The Witness Within

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bawa has told us that the world is full of hypnotisms and magnetisms, and what does that mean? What are these hypnotisms and magnetisms. Essentially, when you are going on this path, there are things that pull you off, things that take you away from the straight route, from the straight path. And they do it because of your inclinations. Now, your inclination is attracted to something that gives you access to that inclination. So, those points which give you access to the inclinations of your lower self are your hypnotisms and magnetisms.

Somewhere in the progress of civilization, man came to the conclusion that he couldn’t trust other men. And to assist with that understanding, they established police forces. And the purpose of these police forces was to monitor the activities of people to make sure that they didn’t do things that they weren’t supposed to do. Soon after police forces were developed, jails were developed because they had to figure out something to do with the people who did what they weren’t supposed to do and became sort of a menace to organized society.

We’re going to do something different today. I’m going to read a song by Bawa Muhaiyaddeen from his new book called “Life is a Dream.”It’s called “I Had a Dream,” and it was written in 1946.I had a dreamI had a dream about casting off my caresClosing my eyesAnd sleeping without sleeping