It is said that to know your Lord you must know yourself. The process of getting to know yourself is intricate, and complex, and takes an astute awareness of what is actually going on with you and through you at all times.
The main functioning organism within our being that we believe is consciousness, prior to enlightenment, is the mind, and we rely on the mind in order to get things done in this world. We rely on the mind to learn our lessons in school. We rely on the mind to learn how to function within the physical world.
Now, in the way that I was taught, it was explained to me that the mind is like a monkey; the mind sees and does, the mind imitates what it sees. The mind is incapable of knowing certain things; it’s incapable of knowing elevated things. The mind is not capable of understanding that which it doesn’t see, so the unseen is beyond the realm of the mind.
Understanding this, we should conclude that the study of haqq, the study of the truth, the study of reality, is beyond the comprehension of the mind. This must be studied through the heart. And how does that happen? How do we get out of the mind and re-concentrate in an area that is capable of becoming near to the divine?
The mind is a constant intrusion on our being, it never stops. It is constantly looking at everything that it sees and giving commentary on what it sees. The mind is judgmental, the mind is critical; the mind is constantly functioning in relationship to the elemental world. So, somehow we have to redirect our being from this constant interface and interaction with the elemental world to the spiritual world, to the world that is not seen. So, how do we do that? What has to happen?
We have to re-center our being so that our priority is not the elemental world. We have to re-center our being so that our thought process is not entirely about the elemental world. There’s no doubt that because we are a physical form, because we are made of the elements, we have to deal with the elemental world, and the mind becomes very helpful to deal with the elemental world.
But, after a while, we begin to understand that the elemental world is not all there is, and the elemental world is not where we can find satisfaction. For some people this takes years to come to that conclusion, for other people they come to that conclusion early in their lives. They see that what the elemental world has to give is temporary in nature and is fleeting in its effects.
Lust is fleeting, desire is fleeting; it’s fleeting until it gets something, and then it desires something else. There’s no stability to desire, it goes everywhere, so we need to re-center our being. We need not to be influenced by the mind, but to be influenced by more subtle things than the mind.
Wisdom is subtle. Wisdom is outside of the purview of the mind. Wisdom is separate from what the mind understands and does…
