Spiritual conversation (sohbet) with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski on 11/06/18
“We come to this world with an essence, soul, and what is going to happen to it? To what extent can it be transformed, to what extent can it be matured, to what extent can it be changed and how will it change? The proposition that I am going to offer here is that there’s a process which we can call ‘the Path,’ or the process of spirituality, that works something like this: that that soul essence of yours and mine, with every experience that it has, if that experience is joyful or sorrowful, if that experience is received in a certain way, in other words consciously, gratefully, spiritually, that very essence is changed by that and it acquires, we could say, taste or fragrance or hues. What I am describing is that the essence is something in the soul; it is a soul essence which also has a psyche dimension, a body dimension, and has all of these experiences, but once these experiences begin to be experienced in this way that I am talking about every experience of life kind of adds up in the soul and becomes a maturing of the soul, an enriching of the soul.
And to go a step further, and a very, very important step further, the more that we receive the experiences of life with the knowledge, the perception, the realization of Oneness—namely that all these experiences are coming from that one single Source in the unified field of Reality, the more we experience every circumstance of life in that way, the more we become coherent, the more there is a coherence in our soul. So, the soul is not only being enriched but gaining fragrance, flavors, colors, all of these qualities, and is beginning to achieve a kind of coherence, in contrast to the other state which is a state of dispersion, where there is no center, where there is just one thing after another, distracted, anything that takes your attention, that takes you along the way with it and there is nothing there; it is just disintegration with a name.
In contrast, there is this other journey, this other process of the soul essence receiving from every experience of life. It doesn’t matter if the experience is an experience of your own failure, even your own sin, as much as your achievement or when you do things right, you’re doing something beautiful and you’re successful—it doesn’t matter. The soul learns from all of these things. That’s the mercy of it all. That is why Allah has said, the One who loves to forgive, because that forgiveness is a process that we learn from our failures, we learn from our weaknesses. If we do it. We don’t automatically learn, but if we are on this path, there’s the possibility of learning from every experience: positive, negative, failure, success, happiness and sadness. Over time, in time, in this earthly life the soul essence on this path, and with those who remember the name of their Rabb with utter devotion (which is another way of saying what I have been trying to describe), develops coherence, a richness of soul.”
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