Imagine along the coastline, like we have on the east coast of the US, and imagine many different harbors, and many different boats. Now, just because they come from different harbors, does not indicate where they’re going, it just indicates where they’re starting.
The ocean has to be crossed, and it doesn’t matter which harbor you start from, you still have to cross the ocean.
Our teacher, Muhammad Rahim Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, described illusion as an ocean, and an ocean that has to be crossed. And he indicated that there are many different harbors that people start from; the different religions. No matter where you start it’s the same ocean you have to cross. No matter where you start illusion still sits in front of you. And no matter what you call it or how you describe it; you have to somehow get across it.
So, we begin. We begin wondering: why, how, who? And we look for answers. But on the way to looking for answers, we run into our lives and we become consumed by our lives. And instead of continuing to wonder: why, who, and how? We become distracted by our daily needs and activities. How am I going to get an education? How am I going to support myself? How am I going to get married? Am I going to have children? Where am I going to live? How do I get the proper housing?
And these things begin to consume our lives, and because of that we forget that we had questions at one time. And the questions were: how did I get here? Why am I here? Who am I?
And we build up these layers of life that we call, and treat, as if they were real when actually, they’re part of the illusion that we have to cross. We forgot not only who we were, we forgot that we were involved in the journey to find out who we were. So we abandoned our journey. We’ve abandoned our search in order to take care of what appeared to be our needs, our present needs, our constant incessant needs, our desires that scream to be fulfilled.
Then as we go along, as we travel through life, every once in a while we run into situations that somehow bring truth back into focus. We’re moving along, working, making a living, getting married, having babies, and then something happens; we become ill, and all of a sudden this continuous ongoing cycle has a break in it; something happened. Or we have an accident and there’s a break in the cycle. Or a relative and a friend dies, who had been doing exactly the same thing that we were doing, was the same age as we were, and all of the sudden they disappeared.
And so now we ask ourselves, “Could this happen to us too? What am I looking for? What am I chasing? What am I trying to accomplish?
