The path has many components and, depending on your proclivities, certain components are easier for you and certain components are harder for you. The path consists of formal rituals: ritual prayer, ritual recitations, ritual fasting, holiday celebrations, and attendance at formal community gatherings such as Jumu’ah. And then there’s another part, and that part has to do with understanding who you are, and finding the truth out about yourself, and cleansing yourself to become pure so that your attitudes take on a certain grace, and a certain luster, and a certain light.
The formalistic portion of the path is there to help you find yourself. But they both take certain kinds of discipline, and certain kinds of attitudes, and certain actions. In order to do the formalistic things on the path you have to be able to control yourself so that you can stop what you’re doing and pray certain times of the day. You have to be disciplined in a way that allows you to do this on a regular basis.
In the Islamic world, children are taught to do this from the time they’re very little, hoping that it will become habitual for them, and they’ll be able to do it over, and over, and over according to the way it’s prescribed. People who enter the path later in life have to create these habits, and sometimes, for people, it’s difficult to create these habits. It’s sometimes easier for them to do the other portion of the path, where with people who are used to doing the ritual, it’s sometimes difficult for them to do the other portion of the path.
What is the other portion of the path? It’s the part where you get to know who you are, and where you ask the question who am I? And you take the journey towards finding out who am I? And it is indicated by the Qutbs, and the prophets, and the wise ones that you have a connection to Allah, and that connection has been, and is in you, and is available to you to be you. In fact it is you, but what has happened is through your connection to the world, and your connection to illusion, and your participation in illusion you’ve lost touch, we have lost touch, with that portion of ourselves.
So, the question is, how do we regain our connection to that portion of ourselves, and what is it that’s stopping us from regaining that portion of ourselves? A lot of this has to do with the mind. The mind, using modern technology, is our interface with illusion and our interface with the illusory world, our interface with the elemental world. Our intellect is our interface with getting things done in the world. The intellect figures out how to do chores, how to do jobs, how to provide for us.
There is another section to us which is connected to the mind called desire, and it has to do with our physical senses. We see, we touch, we hear, we smell, we taste, and we want. We want the things we see, we hear, we feel, we touch, we taste. We desire things. And the mind then goes about attempting to fulfill our desires. And herein lies the crux of illusion…
