The saint Rabia said “I do not desire heaven and I do not fear hell, I want only Allah.” In the testaments, the holy books, the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, there are stories of prophets. The prophets had connections with Allah. In the Old Testament, Allah spoke to Abraham, Allah spoke to Moses, […]
What throws us out of sorts? What makes us become other than peaceful? What takes us from place of serenity to a place of fear? Have we ever been in a place of serenity? Do we know what serenity is? Have we ever found serenity? Or are we constantly uneasy, not knowing what to expect,
When the lottery hits over $100,000,000, sales of the tickets for the lottery go up. It’s as if the lottery is worth investing in when there’s a hundred or two hundred or three hundred million available and it’s not worth investing in when there’s only twenty million available. This has something to do with the
In a city in the northern region of Turkey called Kastamonu there is a türbe, a tomb, a shrine to a Sufi saint whose name is Sha`ban Veli. To get there we have to drive quite a ways through mountains. It must be a four hour trip from Ankara, which is in the middle of
There’s a story about the fish who was constantly asking “What is water?” and “Where is water?” Even when the fish was pulled out of the water and told “This is land, where you were was water.” The fish would then say, “Now I understand, now I understand. Put me back in the water.” When
There’s an expression that says you can’t see the forest for the trees. Quite simply it means that because you’re so close to a specific tree you don’t grasp the enormity of what’s going around you, you deal with that which is right before you. As beings we have that same situation. We cannot see
There are many paths in the world. There are many roads that you can take and it’s not quite as simple as when you come to a crossroads to make sure you take one. It’s more complicated than that. There’s the path of the world and then there’s the path of the true human being.
There was once a great shaikh who had a number of disciples and he also had a lion. The lion protected him from intruders, wild animals, anything that would come to harm him. The lion also protected all of the disciples. The lion would walk around with his tail wagging except when something was challenging
Isa (Jesus) according to the Gospel said “The truth will set you free.” The problem is that the truth is often difficult to find and difficult to understand. The truth seems to be that we walk around on an orb, that spins around another orb, that keeps us warm and that goes at tremendous speeds
There is a certain reciprocal nature to existence. That which you put out there is that which comes back to you in one way or another. As the Beatle said “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” Now, we need to understand this and how it works. Bawa [Muhaiyaddeen] had a
