There was once a great shaikh who had a number of disciples and he also had a lion. The lion protected him from intruders, wild animals, anything that would come to harm him. The lion also protected all of the disciples. The lion would walk around with his tail wagging except when something was challenging the situation and then he would do what was necessary to take care of that. One of the disciples who thought he was ready to become the shaikh himself asked the shaikh if he could begin teaching. The shaikh said “If you think you are ready, that’s what you shouid do. Do you think you are ready?”
The student replied “yes” and the shaikh continued “Is there anything you would like from me to begin this path of teaching?”
The student replied “Yes, I would like a lion.”
The shaikh, in his meditation, saw a lion with two cubs further in the jungle. He asked that one of the two cubs be brought to him. When that was accomplished, the shaikh gave the cub to the disciple and told him to go and do what he thought he should do.
Well the disciple went out, and found a place where he thought he could live and he lived with the lion and he waited for disciples to come. Now lions grow pretty quickly. When the lion was a cub the disciple played with him all the time and petted him. Over time the lion grew larger and needed more and more food. He bought food for the lion. He got what he thought the lion needed, which was meat.
Now the shaikh, of course, had never fed his lion meat.
The lion was very sweet to the disciple. He would lick him all the time, but lions have very rough tongues. One time when the lion was licking him, the tongue scraped some skin, and there was blood. The lion was big and hungry by now. From the taste of the blood, the lion realized that the one who had been petting him was also meat. He reverted to being a lion and was about to go for the disciple’s throat. As that happened the shaiky appeared and stopped the lion, and he said to the disciple “In your arrogance you thought you could do what I do. But you never understood who I was. You never understood what I was and you never disappeared in me. It’s only through disappearing in me that you could understand how I do my work or who actually does the work. So, you thought you were doing the work. You were disappearing into the qualities of the world which gave you the arrogance to think you could do this. I have disappeared into the qualities of
Allah. That’s the difference between illusion and fanaa. Fanaa means that you finally disappear from your connection to the world. Until you truly understand who the shaikh is and what the shaikh is, you can’t do the shaikh’s work.”
The reason there are so many false teachers in the world is that when they view the shaikh and they view the situation of the shaikh, they see it as a place where individual honors come to, where people praise you, where people kiss your hand, where people give you offerings and they want that for themselves. But the shaikh doesn’t do things to have worldly needs satisfied. Different points of view see the same thing in an entirely different way. The point of view of arrogance sees aggrandizement from being a shaikh. Sees a big man. The shaikh himself has disappeared. He not only does not see a big man, he sees an ant man. When the disciple is capable of seeing the ant man, that one who is the smallest, the most discarded, the humblest of all of God’s creations and learns how to merge with that, then a man can do the work of the shaikh. But as long as arrogance exists that true work can’t be done. Why?
It’s really quite simple. Arrogance is not one of Allah’s qualities. The work of the shaikh is done by Allah through the shaikh. Arrogance acts as a block towards God’s qualities. They don’t intermingle with arrogance. They don’t intermingle with self motives. We who are students have to come to an understanding about what it is that we want, and what it is that we want to do. Do we want to get the praise and the acknowledgement and the applause of the world? Or do we want to disappear from the world so that we can actually do Allah’s work. Allah’s work begins with the work for ourselves and if that’s done appropriately, then we can begin to do work for others.
