Most of you know the early history of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen as far as recent history, but I want to go over a little bit of it. In the mid-to-late 30’s someone met him outside of a city called Jaffna in Sri Lanka and they recognized that there was something extraordinary about him, and that he carried with him a holiness that they had never encountered in their lives before. They asked him if it would be possible for him to come to their town and to teach them, and he indicated that he would come, in about six months, and teach.
Six months later he showed up and he began to teach in Sri Lanka. He began to pass on to the people in Jaffna, the city where he was at that time, that which had come to him, and that which he had become. In other words, he brought his state of being into a community, and exposed what that state of being was, tried to explain that state of being, and tried to make that state of being available to the people that he encountered.
Now, that’s what real teaching is about; bringing a state of being to people, allowing them to encounter it, allowing them to understand it, and then, allowing them to become that.
There is a long history of Sufis who used to go from town, to town, to town preaching, but their preaching wasn’t so much about text and scripture, it was about what to become as a human being, and how to become a human being. In order to be able to learn this teaching, you can’t do what you do in school. You can’t read a text, memorize it, and then repeat it to the teacher because that’s not the point of it.
Four weeks ago or so, I was in New York, giving a talk, and after it was over one of the young women at the talk came up to me and repeated the major points in the talk that I had given, because she had a quick mind and she grasped them.
Now the next question is, which I didn’t ask her by the way, was, “Can you now incorporate that into your being? Can you take these words, can you take this methodology, and make it who you are; bring it into action?”
Now, there’s a couple of ways to explain this but here’s a simple one: we can talk about cars, but in order to make cars, we need to have a factory that can produce cars. So we have talk, and then we have factories, and factories make what people think of and talk about, and it doesn’t have to be cars, it can be chocolate. You can talk about chocolate or you can make chocolate. Or even simpler: you can talk about bread, or you can finally learn how to bake bread so you can have bread. There’s a manufacturing process that goes on between talk and production.
One of the things that we talk about in these discourses on Sufism, and what we hear from our teachers in Sufism, is about love. Now the interesting thing is that these teachers who talk to us, they actually make love, and they hand it out, and they spread it out, and they make it available to people.
Now, we can then become consumers of love, but if we consume love, it doesn’t have a very long-lasting effect. Because of the nature of the greed of man, he takes as much as he can get and uses it all up pretty quickly. So what do we need to be able to do? We need to learn how to make love in the same way that these teachers make love and have an abundance of it so it can be given out. We need to become a love factory; so that we can make love and that there is an abundance of it so that it can be given out. So there’s not only enough for us, there’s enough for those around us to take from and to learn.
You can have a few pieces of chocolate, and it feels good when you’re eating it, but it runs out, but if you have a chocolate factory, there’s enough chocolate for you, and enough chocolate for everybody around you.
So we need to learn how to manufacture love, and this is an entirely different concept than being in love, or wanting love, or loving something. This is understanding what the nature of compassion and mercy are, and how compassion and mercy join to make love which is an unconditional love with an unconditional nature. So we become incredibly tolerant, incredibly giving, incredibly patient, and in becoming those things we become a being that can manufacture love.
But in order to become a being that can manufacture love, there has to be other things in us that have been done away with. You can’t manufacture love and be arrogant simultaneously; you can’t manufacture love and be hasty simultaneously, you can’t manufacture love and be jealous simultaneously, you can’t manufacture love and carry resentment simultaneously, you can’t manufacture love and be angry simultaneously. Think about it…
