The Witness Within

What is the natural state of man, and where should we set expectations for ourselves? And what should we expect of our fellow beings? What should the standards be that we have for ourselves? In religious services in various religious institutions there are those who minister the flock, and then there’s the flock. So you have the one who leads the service and the ones who partake in the service. But in different areas different things happen. In a small Arab village where there is no hired imam, the people in the village may take turns leading the prayer. So, each one becomes a prayer leader. In the Jewish communities in Brooklyn, ten people are required to have a sufficient amount to have formal prayers; and very often they take turns in leading the prayers. In the Quaker community, if you’ve ever been to a Quaker service, nobody leads the service. People speak when they have the inclination or the call to do so, and there’s no formal hierarchical ministry. The Catholic church on the other hand has a very formal hierarchical ministry, where congregants are even told that you have to go through the priest or the minister to reach the point you’re trying to reach.So, what is the expectation that’s placed on us? Are we supposed to be good congregants and show up to a congregational service once a week or every morning, and then we’ve fulfilled our obligation? Is our obligation a passive sort of showing up, and then somebody else takes care of the rest of it for us. Well, it’s been made pretty clear that we are supposed to be involved in what we’re doing. We are supposed to be as involved as any congregation leader. We are supposed to be involved in direct communication or at least an attempt at direct communication with our Lord. We need to be involved in our salvation. We cannot depend on anybody else to do it for us.This means that there has to a certain committent in our relationship with God, a certain committent in our relationship with our way, a certain surrender to the way that we do things, a certain surrender to our obligations. And somehow we have to get into that mode.

When Bawa came he taught us about a monastic life outside of the monastery. There was no monastery except for his home. We lived in the world, we married and had children, but he spoke to us and he petitioned us and he implored us to live as if we were within a monastic setting in the world. And that’s the interesting aspect of entering reality in the way that we were taught. The monastery is something you carry with you. It’s not some place that you go. You are the monastery. Your body is the home of the monastery, and your actions within that are those of a monk, monk meaning either female or male.

The story of Jesus according to the Christian tradition was that he taught until he was 33 years old, and then he was sentenced to be crucified by the Romans. And they in fact made him carry his own cross and then crucified him. And he died on the cross. And in that death he healed the world. Now, that’s a very interesting concept. The man considered the son of God by the Christians passed from this world no different than any other man. And that passing had an effect quite other than passing. That passing healed the population of the world who took on the understanding of what he did and how he meant it. Now, that didn’t stop people from passing, but it healed them of something else. It healed them of their burdens. It healed them of their sins. It healed them of their impurities. It healed them of their connection to the world.Now, Jesus did not have a connection to the world. He was already healed from that. But he went through the agony that he went through on behalf of the rest of the world. It says something about agony and the fact that we have to go through some of that. But it also puts in perspective what healing actually means. Healing is the healing of the inner part of us. Healing is doing away with the diseases of the heart. Healing is resurrecting the qualities that belong to Allah. And Allah is the ultimate healthy One. Allah is the One without sickness, without death. And to join that place of no sickness and no death, we need to be healed, healed of our attachments to the world.

Psychologists talk about the influence of genetics and the influence of environment. And all of us live in some kind of an environment, and that environment has some kind of influence on us. When they say environment, they’re not talking about the temperature. They’re talking about the parent, the parental units and their influence on us and the cultural biases and those influences on us. So, each of us are born into some sort of culture. We’re born to a set of parents. We go to certain schools. We have all of this input that is constantly thrown at us from the time that we are babies, and we have to deal with it. In other words we are constantly in the midst of circumstances, one kind or another, but we’re constantly in the midst of circumstances. And we have to somehow react to these circumstances in order to go on with our daily existence in this world.The interesting thing about circumstances is they can be real or imaginary. We can create circumstances for us that have nothing to do with the intention of the people around us. We just imagine them. Some people call this the inability to communicate appropriately. But we’ve also been taught that this life is an illusion and that only Allah is real. So, here we are in the midst of all kinds of circumstances, some real, some imagined; yet, we’re told that in our belief system that even the ones that are real are in fact imagined. So it puts us in a sort of dilemma as to how to react to things and how to find an equilibrium in our being. First and foremost is to be grounded in the understanding that circumstances should not affect our being.

When Rumi met Shams and Shams took all of Rumi’s books that he was carrying with him and threw them in the river, at that time Rumi was considered the penultimate scholar of his region. He knew more than anyone at that time or at least that was how the people viewed him. And he was the one that people came to as the authority on things, yet he was now confronted with this semi-mad-appearing Afghani who indicated to him that his knowledge was without a lot of value and that the extent of it was extremely limited.So, what are we to take from that? We need to understand that all the stories and all the examples are for us. So, here’s a man who is an authority on things, not a kid anymore. He’s aged. He’s been through marriage, children, titles. He’s been through being in charge of things. He’s been through being the one who puts the stamp on the finality of decisions and things. And all of a sudden he is put in a place where he doesn’t know anything. And within a short period of time, he understands that. And he accepts that he doesn’t know anything or at least doesn’t know certain things and has to move forward.

When a baby is born into this world, it has this incredibly soft skin and this amazing newborn smell, other than anything else that exists. You might even say it’s other worldly. And the experience with that baby becomes other worldly. And a baby is capable of taking you to other worlds, other spheres, and other consciousnesses. Whatever state you’re in, if somebody puts a newborn into your arms, that state will change to something higher. But as the baby grows, that softness of skin fades away, that smell of the newborn fades away, and something happens to that child. It’s like being placed in brine does something to whatever you place into brine. It creates a hardness to it.

Recently, I was travelling in the East, and I saw a young couple whom I knew and I was seeing them again. I was actually at their marriage, and about five years had passed since their marriage. And I looked at them, and it was evident to me they were a real couple. This was not people who were just hanging out together. These were people who were truly married to each other. And I said that to the young lady. I said, “It’s so good that you’ve become a real couple.”And her response to me was, “It’s because of the way you see. Your eyes make it that way.”

If we go back into the spools of our memories and think to when we first discovered that there existed within us a yearning to know reality, a yearning to know who we are, an understanding that that which surrounded us and that which we were told was normative was in fact just an accepted script that was put in place because the people putting it in place knew nothing more than what that was, that they were limited in so many ways and tried to make a world built out of their limitations. And all of a sudden it came to us that this limited understanding of things is not reality and that this limited understanding of things doesn’t have to be accepted by us as our life. There can be something more. There can be something else. There can be a much deeper understanding of things and a different analysis of what existence is about and different conclusions can be drawn than the conclusions drawn by the world.

In different phases of our lives, we have different possessions and certain of these possessions become very important to us. When we are a child, we might have a favorite blanket or a favorite toy. As we grow we gather different things, things we need, things we like, things we don’t need, things that are popular, things we think we should have. Now, imagine if you accumulated all of the things that you had since you were a child and kept them with you and never let any of them go. Soon, things would fill whatever your residence was to the point where you would not have the room to walk around your house.

Once I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled, and they shot me up with Novocain. And my tongue also became numb. Unbeknownst to myself while I was under the Novocain, I had bit a hole in my tongue, not a big one but enough so that when the Novocain wore off, my tongue was throbbing in pain. And that pain sort of disrupted everything I was doing to the point that it overwhelmed my consciousness and overwhelmed my ability to get things done or to move around or to do anything. Fortunately, Allah has made things in such a way that your tongue heals quickly. And within a day or a day and a half or two days the pain was gone, and I was like a different person. Well, you should probably say a Fatiha after that kind of a recovery at least for the consciousness of understanding how close we are to being inoperable as beings at any moment and how there can be this amazing turn around so quickly that you go from inoperable to functioning as if that part of you that was inoperable is forgotten.Well, we don’t just deal with physical pain. We also deal with psychic pain and with mental difficulties or with difficulties in our own consciousness because of certain weaknesses in our personal being to the point where circumstances overwhelm us. And sometimes these kinds of situations are more difficult to overcome than the situations dealing with a physical bruise.