Recorded
on 8/6/01 at the Silk Road Tea House, Chapel Hill, N.C.
Belkis: The energy of ashk has brought us together again.
Always
the lovers are coming together, building within our community a
great love...to spread a light.
We begin with music.
The music allows us to tune to each other.
The music allows a transaction of the hearts.
In
the middle of these transactions of love, we find
Allah. Allah is not far from us.
Allah is with us at all times.
Our finding Allah requires a shift in our vision.
The easiest way to make this shift is to come together.
By
coming together again and again,
we see in each other the mirrors in which we can change
ourselves.
The work of any one of us is the work of all of us--and at
the head of all this work is our teacher, our teacher who has submitted
to Allah through love of humanity.
There
is no other path but this path of humanity.
Other
paths are paths of illusion.
We
look for this path with one another.
We
connect heart to heart.
We
take hand in hand and together we walk this path.
A man came before a teacher.
He had been to a concert and the teacher asked him,
"How
was the music?"
and
the man answered,
"The
music was beautiful. It was like angels."
The teacher said, "For you, this music is helal."
A
friend of the man went with him to the same concert.
The
teacher asked, "How was the music?"
The
man answered, "It was loud and noisy, full of sheytan."
"For
you," the teacher answered, "this music is haram."
There is one music.
There
is one Hak.
Everything
comes in how we look.
On
this path, what we are learning to do is [to]
look with a beautiful eye.
The
beautiful eye sees beauty.
In
coming together, we learn to tune our eyes and our ears for beauty.
Everything is in its place.
Where
then is beauty not?
The Prophet was walking down the road with his companions.
A dog had died and its carcass lay on the side of the road.
The companions were ready to skirt the dog
and were holding their noses.
"Come look," said Mohammed.
The companions let go of their noses and came to see.
"This dog ate such filth, had such a
difficult life, and yet look--look at these teeth.
They are white and fine."
Inside everything we see as bad,
there is a goodness hidden.
On this path, our community allows us to learn this patience
to find the beauty.
We share with each other the times that we think
are good and the times that we think are bad.
In this sharing, we reduce our stress and we find love with each other.
The Prophet was taking ablutions.
Before he was to put his boot on,
an eagle came and grabbed the boot.
As the boot rose in the air,
it spilled over and a snake fell out.
In this case, there was an immediate showing
of how there is something of joy in a disappointment.
A missing boot is a disappointment.
A found snake that gets away is a joy.
On this path, we learn to wait for
the joys that seem far from the disappointments.
Our prescription is "Wait and see".
And
again, with our companions on this path, we learn patience.
Sometimes we have difficulties.
Where do these difficulties come from?
These are our testing of ourself.
It is not easy to become a mature and beautiful human being.
Part of us resists.
And so we always have work to do.
When
difficulties come our way, we are asked to wait
with patience--
to put it aside,
to wait to see what the future brings;
and in this way, we take step by step.
Our community is building a new place.
And yet, the place that is being built
is nothing but the energy that is transformed
from here to another physical space.
On the weekend, when we came together,
everyone was moving and working together.
Did we have the eyes to see this beauty?
Did we have the eyes to see each one taking care of the other?
Did we have the eyes to see how this work requires
of each of us our own special natures?
More and more we are working together like the hand.
If each finger were exactly the same, it would never be able to lift a
pencil or a
hammer.
Because each of us has some differences,
we are also able to work as one in a unity.
The work of this path is this work of
unity and love.
And where do we learn this?
We learn this first from the example of our teacher.
For us our teacher is our dost.
What is this dost?
This dost is the one that brings Allah alive in us.
And
that is possible because this dost sees everyone with love.
It does not see this one as noisy and that one as like an angel.
It sees each one as having the qualities of Allah.
The dost shines indiscriminately on everyone.
The
dost shares everything.
When Rumi met Shams, he said, "This is my dost."
The name Shams means "sun".
In his very name, he revealed the qualities of a dost.
The sun shines on everyone.
It does not shine on one more than on another.
It does not wait until we are in a good mood to shine on us.
It is always there providing energy.
The
dost in the same way shares this energy of ashk with all.
In this path, we learn from our teachers how to become dost ourselves.
This is a path of experiential knowledge,
but it is also a path of teacher and student
and a path of community.
And all of these together work like one hand.
In the zikr, we move as one and we sound as one. In the
turning, we create an engine of energy that goes around the
world.
This is not something that is found in books.
This is something that is found only through experience
and coming together
again and again.
This is not something that can be explained simply in
words.
It can only be experienced through the magnetism
of the gathering.
We are thankful that we have been brought together
once more.
Always we are to be thankful, for everything is given to us
if we have the eyes to see.
The store is open.
Audience:
I have a question.
Last week, you told us about the first time that
you ever heard Baba give a sohbet in public and you'd
mentioned he talked about Noah. And you said that he had talked about
Noah as being...the ark as being the body, and the
animals being the nefs, and having to deal with the energy of the
masculine and the feminine, the whole imagery of the ark as the
body. And to me, I took that as being that that moment--the ark, the
flood--is happening today. Now is this what people mean by
"biblical time"? The metaphor is that which connects you beyond
history, identity, other things that attach us and we're able to
transcend time, space--whatever it is--and we connect.
Belkis:
Yes. (laughter)
Audience:
The moment--dem--is that what is meant by dem?
Audience:
Dem bu dem. ["The moment is the moment", ed.]
Belkis:
Dem is the moment. We have many such moments together. All
different and all the same. The variety is wonderful. Have we
ever been to a sohbet night or a zikr night that is the same as the
other one? Is it ever what we expect when we're driving up? This
one has learned that it's always different--in wonderful and surprising
ways. And sometimes one is expecting this and one might be
disappointed that it is that, and yet the that is more wonderful than
the this. (laughter). Did we plan this? Well, of course not. It
is the synergistic characteristic of the people coming together. So
we're not sent out separately to meditate. Although we also
meditate, that's not our main practice. Our main practice is each
other. And so these biblical stories are not something that sit in
books. They're something learned synergistically, and that we can then
feel and see from our own experience. And yes, they're
metaphors, but they're also real. It's not an imaginary...biblical
stories are not an imaginary thing. Noah was a real person.
Audience:
There he is![pointing at a young man named Noah]
B:
There he is. We talked earlier. (laughter).
Totally unexpected. We
met each other. His name's Noah.
We've been working a lot with Noah, and you're real.
(Noah laughs). And we all have Noah.
We're all Noah.
And we're all also the ones that wanted to run away from Noah,
and thought that they could save
themselves with their mind.
So these biblical stories are lived again and again.
The prophets came as warners--
as teachers--and lived out the scripts that allowed them
to have teachings for others.
As for dem, those are those moments when
we're connected.
In connecting to each other,
we're also connecting to what is essential in ourselves.
When that connection is made there is no boundary and
there is no two.
There is only one.
And that's as sweet as it gets.
I think of a phrase from Christian faith about "The peace that
passeth all understanding."
That's
also dem: something where the reason
stops because the reason has gone bankrupt with
wonder.
Now we learn this with each other, but it is also possible to
experience it outside of this community. But it's not that we
sit there with our mouths open. It's that there is an interaction, and
we soften ourselves to allow the sun to come through us--to
allow the ashk to come through us, and then it's not ours. If we try to
hold on to that, then that's ego and I-ness. It takes two to
tango.
My
own ethnicity is Finnish, and in recent years,
the tango has become very popular there.
These people who don't even like to hug,
never speak of love, and don't kiss ever in public...
at lunchtime they are grabbing each other and tangoeing!
They have to have this form that creates the possibility
for this connection.
So even there, they learn that it takes two to tango.
Ashk isn't ours.
It's not personal. It's a grace.
In
Philadelphia, Baba said that everyone has the seed of ashk.
It's like an ember, and it's glowing, but it becomes covered with
ashes, and the role of the murshid is to blow those ashes off.
What are these ashes?
These are attachments to things--things of the world,
which really means: things of our lower nature.
And this lower nature can include things as exalted-seeming as
reputation and title.
And these are our limitations.
We think we are rising into them,
moving somewhere up, but our attachments to those things are limitations.
It's okay to have those things.
We want to do things such that we're thought well of,
that we get good performance reviews
and nice raises, but we have to realize that those aren't us.
Those aren't the things that we want to be attached to,
and where we are going, they're not going to matter at all.
What we are going to be asked is,
"Have we loved? Have we served?"
And
there are many ways to serve.
The problem with attachments is that
we hold onto them,
and if we're clutching we're not open,
and we're closing ourselves instead of opening ourselves.
And it's only when we're open and have emptied ourselves that we can be
filled and that the ashk can grow more.
That fire needs oxygen.
So we need to make a space.
The statues of the Buddha always
have a full belly--full in here,
because inspiration is filling,
is bringing-in to an empty, enlarging space...
the transactions that come through space
and that light the fire and keep that fire going.
So we're told that if we become down or depressed, we're not just to sit
still in our room. We're to get up and move and change our air.
We're to go out among people.
We're to look to see what the other needs
and then the openness increases.
Audience:
So, during the time that the flood was coming, that was an ahiret
time? Is that right?
Belkis:
An end of time, is that what you're asking?
Audience:
There was an end of sorts. Baba also says that that this is also
ahiret time, so we're all going to be filling the ark.
Belkis:
Every time is an ahiret time.
Every time is a consequence of a time that came before.
So, life as the people knew it around the ark was ending.
There's an Ali story about how other people are afraid
of their endings, and I'm afraid of my beginnings.
Because we're always setting the ahiret in motion.
We're always giving birth,
which doesn't mean that we should be afraid,
because it is possible to think about that too much with the mind
and be afraid to do anything.
This isn't the path of fear, or guilt. It's the path of love.
In his poetry, Rumi talks about fear and guilt as being like a worm.
He says, "Our path is the path of the lion."
Audience:
I had something to add, and then a question to go with it.
Baba said, "The pen is the human being."
And I think about that when I write.
Most of it I feel is a preparing to be a vessel to bring
something through, and to listen and to be faithful in recording
what touches you and to not interfere with that transmission.
You feel the spirit, and then you have to go with it.
There's some prudence in technique required
because you can just let go of it,
so we are this kind of pen.
How do we lessen our interference so
that the calligraphy that comes through us doesn't have the traces of
self, so that that calligraphy can be more beautiful, and what
comes from the unmanifest comes beautifully through us?
How do we do that? Muhasebe? Accounting of the intentions?
Belkis:
Uh-huh.
Audience:
It's so hard to know when to speak, when not to speak, when to act
and when not to act, how to get to flow, to flow with it
finally?
Belkis:
Writing is a beautiful thing. Inayat Khan compared the poet to the
prophet. The prophet sees the world as illuminated.
Others might see it as dark, but they see it from the sun.
In a dark room, we don't see what's around us, but won't the prophet turn
the
light on in that room and reveal what's been there all along?
Mevlana gave up a kind of scholarship, but became a true writer.
He knew when he was doing his scholarly writing, his legalistic writing,
that there was something else that he was searching for that
whole time.
And he wouldn't have found it had he not been searching for
it and felt something missing. He was waiting for Shams.
This didn't stop his writing. It transformed it.
So, yes, there are forms and there is discipline.
Nothing that we do is without discipline.
We don't love loosely.
We love at the same time that we are working on ourselves.
So, in our love for others,
we work on our own lower desires and that's part of the whole process.
So it all goes together.
It's not like you have to do this first and then
you do that, but you're working all of it at the same time.
In the practice of writing, one of the difficult things to do is not to
let
the censor come in and keep you away from the creative part of it,
but yet to know that once the creativity is out on paper,
then one also disciplines that.
So it's the two things together. Writing is
also a metaphor for how we do all of our work.
Audience:
In muhasebe, is the emphasis on sincerity, and finding what one
truly...what one's deepest intention is, finding maybe what the
Will of Allah is for us in our own will?
Belkis:
It is to find where we are acting from, to notice where we are acting
from. Are we serving Allah, or are we serving our ego-selves?
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