Anyone who has spent time in Sufism has spent time with the vocabulary of Sufism, knows the word “insan” and the word “insan kamil” and understands that the intention within Sufism is to go from insan to insan kamil; “insan” being the word for a human and “insan kamil” meaning perfected human.
The path from human to perfected human is the path of Sufism, and it is said by the teachers, the gurus, the shaykhs within Sufism, and Bawa used to say it often, that in order to travel this path you need wisdom. So, an interesting question is: what is wisdom, and how do you get wisdom, and what do you do to incorporate it into your being?
Well, let’s look at the transformation of insan to insan kamil as a sort of alchemy, turning the dross into the pure, the gold. Turning lead into gold, but instead, turning humans into perfected humans. And, what is the agent that causes this transformation? What needs to be added to the human in order for the human to become perfected human? That part has a lot of answers, and we’ll just do some of them as best we can.
For starters, the agent is the shaykh, the agent is the teacher. And what is it that the teacher does to cause, or to bring about the causation, that brings wisdom into your being, and then causes the change from insan to insan kamil? What the teacher does, what the perfected teacher does, is he changes your inner dialogue, he shows you how to alter your inner dialogue.
Now if we think about our existence, and our traverse through this world, and if we look closely at ourselves, and one of the things we need to do is examine ourselves, and look closely at ourselves, because it’s through this knowing of the self that the changes occur. One of the things that we will note, almost immediately, is we have a constant dialogue that goes on in our head. We are constantly in the midst of a dialogue. We are constantly thinking about, talking about, considering, criticizing, going over, reminiscing, looking into the future in our head with words. And this dialogue goes on constantly.
Now, what is this dialogue? Well, the dialogue changes over time, changes with events, changes with our own inclinations, our own desires, and our own lusts, and there are many different kinds of lusts that we can be involved in.
So we may have an inner dialogue that is constantly talking about money, how to get money. We may have an inner dialogue that is constantly talking about our job, or our profession; how to get better at it, what to do within it. We may have an inner dialogue that feels sorry for itself, so it’s constantly talking about how we’ve been taken advantage of, and what we need to do in order to change that situation. We may have an inner dialogue that’s constantly involved in resentment because we’re not getting things the way we want. We may have an inner dialogue that is constantly looking at everything else, and wondering, “Why that isn’t mine?” We may have an inner dialogue as someone with a narcissistic complex does that’s just about ourselves, “I am this, I am that, I am this and how do I get other people to recognize the great grandeur that is me?”
There are lots of different inner dialogues, they’re spread all over the place, and they cover anything that you can consider, and people take the time for these inner dialogues.
In the Amazon, somebody is walking around right now having an inner dialogue on how he’s going to get the tip of his spear in his blowpipe into a monkey so they can have dinner. That’s his inner dialogue.
What’s your inner dialogue, and why are you having this inner dialogue?
What the guru does is he alters this inner dialogue, and he changes it from the kind of dialogue that a human has to the kind of dialogue that a true human has. How does he do it? By dialoguing to you, by talking to you in the way that a true human being does, to give you the ideas of what a true human being thinks about, what a true human being encounters, what a true human being does.
“Dialogue” is an expansive word, and when I use it, I’m not just talking about the words that go on in your head, because you also have a dialogue through action, you also have a dialogue through what you do. It’s expanding the word a little bit, but you have to expand it in that way to get a true feeling for all of this.
So, you can have this inner dialogue about how you’re going to get your car fixed to make it go faster, or you can have an inner dialogue about, “What is my place in creation, and who is my Creator?” These are two very clear and precise examples of the kinds of things that your mind can be talking about.
Now, what the shaykh does is, he brings in the dialogue about the Creator…
