Well Sufism is about changing ordinary man into perfected man, about changing the way we are into what Sufism calls “insan kamil – perfected man”. Many of us have had the opportunity in our lifetime to meet a perfected man and when there is that meeting with perfected man you can see the difference. You can see how the qualities are extraordinary, how the love is beyond imagination, and how the general being is different than what you see in what we call normative society.

So the question, which really becomes self-evident, is what is the agent that turns man into perfected man. What makes that transformation occur? What’s the alchemy that does that? And the Sheikhs, and the Teachers and the Gurus tell us that it’s wisdom. Somehow we need to encounter wisdom, And with that encounter things will change.

Well, what is wisdom, and how do we encounter it? One of the ways that you encounter it is through a Sheikh, through somebody who already has it. So they become a painting of wisdom, a manifestation of wisdom. Alive, wise being that somehow has been put in your path so you can see what it looks like. The usual analogy is a mirror. They become a mirror so that you can see what you actually have inside of you. Well that interesting thing about mirrors is that they show you what you are. Ah, think about that; so if a Sheikh, if a live Sheikh is a mirror for you, he’s showing you what you have.

Take that a step further, it’s already inside of you. We just need to bring it alive; we need to somehow make it happen. We need to somehow take what has been given to us, that has been subdued, and suppressed and run over by illusion and bring it back to its full fold, bring it back to what it’s capable of being.

So we need to be able to make the effort to lift ourselves up so that we can find the wisdom within us and then have it work on us. But you see, a lot of things have to fall in place for you to be able to do that: First you have to be willing to do that, and that doesn’t seem like it’s such a difficult thing but it’s the most difficult thing, because to be able to be willing to meet wisdom head-on and to incorporate wisdom you also have to be willing to give up all of the things that have suppressed wisdom in you all of these years. All the things that have suppressed wisdom from coming to the forefront.

So when you meet this wise man, when you meet this mirror, and when you see what you can be something has to happen inside where, all of a sudden, you want to be what you can be, and you want to be it more than you want not to be it, you want to be it more than you love the world, you want to be it more than you love the illusory nature of existence, you want to be it more than all of the gratifications that you get from the world. And we get lots of different kinds of gratifications from the world. And depending to whom you speak, they will tell you about what it is that gratifies them in the world.

The three major gratifications are: wealth, women (or men) and power, People enjoy these things. People spend their life chasing these things, and they believe that these things will give them satisfaction. So somebody in the midst of chasing money, if you tell him, “You’d really be much better off sitting still and thinking about God”, they’re not going to spend a lot of time with you.

Somebody in the midst of lust, chasing whatever it is they’re chasing, and by the way, lust doesn’t apply just to sexual relationships – it applies to everything. We can have lust for money, we can have lust for fame, we can have lust for power, well somebody in the middle of that kind of lust, and imagine that that lust in people is very similar to an elephant chasing a mate. It’s that kind of out of control lust which people have. And if you tell them, ”You’d really be much better off sitting still and understanding the qualities of God’” They’re not going to listen, but what will happen Is if somehow they are able to spend some time with someone who is at peace. If they’re able to spend some time with someone who has thrown off the shackles and the burdens and the weight of all these lusts because boy they keep you busy, and they keep you tired, and they keep you straining, and they keep you involved. If they’re able to meet somebody whose thrown them off who doesn’t seem to have all the anxiety, and all the difficulty that these lusts bring for a second the thought may come to them, “Wow their life seems easier than mine and I have so much more, what is really going on here?”

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It has to do with the fact that, in the face of what seem like very simple straightforward rules and regulations, the mind is somehow able to create doubt. The mind’s capability of creating doubt is quite extraordinary. It can create doubt an almost any situation.

But there’s more. The snake is a nefarious representation. It’s not a nice character. Even in the garden there were not nice characters.

In this world we are constantly running into people, places, things,  that create difficult situations. Sometimes we wonder how is it that we walked into them. What is it that we did that deserved this kind of reaction? How come this happened to us?

Well, I would say probably, most of the time, it has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the nature of those who were approaching you. If you weren’t in that place, at that time, they would find somebody else to do to whatever is their intent.

There were two people in the beginning. Satan went after Eve. If Adam had been there he may have gone after him. If they had had children before he got to them, he may have gone after them. The point is, the energy to divert and the energy to take you away from that point of clarity, and that point of peace, and that point of serenity, is out there and ready to pounce on you.

It can come in many different forms and in many different ways. Somebody can cut you off in traffic, and all of a sudden your entire mood has changed from serene to toxic…

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The spiritual side draws its sustenance in different ways. It’s often said that to fully engage the spiritual self there has to be a renunciation of the physical self. There has to be a pushing away of the world from ourselves. There has to be an ability to let go of the connection to the hypnotism of the magnetic poles from the world, so that we somehow stay separated from it.

But in truth we are constantly in both worlds. We are constantly of both worlds. The larger truth is that we are of the spiritual world yet while trapped in this body… trapped in this bag of bones. We have to deal with all of the various elemental forces that are driven through us and become the forces that make us go in different directions.

If we look externally to ourselves, we see sunny days and we see cloudy days. We see days where the weather is wonderful and where the weather is unbearable. The world presents many different faces and we encounter those different faces. That’s just from a level of temperature.

But the world also presents many different faces in the way it interacts with each of us. We are constantly interacting with people. People, depending on their level of awareness, their level of sobriety (when I say sobriety I really mean their level of maturity within their own existence) dependent on those things and people.

We get different attitudes, different situations, thrown at us and we have to learn how to handle them. In addition, there are the responsibilities that come with our existence in the world which have been given to man since the beginning of time; the responsibility of family, the responsibility of community, the responsibility religious observance, all of the various responsibilities.

Then there comes the very difficult and sometimes overwhelming responses to what the world calls “status”, calls “importance”, calls “fame”, calls “that which is necessary for your being in order to maintain its dignity”.

To find an equilibrium in all of these things in the world is a very difficult work and takes an enormous amount of effort. It also takes the ability to see correctly and to see appropriately. If we have been indoctrinated with certain ideas that have fault with in them, we are going to continuously create fault in our own being by trying to imitate these faulty ideas and trying to place ourselves in a position to be able to carry out these faulty ideas…

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Now, the people in our society who establish what’s appropriate behavior, what’s normal, what’s not normal, walk through this illusion the same way we do. They’re the ones, the PhD’s, who inform us of what’s correct and what’s not correct, yet they’ve been susceptible to the same karmic influences and illusion that everybody else has. They determine what’s OK.

A lot of what is not OK, they’ve determined as OK.

Here we are with the leaders leading the populace and indicating that certain abhorrent behaviors are not abhorrent. They’re OK.

How did this happen?

Well, it happened because somehow we have continuously moved away from a divine understanding of law to an understanding of law as created by man. The divine understanding has been done away with, undermined, undercut and put into a corner as if it had no relevance.

If law is discussed, they don’t discuss divine regulations, they discuss previous regulations set by man, and how those regulations create the ability  to have an imagined equality in existence among people.

It’s almost as if to escape from this, we have to create a bubble around us, in the same way that the boy in the bubble had to escape from that which his immune system couldn’t handle.

We need to somehow develop an immune system that handles illusion. How do we develop an immune system that handles illusion? How do we handle illusion?

It’s a difficult process, mainly because we’ve been taught since childhood that there is a reality in this illusion. We continuously get messages over and over and over and over again reemphasizing the reality of this illusion.

What has to happen for us to create an immune system for this illusion? What do we have to do? What direction does our life have to take? What kind of conclusions do we have to come to? What kind of understandings do we need?

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Well, a few things, it’s a state without anxiety, it’s a state without fear, it’s a state that is satisfied with the moment and the space and the place and the time that we’re in. It’s a moment when we don’t need to go somewhere else. It’s a moment when somehow in all of the chaos in this world, we have found contentment. We have found the ability to be at rest. We have found of the ability to be at peace in the midst of the blaring of sirens of the world. We have found the ability to be at peace and to be not disturbed.

Now, some people think that to find peace, you have to go to a mosque or to a church or to a synagogue. You have to go somewhere. The truth is, we all carry our own place of worship with us, and it’s in our heart. Our heart is our place of worship and if we realize that wherever we go, we have our heart with us, then we should simultaneously realize that we are always in a place of worship. So, we are always in the place. Now we have to have the attitude. Now we have to have the intention because Allah in his mercy has given us each that place, has given us each that house of worship that travels with us.

Allah created this whole world and he put all kinds of riches in it and put in all of the necessities that man would need for his life in it. Then after he created all of that, he then created us and put us in it. Think about that…

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