lived. As a result of that all human beings feel insecure in this life. No matter how powerful you are, wealthy, strong and intellectually able or pure at heart, everyone of us is caught in this web that Allah in his infinite wisdom has created: this most complex being which is described so beautifully in the Qur’an: “And this human self has within it the ultimate highest of the heights above the angels and it can be the worse of the animals at the same time”.
This is the paradox. And we particularly the Muslims are facing a greater challenge because we assume that we have path, we have din, we have a way, we have the Qur’an we have all of these prophetic teachings which are needed for us to go through this life with ease and well being and yet you have seen how much individual and collective suffering and confusion exists.
The answer is very simple – if it is the path of tawhid, if it is about unifying whatever we can discern or allude to, it is about unifying this world and whatever it is that comes after death. If that is the issue then it means our outer restrictions, our outer rituals must result in an inner transformation. And if it doesn’t it is not the fault of that revealed, amazing package which has been revealed through thousands of prophets and messengers and in our case the culmination of the Abrahimic tradition which is described as mercy for all creation.
The fact that we are not experiencing that mercy means that we ourselves as individuals or as groups are not fully transformed into that transcendent state of seeing the truth in its absoluteness and without denying interaction with the truth in its constant relativeness. We act in this world, do our best, get in and out of the usual changes of dualities and pluralities and yet take refuge constantly in the ever-present divine light.
If that is not happening then the final process of evolution has not taken place. Evolution is at two levels: one level is biological. Therefore a three or four year old child is vicious and violent because of the drive to survive. By the time the intellect starts to grow, seven, eight, nine years old if you observe the child you see other signals: the intellect starts to grow, there is the love of the mother, the approval of the father. There is quite a lot of bribery and corruption – do this for me and I will do that for you. The child begins to grow considering other egos.
Then a time will come with the increase of insight rather than just sight and the other senses you begin to have the beginning of a wholesome human being. That wholesomeness is both of the outer senses, the inner senses, the intellect, reasoning, compassion, humanity and the thrill of the presence of divinity. But where is divinity? Has the eternal light not created it, not sustained it, the created the programme for it to return to where it came from? Zero energy in this world.. You can add nothing and subtract nothing in truth. We are all caught in this web or space time and constancy of this energy.
Yet we have within us something extra – the Adamic light. Therefore you and I accept the fact that we can be greedy, we want to dominate, we want to prevail yet we enjoy generosity. We enjoy the act of giving. That is why you have people being photographed when they give something to another. We want to proclaim how good we are. Don’t you see what I am going for charity: I have created nine orphanages and whatever else. Who are you? Where did you know there is this beautiful light of philanthropy if the light of Allah is not in you. Why is it that you pursue wealth in the outer sense? Because the light of he who has wealth beyond measure is there. The vices are there and so are all the virtues.
But it takes an inner technologist to take the vice and turn it into a virtue. Look at your impatience. We have all been in stages and situations where we want to blow up because our expectations were not met. We wanted to be good to someone and they they kicked us in the head. Because you have been stupid. Look at your own stupidity. Look at the difficulty as an opportunity. The difficult was there due to your mistaken expectation and illusion. Allah’s mercy is there. Therefore go from impatience to patience.
In geological time what is a few million years between friends. If you look at the earth it is 500 million years when the impermeable cell decided to vibrate and accept this colour or this light or this field of energy of multiplication everywhere you look. Creatures have all been en dowered with these energy fields and the ultimate, total package was given to Adam.
These are energy fields. The field of compassion. Again the virtue or the vice opposite to it. I want to scream at him, I want to punish him. If you stop and think for a minute you realise that the fellow is ignorant and one ignorant person on top of another is not going to ;produce any positive outcome. So you wait and you ask what can I do to help that person to realise that there is God’s light called the ruh. It is one of those amazing miracles. If you begin to even occasionally mediate on this and if you do your usual Islamic salat, if you go into your sajalah and you do not completely transcend space and time then you are not being energised.
Why are the majority of us Muslims in name and Islam is somewhere else, beckoning us? And the same thing applies to other religions. Just because one has a name doesn’t mean that he or she has been transformed by that path. Not denying the outer. Recognising the responsibility of the outer. Helping to establish absolute justice.
You and I in this worldly kindergarten are given an opportunity to try and play with this idea, with this essential need that we need to establish balance. We need durable wellbeing. That can only come if you regard everyone else the same as you. And we have this amazing verses in the Qur’an for anyone who is serious.
“And is that when you meet your enemy you regard him as your friend”. What does that mean? It means you see in him and her the same potential. You realise that they have the same light as you without denying the different levels of humanity. Humanity can be at the lowest level of the lowest end or it can be very high in serving others, helping others, almost egolessness. Ultimately all of that is driven by the light of divinity in you. The potential is there, but the readiness is not there.
The three-year old girl is potentially a mother. But for the readiness you have to wait for another twenty years and then again there is some other relationship, some other attraction until the timing is right and then two end up being the cause of one. And then the two look at the one seeking for the one. So it is always one two, one two, one. That is the foundation of tawhid.
And if you miss that then you have missed your real nourishment and the real important factor of maturity in life which is you are in this world but not of this world. You don’t deny your biology, you don’t deny your biography, you don’t deny your love and search for your origins in a biographical sense. But what about your origins before creation?
The Qur’an reminds us repeatedly about this. What about all these verses about dikr. We want to go before the memory because there are these two dimensions of consciousness. There is consciousness of consciousness or of awareness which is part and parcel of of the biological growth and evolvement and then there is supreme consciousness – that to which we need to transcend. It is not a big thing of enlightenment, illumination, waking up – it is a natural process.
If you go back ten thousand years human beings were fitri, they never talked about an elevated status – is he religious, is he elevated, is he an alam? Then, especially after the great flood, the advent of great prophets and messengers began reinforcing each other in essence: there is a oneness, that oneness is within you and you have to wake up to it without denying the outer twoness but unless you balance the outer and the inner you are not free and fully in balance.
The outer messages in language and culture differed from one another. In the message of Islam which was a completion of the Ibrahamic message look at the language, it is the language of the Qur’an and we take pride in our ability to read it and to pronounce it. When you read it it is as though it has hit you right now and you have to respond with every cell that is within you.
We have that in our traditions and the foundation is submitting to the truth. We want goodness, we want wellness, we want strength, we want good company. Until recently there was tribal strength and we took pride in how big my tribe was. Most people on two legs are already dead. The Qur’an warns us about that. People think they are big but they are like a drum – there is no life, there is no light, there is no delight. They are concerned, look at their eyes. How can I pay this bill, how can I pay that bill.
The entire world now is wreaking with what has been going on during the past 200 years and now produces this immense poison of scientific materials. Whether you are a Muslim, a Christian or a Buddhist you are caught. Look at the poor Buddhists in Sri Lanka. Look at others. Where ever you look human beings are caught with this worldly obsession.
What is wrong with obsession? Allah has created it so is it wrong? It is to be obsessed with the light that is within you. What about greed? What is wrong with greed? Allah the ever wise and ever perfect has created it. It was a greed for transcending not for accumulating some miserable zeros in some bank accounts and some properties. This is what the story is about but not at the same time denying for society to be given the best possible opportunity, to be helped with. Education for the children to show how the oneness prevails all twoness.
And that is what should be transmitted from the parents to the hearts of the children. That is how eman and erhsan becomes natural. It is not that now we are going to have an Islamic lesson. Usually it means a very boring one. It is also a punishment. If you are not going to behave yourself I am going to send you to madrassa again. It is like what Saddam Hussein did when he said that serving your country is an absolute gift and honour and if you don’t enrol now you are going to do it ten times more. What kind of honour was this – if you do not enrol now you are going to be punished by doing it for ten more years. Look at the contradiction.
It is the same thing with us. We have not been living totally accountably outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly we have shariah. There are boundaries. We try to live within those boundaries. But if you only look at the outer you have missed the inner as the prophet said. So many people pray and there is nothing for them except tired knees. And so many people fast and there is mostly hunger for them. The outer rituals must help us to be transformed to an inner awakening of the sacred, divine presence in the heart.
One of the conditions of salat is to have your heart pure. But as you know when you start praying 50 more thoughts come then were there before. This is the nature of the mind. Tell someone not to think of buttons. I will not think of buttons and I keep thinking of buttons. This is the nature of the mind. It is about having tags. But we are talking of transcending the mind. You need to have a healthy body, you need to be accountable for what you put in your mouth. Allah says what goes in this in his mouth his value is that what comes out.
This is what it is. If you don’t believe me go to Edgeware Road and look at the restaurants in the night. But the majority of people are like that and the stream becomes very powerful so collective suffering becomes great. The inner impoverishment which we are all experiencing globally is a clear sign of the out of balance global situation. Everything is out of balance. But don’t just condemn globalisation and materialism. Condemn the lack of balance. If you have boat with limited capacity and you fill it up with goods it is going to sink.
That is what we are doing. Those in the Arab Muslim world who are not filling to boat attack those who have it. And who are you criticising? There is envy, there is jealousy. And the answer is very simple. Assume that you have it all. Are you going to die happy? Are you willing to die right now contentedly, joyfully so there will not be too much time for the angels to keep you held up in your account. Poor angels. Why not relieve them? Be ready to go. If you have been given something like power and authority remember it can leave you at any time. Are you as happy when it leaves you as you were when it came?
So the whole story for us really beings with iman. If you begin with that there must be a way out of this ultimate paradox. I trust and say that somehow I will meet people, or the Qur’an will reveal itself more to me, or an accident will wake me up and tell me that there is a path that will save me. That is iman, that is why we have beautiful verses that start ‘it begins with’.
There is that first point that I have trust and that I have faith. There are over 900 verses in the Qur’an which all have the same root. So there must be something. This is not a trivial thing that happened and we got used to it. This is about us. You first hear the news, you have the information. If that is not going to bring about transformation then we have missed it. And we say I know the surah. Every Ramadan I read it ten times. Read what?
It is like being told there is a fire in the forest and you see the fire which is raging and it is actually starting to burn you. What a difference when it is burning you run away with that amazing energy. You were quite lazy until then. What a difference between that state and simply being told there is a fire in the wood. That’s fine, there is a fire.
Do not ever be complacent about afflictions that are far from you. Do not ever think that those afflictions will not come to you. There is one humanity, there is only tiny little earth twirling around itself at one thousand miles an hour. You and I and everyone here are actually being turned at 1,000 miles an hour, faster than the sound barrier and we don’t feel it. We all seek outer security. It is only for us to balance that and transfer it to inner security. The outward will never bring security. Allah says that even if you fill the valleys with gold, greed will never be satisfied. Why? Because the self, which is a shadow of the soul, wants what the soul has. What does the soul have? The soul has intimate knowledge of all that is known. I would like to read a few verses for you just to show you how wonderful the Qur’an is.
“Those who are Abrar are already in the garden” It then gives us the condition of the garden. You cannot be amongst the Abrar unless you give that which you want to keep. So empty your pockets. Don’t forget poor or rich whatever we have belongs to Allah in heaven. So you and I whatever we have we are born with it.
The verse also says: “Who are you, where did you get it from? What guarantees do you have that you will have eyes and ears and the brain. You are relying on Allah’s mercy and grace”. We should shudder if we truly realise and if he is to hold us accountable there will be life on earth.
How many wrong intentions do we have? How often did you approach somebody ready to blurt out all kinds of dreadful poison and suddenly you stopped. Look at Allah’s mercy – how many times he covers our stupidity, seen and unseen.
You can only get through when the barrier or lack of faith has been removed. Therefore transformation is by Islam, erfan and ehsan. And that is how the transformation takes places. There are so many beautiful verses that describe to us that what we talk about in the hereafter is already here.
We are all suffering from the tragedies that go on in nuclear families. Why? Because the husband and wife do not have the contract that I am here to help you to reach what is already in you. Therefore I am doing my duty as a mirror and hopefully there is compatibility rather than dependability and blame and claim of territory.
We are in darkness. In order to come out into the ever present light we must transcend the ego without denying it. The ego is the most important element in the journey. Without the shell of the seed that seed will go rotten. That shell is the ego. By the time one is in his 40s and 50s if he did not begin to transcend then you have missed the pathway to the ever present joy.
Allah promises us that this grooming through binah is essential. Corruption is evident on the earth and the sea. There are almost no fish left in the sea. Look at what we are doing. Allah says: “This dreadful state is what we human beings have earned so that we taste some of what we are doing. So that you return”. Return to what? To the ever present light.
Outer afflictions, problems and difficulties can bring the ordinary person to blame somebody else and they feel it is not me, it was them. If only they listened to me. Or you stop and meditate on it. Why are you in it? Why are you not out of it? If you at everybody’s problem it is not the same. It is individual. The mirroring of inner technology or state has been matched by its outer.
If someone says this bank which is supported by the government has come down again. Five or six of you may become agitated. Others say thank God I got my account out. As for me I don’t know what they are talking about. It is the same news. It just depends on your inner state.
People say I have lost myself. For me this is such a delight. There is a lot of hypocrisy. He has died. Oh never mind, there is the next life. He doesn’t know what he is talking about. May he go to the garden. Well if the garden has all those people I don’t want to go. Be honest. What is this business? Hypocrisy upon hypocrisy.
Every one of us deserves exactly what he gets otherwise there is no justice. Don’t talk about God the perfect and just being. Say I don’t know what he is doing. Maybe today he has gone to sleep. If you believe in the ever merciful, the ever compassionate, the ever life from which every other shadow emanated how dare you not see perfection in every instance.
We go from eman to erhsan and that is again the inner and the outer situation. If you truly know Allah has been muhsin, the giver of bounties with no conditionality then you being to understand.
Whatever goodness comes I see the perfection of the seen and the unseen and whatever other mystery or anything I don’t like blame yourself. Sit back and trace how it arose, partly greed, partly speed, partly wanting to impose my will on the others. So do istafir Allah. Cover in Allah’s ever present rahman.
Then realise there is no escape from the duality. There is no possibility of a goodness without the seed of a badness in it. There no possibility of birth without the seed of death in it. No possibility of an earth without the light of heavens in it.
Then again this business of duality. It is he who created you from one soul or if you like the same spirit. What is in the heart? It is for that reason that the path of grooming begins with the child. Do this for me, do that for me so they begin to help and co-operate until they begin to realise it is for him or herself. If you do goodness others will recognise you more.
It is for that reason that if you are a Muslim in this world you and I and everyone else must include the parameters we are living under. And they include outer skills, outer education, outer abilities. No matter what it is. A good carpenter, a good teacher do it as though it is the last thing they are doing. With that total outer emersion you will begin to connect with and realise that ever present field of perfection that is at every level. So we do not deny the outer, we do not deny the world but more than ever we need to acknowledge the light, the divine presence, the sacred fields which brought about the outer.
You are in the middle. You are in this world but not of this world. You are here to experience these dualities and to chose by will to really tune to the divine will and therefore the angels will not have a lot of overtime when you leave this world.
You already know the garden is there. You are already accessing the inner garden. How? Why? By avoiding the fires that you create, sometimes mistakenly, sometimes inadvertently but often by your lower tendencies of the ego, I want this now, I have children, I have to pay………….
We are so busy giving the excuses. You can witness yourself by looking. Look at the prophetic terms of reference. Look at these miserable people. You would very much like to change the world but not yourself. This is the shatan. And it is most illusive. It is always easier to help the neighbours. They are sick themselves but they are promoting remedies. We want to play the healer but Allah is the healer. The Qur’an is the healer.
We want to play because we want to take the colours of Allah. But are you worthy? Have you taken permission? Have you done it for yourself? That is why we have less and less transformation. Because of the lack of connection between intention, connection and transformation. If we do it then the whole world would like what we have.
If you have done it yourself, you have saved yourself from yourself and whoever comes into your company would like to be in your company. And then you realise that it is really by remembrance of the absolute that your heart will be content, your health will be clear. Your heart is ever pure because you do not want anything from it except the delight and bliss that flows from the creator.
I thank you all very much. I am sure that if you apply this you will never be disappointed. But it is you who needs to do for you, by you with reference to this magnificent banquet we have called the Qur’an. And by taking it seriously, as though it is the last thing we are doing before leaving this world, then that urgency will bring about the illumination. And you find it is simple. It is not something strange to do later.
And again thank you for listening so attentively and I am delighted to be with you.
Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri is a realized master, teacher, and inheritor of the Prophetic path to divine realization. He has instructed people throughout the world on this path for over 20 years and has written numerous books on various topics concerned with the wisdom teachings of Islam. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri is an isthmus between the ancient wisdom teachings and our present time. For generations Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri’s ancestors were among the greatest teachers of Islam. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri was steeped in these traditions of worshipping and balanced living from childhood. He left his home for universities in England where he distinguished himself and obtained several degrees in business and science. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri, has received permission (idhn) as a Shaykh of Instruction, from numerous lines (tariqahs) of Sufic teaching including the Darqawi-Shadhili, the Chisti, and the Rifa`i to name a few. His teaching calls to the fulfillment and completion of human potential both inwardly and outwardly in a way that reflects our time yet remains faithful to the original Islamic model. This model is none other than surrender to One Reality that engenders, permeates, and encompasses all that is seen and unseen. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri currently resides in the Republic of South Africa, where he continues his life’s work as a teacher and guide to realizing the ultimate meaning and purpose of life.
