Spiritual conversation (sohbet) with Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski on 01/22/11
“Human beings have a particular kind of problem, particularly modern human beings and particularly western modern human beings, though that disease has now spread all over the world. The disease I am talking about, or the incapacity, has something to do with an over reliance on an aspect of the mind which is caught in the prison of the five senses and the prison of the material world. And the material world, at least as we experience it is— if you were to take the whole electromagnetic spectrum and put it on a graph as tall as the Empire State building, the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we perceive would be about that big (gesturing a tiny proportion). So, what we perceive just is not reality, it is something else. And yet we discount everything else, everything unseen, as being unreal if we buy into the materialist dogma. And, not only that, we are trained and we live among people who are imprisoned in that five sense, three or four-dimensional reality and take it as the only reality.
What we are talking about tonight is going beyond that—and how to do that. It is a natural human capacity except that it has atrophied, it has been crippled in the modern world increasingly so. So much so that— there was this story about a woman who had a stroke (Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight), do you remember this story? One hemisphere of her brain just shut down and suddenly she was in sort of this enlightened bliss. She was just operating through the right hemisphere of the brain and everything was totally different, a totally different reality. The left hemisphere of the brain overrides in modern man, not in traditional human beings, not if we look at the whole history of humanity and many other cultures. But if we look at the modern west, the modern world in general, especially the west, that left hemisphere of the brain, the analytical, verbal, thinking side— literally it dominates and shuts off or breaks the connection to the other side of the brain unless it is restored, unless we have a methodology to restore it, unless we have a practice.
A practice could be meditation, contemplation, true worship, true zhikr—everything that the true religions really teach, not in a dogmatic institutional form, but in the way that their founders intended them. All of those paths open us to the Unseen, open us to a relationship with the signs of God, the qualities of God, with the reality behind appearances. The Sioux do it. They come into the sweat lodge and they honor the directions and they honor the creatures and they honor themselves—and they honor this material world for what it points to. They are living in that reality. There is both material and natural and supernatural all at once. So, we’re training ourselves to do that, but we fall into the hazards of, to use a different terminology, left brain thinking.”
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