The Witness Within

Imagine if you had a job, and your boss sent you somewhere to accomplish a specific task. And when you got there, you got involved in about ninteen other things and came back and then told the boss, “Well, I did this…this…and this, but I didn’t do what you had asked me to do. If the boss wanted that one thing done and that was the most important thing to him, what’s the use of the other things that you’d have accomplished? What was the reason that you did those other things as opposed to what you had been asked to do? What was it that put you in the direction to do what came to you as opposed to what you were told to do?All of us who have read mystical tracts and who’ve been around Sufism know that Allah created man so that He could be known. Now, that’s a direct imperative. We were created so that He could be known, yet what is it that we’re doing here?

In this world we make a lot of assumptions. A lot of these assumptions are based on what we are taught and the way our culture views certain things. Essentially what the culture does is it prioritizes things. It considers certain things good and certain things bad, certain things high and certain things low, certain things successful and certain things unsuccessful. And we as individuals, because we live in the culture, are raised with these assumptions, and we buy into them. Now, the interesting thing about the word “culture” is, if you turn it around, it becomes “ure cult.” So, all of us throughout the world live in small cults, and each of these cults have their own rules and regulations and assumptions. In our culture — and when I say our culture, I’m talking about the Western culture, particularily in America — there are certain assumptions that are preeminent within the society. It’s better to be rich than to be poor. That’s probably one of the major assumptions within the society. It’s better to have things than not to have them. It’s better to be powerful than not to be powerful. It’s better to have titles than not to have titles. In other words, it’s a society which has, at least recently, been drenched with the position that accumulation is good.

It’s very difficult to conceptualize what we can’t see. It’s very difficult to imagine what we’ve never encountered. Even though people explain things to us and tell us that this is the way things are, it’s difficult for us to incorporate ideas into our being as if they were real until we somehow are able to fully grasp them and integrate their meaning into ourselves. For instance, when people say, “We’re all the same,” and when we look around, and we don’t look the same…We can’t walk through each other because we bump into each other and knock each other over. So what does this, “We’re all the same,” mean? How are we all the same?When teachers tell us it’s necessary for us to feel the pain of others in order for us to become advanced because that’s the true state of our nature is that we’re all combined. And when we separate ourselves from others’ feelings, we separate ourselves from the truth — it’s hard to conceptualize that. It’s hard to truly understand what that means because we have an external nature and an internal nature. And as we walk through the world, we see the external nature.Now, imagine ice cubes, and imagine if I took a large number of ice cubes and put them in some water. And the water was cold and we were churning the water somehow. Now, these ice cubes would be constantly bumping into each other. They also float because ice weighs less than water. So, these ice cubes are above the water floating in something that’s exactly the same as them. Yet, there’s all this turmoil between the ice cubes, and there’s no turmoil in the water below them. Yet, somebody tells the ice cubes, “You’re all the same! And the fact that you’re bumping into each other and banging into each other doesn’t really mean anything! It’s false! It’s an illusion! That’s not what’s going on. What’s going on is what’s underneath of you that you really can’t see where it’s all the same.”

In religion there is often a difficulty between the form and the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the form. And the ones who believe very very strongly in the form see those in the spirit as apostates or heretics. They see them as a danger to their well thought out world that they’ve put together and that they’ve described and that they’ve given rules and regulations to.I was recently in Turkey giving a series of talks. And in talking privately to a number of people, their concern was that they wanted a return to the time of the Prophet. They wanted to be able to do things the way they were done at the time of the Prophet, and they were trying to figure out how to do that. And they were trying to imitate what went on then in the best way that they could. However, it was problematic for them. They saw all the difficulties in Islam right now and they were quick to blame it on the fact that people were no longer following the way of the Prophet, but they didn’t seem to be able to grasp what the way of the Prophet was. They didn’t seem to be able to grasp what it was that was different about that time and this time and how to integrate that time into this time. And most of their efforts to do that involved formulistic sorts of things.

“Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there — heaven.” Those are the words that start an old spiritual. There are more words to it, but that is the refrain. It’s an interesting refrain because talking about it isn’t the same as doing something about it. There are lots of implications from the refrain, but I’m going to choose to use that implication. “Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there — heaven.” Essentially, if you’re going to take a trip, you have to make some sort of preparation. And if you’re going to heaven or if you intend to go to heaven, if you intend to go towards that which you imagine as heaven — let’s call it enlightenment — there has to be some sort of preparation that has to go on in the effort to accomplish that goal. And we have to ask ourselves what is the effort that we’re involved in. What do we do to make it possible for us to be in an appropriate state to touch that thing we call heaven, to touch that thing we call enlightenment, to touch that thing we call reality? What have we done for ourselves to put ourselves in a place where that’s feasible? Or do we just talk about it? Do we just give it lip-service? Do we just sit around and discuss it?If you have a very good friend, you would be spending time with that friend because you like being in that friend’s presence. If you want to make God your friend, you need to spend time with Him. You need to put yourself in His presence. And how do you put yourself in His presence? There are the prescribed ways, which are prayer. And prayer is, at the very least, if you trying to do some kind of formalist prayer…prayer is, at the very least, the setting forth of an intention that during certain times of the day, I am setting my being aside for God, for Allah, for the position that I’m taking that in my life, this is important enough for me to stop whatever I’m doing in order to have some sort of relationship with God.Now, that relationship is at different levels of depth because if the relationship is merely showing up at a place and that is considered a sufficient action by you, then that will get you one set of accomplishments. It will be an accomplishment that you’ve formed a habit that you stop during the day and you go somewhere to establish a relationship with God. How far does that relationship go? What happens besides showing up? What happens when you’re actually there?

Among young people, videos games is something that a lot of them do. And there are different types of video games. But one of the consistent genres is the war game where you are the shooter, and your perspective in this game is essentially looking through the barrel of a gun or rather over the sight of a gun. And you keep going through rooms with this perspective. So, you’re constantly seeing everything as if you’re looking through a scope, and it’s a wide scope so you see quite a bit. But that’s you’re perspective, and then when you come upon things, you react to them. Now, when I saw this perspective, I found it very interesting because you had a full scope of what was in front of you, but of course, you didn’t see yourself. And actually you were put into a really narrow focus of the perspective that the sight of the gun had.However, we walk around that way when we look at the world. Our perspective comes from the scope that is our eyes. We see the entire world in front of us as we walk around, and the peripheral view of our perspective is a little bit wider than a gun scope. But essentially, that’s the kind of perspective that we have. Everything is in our sights except us. We see everything outside of us. We don’t see us. And it’s interesting because in our reaction to ourself, we don’t react to our visual presence because we’re not seeing our visual presence. We’re reacting to ourself through whatever’s inside our head and the entire amalgam of emotions that we carry that watches this perspective in front of us. So, it should be very evident that we see everybody very differently than we see ourself. And it’s been set up that way.We see everybody entirely differently than we see ourself. Whenever we look at somebody, we look at their face. We never look at our face unless we’re looking in a mirror or through pictures, etc. The point is in our normal conversations, we’re looking at somebody. They’re looking at us. But none of us is looking at ourself. This is part of what causes this major disconnect between ourself and everybody else.

Freud is generally considered the father of psychology. What is psychology? Well, when Freud came along, all of a sudden people in the medical circles began to think about the psychological makeup of their patients and what they could do to help people who had no apparent physical ailments but had really difficult psychological ailments. They locked a lot of these people up. Of course, in the beginning a lot of this dealt with people on the severe end of these psychological problems. But as time progressed and as psychology progressed, they found that they could work with people to try and resolve some of their own internal conflicts and to make them more normal within the definition of normal that the society had. And now we have analysts and psychologists and all kinds of people for people to go to in order to get some kind of help with their own personal problems and situations.I did a little looking into Freud because I was interested…I had an inkling of where he got his basic information from, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and verify what I had thought. And what I found was that his parents were Hasidic, which means, for those of you who don’t know, they belonged to a Jewish mystical sect. And there is literature that Hasidism joined with Sufism some time in the eleventh century in Spain when the Jews and the Arabs lived in Spain together. And the Hasidic thought came out of a milieu of mystical Sufistic thought. So, if he came from a Hasidic background, that meant that he had access to Hasidic ideas and Hasidic philosophy. He also was in touch with some other people who gave him some of this insight and some of this philosophy. What’s the point?What he did was he took what had been existent for a long time and known for a long time and turned it into a Western science. And what happens when you turn things into science? You take God out of them. Now let’s go back to what is Sufism about. And this is really what’s interesting. One of the major understandings in Sufism is that to know your Lord, you must know yourself. Psychology is trying to get you to know yourself. But what’s the end of knowing yourself? To know yourself! What’s the end of knowing yourself in Sufism? To know God. So, what’s going on in Sufism is really a kind of psychology or an understanding of your own psychological makeup in order that you can go from the state that you are in now to the state of insan kamil or true human being.

There are still Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museums in the world, and a few days ago I passed one. There was a loudspeaker in front of it trying to draw you in. It was talking about the lizard-man, who had had his entire body tatooed as a lizard, and he only had a little bit left to go. And he would be a lizard entirely. I thought this was interesting. If you tatoo yourself in a certain way, you become the picture of what you want to be, and then somehow you become that or at least they were indicating that he would become a lizard-man. There are tatoo parlors all over the place. People put on themselves pictures which sort of signify who they are. And that goes into this whole understanding in our society of trying to identify who we are.From the time you’re a little kid in America, people come up to you and ask you, “Well, what are you going be when you grow up?” And usually kids answer something like a fireman or a policeman or a doctor or a lawyer or president or a thousand and one other things. Somehow we have gotten into our heads that you are what you do or you are what you look like. You are something that’s visible, that can be seen, that somehow you portray yourself as something. Imagine what it must be like for somebody who came from a culture far from this one like any immigrant who came from a culture that’s very distinct from the American culture. And they brought with them all their identity clues and identity fixations and identity parameters that they covered themselves in and they identified themselves with. Then, they came here and they had a kid. And they sent their kid to public school. And this thousand years of culture that they came from, where everybody was like their parents, was like their parents, was like their parents, all of a sudden had a child who’s nothing like them, who speaks a different language than them, who doesn’t accept what they tell them, who has no loyalty to all of the things that they knew, that are now, by the way, shadows in their own head because they can’t even see them anymore because they’ve left that place, but it’s as if they carried it with them here.There are people who come from other cultures and when there is a group of them, they all gather together in small places, and they continue the culture. And some of them never leave the area because that’s reality for them. And to step outside of that is to step outside of reality. In other words, this place that they’ve moved to isn’t real. Everything that’s going on here isn’t real. They just happen to live here. But they’ve created a reality on their block and a half in Queens that’s entirely as close as they could get it to where they came from. We need to think about identity because one of the first questions on this spiritual path is, “Who are you?” And if you can’t get a handle on “Who are you?” or “Who am I,” if you can’t get a handle on all of the various influences that impact you in that understanding, you’re never going to get a handle on the reality of who you are.