The Witness Within

As one travels throughout the world, one runs into different political systems, different religious systems, different cultures. One of the things that people notice as they travel throughout the world is that religions change in different parts of the world. People view their relationship with God within a certain framework that is different from one place to another. In addition, there are differences between the extent of the coersion of the political system and the religious system. Some places allow you to believe as you wish. Some places don’t.

The mind is our closest and most constant companion. We have lots of friends who know a little bit about us and who spend time with us and have known us for different portions of our lives, but our mind has known us since we were born. And depending on the acuity of our memory, it remembers all that we’ve been through or at least a pretty good portion of what we’ve been through. And it highlights certain portions of our existence. It’s so close to us and has spent so much time with us and knows so much about us that sometimes that’s who we think we are. And we begin to believe that we are in direct relation to what we think. We are what we think; we are our memories as if they somehow comprise us. And this of course has certain consequences on our being.

We live in a world of form, and each of us is encased in form. Yet we are told that reality exists in a formless state, that He is beyond form and description. The Quran prohibits the use of images. The Torah prohibits the use of images. And many of the Protestant churches don’t use images. Why the prohibition against images, and what’s the meaning of this prohibition? Our attachment to form is so great and so overwhelming that we need to be commanded directly from Allah not to create images. Is it the creation of the image or the attachment to the image? The hypnotic pull, the magnetism that exists between ourselves and form is such that we, in order to have faith in reality, to have faith in the truth as opposed to hallucinations, have to somehow break our reliance and attachment to form.Interestingly enough, as people become wealthier, they build bigger homes, more grandiose forms to exist in. But if you travel the world, what are the most grandiose forms that we witness? I just came back from Turkey, and I can tell you the most grandiose forms in Turkey are mosques. The most grandiose forms in Rome are churches. With all these prohibitions, religions still create form for the sake of the majesty of form to give forth somehow the majesty of the One who is being worshiped, as if form can instill majesty in you. Well, maybe it can. But I’ve witnessed the Kabba, and the Kabba is as simple a form as is possible. And this was the first house of prayer, and all it is essentially is a bunch of blocks made into a small rectangular building. This connection to form and this attachment to form influences us on many levels.

I grew up in a small town, a farming community. And while I lived there, that little place to me was the center of the universe. I thought that’s the way things were, and all examples of everything could be found within the confines of the small town that I grew up in. Travelling was something we didn’t do very often. And when we did, what today is considered a short excursion, at that time was a major event. But since we did it so infrequently, the impact of wherever we went never really moved me all that much, and it was almost as if it went in and out of my consciousness very quickly as I returned to the center of the world, which was where I lived. In my consciousness there was really no place for anywhere else at that time. And there was an inability to even recognize or need to recognize the existance of other places.As time went on, I began to see more and more places. And then, I began to travel frequently. And now I do travel frequently to far flung places around the world hours from here – ten, twelve hours from here by airplane. And when I arrive there, there’s a perfectly orderly civilization going on, speaking an entirely different language than we speak, having an entirely different set of ideas about things than we have here. And to these people in this other place, all of it makes particular sense. And the centrality of the focus that goes on back home for me sort of disappears and its relevance sort of becomes questionable.

The great saint Rabia said, “I don’t desire heaven, and I don’t fear hell,” a well-known iconic statement. What’s it mean? In the understanding of things at the end of times, people are going to be doing things for two reasons and two reasons only. They are going to be looking for rewards, a desire for reward, and in response to fear of punishment. So, the motivations for people’s acts are going to be getting what they want and not being punished. Well, what Rabia is saying is that she doesn’t care about reward or punishment. She’s not afraid of hell, and she doesn’t desire heaven.

We speak of this life and the next life. We speak of the time before this earthly body occurred and the time after. This body as we know it disappears. Well, if we are talking about times before, during, and after this body; we must consider what is the function of this body in our existence and who or what were we before this body and who or what are we after this body because we are all very conscious of the fact that people die. Even though we may not truly cognate that fact, especially when it comes to ouselves, we do see it. Whether or not it impacts us and has an effect on us to make us realize that the same thing is going to happen to us is another question. But the point is, we’ve all seen it, and we all know it happens.