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…
Once a student of Mevlana Rumi asked him about the four stations of Tasawwuf. Mevlana told him to go ther room next door and asked him to slap each of the four students that were there. So the student slaped each of the four students in the room. The first one got up and slapped…
Fana in Sufism has been defined as the extinction of the Self. It has also been described as the experience where One realises One’s own NonBeing and God‘s Existence as the true self. It is often mentioned in Sufi poems and treatise. I thought it might be nice to look at some things on Fana.…
This theme is an advanced teaching. It presumes that we have to some extent developed a healthy capacity for will. By will we mean the capacity to choose consciously; and will power is the capacity to follow through on what we have consciously chosen. Only then can we glimpse the meaning of “Claim nothing, let…
I’ve been meaning to say some words on religion. Sometimes I think we have a toss the baby out with the bath water mentality. We have seen without a doubt the abuses of religion. I think human history in a large part has been shaped by conflicted expressed through ideology especially religious ideology. But nowadays,…
taken from History of Islamic Philosophy _____________ It is commonly said in the West that the Quran contains nothing of a mystical or philosophical nature, and that philosophers and mystics are not indebted to it in any way. Our concern here is not to argue about what Westerners find or fail to find in the Quran, but to…
