We all have heard the word “Alchemy” and we know about Alchemists, and they would change lead into gold. Now the big search about the ancient Alchemists was to find the agent that they could throw on the lead and make it turn into gold because they needed the medium that could accomplish that.
Well Sufism is about changing ordinary man into perfected man, about changing the way we are into what Sufism calls “insan kamil – perfected man”. Many of us have had the opportunity in our lifetime to meet a perfected man and when there is that meeting with perfected man you can see the difference. You can see how the qualities are extraordinary, how the love is beyond imagination, and how the general being is different than what you see in what we call normative society.
So the question, which really becomes self-evident, is what is the agent that turns man into perfected man. What makes that transformation occur? What’s the alchemy that does that? And the Sheikhs, and the Teachers and the Gurus tell us that it’s wisdom. Somehow we need to encounter wisdom, And with that encounter things will change.
Well, what is wisdom, and how do we encounter it? One of the ways that you encounter it is through a Sheikh, through somebody who already has it. So they become a painting of wisdom, a manifestation of wisdom. Alive, wise being that somehow has been put in your path so you can see what it looks like. The usual analogy is a mirror. They become a mirror so that you can see what you actually have inside of you. Well that interesting thing about mirrors is that they show you what you are. Ah, think about that; so if a Sheikh, if a live Sheikh is a mirror for you, he’s showing you what you have.
Take that a step further, it’s already inside of you. We just need to bring it alive; we need to somehow make it happen. We need to somehow take what has been given to us, that has been subdued, and suppressed and run over by illusion and bring it back to its full fold, bring it back to what it’s capable of being.
So we need to be able to make the effort to lift ourselves up so that we can find the wisdom within us and then have it work on us. But you see, a lot of things have to fall in place for you to be able to do that: First you have to be willing to do that, and that doesn’t seem like it’s such a difficult thing but it’s the most difficult thing, because to be able to be willing to meet wisdom head-on and to incorporate wisdom you also have to be willing to give up all of the things that have suppressed wisdom in you all of these years. All the things that have suppressed wisdom from coming to the forefront.
So when you meet this wise man, when you meet this mirror, and when you see what you can be something has to happen inside where, all of a sudden, you want to be what you can be, and you want to be it more than you want not to be it, you want to be it more than you love the world, you want to be it more than you love the illusory nature of existence, you want to be it more than all of the gratifications that you get from the world. And we get lots of different kinds of gratifications from the world. And depending to whom you speak, they will tell you about what it is that gratifies them in the world.
The three major gratifications are: wealth, women (or men) and power, People enjoy these things. People spend their life chasing these things, and they believe that these things will give them satisfaction. So somebody in the midst of chasing money, if you tell him, “You’d really be much better off sitting still and thinking about God”, they’re not going to spend a lot of time with you.
Somebody in the midst of lust, chasing whatever it is they’re chasing, and by the way, lust doesn’t apply just to sexual relationships – it applies to everything. We can have lust for money, we can have lust for fame, we can have lust for power, well somebody in the middle of that kind of lust, and imagine that that lust in people is very similar to an elephant chasing a mate. It’s that kind of out of control lust which people have. And if you tell them, ”You’d really be much better off sitting still and understanding the qualities of God’” They’re not going to listen, but what will happen Is if somehow they are able to spend some time with someone who is at peace. If they’re able to spend some time with someone who has thrown off the shackles and the burdens and the weight of all these lusts because boy they keep you busy, and they keep you tired, and they keep you straining, and they keep you involved. If they’re able to meet somebody whose thrown them off who doesn’t seem to have all the anxiety, and all the difficulty that these lusts bring for a second the thought may come to them, “Wow their life seems easier than mine and I have so much more, what is really going on here?”
