I want to say first, welcome everybody here, it’s so good to see you all again.

Al-hamdu lillāh. It’s a great joy to be among lovers. And I can see the love in the faces that I am looking at. And when lovers come together love grows. May we have fertile ground today.

The path of Sufism is a path of maturity. We are all born into this world and we all age, but we don’t necessarily become mature. Maturity and growing older unfortunately are not directly correlated. I wish they were, it would make it much easier for all of us. But Allah has not made it automatic. He’s made it necessary for work to occur in order for this maturity to occur.

Now, what kind of work is it that brings about this maturity? What is it that causes maturity? Even more essential, what is maturity? In the world we are constantly in situations where there is conflict. And within us we have needs and desires and these needs and desires constantly push themselves to the forefront of our existence. Inside of us, we have a lower self, within this lower self there is a lawyer. And this lawyer is constantly rationalizing why it’s appropriate for us to go for the things that we want, why it’s appropriate for us to put our own self interest in front of any other interest, why it’s appropriate for us to fulfill our desire. And this lawyer is very clever and he can convince us of almost anything. He’s almost as clever as the lawyers who argued in front of the Supreme Court of the United States and said that pornography is reasonable! He’s that clever. Lawyers can be very clever. Unless we are mature we can’t be clever enough to respond to this lawyer. So when our self interest moves forward and comes and says, “Get this, I want this, do this,” and we say, “Well I can’t because I don’t think it’s appropriate.” Then the lawyer begins to argue. And he says, “Well of course it’s appropriate, look what he did to you, look what they did to you, you need this not only for yourself you will be able to help others with it later.” There’s a thousand and one different scenarios that this lawyer can create.

The only one who can adequately respond to this rationalization is wisdom. Wisdom doesn’t come without maturity. So not only is asking the question, how do we become mature, an interesting question, it is important for our life, because if we don’t understand how it happens we can’t understand how to defend ourselves against our lower self. We can’t respond to all the rationalizations that pour up from our depths to tell us why what we are doing is okay and we don’t need to change.

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