There is a certain reciprocal nature to existence. That which you put out there is that which comes back to you in one way or another. As the Beatle said “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” Now, we need to understand this and how it works. Bawa [Muhaiyaddeen] had a saying which he repeated quite often. It went “God is a beggar to a beggar, a king to a king, a poet to a poet.”
When you think about it, what exactly does that mean? How is it explained? What is the point that is being made?
I’ve looked at it something like this, if you are a king and you show power to your subjects, God will be much more powerful than you can be to you. If you are a poet, Allah will show you poetry that far exceeds anything that you can do. If you are humble and surrendered, then Allah will be humble and surrendered to you, so that your interaction with the way things are in reality is the inner workings of the qualities you display. Those qualities are what are going to come back to you.
If we throw out arrogance, arrogance is going to rebound on us. It is also said, if you take a step toward God, He will take ten steps toward you. Think about it, God is everywhere and involved in everything. Where you step, He steps back and in whatever way you step, He steps back. Imagine if that meant, if you take in arrogance, ten steps in arrogance will come back at you. If you take a step in mercy, ten steps in mercy will come back at you. Understand that you are an integral link in what it is that steps toward you, in what it is that comes toward you. As you develop in an appropriate way, appropriate things come toward you. But, they come to you much quicker than you put them out because God is merciful and He helps the ones who are going back to Him at a minimum of ten times to one. So, if you are running away from Him, if you are pushing away, He will push you further away. In the way that He will give you bring in a stronger potion.
Everybody wants to know what their destiny is going to be like. Everybody wants to know what’s going to happen to them next. Well think about what you are doing because that is what is going to happen to you next. The method of your encounter with the world is going to be the method of the encounter of the world with you. The method of your encounter with existence is going to be the method of existence’s encounter with you. In a very real sense, as opposed to reading our horoscopes, we should be reading ourselves.
We should be doing the study of self-reflection and self-knowledge because as we get to know our self, we will then get to know who we are and where we are going.
