I’m going to do something I’ve rarely done. We’re going to start with a poem. It’s a story that I’m sure all of us know, and I did it in rhyming couplets. It’s called Moses:
Moses on Mt. Sinai climbed,
To gain the words God had divined,
But in his mind a worry rose,
Distraught about his worldly woes.
His wife with unborn child did lay,
And her condition on his mind did play,
He lost his attention on the divine,
And in his mind came thoughts of “mine”,
God called to him three times awake,
I beckon thee to not forsake,
The mission I have sent you on,
In my midst have you become forlorn?
Awake Moses! Make your choice,
And with a start Moses heard God’s voice,
It said to Moses, “Look over there,”
Moses responded, “Where? Where?”
The stone that lies beneath your toe,
Move it over, an inch or so.
Moses moved it his mind ablaze,
And saw a frog on grass agraze.
And a drop of water from the ground did burst,
To satisfy the frog’s small thirst,
Moses forlorn cried,
“My Lord, You I have denied,
Both large and small do you command,
All that exists is in your hand,
You say the word and I obey,
No longer will I, your trust betray,
You are the Father of all that is,
and your care is without remiss,
There is no thing you do not know,
And in that knowledge our faith does grow,
And as our faith becomes sublime,
We lose our attachment to the “mine”,
We grow instead attached to Thee,
And fall in praise in your mystery.
This is a story that Bawa used to tell often about Moses on the way to Mt. Sinai to get the Torah, the words of Allah, and Moses lost his trend of thought. He went from one state to another, and then back to another state. And this is one of the core difficulties in our life; when we lose our state how do we reclaim it? How do we get back to where we have tried to be when the mind and the “mine” take us over? When the compulsions of the world become such that we can no longer keep ourselves affixed to the truth and instead fall prey to the nature and the state of the illusion that we sometimes live in.
How do we keep the appropriate state and how do we stay in the appropriate state? Allah spoke to Moses directly, which I believe probably made it a little easier. But for us, we have to know, that Allah speaks to us too. We just have to be able to pick up the signals, and Allah is constantly reminding us, we just have to pick up the signals. And in the truth of the matter, we have to learn that periods of time when we lose our way can be short periods of time, or very long periods of time.
You can leave the path in a conversation and not come back for ten years. And we all know people to whom that’s happened. It never occurred to them that they’ve left the path that they’ve left the way, that they’ve left what they’re striving for, and we as individuals have to regularly assess our state. And, one of the reasons for the Five Times Prayer is to be able to do a constant assessment of your state, or at the very least, set up a constant return to an attempt to make a connection with the real as opposed to being an illusion.
The methodology of prayer, at least formal prayer, is to pull yourself out of the world for a little while and not let it interfere with what you’re doing, and that’s why it happens so often in the day, so that forgetfulness doesn’t last too long, so that you can be constantly brought back. Now of course, if while the prayer goes on, all that’s going on internally is a reconsideration of what happened in the last two hours, and what’s going to happen in the next two hours afterwards, then nothing is going on.
So we need to understand that for things to really occur there has to be an internal connection. We need to understand that somehow we have to attach ourselves to reality and distance ourselves from illusion. We have to be able to truly understand the non-importance of the things that are not important…
