Why are we here, and by that I mean in this specific location? Why have we been coming for years and years on Saturday mornings to gather together? Why did we come for years and years to gather in front of the sheikh and sit in front of his feet? Why did we make all of the effort to be in certain places at certain times when God is spoken about? Why?
There’s lots going on in the world, there’s plenty of shows to see, there’s plenty of museums to walk through, there’s lots of events that are going on, there’s an enormous amount of things to keep you busy and occupied. Yet some of us chose to ignore what the world has to offer to sit, simply, with people who are talking about God and who are explaining the truth of His holiness, who are explaining His nature to us, and explaining to us the truth about who we are and what we are.
For some of us, for some reason, we’re less interested in knowing what the world has to offer than we are in knowing who we are. This journey towards knowing who we are, and finding out the truth about our existence, becomes an obsessive-compulsive desire that needs to be fulfilled; that needs, somehow, to be satisfied; that needs, somehow, to get satisfactory answers.
It’s said that when the truth hits you, it will be like water after you’ve been traveling through the desert; you know it’s doing something for you, you know it’s changing the nature of your existence, and you know that it’s saving you. Many of us, in our travel through this world, it’s been like a travel through the desert; there’s been nothing here that quenched our thirst. There’s nothing out there that satisfies us, or that gives us satisfaction. There’s no place that we can find peace.
So we continue to trudge, and we continue to trudge, through the world and all of the enigmas that it throws at us, and all of the difficulties that it throws at us, and all of the things that we don’t understand that it throws at us. And we continue to trudge through it with the belief that something will come that will show us the truth, and that all these uncertainties that we have, and all of these difficulties that we have, will be swept away.
Then, like a prince on a white horse, the qutb comes in our lives, and we sit in front of him and he says, “Don’t worry, the way you feel is because you’ve understood that illusion can’t satisfy you, the way you feel is because you’ve refused the temptation of illusion, and you’ve refused the gifts of the world. You’re waiting for something greater because you know there’s something greater. You’ve seen the limitations of what the world has to offer and you’ve refused to bite, you refused to take that as the beginning and end. You know there is more. And I’ve come to show you there is more…”
