Navigating Love Beyond Conflict

This world is full of oppositions. And we are constantly in situations where we have opinions. And we run into people who have different opinions than we have. This creates a situation where one person opposes another and difficulties arise from these oppositions. Anytime you get two or more people together these things happen. In the west we have formalized this, we call it politics. It’s a nice way to say people are vying for control. Vying for supremacy. And it occurs on the smallest level to the highest level. It occurs between two, between three, between five, between millions. And as the groups get larger than two, it’s no longer an ideology of one verses an ideology of another, groups form around the ones that for some reason, somehow fulfill the needs that they have.

Now, the Sufis are known not to be opposers to things. They somehow slide through without getting involved in real opposition. How do they do this? And how can we do this in our own lives so that all the trauma, all the anxiety, all of the difficulties of oppositions and conflict that comes from oppositions somehow is removed from us? Imagine if we could remove all of the conflict from our being, if we could remove all the opposition in our being, if we could remove all of the trauma that comes from that. How do we do that?

Well, everyone talks about love, but love is truly misunderstood. Bawa used to say romantic love was the creation of the twelfth century Italians. Now, romantic love is one kind of love, but people love many things. They love their country, they love their language, they love their society, they love their caste, they love their wife, they love their horse, they love their car, they love their dog. Love is all over the place. However this kind of love is a lot like magnetism. A magnet draws things to it or pushes things away from it. When we want something, we are made up of the elements just like the rest of the world, so when we want to draw things to us we love them. We want them to somehow be attached to us, we want to be identified with them, we love them. What do we really need? Somehow, our elemental self is connected with that in an elemental way and we want these elements to be attracted to each other and we call that love.

Allah is not elemental. Allah is not made up of the elements. Allah is without elements. He is without form. Now, imagine a love that is not elemental. A love that is not magnetic, that doesn’t draw things, a love that infiltrates things in such a way that it brings mercy and compassion to that which it infiltrates without opposition. It infiltrates without opposition because it is not elemental. Because it is not elemental that doesn’t happen. There is no conflict. The non-elemental isn’t in conflict with the elemental. Because the elemental doesn’t even know it’s there. The elemental can’t even recognize it, the elemental can’t see it, the elemental can’t understand it. And the people who live in the world of the elements don’t know what’s happening. They become confused. Something is altered and they don’t know why, because something non-elemental is working on their elements.