One of the most painful part of being a dervish is watching all your ideas and expectations get ripped to shreds. One cannot as Shah Nimatullah has said hold an opinion to sit in the circle of the Friend. Please don’t think it means that I can’t believe that the Knicks wont do well the coming year when the NBA comes back, or that I like my local dinner’s strawberry shortcake better than their Napolean. There is a deeper meaning to this.
I hear a lot lately all I know my experience, and that I know enough to see what is adequate for me. Sometimes I wonder at the validity of that situation. I know for me if I could see what is adequate i wouldn’t need a Sufi path, or people to help me, with everything they have so far spiritually financially, emotionally.
Spirituality, mysticism, the search for Truth or God, it all starts with an act of Humility – I cannot do this without You, I dont know unless YOU show me. I think, and I am biased of course, but can there be a thing such as human completeness without God ? Every tradition talks so much about humility. I think of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsamane after declaring both I am the son of God and I and my father are one. Imagine the savior, the Son of Man a prophet bending his knee and praying. Or imagine the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) praying asking God to show him things as they really. I cannot imagine any Prophet say “I know enough to see what is adequate for me”
I feel every religion, every mystical path, every sacred tradition has this act of submission. A shaman bows down to mother nature, the priest genuflects before the image of the Crucified Christ, the Muslim bows before the Ever Compassionate and Ever Living during the salat – the ritual prayer in Islam, Tibetan Buddhist do full body bows.
Just my thoughts though, let me know what you think?
Dave
__________
From Rumi:
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo.
You might say, “The world outside is vast and intricate.
There are wheatfields and mountain passes,
and orchards in bloom.At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight
the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.”You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up
in the dark with eyes closed.Listen to the answer.
There is no “other world.”
I only know what I’ve experienced.
You must be hallucinating.
The Second Stage of Fana: The Effacement of Attributes
Comprehension
The Central question we might ask of this attribute is, who is it in me who fully understands anything. The Quran Declares: God is All-Hearing (3:121). “He is the All-Hearing and the All Knowing (7:200) and “Allah can make any that He wills to hear (35:22)
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- Sufi Practices of Remembrance, Contemplation, Meditation, and Self examination (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- Spirituality and Sexuality taken from Forty Days: The Diary of a Traditional Solitary Sufi Retreatby Micahela Ozelsel (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- A Reader Prays for me to burn in Hell (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- The Inheritance of the Prophets and the Transference of Energy (2) (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- To Become a Sufi: Do I Need to Join a Sufi Order? by Dr. Stewart Bitkoff (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- A Comparison Between Sufism and Psychoanalysis (4) by Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh (mycaravanofdreams.com)
- Confronting our darkness from Love is a Fire – The Sufis Mystical Journey Home by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (mycaravanofdreams.com)
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- How Many Sufis Are There in Islam? by Stephen Schwartz (mycaravanofdreams.com)
