What is faith? How do we develop faith on the Spiritual Path? In the last issue of "Divine Remembrance," Sheikh Din Muhammad Abdullah al-Dayemi presented the first two elements of "The Four Elements of Faith." We learned that the practitioner must be willing to take risks in order to have greater life experiences and then must exercise the insight that everything that has ever happened to them has brought them to where they are in the present moment. Read on to learn more . . .

After we see that everything and everyone is interconnected and bound in accord with each other, the third element of faith is to realize that everything that happens through thought, word and action, no matter what, is a custom course work that is being designed by God/ Allah, the Divine Architect, the Divine Instructor, the Divine Professor, for my personal benefit. It took everything that has ever happened to me to get me here. All of Reality is designed for me, for my lessons.

The mind-blowing thing about this Reality is that it is happening for everyone, for all, at the same time respectively, in the same way on every conceivable and inconceivable level. Imagine that! Everything that is happening here is a complete custom design for each one of us individually, yet we are all experiencing it collectively. Wow! That is what makes God, "God." This can happen in time and space in the "mind" of God. Everything that happens to you is for your benefit. How can you know that? Because, you needed everything that has ever happened to you to get you to where you are now.

What has it taken to get you here? Look at all of the things that you have done in your life. Are you proud of all of them? Do you feel at peace with all of them? Not necessarily, but they got you here. How many things have you had happen in your life that, at the time they were taking place, you didn't like the way they were happening at all? They hurt, and they hurt badly. But somehow you realized through that experience that you were actually growing, and you needed to be "awakened."

Some of us need to get hit over the head with a baseball bat before we'll wake up. Others seem to awaken automatically. Some people get up really early in the morning, and they don't even need to set an alarm clock. You suggest to them, "Meditate every morning before you go to work, before the sun comes up and start your meditation at 5:00 A.M." Those special people will just make the "decision" to arise in the morning at 5:00 AM, and immediately develop the habit. I am not one of them. I need a 2 x 4 rapping on my skull. Get up! And then I'll argue with the 2 x 4, you know? We all need something different to get us here.

Complete faith recognizes in the third element that everything is part of a design - a course work. Letting yourself be in the experience in the laboratory of human life, the first element of faith, liberates your mind from the narrow definitions of what is "good and bad" or "sin and virtue." Look at how much you are motivated and pushed around, "demotivated," by guilt, anxiety and worry. Through the first and the third elements of faith, these tensions start to lift.

Now, I did not say there was not such a thing as "good and bad." That is another topic altogether. However, we are here to experience, and it is okay to fall down, it is okay to trip, it is okay to mess up (whatever "messing up" means) and it is okay to get back up again. Get down. Get back up - a custom course work. Everything that is happening at every moment is the next lesson, like the next "flash card." Every person that walks in the door is the next flash card for you, your lessons. Every thing that you feel is the next flash card for the next lesson. Everything that you see, everything that you taste, everything that you smell, everything that you hear and all of your realizations are part of the next lesson. Now "faith" is starting to become some thing real and personally engaging.

The fourth element of faith to develop the understanding, an intuitive understanding, that everything is already perfect. I did not say that everything always feels good. I said it is perfect! Stand back far enough away from your experiences. Be the "universal witness," and see if you can figure out what isn't working properly, so to speak. Human beings are having a hard time learning their lessons these days, so their lessons are hard right now. The third tenet I said is that everything is a custom lesson. If we engage in suffering activities, we will suffer, and we will have to learn from them. If we hurt each other, if we are "bad," then we will experience the repercussions of those actions through cause and effect. It is a perfect system. "As you sow, so shall you reap." "As you give, so shall you receive." "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "What goes up, must come down." The system works. It is perfect!

One, having evidence and experience; two, seeing the interconnectedness of all things; three, each moment is a custom designed lesson, a custom course work for my life and; four, by putting all the lessons together, we have the insight that the whole system, God, is perfect. These four elements give a person a sense of "complete faith." These elements are worth making the decision to develop.

Sometimes we have a "crisis of faith." It is easy to have faith when you are feeling faith. It's not so easy to have faith when you are not feeling it, right? Complete faith is more than just a sensation inside or a "feeling" of faith. It is also a decision. It is a practice. Faith is a decision to practice the four elements. In addition to feeling faith, you must practice having faith. Feelings are going to rise and fall, but you must cast your bearing, set your sight on something that is great enough that even though your feelings and sensations are going up and down, you will keep going toward your Goal.

Sometimes the Spiritual Path in relationship to the practices and the Teacher is ecstatic. Sometimes it is hell. No matter, are the four elements present and taking place? If the elements of faith are present, then we return to our higher intelligence, our free will. Often we are growing in these four areas of faith, yet we are not complete. We cannot completely see from our vantage point what is "right and wrong," what is best and what is not. So we have faith in someone else to help us. This is part of the relationship with a Teacher.

Faith is predicated on personal experience, yet faith is not limited to the narrowness of one's own "personality" experience. If something is limited by one's own personality, one is just processing their life through the ego once again: "What I like and what I don't." That is only the voice of the ego personality.

We can learn and be trained to have greater and greater experiences of faith. Our training must include the opening of the Heart and the opening up of intuition. By being in the company of Masters, we can actually learn to have intuitive experiences which open us to an array of life that is more than what meets the eye. Those Masters are our "life teachers." Just by being in their presence, our field of energy changes. Our outlook changes, and things happen to us simply as a result of being around them. Teachings that come directly or even indirectly from a Master are a "transmission."

Faith requires that our minds make a decision to engage in discipline. One of the disciplines is to listen, follow instructions and to stay committed to our decisions even during moments of pain, doubt and weakness. We exercise faith by applying the decision to have faith. This is not blind faith so long as you maintain a conscious and ongoing, increasing sense of experience, interconnectedness, learning and sense of perfection. You can know if you are "in faith" and that you are around something that is "faithful" and trustworthy, if it gives you more of that same experience for yourself. Then you'll be inclined to trust the experience.

Relationships start to become reciprocal when you have more faith and trust, and life's lessons can be delivered and received in increasing amounts. Then you will not always need to protect yourself when a suggestion is made. You will have the opportunity to be excited about the next suggestion even though you may not see the meaning or the purpose yet. You will have developed trust from your previous experiences. You have learned to see the interconnectedness of all things. You now see that what is before you is your next lesson, and you see that what has already happened for you has actually been a perfect part of your life.

These are the reasons why faith is so critical to the Spiritual Path. They are the same reasons why faith is so misunderstood. Faith is really intelligence, but it is intelligence on a level that is other than how we are used to operating in the world. True faith requires the focusing of all our attention. Those who have come into "complete faith" have a lot of peace in their lives. It is peaceful when one experiences that everything that is taking place is the perfect design of a perfect course, that everything is interconnected and that everything that has happened to me has given me greater experience and greater learning. Then of what do I have to be afraid? I will not have fear. I have faith. Not fear. Alright Lord, let me have the next moment and then the next moment. I no longer care whether these moments are "happy or sad," because the excitement is that they are the "journey moments" of my life. Have more faith.

Hey look, the roses opened while we were singing! Any questions or comments?

STUDENT: I might be a little confused about your talk, but in order to follow the path of enlightenment you need to have a certain "light," and then you say you can have blind faith because . . .

SHEIKH DIN: You cannot have blind faith when you are on a path of enlightenment!

STUDENT: Isn't it, in a sense, that faith itself is blind, because it contains light, yet we cannot "see" it?

SHEIKH DIN: It is a good question. The "seeing" that we are speaking about on the Spiritual Path is not the seeing with this eye (pointing to the physical eye). It is seeing with this eye (pointing to the location of the Heart). When you see with this eye (the Heart), the evidence, like I said, is in your personal experience. It is what you experience inside. When you have an experience that you know to be true, you can say that you have "seen the light."

I do not advocate blind faith, because people who have blind faith often do not have any experience whatsoever. They just do what they do because someone told them to do it. There is nothing inside here (the Heart) that responds, "Yeah, I feel it in me! It is true. I am getting bigger." See the difference? So the word "see" is a metaphor. True seeing is to see light, not with the organ of the material eye, but with the organ of the intuitive Heart.

STUDENT: Is it a feeling?

SHEIKH DIN: Knowing. Feeling. Intuition is your "wisdom." There are many things in your life that you "know." You may not be able to explain them adequately in words to another, but you can "feel" it. There is nobody to talk you out of what you know in this regard, because you "know." You have had the experience. It does not mean that ou cannot "see" what you know, you see it in a different way. Others might not be able to see what you see in the same way.

STUDENT: You talk about everything being a lesson to grow. A "clash" is a lesson. So how can you explain, for example, a persona who kills another person? In A sense it is a task, a lesson to kill a person, but what is it to the person who has been killed? What do they get out of it?

SHEIKH DIN: On the surface we might not know what they get out of it. However, what I said before is that everything is interconnected with everything else. So in this case, it is not just about the person who killed this other person, but it is the person's family, and then the person's society, and then the issues of society as a whole, and then it is the other person's family, and the other person's society, as well as the issues of society as a whole. The true reason is at the root of the whole play, the inter-dimension among all of these forces that are taking place all at the same time. All of the combined forces lend us to realize the greater dimensions in terms of being social beings, social creatures, human beings, living in particular situation, trying to figure out what we do and what are our lessons. How many times have you had the experience where something happened that you thought was minor, maybe something just between two people, yet it affected a whole bunch of other people? It ended up being a lesson for everybody.

I have this experience all the time, and I am just one person! People regard me as their Teacher, so I guarantee you that if I have even a slight opinion about something, or make a comment or simply do something in a certain way, people all across the country hear about it. Then they try to "adjust" to one comment I made. To me it was just a comment, you know? It was just something that I did or said spontaneously. For example, I like a particular thing. Next thing I know, I receive it in the mail. I did not even really care about it all that much.

When we start to deal with the concept of "evil," as in a particular person's suffering and pain, the first thing you have to realize is that the existence, experience and effect of that evil is not solely located or limited to that particular person in that particular situation. The suffering and pain have a broader impact. Everything is connected to everything else, to everything as a whole, to all of history.

If we had not had a Hitler, for example, although it might be hard to appreciate what service Hitler could have possibly provided, we would have been left without one of human history's greatest examples demonstrating what is truly "evil." We would not know what is evil otherwise. Without these experiences, we would have no way to measure or accommodate the meaning of the "greater human goodness.' These experiences teach us how to incorporate the spiritual and social codes, laws and guidelines that we should entrust within our very our families and communities.

Watch generation after generation of families go through their various issues. Families have be come so broken down in this day and age that one of the biggest topics in families right now is, "What are we supposed to do with our kids? How are we supposed to treat our children? What will happen to them? I have a teenager. Basically his attitude is, "You guys messed up the planet, so what's left for me?" There is a lot of pain between him and his adult role models. At the same time, that which is making adults pay attention and wonder, "What are we going to do?" as well as the motivation for the kids to get together to make things better is the pain, suffering and separation.

Secondly, often out of what appears to be the worst experience comes real enlightenment. It takes that much of a blow. It takes that much of an impact to get people's attention. Death is always a really good teacher. When death comes to us, then we start crying, "God, how should I have lived my life?" I often times think about AIDS victims. A person's life seems to be going along, playing the field and "burning down the house" out there. Then one day they feel a little sick and go to a clinic. The nurse takes some blood out of their arm and gives them a number. That is how dehumanizing this process is; you get a number. You are not even a person anymore. You are a number. They call your number and if the results are positive, all of the sudden, "God! I wish I hadn't . . . I could have . . . I should have . . ." Death and the threat of death are great teachers for how it is we should have lived our lives. What good does AIDS serve that person? What good does death serve a person? Death serves a person if the threat of having life taken away causes you to see how you should, could, would have lived your life. Then, if you have the courage, you will do it from this moment forward.

Sometimes you meet people who have had unbelievable trauma in their lives. Yet, you will see in the eyes of that person a soft light. You can see a glow that comes from all their pain. Pain teaches us what is really important and what is not, what is really worth holding onto and what is not. The second thing is just because something is painful and "horrible" does not mean that there is not a lesson in it, and it does not mean that it will not provide us the landscape for how to live our lives.

Every once in awhile, I see something happening "out there" which reminds me that I do not want to live my life that way. I do not want the people that I love to have to live their lives that way either. Seeing the suffering gives me greater inspiration. Even death is a service. I may not always be able to understand all of the pain and suffering, but at least, thank you, Lord, for providing it for me, to let me know what it is that I do not want.

The third thing is that it is impossible for a normal human being to really know what another human being is getting out of an experience. We see according to our prejudices, and we have opinions or attitudes based on them. If you talk to the person on the other end of a particular experience, even in simple matters, you might find that they have a totally different perspective even of those "evil" things that are hard to understand.

So those are three things to consider while still maintaining faith in the face of suffering and "evil." Just because it is "dark" now does not mean that it will not be "light" again. How will you know "light" unless you have seen "darkness"? You will not know the difference. Right now on this planet the sun is shining. Somewhere it is a bright sunny day. And somewhere, here for instance, it is dark. When the weather is great we feel, "Oh God! It is a great beautiful day." Yet somewhere on this planet at the same time it is a "horrible" day. Both have their place. The two sides are in perfect perspective.

A spiritual person on the path of "enlightenment," on the path of spiritual liberation, realizes that the Truth lies in an experience that is neither in the darkness nor in the lightness. Truth is neither the happiness nor the sadness - not this one nor that one. The Truth is transcendent. God/Allah is the whole, so the experience of Truth is something that transcends either this one or that one, right or wrong, left or right, in or out, up or down, male or female, young or old, good or bad and black or white. These are only the polar positions in the relative reality; they are not the Truth of the Reality.

STUDENT: It is so hard for me to put together the idea that everything is perfect. I am very sure that it is the same way for everybody else. That it is hard, the chaos, bothers me. It is so hard to get the idea that everything is perfect. I guess my question is once you accept that the world is perfect, that everything has a purpose and is perfect, at that moment of realization, would you sort of jump into the path of spirituality? Do you know what I am asking? If you do, what would be your advice or solution for everybody to get to the point where they can accept that their life is perfect?

SHEIKH DIN: It takes practice. Sometimes you have an experience, and it is like "BANG!" You have had experiences where you went, "Wow! That's perfect. It's perfect!" You may not live that way all the time, and it may not last continuously. It may have been just a moment, a flash. Spiritual life requires putting yourself in the company of others on a path with practices and being guided by someone who knows continuously the perfection. That is how you practice. You learn from someone who knows the perfection; you keep the company of others who will support you to be in perfection; and you practice techniques that help you to open your eyes to perfection.

Then you will have more and more experiences of it. It is like anything you would want to master. If want to become a master musician, hang around people who are musicians. Any subject, pick a subject. The same principle applies, right? It is the same way in life. If you want to master life and what it means, hang around a Master. Hang around people who are doing it. Then you will be encouraged. You will have greater moments. When your moment of perfection flashes, another one comes in close behind. The moments get closer and closer together. They get longer, last longer and start to spread out.

The brain, this thing up here, cannot figure out perfection. When you have had that flash of perfection, it did not come from up here (pointing to the head). It was not your brain that went, "Ah, perfect!" It was something else inside. Perfection might even short circuit your brain - like a moment in nature, or a moment between a man and a woman, or a moment where everything just seems to come together. These times are not located in thought. They are not about figuring something out. So imagine, just for a moment, that in your life every moment offered that same sensation just . . "A-a-a-ahh!" Do you know what I am talking about?

STUDENT: I was just thinking about how amazing the Surah al-Faatiha is like in the discussion about "faith."

SHEIKH DIN: It calls us into faith. The Faatihah is the opening surah, the opening prayer of the Qur`an which is the most oft repeated invocation of the Sufis. The first words are, "Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim," In the name of Allah (the Almighty Divinity), Most Merciful and Most Compassionate. I you can consciously invoke before any thought, word or action, "In the name of Allah, Most Merciful am Most Compassionate," and experience God as all Mercy and all Compassion, then you are experiencing faith You, at that point, are basically saying to God, "Lay it on me. Whatever You lay on me is Mercy, and since You have Compassion for my situation it must be perfect, because it is here. You are why I am receiving this lesson." Say, "Bismillah hir Rahman nir Rahim," when having a good time or a bad time. In the learning, Mercy and Compassion are realized.

Okay, shall we eat? Do we have faith that dinner is ready?