There was a sheikh in Baghdad who had fifty disciples, and one morning he gave them each a chicken and said, “Go kill the chicken where nobody will see and bring it back to me.” And a couple hours later they all came back, and there was one particularly slow disciple, whose name was Ahmed, and forty-nine disciples came back with dead chickens, and Ahmed was still holding his chicken. And the sheikh said, “What’s the matter?”
He said, “Well you said to do it where nobody could see, and I couldn’t find a place where Allah couldn’t see.”
Allah is everywhere. Wherever we are we can pray. Inspiration can come at any moment no matter what place we are in. It is understood among Sufis that there are people on this earth called Qutbs, and a Qutb is the axis between Allah and the world, the axis between the heavens and the earth. It’s a pole that runs through existence, and it’s what keeps existence going. And without these axes, there would not be existence. But think about that for a second; the Qutb can be anywhere. He can be in Philadelphia, he can be in Sri Lanka, he could be in Europe, he could be in Africa, but there’s still an axis.
So, what’s the point? The axis can be anywhere in the world; that connection between Allah and the world can be anywhere in the world. Let’s take it a step further: that axis between Allah and the world is anywhere in the world or is everywhere in the world. So for you to be in a place where you are at the axis of the connection between God and the world, you need to be aware of the fact that you are at the place where you are at the axis of you and the world.
Now, I lived with a Qutb for an extended period of time, and I knew when I was in his presence that I was at the center of the universe. There was nowhere I had to go, there was nowhere else I had to be; I was already there. Now, he wasn’t always in the same place, and whenever I was with him I was at the center of the universe.
Well, you should realize that wherever you go, wherever we go, wherever you are, wherever we are, that place has the possibility of being the center of the universe. But only if you understand that it has the possibility of being at the center of the universe; only if you let go of everything that stops you from being connected to God. The things that stop you from being connected to God dissipate the axis; they make it disappear, not in reality, but for your existence. So you either are at the center of things in haqq, in reality, or you are at the center of illusion…
