Spiritual conversation (sohbet) with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski on 10/24/13
“There are lots of ways we could define submission, and, by the way, these are not meant to be dogmatic assertions as much as suggestive phrasings of how we could understand these different principles. Submission: allowing the Divine to be the center of our reality. The effective result of this submission is both self-transcendence and a capacity for sacrifice. Submission proceeds from the conditioned to the unconditioned, the compulsive self to the essential self, the finite to the infinite. I tend to pack a lot into a few words. There’s experience behind this, there’s metaphysics behind this, and there’s an intention behind it. So, true submission is when we know that the Divine Reality is the master truth of existence and we yearn, we desire, we’re committed to keep it at the center of our consciousness. It doesn’t mean that it precludes all the other things that we have to do. Everything else is taking place around that center and within that context. The human being who is in that constant state of submission is aware moment by moment, on some level, not making it a kind of explicit activity of thought but a sense of the heart that we are living with the Divine, we depend on the Divine, we can trust the Divine and we wish to align ourself with the goodness, the beauty, the generosity, the creativity, the intelligence of the Divine. And, little by little, our lives begin to take shape around that master truth. It doesn’t happen like that (clicks his fingers)—submission is not just like, ‘I think I’ll submit right now.’ or something really challenging happens and we say, ‘Please God, if you let me get through this, I promise I’ll submit to you.’ No, it’s a process of ripening, a process of maturing, it’s a process of deepening love as well.
So, submission is both an initial step—in some ways it is one of the first steps, but it also has depth to it, it has levels to it. We actually say there are three levels and some of you know these already. The three in Arabic, the three words would be islam, which is the preliminary submission, which is like, ‘Ok, I am going to try, I’m going to attempt to be in alignment with the Divine.’ Then, iman, which would be translated as ‘faith’ or ‘faithfulness,’ which is, ‘I’m really going to be faithful to this truth.’ It is a higher state than just the preliminary submission. And then finally, there is ihsan, which is the state of beautification, the state in which the beauty and goodness of the Divine takes a person over so much that they naturally and spontaneously are doing what is appropriate, what is right, what is good, what is beautiful, as if they saw God in front of them every moment and knew that they were, shall we say, within the consciousness of the Divine. That’s the highest state. So, submission is both a first preliminary step and it is also in some sense a final step, based on the idea of allowing the Divine to be the center of our reality.”
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