There is a state called the melted heart and if you’ve ever seen Bawa’s picture of the rock heart you can have a pretty good idea of what the melted heart is. People who have become accustomed to the world, and who have found the world to be their playground, and have found it suitable […]
Ignorance doesn’t understand wisdom, and before wisdom comes into a being, there’s a long state where that being has to have the capacity to be silent and patient in order to allow the teaching to be absorbed so that there can be some understanding. And while this is going on ignorance is constantly doubting. Ignorance
The world right now is under great stress and in great difficulty in many parts of the earth. These things don’t seem to be resolving themselves very easily. Feuds that have existed for hundreds, even thousands, of years, continue to stay in existence, stay strong, and be acted on. And there seems to be no
Consciousness is something that Allah has given to not only man; animals have consciousness. And animals have a certain amount of intellect. Some animals have more intellect than others, some have instinct, but if you ever do a study or watch some of these animal documentaries on television, you can see that animals can use
Last night, for some reason “to be or not to be?” kept floating through my head. When Hamlet was talking about it he was contemplating taking his life, but “to be or not to be?” has other implications. In Islam there is a Canon Law called the Shariat. It tells you how to act or,
Words have impact. The way you say words has impact. We have to be careful how we use words. Yet words can’t be seen. They can be heard but they can’t be seen. Faith can’t be seen, it can’t be heard, but it has impact. Faith has tremendous impact on who you are and how
Most people who have studied Sufism know a little bit about Rumi, have heard of Rumi, have read some of Rumi’s poems – translated, of course, into English; unless you’re Turkish, then they were translated into Turkish because they were originally in Persian. But not everybody knows that Rumi found his way through a man
Imagine if you lived in a monastery high up on a hill somewhere with limited access to the rest of humanity, with limited access to anything, and your life up in that monastery consisted of growing your own food, staying self-sufficient, very little interaction with anybody, and prayer. A separation from the world; something like
There’s a saying in English that some people can’t chew gum and walk at the same time. The point is that we have trouble doing more than one thing simultaneously because whatever it is that we’re doing takes all of our attention. So, in the world we go through our mundane tasks every day. Depending
Civilization has calendars, and these calendars count the days. Some count them by way of a lunar calendar which has to do with the cycles of the moon, and some count them by way of a sun calendar which counts the days as the earth revolves around the sun. But, civilization has calendars and we
