Monthly Archives: August 2011

Most of us spend a lot of time each day trying to meet our responsibilities, doing the work we have to do, keeping up the communications we have to keep up. We ask questions like “Am I doing my job right?” “Am I fulfilling my responsibilities?” “Am I doing my work as well as I should/could do it?” This is the focus of much of our everyday consciousness. But Mevlana takes us far beyond our everyday concerns by putting them into a perspective that’s quite shockingly different from the way we often see things. What’s shockingly different is that upon entering that dimension, that Reality, all the questions are answered and put into the perspective of trust and faith. We can even say a kind of bliss results.

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As our spiritual awareness grows so does our awareness of our own limitations and helplessness, yet we must not allow that awareness to separate us from God. The advice of the Qur'an, Ibn Abada, Rumi and all the saints of this path is that our primary jihad (struggle) is to remember God, to trust God, to call God's presence and see God as our companion in all our states -- in our weakness and in our strength. That becomes our abiding awareness of the Mercy that is the essential characteristic of the universe and will not leave us in a state of helplessness forever.

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The key points on the project of spiritual development describe a dynamic, very complete process that takes in every aspect of life. Times and human conditions continue to change. Today we live in a world where more choices and possibilities are presented to human beings than ever before. This requires us to find some realistic and appropriate form of spirituality so we can go deep and be liberated from that from which we need to be liberated.

The first steps in this process may be intellectual. However, we must never forget that Reality or Truth is beyond anything we can say or formulate, and yet as human beings we can realize ourselves more completely if our ideas are in harmony with our possibilities. It may not be possible or necessary to say what Absolute Truth is, but truth for the human being is something like this: We are integral to the Truth not separate. Not a mere part, but integral. And we can experientially realize this.

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