Age and maturity don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. So now that we have determined that age is not necessarily a sign of maturity, what is a sign of maturity? What is an indication that you are a mature being? Well, in order to establish that, we need a frame of reference; we need to know where we’re coming from.
In the world, if you have a degree like a PhD or a Masters, you’d be considered a mature individual because you’ve taken on a certain amount of knowledge, and you’ve done it successfully, and you’ve been rewarded with the letters after your name. But maturity can be considered your ability to cope within the world and to accomplish things within the world, like, “He’s a mature businessman,” or “He’s a mature doctor,” or “He’s a mature lawyer,” or “He’s a mature (whatever it is that you do),” that you’re successful at it.
But the truth is that the only real measure of maturity is your relationship with wisdom, and the extent of your relationship with wisdom, and the depth of your relationship with wisdom. And in understanding that; you begin to enter into the realm that separates reality from illusory existence. It separates reality from the dunya, the dung-heap of the world; it separates reality from maya, illusion.
Now, in Arabic, reality is haqq. Haqq means “the real” it’s a name of Allah, Haqq; the real. It means you have passed beyond the illusory and entered into that which has true substance and true eternality. And for the Sufi, maturity is entering into that world and the extent to which you’ve entered into that world.
The key to entering into that world is the ability to be in a state of love in many more ways than we can imagine, and as that state of love increases many of the ways that we couldn’t imagine before we can imagine now.
You can be in love in this instant, you can be in love while driving your car, you can be in love while going to bed, and you can be in a state of love while taking a shower. You can transcend the worldly pecking that goes on at you constantly by being in a state of love. It transcends all of that.
So, how do we get into that state of love?
When I met my teacher, my wife and I were together, and we had a relationship and we thought we were in love, and of course this is over 40 years ago, and then we met the sheikh. And, I had never encountered a being such as the sheikh, because when I first sat in front of him, I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, and I was enveloped by his love.
