goal of their lives. This drive to always want more is based on the misconceptions that having more will make me more happy, more important, and more secure, but all three ideas are untrue. Possessions only provide temporary happiness. Because things do not change, we eventually become bored with them and then want newer, bigger, better versions.

It’s also a myth that if I get more, I will be more important. Self-worth and net worth are not the same. Your value is not determined by your valuables, and God says the most valuable things in life are not things!

The most common myth about money is that having more will make me more secure. It won’t. Wealth can be lost instantly through a variety of uncontrollable factors. Real security can only be found in that which can never be taken from you – your relationship with God.[]

(Rick Warren)

40

2010-11-23T22:42:00.000-08:00

The Holy Book is clear that God considers 40 days a spiritually significant time period. Whenever God wanted to prepare someone for his purposes, he took 40 days. In addition to that, the number forty also plays a significant mark in human's life:

• Reading all content of Al Qur’an in 40 days is highly recommended by Prophet
Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) (Hadith Tirmidzi)
• Rasulullah PBUH received his prophethood at the age of 40
• Noah’s life was transformed by 40 days of rain.
• Moses was transformed by 40 days on Mount Sinai.
• David was transformed by Goliath’s 40-day challenge.
• Elijah was transformed when God gave him 40 days of strength from a single meal.
• Prophet Yunus was in a whales mouth for 40 days.
• Prophet Muhammad PBUH said, “In every one of you, all components of your creation
are gathered together in your mothers womb by 40 days” (Narrated in Saheeh Muslim)
• The average “Nifas” period (blood that is discharged due to childbirth) is 40 days.
• In the book of Numbers, the Israelites are shown to have first searched the
promised land (Canaan) for a duration of 40 days
• Primal Christians can also be recited to have held special regard for a time span
of 40 days. According to the synoptic Gospels, Jesus fasted and was "there in the
wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan... "
• Human body comprises around 40 trillion cells.
• Human red blood cell average life span is 40 days.

and offcourse, wise old saying said that "life begins at 40"[]

It Takes Courage

2010-11-21T16:41:00.000-08:00

“It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult.”

~ Seneca quotes (Roman philosopher, mid-1st century AD)

The long arduous journey to God is indeed filled with ups and downs. It's been assembled that way, paradise is very high, and ascending to lofty places takes a great deal of effort. The way to Paradise is filled with things that go against human wishes and inclinations. This needs strong determination and willpower. In a hadith narrated by Bukhari and Muslim from Abu Hurayrah, the Messenger of Allah, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, said: "Hell has been veiled with desires, and Paradise has been veiled with hardships."

Even the prophets prayed to God and asked "Where are you God?" when they are in their deepest sorrow. But, if we take a look at them closer, their attitude revealed a firm and unshaken faith. In an abyss of difficulty they called to The Lord, the only One who is able to safe them. And that, what makes them survive.

How many times in our life have we called upon our Lord when we are facing difficulties, instead of whining to people and complain how miserable life we have?
And do we realize that by doing the later we are actually mocking God by expressing how terrible is His scenario in our life?

"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Joshua 1:9)

Next time we face difficulty in life, just ask God for courage. He knows that we often feel inadequate just to handle the problems of everyday life. He knows that we need to be brave to stand up for ourself. It is never the problem that makes us sorrow, but the lack of trust and hope towards God.[]

Seeking God's Approval

2010-11-14T00:05:00.000-08:00

"It is better to have God's approval, than the world's applause:
there is a time shortly coming when a smile from God's face will
be infinitely better than all the applause of men: how sweet will
that word be, 'Well done, thou good and faithful servant.'
(Matt. 25: 21)."

- Thomas Watson

The Invisible Thread

2010-11-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

Despite deep fears of terrorism, economic or environmental threats, the anxiety that is present in our culture does not come from any outside force. The real problems we are facing are not political, sociological, or even ecological. Rather we are recognizing that something in our foundation no longer holds. This is the deep reason for our collective unease that we projectonto outer forces which appear to threaten us.

It is time to look closely at what is really happening. The mystic has always known that in order to find the cause of any effect we have to turn our attention inward, to look at the inner patterns. We look to the hints in our dreams, we read the images of our psyche that are not censored by our conscious conditioning. When Joseph interpreted the dreams of the seven years of plenty and the seven lean years, Egypt was saved a catastrophe.

And yet we have rejected the images of the inner as belonging to mythological past or the psychiatrist's couch. Instead, we try to listen to the voices of the outer experts. But with so many newscasters, political and economic analysts, and even spiritual visionaries, how do we knoe who and what to trust? And do we even know how to listen?

But if we look carefully we can find a thread that links it all together - links our dreams and the stories on the news, links the trivia, the mundane and the sensational. There is a thread that is our collective destiny, and it is inside each of us as well as in the world around.

This thread is so simple it is overlooked. It is so ordinary we pass it by. It is in our hope, in our need to be loved, in the warmth of a handshake or the touch of a kiss. It is in the most basic connection between human beings, not the words we say but the very nature of communication. It is the simple fact that we all live together, whether in the slums or the suburbs. It is in the primal knowing that we are one.

In the simplicity of our human values, love and joy, and hope, we are all connected together. But we can only discover this connection when we return to this simple core of being. Otherwise we will fall apart with a world that has lost its center. When we return to this connection of the heart we will see what is being born, how a linking together of individuals, groups, and communities is taking place, how patterns of relationships are growing and how life energy is flowing along these patterns. Once again humanity is recreating itself, creating a new civilization amidst the old.

(Llwellyn Vaughan Lee)

Purpose of Life

2010-03-02T04:30:00.000-08:00

Life is one, has always been one. It is a single, living, organic wholeness and everything in creation is a part of it, as vitally and inseparably related to the whole of life as an individual cell or organ is related to the larger organism of which it is a part. Life is alive, with its own intelligence and purpose.

And that purpose, which is our own purpose because we are not separate from life, is to bear witness to its Creator, to know and love and praise Him. “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, and so I created the world” (Hadith): the world is God’s revelation, His knowing of Himself.

(Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee)

Path of Love

2010-03-02T04:18:00.000-08:00

This sermon is based on a poetic excerpt from Ibn Arabi (1165‐1240). He was a Sunni Sufi Muslim mystic and philosopher who was born in the Muslim‐controlled Iberian Peninsula and lived in Spain from the ages of 8‐35, when he made a pilgrimage to Mecca. The poem is in Arabi’s book Tarjuman al‐Ashwaq or “Interpreter of All Desires.”

The poem:

My heart has become capable of every form
It is a pasture for gazelles,
And a monastery for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols,
And a Ka'aba of the pilgrims,
And the tablets of the Torah,
And the book of the Koran.
I follow the religion of Love:
Whatever path Love's camel takes

The Hazard of Paid Jobs

2009-03-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

(Aristotle)

Smile

2009-03-05T02:25:00.000-08:00

Everytime you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing.

(Mother Teresa)

Loving is Sharing

2009-03-05T00:43:00.000-08:00

In true love, life must be shared.

Illness, wealth, bodily suffering, happiness, joy, and sorrow must all be shared. Whenever there is love in which the husband and wife do not share everything equally, that love is born of selfishness.

Only when everything is shared can it be called true love.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen)

No Attachments

2009-03-02T17:32:00.000-08:00

When we do our duty to others, to the human race, we must do it without attachment, without selfishness, in the proper way, expecting no reward.

Act that pours forth like this is an act of true love.

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen)

A Broken Love

2009-03-02T01:11:00.000-08:00

If we pursue God, worship Him, ask Him for favors, for property, money, possessions, a baby, great titles, a kingdom, or even for heaven, if we love God with interested motives, with selfish love, that love will break down. It is a broken love...

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen)

Circular Path of Sufism

2009-02-24T17:56:00.000-08:00

The whole difficulty on deliniating sufism is that sufism cannot be deliniated, the whole problem of saying there are stages but there aren’t really any stages because it is a circular path, then how can you have stages on a circle because it depends on where you are start and where you are going.

(Llewellyn Vaughan - Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order)

Selfless Love

2009-02-17T22:44:00.000-08:00

The only love that is beneficial is selfless love.
Whatever we raise or touch – cattle, goats, donkeys, horses, dogs, cats, rats, house, property, possessions, learning, titles, fame, political status, or even wisdom – whatever it is we love, if our love is directed toward something and remains fixed on that thing, it is a love which can be lost, which can die...

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen)

Love that never breaks down

2009-02-16T00:14:00.000-08:00

Unless love is connected to God,

Unless it is connected to truth, to compassion, to justice, and to grace.

It is possible for it to break down

(M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen)

Smile!

2008-12-26T02:47:00.000-08:00

Peace begins with a smile

- Mother Teresa

To Be Misunderstood

2008-12-26T02:37:00.000-08:00

"Is it so bad to be misunderstood?

Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton,and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

True Strength

2008-12-26T02:26:00.000-08:00

Intelligent people know others.
Enlightened people know themselves.
You can conquer others with power,
But it takes true strength to conquer yourself.

...
- Lao Tzu

Wood for His Fire

2008-12-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

If you don’t have the Beloved why aren’t you looking for Him?

If you have the Beloved why aren’t you rejoicing?
If the Friend is truly your friend. Why not stay with Him?

If the rebec does not wail,Why not teach it how to sing?

If someone bars you from the truth, Why not fight him and his brother as well?
You sit quietly and say to yourself, “Something strange is going on.”The only thing strange is that your best friend is a stranger.

You are the Sun of the world -Why is your heart so black?Why do you fall back on your drab and stagnant ways?Don’t stay melted like gold in a furnace -Become a piece of jewelry!

The treasure of Unity is found by those who look within.Why not join your spirit to the onewho sits inside your heart?

Did Majnun ever love two Laylas? Why seek more than one face and one cheek?

There is such a glorious moonhiding in the shadows of your being.Why not make it rise with the power of a midnight prayer? You have danced in the tavern for ages, Love’s wine never slips from your hand,Yet with each new sipyour soul is ravished like never before.

The wine I drink is the fire of love and God Himself pours it into my mouth!
What use is your life If your bones are not used as wood for His fire?
I’ll leave you with that.I could go on,I could fill pages with these elegant verses
But this is a tale for the heart and soul, not the lips.

...

Rumi– Version by Jonathan StarFrom “Rumi - In the Arms of the Beloved”Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York 1997

Thou and I

2008-12-25T23:59:00.000-08:00

“Happy the moment when we are seated in the Palace, thou and I,

With two forms and with two figures but with one soul, thou and I

The colours of the grove and the voice of the birds will bestow immortality at the time when we come into the garden, thou and I.

....

The stars of heaven will come to gaze upon us; We shall show them the Moon itself, thou and I. Thou and I, individuals no more, shall be mingled in ecstasy, Joyful and secure from foolish babble, thou and I.

...

All the bright-plumed birds of heaven with devour their hearts with envy. In the place where we shall laugh in such a fashion, thou and I.

...

This is the greatest wonder, that thou and I, sitting here in the same nook, are at this moment both in Iraq and Khorasan, thou and I.”

(Jalaluddin Rumi)

Love and Forgive

2008-12-12T05:08:00.000-08:00

~
If we really want to love we must learn how to forgive.

- Mother Teresa
~

The Secret of Life

2008-12-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

The principal teaching is that the heart of man is the shrine of God, to recognize God in one's own heart, to feel His existence, presence, virtue, goodness, all manner of beauty.

It must be remembered that the whole life around us is a life of falsehood.

The more you see and experience the more you see how very false it is, how much disillusionment there is.

The only way of getting over it is to light the lamp in the darkness of night, and all will be cleared. The secret of life is this: to produce beauty in ourselves.

When beauty is produced in the heart, then all that breaks the heart vanishes and the whole universe becomes one single vision of the sublimity of God.

-Religious Gatheka 13, Message of Christ, Hazrat Inayat Khan

Give Me Your Hand

2008-12-12T03:53:00.000-08:00

God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Looking for Your Own Face

2008-12-12T03:50:00.000-08:00

Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.

You can never see your own face,only a reflection, not the face itself.
So you sigh in front of mirrorsand cloud the surface.
It's better to keep your breath cold.Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.

One slight movement, the mirror-image goes.
Don't be dead or asleep or awake.Don't be anything.
What you most want,what you travel around wishing to find,lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,and you'll be that.

- Attar

Mystic Silence

2008-12-12T03:40:00.000-08:00

From each, Love demands a mystic silence.

What do all seek so earnestly? Tis Love. Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts, In Love no longer "Thou" and "I" exist, For self has passed away in the Beloved.

Now will I draw aside the veil from Love, And in the temple of mine inmost soul Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.

He who would know the secret of both worlds Will find that the secret of them both is Love.

- Attar

In the Dead of Night

2008-12-12T03:00:00.000-08:00

In the dead of night, a Sufi began to weep,

he said this world is like a closed coffin, in which we are shut and in which, through our ignorance, we spend our lives in folly and desolation.

When Death comes to open the lid of the coffin, each one who has wings will fly off to eternity, but those without will remain locked in the coffin. So, my friends, before the lid of this coffin is taken off,

Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;

Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers."

-Attar

Why Was Adam

2008-12-12T02:36:00.000-08:00

'Why was Adam driven from the garden?'

The pupil asked his master. 'His heart was hardened with images, a hundred bonds that clutter the earth chained Adam to the cycle of death following birth.

He was blind to this equation, living for something other than God and so out of paradise he was driven with his mortal body's cover his soul was shriven.

Noblest of God's creatures, Adam fell with blame, Like a moth shrivelled by the candle's flame, into history which taught mankind shame. Since Adam had not given up his heart to God's attachment, there was no part for Adam in paradise where the only friend is God; His will is not for Adam to imagine and bend.

- Attar

Always Beautiful

2008-12-12T02:30:00.000-08:00

Know the true nature of your Beloved.

In His loving eyes your every thought,Word and movement is always-Always Beautiful."

- Attar

A Learning Soul

2008-12-12T02:20:00.000-08:00

Soul receives from soul that knowledge, therefore not by book nor from tongue.

If knowledge of mysteries come after emptiness of mind, that is illumination of heart.

- Jalaluddin Rumi -

English Translation by Coleman Barks

The Progress of Man

2008-12-12T01:59:00.000-08:00

First he appeared in the realm inanimate

Thence came into the world of plants and lived the plant-life many a year, nor called to mind what he had been;

then took the onward wayTo animal existence, and once moreRemembers naught of what life vegetive,

Save when he feels himself moved with desire towards it in the season of sweet flowers,

As babes that seek the breast and know not why.

Again the wise Creator whom thou knowestUplifted him from animality to Man's estate;

and so from realm to realm advancing, he became intelligent,cunning and keen of wit, as he is now.

No memory of his past abides with him, and from his present soul he shall be changes.

Though he is fallen asleep, God will not leave himIn this forgetfulness.

Awakened, he will laugh to think what troublous dreams he had. And wonder how his happy state of being he could forget, and not perceive that all those pains and sorrows were the effect of sleep and guile and vain illusion.

So this world seems lasting, though 'tis but the sleepers' dream; Who, when the appointed Day shall dawn, escapes from dark imaginings that haunted him, and turns with laughter on his phantom griefs when he beholds his everlasting home.

- Jalaluddin Rumi -

English Translation by R.A. Nicholson

The True Sufi

2008-12-12T01:49:00.000-08:00

What makes the Sufi? Purity of heart

Not the patched mantle and the lust perverse of those vile earth-bound men who steal his name.

He in all dregs discerns the essence pure:In hardship ease, in tribulation joy.

The phantom sentries, who with batons drawn Guard Beauty's place-gate and curtained bower

Give way before him, unafraid he passes

And showing the King's arrow, enters in.

- Jalaluddin Rumi -

translated by R.A Nicholson

The Value of Knowledge (3)

2008-11-25T18:52:00.000-08:00

As to [the evidence of the value of knowledge in] the sayings of the Companions (al-athar), `Ali ibn-abi-Talibsaid to Kumayl, “O thou perfect of knowledge ! Knowledge is better than riches; for knowledge guardeth thee whereas thou guardest riches. Knowledge governs while riches are governed. Riches diminish with spending but knowledge increases therewith.”

And again, “The learned is superior to the fasting, praying and self-mortifying man. Should the learned die, a gap would be created in Islam [by his death] and no one would fill this gap save one of his successors.”

`Ali said:
“Learning is the glory of mankind,
The wise are beacons on the road to truth;
Man is worth his knowledge, nothing more –
The fool will be his inveterate foe,
Knowledge is man’s hope of life immortal,
Man may die but wisdom liveth ever.”

Abu-al-Aswad said, “Nothing is more precious than knowledge; while kings rule over men, they are ruled by the learned.”

Ibn-`Abbas said, “Solomon the son of David was asked to choose between knowledge, wealth or power, but he chose knowledge and was thereby blessed with wealth and power as well.”

Ibn-al—Mubarak was asked, “Who constitute humanity?” To which he replied, “The learned”. It was then said, “And who are the kings?” He answered, “The ascetics”. And who,” he was asked, “constitute the lowest class among men?” “Those,” said he, “who, in the name of religion, grow fat in the world.” Thus only the learned did [ibn-al--Mubarak] regard as belonging to mankind, because it is knowledge which distinguishes man from the other animals.

Furthermore, man is a human being, not because of his physical prowess for physically the camel is his superior; not because of his size for the elephant is larger; not because of his courage for the lion is more courageous; not because of his appetite for the ox has the greater; not because of coitus for the least of the birds is more virile than he, but rather by virtue of his noble aims and ideals. [As a matter of fact] he was only created to know.

One of the wise men said, “Would that I might know what thing was attained by him whom knowledge has escaped, and what thing has escaped him who has attained knowledge.”
The Prophet said, “Whoever has been given the Qur’an and thinks that anyone has been given something better, he has degraded what Allah has exalted.”

Fath al-Mawsili said inquiring, “Would not the sick die, if he is given no food or drink or medicine?” They said, “Yes”. To which he said, “Similarly the heart will perish if it is cut off from wisdom and knowledge for three days.” He did indeed speak the truth, for the nourishment of the heart, on which its life depends, is knowledge and wisdom, just as the nourishment of the body is food.

Whoever lacks knowledge has an ailing heart and his death is certain; yet he is not aware of his doom because the love of this world and his concern therewith have dulled his sense, just as a shock from fright may momentarily do away with the pain of a wound although the wound be real. Thus when death frees him from the burdens of this world he will realize his doom and’ will, though to no avail, greatly regret it. This is like the feeling of a person who has attained safety after having been through danger, and like that of a man who has just recovered from his drunkenness.

We seek refuge in Allah from the day when all things will be brought to light. Men are asleep but at death they Will awake. Al-Hasan said, “The ink of the learned Will be likened to the blood of the martyrs, and the former will prove superior.”

Ibn-Mas`ud said, “Seek ye knowledge while it be found; it will be veiled when its narrators pass away. Verily, by Him in whose hand is my life, several men who died martyrs in the cause of Allah would rather that, at resurrection, Allah would raise them up as learned men for what they see of the veneration accorded the learned.” No one is born learned, but knowledge is only the result of learning.

Ibn-’Abbas said, “I would rather spend a part of the night in learned discussion than in continual prayer.” The same was related of abu-Hurayrah and Ahmad ibn-Hanbal.

AI-Hasan said that in the words of Allah, “Give us good (hasanah) in this world and good in the next,” (2:197) the good in this world meant knowledge and worship while that of the next signified paradise.

A wise man was once asked, “What things shall we possess?” He replied, “Those things which you will not lose in the event of shipwreck,” meaning thereby knowledge, while by shipwreck, it is said, he meant the decomposition of the body through death.

A certain wise man said, “Whoever takes wisdom for his bridle will be acclaimed by men as their leader, and whoever is known for his wisdom will be looked upon with respect.”

Al-Shaf’I Said “One of the noble things about knowledge is that he who is given a portion of it, no matter how small, rejoices while he who is deprived of it grieves.”‘

Umar said, “O men! Seek ye knowledge. For verily Allah has a mantle of love which He casts upon him who seeks knowledge even of a single section. Should he then commit an offence, Allah will remonstrate with him thrice in order not to rob him of his mantle, even though that offence may persist with him until he dies.”

Al-Ahnaf said, “The learned men came very near being Allahs; and all power which is not supported by knowledge is doomed.

Salim ibn-abi-al-Ja’d said, “ My master bought me for three hundred dirhams and later set me free. Thereupon I said, ‘What shall I take up for livelihood? Finally I took up learning and no sooner had a year passed than the prince of Ma kkah called upon me but I would not receive him.”

al-Zubayr ibn-abi-Bakr said, “My father had written me while in al-’Iraq saying. ‘Go after knowledge; should you become poor it will be your wealth, and should you become rich it will be your embellishment’.” (This has been related among the exhortations of Luqman to his son). He also said, “Sit in the company of the learned and keep close to them; for verily Allah quickens the hearts with the light of wisdom as he refreshes the earth with the rain of heaven.”

A certain wise man said, “When the learned dies the fish of the sea as well as the fowl of the air will mourn him; while his face shall disappear his memory will not be forgotten.”
AI-Zuhrisaid, “Knowledge is glorious and is not treasured except by the glorious.”

From: Al Ghazali’s – Ihya Ulumuddin (The Revival of Religious Sciences) – translated by Nabih Amin Faris

The Value of Knowledge (2)

2008-11-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

As to [the evidence of the value of knowledge in] tradition (al-akhbar) the Apostle of Allah said, “Whom Allah doth love, He giveth knowledge of religion and guideth him into the straight path;”
and again, “The learned men are the heirs of the prophets.” It is also well-known that there is no rank above that of prophethood, no honour higher than its inheritance.

The Prophet also said, “What is in the heavens and in the earth intercedes for the learned men.” And what rank is higher than that of him for whom the angels of the heavens and earth labour interceding with Allah on his behalf, while he is preoccupied with himself. Muhammad Salallahu ‘alaihi wassalam [s.a.w] (peace be upon him) also said, “Wisdom adds honour to the noble and exalts the slave until he attains the level of kings.”

The Prophet pointed this out relating to the benefits of wisdom in this world, since it is well-known that the hereafter is superior and more lasting. Muhammad said again, “Two qualities the hypocrite lacks - good intentions and religious insight.” Do not doubt tradition, then, because of the hypocrisy of some contemporary jurisprudents; theirs is not the jurisprudence which the Prophet had in mind. (The definition of jurisprudence will come later). For a jurisprudent to know that the hereafter is better than this world is, after all, the lowest type of knowledge he can possess. Should it prove to be true and prevail, it would clear him of hypocrisy and deceit.

The Prophet said, “The best of men is the learned believer who, if he is needed, he will be useful; and if dispensed with, he will be self-sufficient. “

And again he said, “Belief is like unto a nude who should be clothed with piety, ornamented with modesty and should have knowledge for progeny.”

And again, “The nearest people to prophethood are the people of knowledge and the warriors of jihad”: the former have led men to what the prophets have proclaimed, and the latter have wielded their swords on its behalf.

He also said, “The passing away of a whole tribe is more tolerable than the death of one learned man.”

And again, “Men are like ores of gold and silver, the choicest among them during the Jahiliyah days are also the best during the days of Islam, provided they see the light.”
He also said, “On the day of resurrection the ink of the learned men will be likened to the blood of the martyrs.”

And again, “Whoever preserves of the law forty Traditions in order to transmit them unto my people, I shall, on the day of resurrection, be an intercessor and a witness on his behalf.”
Muhammad s.a.w. also said, “Any one of my people who will preserve forty hadiths will on the day of resurrection face Allah as a learned jurisprudent.”

And again, “Whoever will become versed in the religion of Allah, Allah will relieve him of his worries and will reward him whence he does not reckon”

The Prophet also said, “Allah said unto Abraham, `O Abraham! Verily I am knowing and I love every knowing person’.”

And again, “The learned man is the trustee of Allah on earth.”
The Prophet said, “There are two groups among my people who when they become righteous the populace becomes righteous, and when they become corrupt the populace becomes corrupt: these are the rulers and the jurisprudents.”

Again he said, “Should the day come wherein I increase not in knowledge wherewith to draw nearer to Allah, let the dawn of that day be accursed.”

Concerning the superiority of knowledge to worship and martyrdom, the Prophet said, “The superior rank the learned man holds in relation to the worshipper is like the superior rank I hold in relation to the best of men.” See how he placed knowledge on an equal footing with prophethood and belittled the value of practice without knowledge, despite the fact that the worshipper may not be ignorant of the worship which he observes.

Moreover, without this knowledge there would have been no worship. The Prophet also said, “The superior rank the learned man holds over the worshipper is similar to the superiority of the moon when it is full over the other stars.”

And again, “They will, on the day of resurrection, intercede [before Allah]: the prophets, then the learned, then the martyrs.” Great then is the state of knowledge which ranks next to prophethood and stands over martyrdom, the merits of the latter notwithstanding.

The Prophet also said, “Allah was not worshipped with anyone better than the learned in religion. Verily a single jurisprudent is more formidable to Satan than a thousand worshippers.” For everything has [its] foundation. and the foundations of this religion is jurisprudence.

And again, “The best part of your faith is [also] the easiest, and the best form of worship is jurisprudence.” The Prophet also said, “The learned believer holds a rank seventy degrees higher than that of the ordinary believer.”

And again. “Verily you have come upon a time whose jurisprudents are many and Qur’an readers as well as preachers are few, whose beggars are rare and givers numerous, wherein deeds are better than knowledge. But there will come a time when jurisprudents are few and preachers many, whose givers are few and beggars numerous, wherein knowledge is better than works.”

The Prophet also said, “Between the learned and the worshipper are a hundred degrees, each two of which are separated by the extent of a racing horse’s run in seventy years.”

The Prophet was also asked, “O Apostle of Allah! What works are best?” To which he replied. “Your knowledge of Allah.” He was then asked. “Which knowledge do you mean?” He answered, “Your Knowledge of Allah.” Again he was asked, “We enquire about works and you reply concerning knowledge.” Muhammad then said, “With your knowledge of Allah, a few works will suffice, but without such knowledge, no works, however numerous, avail.”

The Prophet also said, “On the day of resurrection Allah will [first] raise the worshippers and then the learned to whom He will say, ‘O ye company of the learned, I did not imbue you with My knowledge but for My knowledge of you. Moreover, I did not imbue you with My Knowledge in order to torment you. Go ye, therefore, for verily I have forgiven you’”

From: Al Ghazali’s – Ihya Ulumuddin (The Revival of Religious Sciences) – translated by Nabih Amin Faris

The Value of Knowledge (1)

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The excellence of knowledge. The evidence for the excellence of knowledge in the Qur’an [is manifest] in the words of Allah:
“Allah bears witness that there is no Allah but He, and the angels, and men endued with knowledge, established in righteousness.” [3]:16. See, then, how Allah has mentioned Himself first, the angels second, and men endowed with knowledge third. In this you really have honour, excellence, distinction and rank.

And again Allah said: “Allah will raise in rank those of you who believe as well as those who are given knowledge.” [58]: 12

According to ibn-`Abbas, the learned men rank seven hundred grades above the believers; between each two of which is a distance five hundred years long. Said Allah. “Say, `shall those who know be deemed equal with those who do not?” [39] :12

Allah also said, “None fear Allah but the wise among His servants;” [35]: 25
and again, “Say, `Allah is witness enough betwixt me and you, and whoever hath the knowledge of The Book!’ ” [13]: 43.

This I mention to you in order to show that it was possible only through the power of knowledge. Allah also said, “But they to whom knowledge hath been given said, `Woe to you! The reward of Allah is better [for him who believes and does right],” [28] :80 showing thereby that the great importance of the hereafter is appreciated through knowledge.

And again Allah said, “These parables do we set forth for men: and none understands them save those who know.” [29]: 42.

Allah also said, “But if they were to refer it to the Apostle and to those in authority amongst them, those of them who would elicit the information would know it” [4]: 85

He thus made the knowledge of His will dependent upon their efforts to find it out, and placed them next to the prophets in the [ability] to make it known. It has been said that in the following words of Allah, “O Sons of Adam! We have sent down to you raiments wherewith to cover your nakedness, and splendid garments; but the raiment of piety-this is best,” [7] :25 the raiments represent knowledge, the splendid garments, truth, and the raiment of piety, modesty.

Allah also said, “And We have brought them a book: with knowledge have We explained it;” [7]: 50 and again, “But it is clear sign in the hearts of those whom the knowledge hath reached;” [29]:48 and, “With knowledge will We tell them;” [7]: 6

and again, “[He] hath created man, [and] hath taught him articulate speech.” (55:2-3) This, however, He said reproachfully.

From: Al Ghazali’s – Ihya Ulumuddin (The Revival of Religious Sciences) – translated by Nabih Amin Faris

Learning from the Bees

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And your Lord inspired (awhaa) the bees, saying: “Take you habitations in the mountains and in the trees and in what they erect. Then, eat of all fruits, and follow the ways (subula) of your Lord made easy (for you).” There comes forth from their bellies, a drink of varying colour wherein is healing for men. Verily, in this indeed a sign for people who think (tafakur). (QS An Nahl [16]: 68-69)

Bees is a symbol for a faithful human being. A person who dedicate all of his life in God’s way. Therefore, there are some similarities between the life of a bee and life of a faithful person.

Selecting their food
Bees only consume nectars, it’s a symbol of a divine knowledge. It’s place is within the center of the flowers. They don’t fly around in anything that takes place in the ground like the flies do. They are really choosey when it comes to what their gonna put inside their body.

A faithful person is really cautious with what they consume. Not only they hold on to the rule of Halal and Haram (rules that restrict what to eat and not to eat in the Holy Qur’an), but they also be very attentive to the details like the portion – they don’t eat too much - and composition that suit their body. Because each person has a different response to foods.

Other than that, the nectar also symbol for divine knowledge. It is the secret that lies in every aspect of human studies. It is in medicine, philosophy, psychology, economy, culture, arts etc. Each of those discipline has its own ‘nectar’ – a divine knowledge that leads to the single “Source” – The All-Known Creator.

Therefore, another characteristic of a faithful person (mu’min) is that they are a deep learners. They always thrist for knowledge, seeking the truth and very desirous when in comes to unveil the divinity.

Yields goodness
Like bees that secreting honey from their bellies - that gives benefit for human life. A life of a faithful person is also brings goodness that permeates through his surroundings. Every words, expressions, or actions is meant to be a good conduct. He brings joy, happiness and comfort in other people’s life. Even sometimes it sacrifices himselves.

Communal creature
Bees live in harmony within its community. They don’t life separately, instead they build its nest together in harmony. Each bee carries a specific duty. There are nectar seekers, nest builders, and queen. They don’t acquainted with coup d’etat, because every bee understand their own position, its mission of life. So there won’t be any story where worker bee dissatisfied and trying to be a queen.

It’s not about how high your position is, it’s about whether you are already in your position or not. Like a bee, God has endowed each man with a specific talent in order to perform his sacred mission in life. The trail towards this mission of life lies all the way from the time that we were born. There is no single action of our life unless it is written within Book of Fate (Luah Mahfuzh). If only each person embrace it and life accordingly within it, then they will find their way back to the Source. Where all mysteries finally answered. And again, like a bees, it is easier when you do it all within a community instead of being a single fighter.

True Friend

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Of a thousand whom ye know, one be your friend
- Prophet Solomon

Then said Matthew, ‘Then shall we not be able to love anyone.’

Jesus answered, ‘Verily I say unto you, that is not lawful for you to hate anything save only sin, insomuch that ye cannot even hate Satan as creature of God, but rather than as enemy of God. Know ye wherefore? I will tell you. Because he is a creature of God and all that God hath created is good and perfect. Accordingly, whoso hateth the creature hateth also the creator.

But the friend is a singular thing, that is easily found, but is easily lost. For the friend will not suffer contradiction against him whom he supremely loveth.

Beware, be ye cautious, and choose not for friend one who loveth not him whom ye love. Know ye what friend meaneth? Friend meaneth naught but physician of the soul. And so, just as one rarely findeth a good physician who knoweth the sickness and understandeth to apply the medicines thereto, so also are friends rare who know the faults and understand how to guide unto good.

But herein is an evil, that there are many who have friends that feign under earthly pretext, and what is worse, there are friends who invite and aid their friend to err, whose end shall be like unto their villainy. Beware that ye receive not such men for friends, for that in truth they are enemies and slayers of the soul.

Let thy friend be such that, even as he willeth to correct thee, so he may receive correction, and even as he willeth that thou shouldest leave all things for love of God, even so again it may content him that thou forsake him for the service of God.

But tell me, if a man know not how to love God how shall he know how to love himself, and how shall he know how to love others, not knowing how to love himself? Assuredly this is impossible.

Therefore when thou choose thee one for friend, see that thou consider first, not his fine lineage, not his fine family, not his fine house, not his fine clothing, not his fine person, not his fine words, for thou shalt be easily deceived. But look how he feareth God, how he despiseth earthly things, how he loveth good works, and above all things shall fear God, and shall despise the vanities of the world; if he shall be always occupied in good works, and shall hate his own body as a cruel enemy.

Nor yet shalt thou love such a friend in such wise that thy love stay in him, for so shalt thou be an idolater. But love him as a gift that God hath given thee, for so shall God adorn him with greater favour. Verily I say unto you, that he who hath found a true friend hath found one of the delights of paradise: nay, such is the key of paradise.’

- The Gospel of Barnabas, Chapter 85-86.

Lord of Vineyards and The Three Husbandmen

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There was a man who had three vineyards, which he let out to three husbandmen. Because the first knew not how to cultivate the vineyard and the vineyard brought forth only leaves. The second taught the third how the vines ought to be cultivated; and he most excellently hearkened to his words; and he cultivate his, as he told him, insomuch that the vineyard of the third bore much. But the second left his vineyard uncultivated, spending his time solely in talking.

When the time was come for paying the rent to the lord of the vineyard, the first said: "Lord, I know not how thy vineyard ought to be cultivated, therefore I have not received any fruit this year." The Lord answered, "Oh fool! Dost thou dwell alone in the world, that thou hast not asked counsel of my second vinedresser, who knoweth well how to cultivate the land? Certain it is that thou shalt pay me."

And having said this he condemned him to work in prison until he should pay his lord, who moved with pity at his simplicity liberated him, saying : "Begone, for I will not that thou work longer at my vineyard, it is enough for thee that I give thee thy debt."

The second came, to whom the lord said, "Welcome, my vinedresser! Where are the fruits that thou owest me? Assuredly, since thou knowest well how to prune the vines, the vineyard that I let out to thee must needs have borne much fruits."

The second answered, "Oh lord, thy vineyard is backward because I have not pruned the wood now worked up the soil but the vineyard hath not borne fruit, so I cannot pay thee."

Whereupon the lord called the third and with wonder said, "Thou saidst to me that this man, to whom I let out the second vineyard, taught thee perfectly to cultivate the vineyard which I let out to thee. How then can it be that the vineyard I let out to him should not have home fruit, seeing it is all one soil?"

The third answered, "Lord, the vines are not cultivated by talking only, but he needs must sweat a shirt every day who willeth to make it bring forth its fruit. And how shall thy vineyard of thy vinedresser bear fruit. Oh lord, that if he had put into practice his own words, while I who cannot talk so much have given thee the rent for two years, he would have given thee the rent of the vineyard for five years."

The lord was wroth, and said with scorn to the vinedresser, "And so thou hast wrought a great work in not cutting away the wood and levelling the vineyard, wherefore there is owing to thee a great reward!" And having called his servants he had him beaten without any mercy. ANd then he put him into prison under the keeping of a cruel servant who beat him every day, and never was willing to set him free for prayers of his friends.

- from The Gospel of Barnabas Ch. 76