When we first came to our encounter with Muhammad Rahim Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, there were no books, there were no videotapes, and there were no audiotapes. There were a lot of people sitting around with those little recorders they used to have then, pressed to record and we would take them home. But then, within about a year, the first book came out. The first book was called “The Divine Luminous Wisdom That Dispels the Darkness, Man-God, God-Man” and now, after forty years, I realize that the title to that book was the core of the entire teaching. He’s been explaining “The Divine Luminous Wisdom That Dispels the Darkness, Man-God, God-Man” for his entire life.
That book particularly started out by explaining the seven states of consciousness and then going into little stories, Sufi tales, and that was basically the extent of the book. But we need to consider: what is that? What does that mean: The Divine Luminous Wisdom That Dispels the Darkness, God-Man, Man-God?
It’s talking about a state that is beyond ignorance: wisdom. And wisdom is the state where you begin to understand the truth about this enigma that we live in. And you begin to learn that we are caught in a duality; we are caught between our physical state and our spiritual state. We’re in some sort of in-between state. We are also, constantly, in an object-subject relationship with our senses. When our senses interact with the world what happens? If I hold out my hand, and somebody takes my hand, like my wife for instance; I’m holding her, she‘s holding me, we are sensing each other.
When I look with my eyes, I see something and I react to it; there’s me and there’s what I see, there’s me and there’s what I touch, there’s me and there’s what I smell, there’s me and there’s what I hear. Every time we’re involved in a sensory perception there is duality: me and what I am involved with.
The operating forces within us have different levels of comprehension and different levels of understanding. The lower-self, the nafs ammarah, the ego-driven forces that have the direction to promote the “I”, to promote the “self”, when they are involved with the object-subject relationship, always take it to the same place: what can it do for me? How can I use it? How can I incorporate this to make myself more satisfied? What can it do to help me?
The Divine Luminous Wisdom dispels that darkness. When we are constantly involved with things that we’re trying to manipulate, that we’re trying to use for ourselves, we believe that we’re getting something out of it. But in truth, we are becoming slaves to what we’re trying to manipulate…
