Man has taken on this funny idea that they can somehow appoint people as representatives of God, or they can somehow anoint people as representatives of God. Representatives of God are only those who somehow become representatives of God by becoming worthy of being representatives of God.
So all of these self-made appointments by men lead to a kind of destruction when those appointments are connected to very powerful armies and power. The Islamic religion has a sect of it that used to have an overriding principle that the religious leaders would run the religion and secular leaders would run the country; the politics, the day to day business of the country. Recently that was changed in Iran where Khamenei basically said that the time has come that the Ayatollahs’ should also rule the government as opposed to just the religious portion of the country. This went against a very, very long tradition that had been established for a very, very long time. And we can all see what’s happening to Iran right now because of that change in policy.
Now personally, I think that the institution of that policy was brilliant. It was one of the first separations of church and state but not in the same way as we think of it. And why should state be separated from church? Because once the church and the state become combined, and the state has arms and becomes powerful, all of a sudden everything that the state does is on behalf of God. And the emotional upheaval that causes among its people, and the emotional fervor that it causes among its people leads to what right now and for ages in all religions has been one of the great dangers to the world; which is religious fanaticism.
So if you combine religious fanaticism with guns, you’ve got a real problem. All of a sudden the things you’re doing are not for power, or real estate, or wealth, or control; they’re for God. And then you appoint somebody to be the Head of State and you call him a “Pope” or a “Khalif “ and all of a sudden the person leading this is God representative, God’s representative. So now you have God’s representative leading an onslaught of war for God.
These kinds of mistakes are the kinds of mistakes that lead to the kind of destruction that’s in the world right now.
Let’s look at Sufism, and why was Sufism created? What’s the need for Sufism? If there’s already established religion why do you need Sufism? Why isn’t the religion enough?
Well, one of the reasons is that Sufi’s are very small groups, and for the most part they don’t have political power, and they don’t have military power. And to make your way towards Allah you need to be without military needs and without political needs. Because once political needs and military needs enter into the equation they overwhelm Godly needs and Godly desires.
It’s just like if we spend all of our time individually in the pursuit of money, or in the pursuit of fame, we can’t establish a personal pursuit of God. So we have to make a decision to either pursue God or pursue the world. And Sufism, in its earlier incarnations was an order, not monastic, but like monastic in that the pursuit was for God and a rejection of the governmental worldly powers, a rejection of the governmental political powers.
So the question really comes down to: is there such a thing as organized religion and does organized religion really make any sense? Or should religion be like the Sufis’ in small groups with an overriding set of principles yet isolated by themselves sort of separated from the world doing what they can do to form a relationship with Allah?
