Man is a fragile creature and susceptible to many different influences and diseases; diseases of the body and diseases of the mind. And all of these can incapacitate him to the point of his being totally unable to function within the world.
Now, functioning means more than one thing. For instance, when a psychiatrist labels you normal; he labels you normal according to your culture, he labels you normal according to that which goes on within the community that you live in. Can you function within the community? Can you go to work? Can you provide for yourself? Can you generate income? Can you talk to other people? Can you carry on in the world? That’s functioning.
Now, in the Sufi world there’s a different kind of functioning and there’s a different set of rules. In the world we have the laws of the state which govern our interaction with other people. In older times, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and in some places right now, the law of the state was religious law.
In other places, like America, where there came about a separation between the church and the state, we have secular law; law that governs the relationship between men and women within the secular state. And we have books, and books, and books of statutes that govern these relationships.
And you know in the United States we have a lot of states, and what you may not know is each of the states has their own set of laws; each of the states has their own set of statute books. And then we also have federal laws which supersede the state laws but these are all secular laws, and they are about secular relationships.
Now, in Tasawwuf, in Sufism, there are also laws, and they are the laws between man and God, and the laws between man and man. Now, if we understand the precepts of this path; what we’re doing on it, why we’ve gotten on it, we begin to understand that there are veils that separate us from the truth. And these veils have to do with our attachments to the world.
Now, people who lived in the secular world, when they are told about the laws of attachment to the world, and how they are veils that keep you from a different reality than the world, sometimes they laugh at you, and sometimes they just talk as if these things have no meaning because they want to make their point.
What’s interesting is, even among Sufis, they will neglect these laws as if they didn’t exist and they didn’t have any bearing…
