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The True Depth of Your Satisfaction
January 1996 "Sohbet" is the Arabic word for the Sufi tradition of spiritual discussion and instruction particularly in the presence of the Murshid or Spiritual Guide. The following questions and answers are from a conversation shared between Sheikh Din Muhammad Abdullah and some of his students in November 1994. STUDENT: My consideration is that, "Is there a problem that there is still satisfaction in my life?" I mean, am I to be saying to myself that I am not suffering enough to really get to the core of knowing what I am yearning for? It seems to me that I celebrate so much in my life, I must be a real dilettante. I don't know!? I am just getting the sense that what is missing for me is the pain and the suffering. MURSHID: No. There doesn't necessarily have to be pain. I am talking to these "other" people. They are in pain. If you are not in pain, it shouldn't discount or disqualify your celebration and your yearning for more. OTHER STUDENT: Right! And it doesn't have to take away from play either! MURSHID: No. However, sleep is a very comfortable state. The alarm can go off, and we can sleep right through it. Because we are asleep to the things happening around us, we may not even be aware of what position we are in. People have gone to sleep and not awakened with their house burning down around them. So you could say, "Well, they weren't suffering." But, they were not awake enough to know the house was burning down around them! STUDENT: Right. I guess that's what my concern is. Maybe my pleasure is out of such superficial living that it is like if I were really probing deeply... MURSHID: Are you really probing deeply? STUDENT: I don't have much of a sense of that particularly. In other words, I don't know if I know! MURSHID: To probe deeply does not need to take away from your "celebration", but you will know if you are really probing deeply. If you are relentless at the depth of your probing, you will know it. One of the ways that you can tell, is to see if you can "land" somewhere long enough without changing your approach or your environment. See what you really get, rather than going to the next place too quickly. See how long you can stay still, and how much quiet you can come into. That will give you an indication of how deeply you have "dug your well". Can you actually land in one place, become singularly focused and dig, and stay there, and do your work? Stay there without needing to have to go to other ways, and other places, and use other devices and other happenings incessantly in order to celebrate your celebration? OTHER STUDENT: To just fill up your life? MURSHID: Exactly. So that you have "things to do". STUDENT: Well, that's not my sense of my life. It seems to me that it is starting to strip away, actually. It is getting simpler. MURSHID: Well, then good. You'll find out how deep you are digging your well. That has to happen, in order to find out how deep you have dug your well. OTHER STUDENT: What has to happen? MURSHID: Your life has to be stripped away, so that you have the opportunity to simply see, hear and know the depth and quality of your own experience. When this circle (pointing around the room) is no longer around us and we are alone, and it is just us in our four walls, and we are not reading about it, and we are not in some "high" occasion, but we are just naked and bare, and it's just me, myself and I, "How deep is my well of true satisfaction?" STUDENT: In that case, I don't even think that a comparison would be made, would it? You are not even thinking about it. I mean, I wouldn't be putting a dipstick in to see whether I was getting satisfied or not. MURSHID: I am not talking about where you are trying to get to. I am talking about where you arc really at. I am not talking about your aspirations right now. When you are alone, and you have no other input, then that is your time to have the opportunity to know the depth of your true satisfaction. If in those moments there is no longer a yearning for learning, or a need, or an impulse, or a pull, or a push, or a dissatisfaction that causes you to want to, have to, move to some other place to go fill yourself up, then you are starting to have a deep well. OTHER. STUDENT: And doesn't that tie into what you were saying last night, because at that moment, you would have some sense of Unconditional Love? So you wouldn't need anything? MURSHID: Certainly. You would be transcendent to needs and wants as we ordinarily have them, define them or understand them right now. STUDENT: But you could be seriously working and also experience joy in life at times, couldn't you? MURSHID: Yes. There is nothing that I am saying here that means "without joy". It is not mutually exclusive. Like the line from that Rumi poem, 'Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, just come." Very often suffering pain is the excuse that is offered, the rationalization to oneself, to not go further. That is why we have to bring pain up in our conversation. It is the rationalization for why I can't go further, or why I'm stuck, or why my life is not working. Nobody says that people must be in pain, but most people have a degree of pain that prevents them from being in Unconditional Love. That is the Reality of it. Teachers or spiritual teachings do not really want to embrace the pain and suffering. What they want is to offer a panacea of remedies to just make the pain go away, without allowing its presence to exist. Pain has an energy and a lesson to provide. Pain is a message. The idea of talking about pain is not without joy, and it is not a negative thing. It is not a "heavy" thing. It is realistic and whole. It allows us to embrace the many sides of ourselves, dark sides and light sides. Real spiritual work is not simply an "Alice in Wonderland" or a "Wizard of Oz" type trip. It is the whole. It is every part of agony, and it is every part of ecstasy - both. Allah is every part of the endeavor. How could we know what day is without having night? How could we measure how much darkness we are under, unless we have ever seen light? How can we measure how bright the light is, unless we have known some darkness? We cannot separate these things from ourselves. If we sit here, and the reason why I said before, "Land and see," if we were able to sit here long enough, right here in this place, you would see day turn to night, and night turn to day. You wouldn't even have to leave this place. You would see both. Both are present here. You do not have to leave and go to some other place to experience it. Just land and be still long enough, and you will see it happen right in front of you. There is no other than the dimension of how we see it, from where we are at. This will become "day" right here. Some people here have more moments of heaven than others. Some people in this room have more moments of hell. Although, we basically share a very common type of life. MURSHID: (to another student) Am I answering your questions? STUDENT: Yes. I hear you talking about practice, and my question is, How does one soften one's Heart and get out of one's mind?" MURSHID: That's a good question. You need to go through a "Heart Tenderizing" process. What it requires is generally a period of apprenticing yourself to a "Heart Tenderizer". The thing that keeps the Heart hardened is the ego shell of our self-importance that we build around it. Most of us, most of the time, are not brave enough to consistently and purposefully break the patterns of that shell in order to get the soft Heart to come out. So, we have to place ourselves at the hands of either someone or some situation that we trust enough to learn how to do it. 'Then practice those instructions and those ideas. It is up to us to stay still long enough to practice. We are so instant gratification oriented though. We have built ourselves into a society where you can pull up to a building, yell an order for food into a microphone, be told how much it costs, and ninety seconds later pull around the corner and pick it up. Real spiritual practice doesn't work that way. It is the old-fashioned way where you have to make things from scratch. You scratch, and then you make them! (Laughter) Here comes the Murshid. A lot of times I talk about three things: Teacher, Path, and Practice. The braiding of these three makes a single thread, but there are three distinct parts. Teacher, Path, and Practice. That is what you need for the Heart Tenderizing process to take place. |