A Recent Sohbet – Abdur Rahman’s Corner
Peace, one and all…
I wanted to share the text of a recent sohbet, and a few reflections on those texts.
May the hearts of the lovers be opened!
Sohbet Text
‘Gather me together with those who are truly living, whom You nourish both physically and spiritually’
Mevlevi Wird
My God, how often has Your justice destroyed the dependence I built upon obedience or the state I erected! Yet it was Your grace that freed me from them.
My God, You know that even though obedience has not remained a resolute action on my part, it has remained as a love and a firm aspiration.
My God, how can I resolve while You are the Omnipotent, or how can I not resolve while You are the Commander?
My God, through Your direction make me dispense with self-direction, and through Your choosing for me make me dispense with my choosing and make me stand in the very centre of my extreme need.
Ibn Ata’illah, Divine Discourses, 15-17; 25
Here we stand at the door of benevolence
awaiting without hardship the kindness of the Friend.
You Who answers prayers, hasten Your grace upon us
You are truly the One full of generosity, goodness, and favour.
Grant us the gratitude incumbent upon us
which beckons increase without any loss.
Bring us forth from the prison of physical forms and raise us
to the realm of spirits as recompense for thanks.
Efface us from our egos and sustain us always in You,
that we might be among those who are heir to the secret.
Muhammad ibn al-Habib, Diwan, Praise.
Reflections
Our recent sohbets have included some beautiful reflections on breath, knowledge and free will, and how we might deepen our understanding and attention to Truth. This one has been particularly struck by just how expansively the Masters of the Way view such things. Their words flow from their state and are an expression of deep connection with the Real. They are also a kind of spiritual technology, allowing us to gather much-needed insight on we ourselves might grow. This is one of the main reasons that this heart loves God’s beloved friends so very much! Allah!
This month’s theme is: ‘Free will is the effort to thank God for his gifts’. As last week’s sohbet made clear, this is such a rich topic, and one made all the richer for our shared exploration. Sitting with these issues has brought a number of things to this heart.
Firstly, given the fractured state of the nafs, it seems clear that the only way to grow is to turn ever more deeply to Allah. That is, my focus should be on understanding my own blockages, with the intention of gently and humanely overcoming them. This requires both deep insight, which can only emerge from ongoing self-accounting and thus, muraqabah, and also an ever more authentic practice of prayer. As we repeat after every prayer, ‘and Allah says ‘call upon Me and I will respond’, our Lord answers, and is thus active in our gradual unfolding! Allah! Muraqabah and heartfelt du’a can open our hearts, providing insight, connection and guidance. Our first reading this week really expresses this deep point: ‘Gather me together with those who are truly living, whom You nourish both physically and spiritually’.
Secondly, our divided condition makes it difficult for us to fully understand the subtleties of such intricate topics as free will. We are repeated told by Hz. Mevlana that the rational faculty, by itself, is an uncertain tool at best. This has been made clear to this heart on many occasions. Until we have grown beyond the compulsive demands of our egoic selves, our reason is far too easily co-opted by our nafs as a tool to defend its own separation! In many stories of Book One of the Masnavi, Hz. Mevlana strongly underlines both the limitations of our partial intellect and the extent to which the nafs is the real controller of most of our intentions and behaviours in this state (the story of the King and the Wicked Vizier, and many others come to heart). There are so many things that this one does not yet understand, but that doesn’t seem to stop me from thinking I do! Allah!
Thirdly, there is a stage at which we fall into a kind of bewilderment. In this context, we are given free will, and we are commanded to be just in our dealings, and yet as these are so deeply coloured by our egos, we act mostly from compulsion – made up of our early conditioning, cultural values and ideas of our own worth. As we grow, we begin to let go of unhelpful things and become actually freer. We then consciously turn our lives more fully over to the direction and care of Allah, thereby seemingly letting go of our free will. And yet, the more we surrender to the Divine, the more freely we can make conscious choices. We move from the appearance of free will to actual freedom from compulsion in God by striving to surrender ourselves. This reflection brings this heart to a state of beautiful bewilderment. Praise be to God in every condition and state!
Our first reading comes from the Mevlevi wird. It was the first passage that my eyes saw on opening it up last weekend. It struck this heart deeply, and expresses the central truth of this week’s sohbet – a humble appeal to our generous Lord for a truly free life. Our second set of readings are all drawn from beloved Ibn Ata’illah’s profound munajat al-ilahiyya, or divine discourses, found as an appendix to his Book of Wisdoms (Kitab al-Hikam). They highlight our ongoing tendency to subtly shift from focus on Allah, to focus on some other thing, whether that be money or position or our own ‘obedience’. We build such lofty structures on ‘our’ obedience and ‘our’ states, as though some thing other than Allah can ever truly make us free! It is God’s justice which frees us from dependence on other than Him, which is to say His justice is really His love in motion, bringing us to more authentic balance. And yet, our actions, as faulty as they are, are important as inward intention and aspiration; our heart’s deepest yearning is to act and to live in truth – Allah answers every call made in sincerity and in truth!
We then come to the nub of it. We are required to resolve, but are yet incapable of it, as we are. There is an empty space in the midst of these seeming opposites, a space where we empty to allow the Divine take over. This is space the semazen stands in as she whirls! Our last selection from Ibn Ata’illah is a prayer to God to help us abandon self-direction, and compulsive choice, to stand openly in the centre of the only thing we truly ‘own’: our extreme need.
The beautiful excerpt from beloved Muhammad ibn al-Habib’s diwan, drawn from his poem entitled ‘praise’, brings our text to rest. It captures so much that this heart wants to share: an attempt to stand at the Friend’s door, in loving gratitude, that takes us from the gift to the Giver:
Efface us from our egos and sustain us always in You,
that we might be among those who are heir to the secret.
May we all arrive at this blessed place, as one, hand over hand over had.
In bringing these reflections to rest, this heart simply wants to say: wa akhiru da’wana an il hamdu lillahi rabbil alameen (Quran 10:10) (‘and our last prayer is in praise of God, Sustainer of all the Worlds).
Huuu!
