Anyone who has been involved in acting, or whosever seen a play, or whosever seen a movie understands that individuals take on a persona when they act, a different persona than their own.
There used to be an acting school in New York that taught something called “The Method”. “The Method” meant that you got to study the persona that you were taking on and you attempted to become that persona. And you would do this through studying motivation and the reasoning why the person did the things they did in that play or in that screenplay. By doing that, the performance that you gave would appear to be more real and have a stronger impact.
Interesting: actors study fake personalities to assume made-up personalities to be able to give them reality. Yet we have our own situation and we don’t spend a lot of time studying who that is, who we are, and what are the motivations that drive us.
The great Sufi Sheikh Ibn Arabi said, “To know your Lord you must know yourself” and therein lies a very large portion of what Sufism is about, at what Sufism tries to teach. Sufism takes you on a path to your Lord, but it takes you on a path to your Lord through yourself. So, in the process of getting to know yourself, you are able to become closer to your Lord.
The questions arise: how do you get to know yourself?
Well, there’s a story about two bullfrogs that were in competition and they finally confronted each other. And, bullfrogs are large frogs and they also have the ability to expand, and they have a large mouth which also has the possibility of expanding. And as the bullfrogs attacked each other, one opened its mouth and the other one went inside its mouth. The one that was inside the mouth kept expanding and the one that had opened its mouth kept opening it bigger and bigger. So as they both did this they finally got to the point where they both exploded.
This is what happens in the world, instead of trying to know who we are, the usual activity in the world involves one of two things; people are either trying to swallow the world, or trying to get bigger than the world. So people are trying to make themselves big or trying to engulf everything around them.
There’s a simple point in the story and that is; if you’re busy trying to swallow the world, or if you’re busy trying to get bigger, and bigger and bigger in the world, you’re not spending your time trying to get to know who you are. You’re spending your time in relationship to your existence in the dunya, the world.
So one of the first plateaus that you have to reach in the study of Sufism is; you decide whether it is you want to interface with the world as your prime objective, or you want to interface with yourself as your prime objective. Because if you interface with the world, there’s enough out there that you can be constantly interacting with it, and creating and solving problems in it, and chasing and getting possessions in it that you have no time to spend with yourself. You have no time to be able to find out who you are.
When I was a young lawyer, I was working with an older man who was in his mid-seventies who used to be able to walk into the library when I asked him a question and pull out the book where the answer was, which was quite an extraordinary feat and I told him it was quite an extraordinary feat. And he said to me…
