Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Levi
Musa Muhaiyaddeen (E. L. Levin) is a direct disciple of the Sufi mystic and teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. He met Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in 1972 and studied with him until Bawa Muhaiyaddeen left his earthly form in 1986. He now shares what he learned during the 14 years he spent at the feet of his venerable teacher. He has traveled to Africa, Europe, Asia and throughout North America speaking on the teachings of Sufism. The International Association of Sufism (IAS) has published his book: On the Road to
Infinity, which is a compilation of talks given by him on Sufism in various venues throughout the world. His insights on Sufism are now available online at www.thewitnesswithin.com and are presented in audio, video and print format. He has made numerous trips to Mecca and Medina and has taken hundreds of people with him on the pilgrimage. He is co-president of the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship. He is married with 3 children and 6 grandchildren.
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In the name of God the most merciful and the most compassionate. Sufism is a state of being not a philosophy. One studies Sufism to change from insan (man) to insan kamel(perfected man). It is about leaving the illusory world and entering reality. It is about becoming peaceful, tranquil and loving. It is about understanding the qualities that are related to reality and differentiating them from the ones that bind us to the illusory world. To become a perfected man, one must know the portions of the self that are capable of merging with reality and differentiate them from the rest. Man must learn to identify himself with that which he actually is as opposed to identification with his temporary, illusory nature. The intent of the material on this website is to aid in the process of coming to know the true self. Each talk is a meditation on a specific aspect that assists in gaining knowledge of the true self. They are about the difference between reality and this illusory world in which we live. The talks are not scripted. They are meant to be listened to in their entirety in one sitting which is the way they were presented. The essays are edited talks. They were spoken and then worked on by an editor to put them into appropriate form for the written page. Each one of these talks usually covers one point of understanding, and their effect is cumulative. It takes listening to many of these talks and reading many of the essays in order to get the thrust of what is being conveyed. The talks are downloadable, and the essays are printable. They are meant to be used in whatever format is most convenient for you.
E. L. Levin (Musa Muhaiyaddeen)
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About Us
A Short Explanation about Sufism, the Author and the Intent of this Website In the late 1960s my circumstances and point of view led me to question the reason for my existence. I began on a course to find answers to these questions. I found that these are, in truth, some of the most complex questions that we can have. Questions like, why am I here? What is the purpose of my creation? How was I created? What is my purpose in existence? Where do we go from here? What is the purpose of this body? What is our true relationship with the rest of mankind? How are we supposed to act? What does a human being who understands the answers to these questions look like? What is the essence of one who understands the answers to these questions? In this search I came upon the Sufi Saint Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. I met him on Easter Sunday in March of 1972. The interaction had a profound affect on both my wife and myself. We both realized that we were in front of a being who was different than any being we had ever met. Even though he was from a culture that was entirely different from our culture and spoke a language that we did not understand, it did not interfere with the fact that being in his presence made us feel like we were at home. For the first time in a very long time I felt I had arrived at where I needed to be and there was really nowhere else to go because it was all right here. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen returned to his native Sri Lanka from the United States shortly after I met him and returned to the U. S. in 1973. As soon as he was back, we went to see him and he brought us close to him, directing us to meet with those who were interested in his teachings and share what we were being taught. We spent from 1972 to 1986, when he passed away, under his direct guidance and influence. Over the years, we understood that the essence of his teaching, which is called Sufism, is a touchstone to reality. It is the heart within all matters; it is the heart within all religions. It doesnt belong to anyone, but it teaches everyone. The teachings are loving, tolerant and magnanimous, generous, trustworthy and gracious. The teachings are given from our Lord as a gift to bring us closer to Him. Over the last 20 years or so, I have made pilgrimages to various parts of the world. I began to speak about the experiences I had and knowledge I had gained from my time with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. We have traveled to Asia, Africa, Europe and throughout North America to many different countries and locations, speaking about Sufism. In the last seven or eight years, we have had weekly encounters with a small group of seekers of truth wherein we shared our understandings and experiences. Recently some of these people have suggested that we begin an internet site wherein these encounters could be shared with a larger audience. We share these insights as a student with other students. The learning process never ends. We are all initiates on the path. It is our responsibility to share what we have received with others. We agreed to begin this website. We ask the blessings of our teacher the Sainted M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. We ask the blessing of all of the prophets. And we ask the blessing of our Lord in this endeavor. May it be of benefit to the people in this world.
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Divine Intervention
Why do people come on pilgrimage to the burial places of certain holy beings, why do we come there to pray? We come to acknowledge there is a world beyond this one. We believe what the prophets have told us, what God has told us through all the prophets, that there is a world to come after this world. We believe there is a connection between these two worlds, that the next world can inspire and influence this one. We believe that at places of pilgrimage we are closer to that other world. There are countless numbers of hypnotizing illusions and deceptions in this world. This means, in part, that there is an enormous amount of worldly static, influences from this world which are overwhelming. They capture us, hypnotize us, magnetize us, they lure us into various aspects of creation where we are enchanted, engrossed, and in a very real way, made sluggish, reduced to a state of torpor. We might come to a point at which we are so engulfed by these things they control our lives. We think we control them, but they actually are in control of our lives; we are so fascinated by these illusions we are committed to them instead of anything else. What are these things? They are different for each of us because we are all caught in different ways. The forces of darkness and illusion attack us at the point of our weakness and drag us in their direction. Our differing weaknesses depend on the way we
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What is the meaning of pilgrimage, how did it begin, why do we go on pilgrimage? It began when the prophet Abraham came to visit his son and together they built the first house of God. Abraham told his son it would be a place of pilgrimage for all those who believed in one God; it did become a holy place, it remained a place of remembrance for a long time. Later, when belief in one God was lost in paganism and people worshiped many deities, Gods house became a temple for many gods. They worshiped idols but it remained a temple, a place of reverence without understanding. When the monotheist rituals of Abraham were restored by Muhammad, this was a problem for those who had earned their living from all the tribes who came there to worship their gods. But todays pilgrimage re-creates what Abraham did, todays ritual is an imitation of Abraham. Imitation is interesting, it is an act of becoming, redoing, joining, melting into. Now this ritual is performed attempting to imitate what two prophets, what Abraham and Muhammad both did. Pilgrims walk in the steps of Muhammad who walked in the steps of Abraham. The point here is continuity, nothing new, a re-creation of an ancient observance, pilgrims declaring themselves to be of that lineage, part of that continuity, the truth which has always existed. Imitation is the act of becoming what existed before. There is a story here to illustrate this point, a story about an enlightened teacher called John. His disciple Michael was running around town shouting, Im John, Im John!
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Obedience to God
We should understand that everything happens according to Gods will, whatever occurs happens with His will. We are here with obligations, with duties to perform, this we should understand too, something which can be difficult to grasp. If everything occurs with Gods will, why are we involved? If everything is ordained, why are we given the options of what is correct and what is prohibited? To understand, first we need to establish trust in God, and part of that trust means living without tomorrow, it means we are not worried about the future. We have no doubt, that worry has left because we trust in God, because we know everything is in His hands. Nevertheless we do have obligations, we do have duties, there are things we need to accomplish. Sometimes this might be difficult to grasp because here we are, doing what we can in the world to accomplish certain things, and we are supposed to be satisfied with whatever occurs. This means we persist with goals, yet without attachment to them, we try to do things but without attachment to results. We think we are supposed to have results with certain things, we think a state of prayer should have results. The preparation to receive God seems to promise results, but prayer to God should be understood as obedience to Him.
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In the morning when we wake up we take a shower because sleep is still with us. We need water to wake up, not cold water, just water, a physical, elemental thing which changes us, changes our state, taking us from a sleeping state to a waking state, relatively speaking. During the day there is a continuing obligation to wash, to use water for purification, for waking up because we tend to go to sleep while we are awake. Sleep does not come only when we lie down in bed, sleep comes whenever we are entranced, sleep is a trance. We are in the sleeping state whenever we are hypnotized, when we are so attracted by something it overwhelms our senses, sleep comes when we take certain drugs which overwhelm us. That dazed state of torpor is sleep, the loss of our perceiving faculties in their highest forms means we are asleep. Now this implies we spend most of our life asleep; those of us who have traveled this path for a long time are aware when these faculties are awake, and we are also aware how short that time is. We know also that we travel this path to develop the ability which makes those faculties grow, which makes them more available, so that we deal with reality, we learn how to be awake in reality, not the things that put us to sleep. One reason we gather together in groups is to wake up that experience, that wakefulness which gives us a sense of being attuned to reality. When we sit together, focusing pointedly without concern for the past, without concern for the future, without concern
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There is competition in this world as we work to earn a living, competition for money, competition in business and among those who are trying to sustain their material existence. This is the way of the world, a state of continuing competition. Little fish eat smaller fish and then they are eaten by bigger fish; everything is in competition with everything else for sustenance in the world. Capitalism includes the profit motive, we go out there for gain, and that gain, that monetary gain which sustains ourself and our family is permissible. There is competition and the permissible within competition; in other words, as long as we function with integrity, we are encouraged to play the game of the world. Certain things are forbidden, high interest for instance, high interest which can destroy someone is not permitted. In capitalist competition usury is forbidden, although both competition and gain are permissible. There is the path of the world and the path to God, the path of real human beings, true human beings who are not in competition with each other. The rules of capitalism do not apply to our dealings with each other. When we are competitive with each other, when our mind and our attitude insist we must prevail, difficulties arise. Some people not only need to do what they do, but they also need others to accept what they do and think. If this is a driving force in their life they can go astray on this great path.
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This culture encourages strong intellectsit offers respect to powerful intellects by conferring degrees or titles, by calling them experts. If we discourse at length about certain themes, use historical references, build logical arguments, we are considered to be people of substantial intellect. This is the way it appears outwardly, but we need to understand what things are like inwardly. Since the goal is to understand our relationship to God we need to ask ourselves, what is the importance of a strong intellect for someone who does not have one, what is its importance for someone who has? When the intellect pushes and pulls us through certain situations, certain difficulties, we can become arrogant, the arrogance of ability, the arrogance of knowledge, the arrogance which says I can do this. Only if we lose this arrogance can we begin to understand that someone else is the doer. If we see that we are not doing the pulling and pushing, that the truth, if we are in touch with it, did not come from the study of history or logic, it did not come from the books we have read, it came because something let us bypass that arrogance of the intellect, bypass that part of ourself which insists on being the doer. An insistence on our own capacity creates veils for us, it subverts the belief that all responsibility for action belongs to God, creating a sense that I am the actor, I am the one doing things. To break with that way of seeing things, to break from the
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May the peace and blessings of God be with you, now and always. Satan was an angel who thought he knew better than God. When God indicated He was going to create man as His ultimate creation, Satan disagreed, then when God said all the angels should bow before man, Satan disagreed again. This was the root of arrogance, where arrogance began, it began when Satan assumed he knew better than God. Arrogance moved into our humanity where it sits as a separation between God and ourself. Arrogance, the first quality of separation, initiates a chain of reactions, acquiring other qualities to enforce itself. Arrogance insists on having its own way, believing in its own correctness and its right to control. When arrogance cannot control by merely issuing a command it becomes anger, then anger engages energy which can be applied in many different ways, on the individual level, on the national level, on the international level. What happens when arrogance and the army of its comrades rise up in people, what is the danger in this? Arrogance begins with a need to establish a certain position, the refusal to step away from that position, to surrender it to someone else or to some other prevailing situation, the insistence on a specific situation. Arrogance in an individual is based on a self-righteous understanding that he or she is completely correct, and everyone else is wrong. People might even think, in their
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Hypocrisy
May the peace of God be with you, now and always. Sometimes as we develop from childhood to maturity we discover that certain actions will or will not get us what we want, and we learn how to adapt ourself to situations so that we do get what we want. We learn to say what needs to be said to achieve our goals, we learn to manipulate, to lie, to be two-faced, we learn to say something other than what we actually think. Schizophrenics often have difficulty separating what they do from what the voices in their heads tell them to do, they do what the voices say, causing terrible problems. Some who are sane, some apparently normal people have learned that certain thoughts and feelings have to be suppressed, they present what is socially or politically correct even if they disagree, then when they are alone or with a group of likeminded people, they say what they really think. This is hypocrisy which has been described as Satans sin, a great sin. Hypocrisy means thinking one thing and saying something else, making others think we believe something we do not in order to achieve our ends. Those who think this kind of hypocrisy is legitimate, because it is useful for their own purposes, believe this is a way to acquire what they want, things of value. In fact, it is not true, hypocrisy prevents something, it stops the growth of the individual. Even when it is defined by a specific conflict, this hypocrisy supports duality, partnering the overriding sense of duality itself which needs to be eliminated. Most people fail to realize what hypocrisy does on this path of self-discovery, this path requiring a deep understanding of what goes on inside us. When we do what is right for appearances sake, without any attachment to what is right, we have no love for it, we love only our desires.
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What we see with our eyes is so persuasive, so overwhelming it is difficult to recognize the illusion, difficult if we function with sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste to acknowledge the things we see, hear, smell, taste and touch are merely illusions, difficult to go beyond things on the physical plane and grasp their temporary nature. The physical plane is hypnotic, its effect is magnetic, it pulls us in inducing a condition which keeps us from seeing it for what it is. It sparkles, makes a noise, produces sound, it does things which affect us physically. In a sense we have to protect ourself from interacting with the physical world; if we are not prepared for what we encounter we are not ready to deal with it. When people grew their own food in earlier times they had to be ready for the physical reality of storms, heat, drought and rain, or they would not have had food to eat. This meant constant interaction with the world. How do we tell someone the grain they grow is illusion when they need this food to live, to survive? The world gives us so many reasons to believe in its reality we are overcome just thinking about it, trapped and snared into thinking it is real. Also persuasive are the actions of other people we observe, they deal with the world as though it were real, their emotions are invested there. How do we deal with a world which is not real when people fight or struggle to get what they can from it, even though wise men insist it is not real? How do we develop the understanding that it is not real and yet we have to
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One type of insanity has been defined as doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results. If we apply that definition to world history, we might conclude the world has been engaged in mass insanity. One reason we have so much individual insanity is excessive involvement with that world when we should be spending time trying to figure out who we are. If we look to the world for answers, for responses, if we look outside ourself for specific things, all we get is what these outer things have to offer, they can only give to the extent they have something to offer. A cobra can only offer poison, things can only give what they truly are, nothing more, this is what they can give. If we expect anything else we are disappointed, a dangerous disappointment in certain circumstances. There is an old teaching story about a boat on a river, a large boat with animals in the hold. When a storm came up rocking the boat to pieces, the animals were all very frightened as the boat began to come apart. While the boat was breaking up a scorpion jumped on a camels back. Get off me! said the camel. The scorpion pleaded, The boat is breaking up and I cant swim. I beg you, please carry me to the shore.
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Knowing Ourself
If a penguin wanted to be an eagle it would be difficult because its characteristics are not suitable for eagles, but they are suitable for penguins which have been given attributes making it possible to do what penguins have to do. As an eagle, a penguin would be a failure, not only a failure but an extremely frustrated failure. Similarly, if an eagle wanted to be a penguin it would be tough for the eagle. Can you see an eagle surviving in the Arctic, diving under water to look for fish? It would not work, it would be nothing but a failure. In the same way, in our lives we have to understand who and what we are, what is suitable for us. We have our specific nature, we have all been given certain gifts. We have to understand the gifts we have been given, and we have to know them. Imagine if an excellent carpenter wanted to be a physicistit would be difficult and frustrating. If a painter wanted to be a singer, if a singer wanted to be a painter . . . . . we have to be sufficiently in touch with ourself to understand the natural flow of who we are, where that natural flow goes, what it has difficulty with. The ability to stay within what God has given us is something we need to understand, staying with the gifts given to us by God is something we truly need to understand. When we cannot do that or when we will not do that, we find ourself in the endless
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Conversion
We all need the experience of conversion. What is conversion, what does it mean? Conversion is usually taken to mean changing from one set of beliefs or one religion to another, but this is not the way the great teachers have explained it. Most of us are born to a religion, yet the fact we are born to a certain religion does not mean we believe in God, it does not mean we believe in truth, it means only that we are born to a certain religion. In the world today many religions have become a business, they have become a political party, a way to bring a specific group together, imposing the will of some in that group on the rest. This is what is often called religion today, it is often what religions do in this world. The experience of conversion, according to the wisdom of saintly beings, is something other than that. Conversion means coming to the point where we realize we need God in our life. No matter what religion we are born to, we now take the position that we choose God instead of the world, we take that step, a step which lies beyond what the world has given us, what the world has supplied us with, what the world says is correct. We step into a place where we say there is something else, I need to know what this something else is. At this level of consciousness, a place where we no longer find answers with our intellect, where we know something else is going on in our heart which is not being responded to, which is not being answered, we know that we need answers, we need
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Chutes and Ladders is a game we used to play when we were very young. This is a game whose players start at the bottom of a board trying to reach the top with the throw of the dice, a few spaces at a time. The winner is the first one to reach the top. At some spaces there is a ladder on which the player climbs up, at other spaces there is a chute on which the player slides rapidly back down. Images of chutes and ladders are interestingto slide down is quick, it takes no effort, we land on a chute and before we know what happened we are at the bottom again. With a ladder it is one step at a time, we go up a ladder slowly to reach the next step. Our life is like that, our state can change so rapidly, the smallest thing will set us off. We hit a chute and down we go to a lower state in a matter of seconds. Getting out of it is different, we cannot get out in a matter of seconds, we cannot just take another step then slide up. It doesnt work that way, we can slide down to a lower step, but to get back up takes effort. We have to get back up that chute or find a ladder, then one step at a time we crawl out of the hole. It does not take any effort to fall, to rise we must engage effort. As long as we are unaware we have dropped down we find no reason to climb out. The experience of falling down a chute happens so quickly, the change of state is so intense, so rapid we do
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Attachments
The word attachment means something that is tied or fastened to something else. This suggests our attachments are literally fastened to us, everywhere we go they go with us, and more importantly, everywhere they go we go with them. There is a problem here, who are we, what are we attached to, where do we go, why, what takes us there? Once we begin to understand the relation between ourself and our attachments, we can attempt the detaching process. Think of a fishhook on a fishing rod as a lie dangling from the rod, a lie to the fish that this is something to eat. The fish is deluded by the lie and bites, then suddenly it is attached, attached to a fishhook, attached to the end of its life. It is very difficult for the fish to get rid of the hook. A big fish can try swimming in the opposite direction, but at the very least it will rip a big hole at the point of attachment which will be painful. Have you ever looked at the barbs on a fishhook? Not only is there a hook on the way in, there is also a hook going out, a barb at the bottom going the other way so that the fish cannot release itself. We have been hooked so many times we are attached, we have to follow the rod wherever it takes us because we are attached. To detach ourself entails effort and pain, either we are willing to put up with the effort and pain or we have to keep swimming with the hook in our mouth until we are pulled from the water. We all know what happens when we are pulled from the water.
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The Whisperer
In a collection of the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, one at the beginning of the collection indicates that the consequence of our actions depends on our intention. This is an important understanding which informs us that not everything is as it appears to be. In addition to all the external layers are the inner layers where truth exists. As we go through life we are often so fixed on a specific goal we stop looking at our actions because we believe the goal is paramount, we assign such positive things to the goal we sometimes forget about the actions we take to achieve this goal. God has only to say, Be! and that thing exists. Results are in His hands, not ours, yet what is in our hands is our intention as it manifests in our actions. Our intention may not bring about the results we intend, but if our intention is correct it will cause something appropriate for our state of being. We need to go through life with appropriate intentions. What is an appropriate intention, what is correct for us? This is something to consider, something we should contemplate deeply, we need to understand what that intention can do. Intention is our bandwave connecting us to the open space of His holiness, our intention must be aligned with His. To do this we have to walk to Him on the path of purification. As long as our intention is motivated by something other than His grace or His glory, our intention is not pure. How do we stay pure, how do we stay on the path to Him, and how do we understand the
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Breaking Habits
May the peace of God be with you, now and always. We go to sleep at night and we wake up to a new day; in His mercy God gives us a continuum of new days. We get out of bed to start again, and every time we get up we decide how we are going to begin. If we are caught in a continuum of sameness, a failure to understand that an opportunity lies before us for a fresh beginning, nothing changes. But if we understand that the sun sets and the sun rises, even though it is the same sun it is a new opportunity. If we miss the available mercy, the mercy given to us, we miss an understanding that God starts the world all over again, we miss an understanding that with each breath there is a renewal in our state of being. We cannot be tied down by what happened before, we have to move away from that. Negativity ties us to the difficult; being positive is a source of renewal, being positive carries springtime around with us. Renewal is characteristic of this world, death and renewal go on all the time. We must allow death and renewal to proceed within us, there must be a death for our base desires and a renewal for purity. Purity must be renewed continually. If we want fresh bread we have to bake every day, if we do not bake every day we cannot have fresh bread. The smell of freshness is given off because the bread was just baked. There is a vibrance when we resonate reality because we have made the effort to be there, we keep making that effort, we keep remaking that effort.
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May the peace of God be with you. We need to explore and understand the special relationship which can exist between man and God. We have been told that God existed in the beginningless beginning, before creation, and during that timeless period He knew Himself. He knew Himself through Himself and only through Himself because nothing else existed, there was only God. God wanted to bring something into creation through which He would also know Himself. Before He created man, He created the world and the angels, but there was no creation in whom God had breathed His essence, no such creation existed. There were so many creations but none who had been given its essence from God, the essence through which God would recognize Himself. When His intention to create such a being was known to the angels they objected, If You create this being he will dispute with You, he will argue with You, he will try to tell You what is right and what is wrong. He will also be the cause of bloodshed and killing in the world. God replied to the angels, You do not understand what I am going to create, you do not understand My essence. Now most of the angels accepted this, but one did not, the one known as Satan. Interestingly, the angels were doing the very thing they objected to, they disputed Gods decision in exactly the way they said man would dispute. The point here is that, until it reaches
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May the peace of God be with you, now and always. Once when a man who was with the prophet Muhammad finished his prayers the prophet said to him, Go back and do your prayers again, you didnt do them correctly. After the man had done his prayers again the prophet repeated, You didnt pray correctly, do your prayers again. He did them a second time, but still the prophet told him, You havent done them correctly, do them again. After the third time the prophet said once again, You didnt pray correctly. This time the man asked, Tell me what I have to do to pray correctly. The prophet answered, Stand and recite two verses from the Quran until you find peace in them, then bow until you find peace in your bow, put your head on the ground until you find peace there on the ground, then sit until you find peace in sitting.
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Bridging Separation
A story in the Old Testament tells how a certain people wanted to build a tower to God using stones as their building materials. At that time the peoples in that part of the world all spoke the same language, but as the tower grew higher and higher God changed that one language into many, they could no longer communicate. This stopped the building of the tower. We know we cannot reach God by building a tower of stone, however there is another lesson in this story. If we speak the same language, if we come from the same culture, it is easier to communicate; when we come from different cultures and speak different languages it is more difficult. We can reach God by communicating human being to human being, not with stones, not with towers, but by communicating with each other. We have to cross the bridge of language, cross over cultures, over any sense of differences and all the things these differences give rise to. They cause a separation which means we perceive some people to
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In God We Trust
Yesterday it was announced that the United States has issued a new nickel, and I was curious to see how it looked. Like the old nickel, it has a portrait of Jefferson, more important to me, I wanted to see if the front of the coin still has the words in God we trust. This phrase, in God we trust, is interesting. The first of the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament asserts that God alone is God, we are to have no other gods. The first words of faith in Islam assert that there is no god but God. When America was colonized by the English the early settlers came to escape religious difficulties, they wanted to live in a place where they could practice their religion as they chose. Each of the early colonies practiced their Christian religion in a different way. Massachusetts was settled by the Puritans who excluded those who were not Puritan. Maryland, that is Mary Land, was settled by Lord Baltimore, a Catholic. There is still something called the Baltimore catechism, a certain version of Catholicism. Maryland was Catholic. William Penn, a Quaker, had a land grant given to his father by the King of England which became Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia as its principal city.
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In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful, the creator, sustainer and nourisher. These words are intertwined to give us the understanding that if it were not for God we would not be here, and if it were not for God this creation would not exist, if it were not for God there would be no protection, if it were not for God there would be no sustenance. When we repeat these words do we believe them, do we believe that God is the protector, sustainer, nourisher, the merciful and compassionate? If we believe it, why do we fear things? If we believe it why do we have difficulties in relationships, if we believe it why do we put ourself in situations which make us hesitant or anxious? How deep is the faith that our protection comes from God? Or do we believe that protection comes from other things, from our ability to influence other people, an ability to influence situations, an ability to make things work one way or another? What makes us cling to the understanding which takes for granted that everything depends on our intervention, not His? How do we change our understanding from a dependence on our own actions to a dependence on His? God loves the effort we make. Certain things are our duties in the world, yet we should understand as we perform them that results occur because of His grace; our responsibility is to be satisfied with the way things turn out. We are responsible for what we are given, but what He has kept for Himself is not within our comprehension or capacity. We have a certain understanding of what belongs to Him and what belongs to us. Let us focus on the limited nature of what is ours. We do have a limited nature, if we understand the truth of our limits and the glory deposited there, we know we are not deficient. As long as we feel limited, as
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A young man once went to a minister and said, Tell me the difference between comedy and tragedy, I want to be a playwright. The minister looked at him and answered, You see that roof over there, how steep it is? Two days ago as I looked out my window, someone was putting new shingles on it to stop the leak. When he fumbled with a few shingles he slid down the roof, fell to the ground and broke his leg. That is comedy. Yesterday as I was preparing my sermon, looking through the papers I planned to read, I got a paper cut. That is a tragedy. The way we understand things sometimes has to do with how close they are to us, how much impact they have on us. We give different importance and thought to things which affect us directly. Since we all walk around in a body, every time we collide with something it makes an impact; we are always bumping into things that affect us. Now the question we should ask is, how subtle is this body? If we were composed of gas, when we collide with a wall there would be very little impact. Because we are not gas, when we hit the wall there is a major impact. We also have to examine our inner subtlety. Be like smoke, not easily damaged. What kind of collision makes a dent in us, a dent so overwhelming it needs to be repaired?
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A baby in the womb is an embryo attached to an umbilical cord; for the first few days after birth, the newborn still has part of this cord attached to it. Both the embryo and the newborn live in a state of dependency, something which came from somewhere else, relying on something else for sustenance. That little piece of umbilical cord falls off but there is another stage of dependence, the baby still depends on its mothers breast or a bottle to survive. As the child grows, no longer physically attached, there is a degree of separation which brings a kind of independence. This independence evokes certain thoughts, certain ways of understanding the nature of our existence. Once we lose our dependence we think in terms of individual consciousness, a consciousness in a separate body. It is no longer easy for a child to remember its dependence as it seems to be more independent. When the mind begins to tell us about our independence, a child feels more independent, losing the memory of dependence and attachment. Here is the beginning of so many problems, arrogance, the arrogance of an independence which has forgotten we came from something else, forgotten we are indebted to something. We have forgotten we are supported by something outside ourself, we are nourished by something outside ourself, we are taken care of by something other than ourself. Now we believe we are taking
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Sincerity in Faith
As we proceed through life we discover we have certain things and we lack certain things, there are times when we feel a sense of want, times when we think we need something, when we are caught by the desire for something we want. In this state of intense desire or longing we can be overcome by emotion, overwhelmed by the fear we will not get what we want. This desire can be excessive longing for a certain man or woman, convinced our life is incomplete without that person; it can be the desire for money, convinced our life is incomplete without wealth; it can even be the desire for health, convinced our life is threatened by some terrible illness. The mind approaches any desire much the same wayto understand how desires affect us we have to understand the minds approach to desire. The mind looks for satisfaction in the world, it assumes the world is a place which will give us what we need to be satisfied, to satisfy our existence and our desire. But the world is a place of limits, not a source of abundance, fulfillment is necessarily incomplete. When we look at things which are limited for fulfillment, we fail to understand their limits. Until we look for fulfillment in a place which is limitless abundance we cannot be satisfied, we cannot find peace. There are different ways of understanding this, easy enough on an intellectual level, talking about it on an intellectual level, but this is basically hypocritical: if our understanding resonates only mentally all we are doing is discussing concepts, it is hypocrisy until
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The world calls itself moderntodays world is a time of discovery, a time of innovation and radical developments in technology. We think of the past as a time of darkness and not knowing, we think of this as a time of enlightenment and knowing. We believe we can repair the ills of the world with the discoveries of today. Modern medicine can wipe out the devastation of disease, modern psychology understands the mind and the psyche in ways which have not been understood before. This is the arrogant propaganda sold to modern society: our modern culture is hip and cool, we are all-knowing and all-accomplishing, all we have to do is jump on board for the ride. But the truth is that the state of mankind has not changed over the centuries, the condition of man has not changed, the life of man exists essentially within the same limits. We make much of the fact that our lifespan is longer now, this confirmed by the statistical evidence gathered in our modern day, although we ignore both the transience of life and what lies beyond. More than that, we have lost touch with ancient knowledge and the ancient understanding. We believe we now have new explanations to understand human beings. We believe in an evolutionary theory of human growth which has us developing in an unbroken progression, we do not contemplate a human existence which has developed, regressed and needs to develop again.
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Balance
I used to wrestle when I was young and the first thing they taught us was how to stand, how to be balanced. If we are not balanced it is easy to push us over. The first exercise was rocking back and forth on our feet, finding our center, finding a solid standing position so that when we received some impact we did not fall down, we were capable of sustaining our effort. Even though we think we are balanced as we walk around, we do not have the necessary balance to withstand a heavy encounter or assault. There is a difference between the balance for walking and the balance ready for some encounter. Similarly, the first thing we need on this path is balance, a balance including the capacity for encounter. Our path lies in the world, we have not chosen to become monks, we have not chosen a path away from the world; this path entails encounters which are not easy, not just walking down the street. Some encounters are like wrestling, some are actually war. To survive these encounters we need great balance or we fall down. How do we center ourself, what keeps us off center? Why do we lose our balance, our center, what creates our center, what is a correct center, what is an incorrect center? To be at peace is to be centered. What takes us away from our peace, what destroys our peace? Emotional reactions can shatter our peace; it is difficult to be balanced if our face is turning red and we are shouting.
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Opinions
May the peace and blessings of God be with you, now and always. Opinions are interestingthey are the things other people have although we have absolute truths, something which creates serious problems in the world. We notice exchanging opinions with other people, as soon as we come to some subject close to their heart we are no longer dealing with opinions, we are talking about truth. Even when we are unable to be objective about someone elses opinion, we fail to grasp that what we accept is grounded in the same kind of reasoning. We consider our point of view valid and theirs ephemeral, we think they are floating on air, their opinion will change when they understand and rise to a higher level of consciousness. We should understand there is more than one way of seeing things, we should be more tolerant of other perspectives. We are not required to agree with them, but we are required to be tolerant, a difficult thing. In certain situations we frequently see the opposite, we see people repeating what they have in their mind again and again, as if repetition makes it valid, so convincing it cannot be denied. Some people shout, thinking perhaps if they speak louder than anyone else they make it valid. People have different techniques in their conversational approach to validating their opinions, to establishing them as more important. How dearly we hold onto them, how important it is to us that they prevail in our circle of friends, acquaintances or family.
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Transparency
If we look at water, clean water, we can see through it, it has no color, it looks uniform, no separations. They say water looks this way because it is not arrogant, an interesting perspective because we use water for purification. Since we think of water as a way to cleanse ourself, it makes sense that it should be free of arrogance. By pouring something over us which is free of arrogance, immersing ourself in something pure, it affects our own arrogance. The Abrahamic and other religions all have rituals involving water and cleansing before prayer, or ritual immersion as a form of cleansing. To go on this path to God cleansing is involved, all the religions are concerned with cleansing. If water alone could do the job it would be easy, but water alone does not do it. Water helps but something else must go on, inner cleansing is different from just washing with water. If our hands are dirty and we wash long enough the dirt comes off, but like Lady Macbeth who could not wash her hands clean, we have to find a way of cleaning ourself inwardly. What is this purification, how are we supposed to understand it? There are qualities which belong to God and qualities which belong to the forces of darkness and illusion. In world politics we see the use of qualities which do not belong to God, leaders who say that for a period of time we will do these things to accomplish certain goals, the end justifies the means, the end justifies
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Perception
Different people look at the same things but have different perceptions, colorblindness for example. Even without physical disabilities we perceive things in different ways, we draw different conclusions from similar perceptions. Perception or the ability to be aware of things, to see things clearly is worth examining. It should be evident that something about the perceiving individuals makes them perceive things as they do. The colorblind example is an obvious physical problem, but our perceptions are also related to our mental and emotional state, we perceive things, both examples suggesting we perceive things because of the way we are. If we do not examine the way we are we will not understand why we perceive things as we do, we will not understand our perceptions are inherently prejudiced. In other words, our motives color the way we perceive things. If I wanted
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Some people are good at taking love but not so good at returning it, giving it back. Why do people act the way they do, what does it take to recognize how we behave? We seem to have only a limited ability to recognize our own emotions, possibly because emotions limit consciousness, they overwhelm consciousness in the same way that alcohol and drugs do. Strong emotions overwhelm our consciousness and keep us from thinking clearly, we think through the emotion, the qualities this emotion brings with it. We have everything inside us, including a lower and higher self. Many of our emotions are attached to qualities of the lower self. When these emotions take control of us the lower qualities are in control, we learn to think this is who we are. Now we are confused, we fail to see these qualities as a strange, invasive force making us behave in unacceptable ways, we see these qualities as ourself, who we are, and this is just like consuming alcohol, it makes us behave differently. There is nothing we can do about it until the alcohol passes through us, until it no longer affects our capacity. There are two considerations here, first, what these qualities do to us, and second, what we can do to understand ourself better when these qualities rise up in us or in others. Many of the difficulties we have come because of what might be called diseases of the heart, in other words a heart without purity, a failure of purity which causes inappropriate actions. If we understood
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Love
We spend our life looking for love, turning many corners expecting to find it, looking into many faces expecting to find it, going everywhere expecting to find it, but first we should search for love within, then we will be able to see it out there. We can be in either a loving or an unloving state. The unloving state could be nothing more than stubbornness, the state which refuses to love. What is this refusal of love, this stubbornness that keeps us from loving? It comes from all the things we are attached to other than love, our deliberate refusal to give them up, it comes from the separation of the self from others, a sense of mine and yours, a sense of differences, everything supporting our base desires, it comes from an egocentric perspective on existence. All that keeps us in stages of the unloving state, a state in which we are not our true self. There is the self which is part of the merging totality and the self which is separate. If we confuse the two, if we do not know the difference between them, we spend a lot of time not being ourself. This negative part of us has to be eliminated, it should not be part of us; our inclination to stay in that place keeps us from reality itself. Love exists, God exists, and we can put an equal sign between them, God is love. When we are in a state of love we have the possibility of aligning ourself with God, when we are in an unloving state we cannot be aligned with God. Think about it this
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May the peace and blessings of God be with you, now and always. Much of the difficulty in the world is caused by the need of some individuals to distinguish themselves, to identify themselves as superior, different, as better. This need for distinction, the need to be separate is directly opposite to the need for unity, for merging. The path to God requires the disappearance of the self. It should be evident that the path of purposeful distinctiveness, purposeful separation is opposite to the work required for genuine peace. The prophets came to bring the message that there is a path to God, there is a way to approach Him, there are instructions and rules governing the state of being which allows this. Different prophets came to different groups of people. Many of us today have known holy men whose circle we have stepped into, not a large circle, a small circle where we began to learn. At times, now and in the past, some people have wanted their circle to be bigger, some people have thought the circle was more important than the message, that increasing the size of the circle was more important than the path itself. If this process evolves without any checks, eventually the religion becomes more important than the prophets, the religion becomes more important than the message.
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The journey of life passes through many stages. To have a quick view of this journey we can read biographies, that way we can go through someones life in a couple of days. This should give us an idea of how quickly time passes, what it means to understand the passage of time. They say enlightenment can occur in an instant, something we should always remember, something we should keep as a point of reference, a focus we should not lose. Our hope lies in that, it is our reason for existence, our sanctuary from the chaos, the torture and anxiety of this world. We should look at that moment in time when enlightenment occurs, a moment which always exists, which is always the same moment. The difference from moment to moment is merely our misunderstanding of time, time which has been described as the skin of illusion. Time allows us to organize illusion, to give illusion some historical reference or progression which reinforces the nature of illusion. That moment of enlightenment does occur, but it occurs outside all this history, outside of time; it is the moment we break free of history and illusion, we break free of our biography, existence in this world. We change worlds, we change roles, we pass through illusion into reality. Now God has sent many prophets and enlightened beings, many teachers to show us what this is like. My experience with one such teacher has shown me the positive understanding of these beings, an understanding they use to take others from wherever
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A Sense of Awe
A sense of awe can produce maturity. Great and wise teachers can inspire this awe. If we come before them, off the street, full of ourself, immodest, needing attention, needing love, just desperately needing something, they stand us in front of a flame which produces awe, a transformation occurs, awe transforms us. It makes us modest, mature, surrendered. It can put us in a state like a brides, ready to enter the next maturing phase of our life. If this process continues we are ready to understand the truth of this existence, the truth of reality. God gives us many chances to understand His truth. The world is in a constant state of re-creation, if God suspended His sustenance for even a nanosecond everything would disappear. Sustenance is the act of creation, again and again. Why does God keep re-creating us this way? He does it to bring us to the place where we can know Him, where we can become a being who has no beginning or end. It has been explained that if we enter the place of light there is no night, there is no tomorrow, there is only today, only now. Darkness disappears, it no longer returns, there is no separation between past and future, there is only now and light. Even the
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God has only to say, Be! and something is brought into being, it exists. If God wants something to occur it happens, we are subject to these events, we are subject to Gods wishes and intention. However our memory is short, we are so arrogant we forget the nature of our place in the world. When we lived in an agrarian society, to maintain a livelihood we understood our reliance on Gods gifts on a daily basis. We realized that crops would grow if there was rain, but rain was not under our control, nor was drought, the climate, too cold or too hot, this was not under our control. As time passed we developed methods of manufacturing and production. We used to live on the land in a factory without a roof, then we created factories with a roof, a roof which gave us the illusion we no longer depended on God for our sustenance. Here we could control the weather, control the elements, control our life as we could not before, and this we have called the advance of civilization. With this advance we have drifted away from our reliance on God, drifted away from the belief that control is ultimately in His hands, not ours. This must have something to do with our short memory span, our inability to grasp reality as we are overtaken by illusion, by the media, by forms of technology. Our technology has so overwhelmed us it has begun to replace our belief in God with a belief in
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Some people call love an emotion, but if love is described as an emotion that makes it a lesser kind of love, a love which entails things that give us satisfaction. This kind of love, this kind of emotion is deeply attached to our ego, to our sense of selfhood which is so powerful within the ego with its built-in range of attitudes. The ego is proud of the self, protective of the self, and in its own way develops a sense of honor for the self. This does not mean that things developed by the ego have any ultimate reality, they merely exist within the self. When the egos pride is in pain it reacts emotionally. Since the ego is tied to self-love, to love of
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We play many different roles on many different paths, some we are conscious of and some we are not. Lets think about the acts we are conscious of. To display certain reactions in some situations we know how we have to act and respond. We project a deliberate persona in these situations to produce the responses we need. If we do this over a period of time we become good at it, and if we are sufficiently aware of other peoples requirements, we are also good at knowing what personality will evoke specific responses from others. We acquire a list of characters we know how to play, we have an index of acts we know how to play. As we encounter different situations in our life we pull out these different acts and personas. It took years to develop the cast of characters, it took years to understand how to use them, how to manipulate situations to make them turn out the way we wanted them to. We are now so good at this they do not appear to be acts any more, not to the people who watch or to the people with whom we interact. If we do not sustain the consciousness of having developed these acts, if we do not have a broad view of our own history, we forget how and why these acts were developed. We forget how difficult they were to develop, we forget the unsuccessful situations when we said afterwards, if I had only said this or if I had only said that, situations which taught us how to build our act, how to fill out the persona, so that the next time something similar came up we remembered to say this and we remembered to say that.
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Maturity
If we observe a fruit tree in the springtime when it blossoms, first we see a flower which slowly blooms and dies, then the flower is replaced by a small fruit which grows. If we watch the fruit we see it not only grows, it also changes, as it grows it changes. If we pick a piece of fruit in its early stages it is quite different from the later stages, there are obvious differences, and if we pick it at the right time it has the right taste. This fruit goes through a maturation process, after maturation there is decay. At a certain time the fruit will fall, the stem can no longer hold its weight, it can no longer take nourishment; fulfilled, it falls to the ground. Once separated from its sustenance, the process of rotting begins. Initially, the rotting is actually maturity, for awhile it is sweeter, but the sweetness becomes rot. People are not like fruit although they do go through certain processes just as a piece of fruit does. One problem with people, unlike fruit they do not necessarily become sweeter with age.
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What the wise teachers have taught is a subtle teaching which requires subtle understanding. We are told we need to find liberation, the freedom of our soul, but to find this freedom we have to be bound in certain ways, we have to be bound to find our freedom. This world is a difficult place where we have so many trials, so many problems, yet here we are looking for the liberation of our soul while we live in this world. We encounter people who treat us unkindly, who treat us unfairly, who mock or deride us, who cause us difficulty, and still we are bound to forgive them, to find that liberation we are bound to forgive them. If we cannot understand this forgiveness, if we do not realize how we are bound to be forgiving, liberation cannot be ours. We have duties in this world which means we have to find jobs, we need to be successful in the world, nevertheless when we are successful we make enemies, people are jealous of our success, but we are bound to our duty and bound to liberation, we have to do both. Sometimes if we are kind, generous and good to people, we are accused of acting with ulterior motives, people say there must be a reason why we are kind, generous and good, they do not understand that searching for liberation means we are bound to be kind, good and generous. And sometimes when we are honest and sincere in our dealings with people, they might think they can cheat us, in fact, they might, yet we are bound to be honest and sincere whether people treat us correctly or not, whether they cheat us or not.
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Holiness
Since we spend so much of our life in the mundane, the transition from mundane to holy is something we need to think about. In the midst of the worldly we need to take ourself to another station, another state, another place. We know that already, but how does it happen, what does this juxtaposition of the mundane and the holy mean, how do we accommodate these two aspects of our life? Many religions have ritual ceremonies for this transition, most involve water. In Christianity there is baptism, acceptance of the way, usually a thing which occurs once signifying entrance to the holy. In Judaism there is the mikvah, a purifying bath the rabbis in older times used to take before the Sabbath, immersing themselves completely in water, making a transition. In Islam there are ablutions, the ritual washing before prayer five times each day. In all of them we have the understanding of transition, the understanding that transition is necessary to enter another state. Let us go beyond the outer signs of transition and talk about its inner actualization. What occurs within us to make this movement from one place to another, what attaches us to the movement taking us to holiness? We are born into the world where we develop a certain ability to deal with it, a belief in that ability as we become confident of the things we learn, our ability to survive, to take care of ourself. We love our abilities, especially if we are good at things and confidentthat very confidence impresses us and we love with this too.
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Spirituality is about being not about talking. We can talk all we want, but unless we become, talking is of no consequence. There are certain individuals who have become what they talk about, and in that case the spoken word carries the resonance of reality. This is an extraordinary phenomenon; if we can sit with someone who has entered reality there is an opportunity to learn something from the words themselves, but if the words come from a person who does not exist in that reality the words are of little consequence. There is a story about a prayer leader who was reciting the Quran one day. He happened to be a man who had memorized the whole Quran. On this occasion someone was sitting in the assembly listening to him, looking at him, sometimes smiling happily
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The heart should be a place melted in love, but too often it is a rock, a hard, difficult rock which reacts to the world in a rock-like way. What happens to the soft place in a baby to make it the rock-like place it often becomes? When a baby enters the world it has not landed yet, it has come into time and space, but it is still not actually here, it remains in another world until slowly, it is rooted in this world. Children have different experiences when they are brought into this world, some are born into strong, kind, nurturing environments, some are not. Sometimes, even what appears to be soft, kind and nurturing has an edge which frightens a soft child, and fear does terrible things to people, fear and occasionally the reality of what happens to their young lives. When children are frightened they might develop a mechanism to deal with that fright. There are different mechanisms; there is one in which they develop a protector, something to protect themselves from all their difficulties or invasive fears. Inwardly, the child is a soft, vulnerable being, but to protect this soft, vulnerable inner being, it develops a coating, a hard shell to protect what lies inside.
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If we cannot see the truth in ourself we cannot see it in others, we are in a state which has veils covering our ability to see. Arrogance is one of those veils, a state blocking our ability to see the pure heart in another person. Not only does arrogance block our ability to see that others have melted in purity, but it also blocks our ability to see that the possibility exists. Until our own heart melts we will not understand this melting process in others. Enlightened teachers see through the veils which keep us from seeing our true self, they see through and beyond them. They see what is available in us that we do not see, they see it because they are in that pure melted state, they know what it is like and how it happens. When we melt we are softened, the veils are parted, then we can see the possibility in ourself and in others. In this state we see beyond the apparent, we see through the obvious to what lies beyond. This make a difference in the way we respond to the world. The master who sits in a room filled with people sees the light in everyone. Can we? If we cannot, why not? We cannot if our heart is not melting, if it is not, we do not see the light in others. Once we begin to melt, when we are with other people, even in a
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The creation of Adam, the first man, is a great mystery, and we are all related to this mystery in a very significant way. To understand who we are, we have to understand who Adam is, what his creation means because we are a re-creation of that original creation. To know ourself we can start with this question, why was this species called man created, why did God create Adam? We have been told by the saints and the prophets that God created the world and other beings before He created man. When God told the angels that He was going to create a being who would be greater than they are, with a capacity to know Him greater than theirs, certain angels objected, certain that if He created this being he would not be obedient, he would not do what God said, he would kill other creatures and argue with God. What the angels could not understand, and what we find it difficult to understand, is a state higher than our own. The angels could not understand Gods reasons for creating man because they did not know what God knew. In just the same way, we often assume things we cannot understand, we are limited by what we know, limited by our own state. God did have a reason to create man. The rest of creation had been brought into existence as things which He produced from Himself yet not from His essence. He wanted to create something that came from His essence. The Old Testament says that God
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Understanding Love
When we set out on this path to reality there are certain fundamental questions we have to ask ourself: who am I, why am I here, what is the purpose of creation, why was I created, what is the purpose of existence, what is the purpose of this life? The answers are easy, living the answers is difficult. We are here because of love, we were created because of love, we exist because of love, we came from love, we are love, our intention is to return to love. This love we talk about is a powerful yet elusive quality. We have all used the word love, we have all been in love, we have all been in love with love, we all have had some experience of love in our life, but have we ever focused on love as the reason for existence, on love as the core of existence, love as the power keeping electrons within atoms in the place where they are meant to be? What is this love, how do we become part of this love, what does it do to us, do for us, through us? How are we in touch with this love, how do we understand it, what does it mean? When we contemplate a field of flowers off in the distance on a bright sunny day, we see the horizon, the different colors of the flowers and grasses, the gentle movement of the plants and small animals, we experience a sense of peace, of serenity. If that serenity grows and becomes luminous we have a sense of integration in an aspect of serenity itself, we feel as if we are part of the
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May the peace of God be with you, now and always. What is transformation, what is transformed, who are we, what do we need to know about ourself? Saintly beings have told us that to know our Lord we must know ourself. This means we must go through the process of learning who we are. No one else can do it for us, no one else can explain to us who we are, we must go through the process ourself, find out for ourself who we are. Scripture tells us there is no compulsion in religion, and part of what this means is that we cannot force religion on each other. Now take marriage, it is supposed to be a loving union of two people. We can force people to marry, but we cannot force them to be loving. When parents force their children to marry, they cannot force them into a loving union. That union happens when two individuals open their hearts to each other, when they love each other. It is the same with religion, only certain things can be forced. Society or the religious hierarchy controlling society can force attendance, force the performance of rituals, yet they cannot force the opening of the heart, they cannot force devotion to God or voluntary obedience to Gods law. All they can force is an outer obedience by punishing those who do not conform, and with the fear of punishment they create apparent obedience.
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Recently we met two people who were believers in God, believers who wanted to be with other people who are enthusiastic about their belief. Because we all shared this enthusiasm the experience was beautiful, rewarding, we shared common feelings, emotions and understanding. There was so much of this communal understanding it brought unity; when there is unity God joins us because He wants us to be one. If we do what He wills, His will is to be with us. Why do we have such meetings, why do we come together? We do this to understand how to align ourself with His will, something which allows Him to come among us, to be with us so that we can engage His joy shared with all creation. Here is a Creator who is compassionate, here is a Creator who is merciful. What has He done for His creation? He has let us know compassion and mercy. In His mercy He has given us the ability to experience compassion, in His mercy He has given us the ability to experience mercy, and what happens when we taste this food of His, what happens when we absorb these gifts? We come closer to Him, and by coming closer to Him a new field of vision opens for us, new ways to see are opened, the love which is our natural state begins to grow. Every time we meet we bring another log and add it to the fire, we make the fire burn higher, we make that thing which burns inside us, the love which grows inside us, we make it burn a little higher as we are set on fire, as we are inflamed. With the certitude that He is with us, that we are with Him, we are inflamed with the knowledge that our Father is with us, we are with Him, and then we are stronger, more steadfast in certitude.
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MIA 153 March 10, 2013