Sincerity, Sohbet, January 7th
A discussion of the importance of "Sincerity" with Shaikh Kabir.
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The Rumi Daybook
When the words of Rumi enter your heart, something softens, breaks, and is subtly reborn. That he wrote the words seven hundred years ago in a medieval Persian world that bears little resemblance to ours makes their uncanny resonance to us today just that much more remarkable. Here is a treasury of daily wisdom from this most beloved of all the Sufi masters—both his prose and his ecstatic poetry—that you can use to start every day for a year, or that you can dip into for inspiration any time you need to break through the granite of your heart.
The Seeker Will Appear In The Sought
We often attempt to deepen in a Reality that may seem fragile, distant or not there at all. Experiences of devotion come easily within certain external frameworks, like holy places in Turkey, the Mevlevi Tradition’s homeland. The challenge is to sustain some of that orientation every day.
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Embody Patience
To embody patience is, at the least, to show no haste in matters that require time. This requires a presence that is fully in the moment and, simultaneously, outside of time. Only in this way can we give each thing its proper time. But the mental awareness alone is not sufficient to induce a holy patience. Something else is required—a sense of the Divine Presence.
It No Longer Remains This World
Recording of weekly sohbet with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski.
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The Ecstasy of Recognition, Day of Arafat
Imagine yourself standing with millions of other human beings at Arafat, stripped-down to bare essentials, wearing a simple sheet of white cloth, all distinctions of wealth, position, and national identity erased. All you have is the sum of your life's thoughts, feelings, and deeds, the net result of your relationships, your loves and hates—all these things that have shaped your soul, what you are. The people on Hajj are experiencing that today. We all will experience it one day, on the day of conscious recognition.
Unite with the Living
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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We Fell in Love with Lowliness
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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Claim Nothing, Let the Divine Do
This theme is an advanced teaching. It presumes that we have to some extent developed a healthy capacity for will. By will we mean the capacity to choose consciously; and will power is the capacity to follow through on what we have consciously chosen. Only then can we glimpse the meaning of “Claim nothing, let the Divine do.” A healthy will is a will that more often than not chooses what is good for the soul and is independent of the whims and desires of the lower self. It is at this stage that this theme becomes applicable.
We Are Integral to this Truth
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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