Spiritual conversation (sohbet) with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski in 2008
“How can we approach salat and benefit from it? We can see salat as a means of developing being. By being we mean a strong inner life, a unity in our inner life, a unity of all aspects of our being, including physical, emotional, mental and spiritual and unitive. Salat offers us this possibility because it is a single act in which all of these things are potentially unified. We have a verbal part which is the Fatihah, and other parts, but the Fatihah is the one essential part. So, we say, ‘In the name of God, the Infinitely Compassionate, the Infinitely Merciful, etc.’ and we’re engaging the mind. We’re also standing in front of Infinity and we’re quite consciously feeling that sense of relationship, and the relationship is one of the human with the Divine, the natural to the Supernatural, the finite to the Infinite. So, in the standing posture, we’re aware of that. We’re also aware that we’re standing there as human beings in all the dignity of being human and we’re standing upright in this world; it’s a very strong, strong position but it’s a meditative position.
And then, next, we’re bowing. In the bow, we are acknowledging our servanthood, ibada, which means both worship and servanthood. This is what salat essentially is. But our servanthood and our worship extend to every aspect of our lives. So, our worship is to be conscious of the Divine Presence, and to know that our life here on earth, and everything that we do, becomes service when we remember God. So, we work in God, we love others within God, we create, we contribute within God, always aware of that larger context. So that’s the bow of servanthood.
And then the next posture is the prostration, surrender, effacement: the forehead touches the ground, the heart for once is higher than the head. And this whole process of standing, bowing and prostrating is a process of ever deeper self-effacement, of becoming transparent to the Divine, of merging with the Divine. Ideally this cycle of postures can become so wholehearted and conscious that we in our normal personality and conditioned self are not even here because we are so present in the worship. So, this is what it is practiced for, and that’s what we mean when we say it is an exercise of being, increasing exercise of being.”
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