Spiritual conversation (sohbet) with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski on 11/05/14
“If enlightenment means escape from this world or being finished with this world, maybe that should be questioned because—do we have a purpose? I can speak better on the Sufi point of view [regarding enlightenment]. The Sufi point of view is that there’s a reason why we are here embodied and the reason is not to escape it, dismiss it, deny it. The reason is to find the Presence of God and the Tender Mercy of God in every detail of life. And, to try to speak about and talk about what the highest states in Sufism are—I would say that it is something like this: We say the purified heart (the heart is a cognitive knowing instrument), the heart when it is purified, receives guidance directly from Divine Intelligence and is able to respond— to act, to move, to communicate with an almost immediate flow from the Divine into the present. In this model, we might say, ego is nothing but an obstructing factor, ego does nothing but get in the way. It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose. When I say ego, I mean the false self construct, egoism. I don’t mean “I-ness” itself. Our “I-ness” itself can also be a reflection of the Divine. The “I-ness” can be like the lense that focuses the Light of the Divine. That would be a nice kind of “I” to have.
Let’s clarify. We do say that on the Sufi journey, the human being comes to a state of merging with the Divine, in a state of ecstasy and One-ness, intoxicating Oneness where the “I” seems to disappear. But we emerge from that state without necessarily that drunkenness but with a sobriety that is wider, bigger, more comprehensive than that internal bliss and ecstasy. But the bliss and ecstasy, they don’t vanish, they’re not denied, but you come into a state of more mature sobriety. And when you come into that state of more mature sobriety, there are issues, there are responsibilities in terms of how we live in the world that cannot be denied. And, first of all, law as expressed in the Quran—there are specific behavioral things that are offered and that’s a big subject, not one to get into much detail right now, but when all the principles are all understood together and put in their proper hierarchy, we understand that the highest values are human love, human dignity and social justice. Within that hierarchy of priorities, then the details of life and how we transact in the economy, how we care for the environment and how we apply law, all those things are guided by those spiritual principles. Now what I think is really special about the Islamic Sufi framework is the degree of its integration with that higher consciousness—how it integrates that higher consciousness with the intimate details of life.”
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