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Mysteries of Mysticism
At the outset of his long
talk, "Being Blessed
by Being Broken," Masud Sheikh noted, quite
rightly I suppose, "Many of you might be wondering
about the title of my talk
. . . , " a
choice influenced by
M. Scott Peck's book, THE
ROAD LESS TRAVELED -- and, indeed, one wonders
what all that had to do with Mysteries of Mysticism.
If one follows Masud on his
less trodden path, one learns that most children and
perhaps 20% of adults fall in the
first of four stages called "Chaotic or Antisocial." In the
second "Formal,
Institutional or Fundamental" stage, Masud
groups together "Muslim mullahs,
as well as people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the
Jewish religious zealots who form the core of the Israeli
settler community, or people like the Hindu zealot who
assassinated Mahatma Gandhi"
-- a combined breed that is rarer than the number of mystics
who are holding this planet together in The Milky Way.
Masud reminds us that a
large majority of people graduate
to Stage II by the time they move to adulthood,
and he goes beyond the bounds of THE ROAD
LESS TRAVELED in telling us why he thinks U.S.
president George W. Bush was "a Stage One person until he
became a born-again Christian." He throws in a couple of
irrelevant snippets from the president's private life and
then concludes, "So I think the president of the only
super-power in the world today is now in the Stage II of
spiritual growth, where his combination of nationalism and
religion sustains him."
Up to this point, Masud
has used more than a third of his allotted time to remind
the listener that some Stage II people simply move to
another Stage II, where there's
no growth but only change in loyalty from one institution to
another, as when
people change jobs or the country in which they live.
"These days I find
it interesting," he tells the
Family of the Heart, "that some people who were
earlier staunch Muslims, and have moved to America are now
more anti-Muslim than many redneck Americans. Earlier, these
people may have owed their loyalty to Islam, now America has
replaced Islam, and not much else has changed."
He goes on to remind us
that Stage III people are
skeptic individuals and questioners
who make loving and dedicated parents, often
as scientists and active truth seekers,
and how people move,
with varying degrees, from Stage II to Stage III.
"My own move from
Stage II to Stage III was somewhat difficult. Let me now
tell you about it. I have had only one full-time job in my
life, which was with IBM for 27 years. My family was not
religious, and I joined IBM immediately after completing
studies. IBM, of course is a huge corporation, in which I
worked during some of its best years. The corporation became
the institution to which I owed loyalty. The first change in
perception came when I went on assignment to Kuwait.
Particularly for a bachelor, social life is difficult in
Kuwait. I found the environment too different from what I
had got used to in my office in Pakistan, where there tended
to be paternalism, which I quite happily accepted. Living in
a world of individualists was traumatic for me. Since
temperamentally I have never been attracted to simply money
or material benefits, the much better salary was not enough
of a reward for social difficulties. The net result was that
I terminated my assignment after one year, when the normal
term was three years. That started my move from Stage II to
Stage III," he tells us.
Finally, with more than
three-fifths of his time logged up, he arrives at Stage
IV, to tell us about the
mystics of this world who
transcend their backgrounds and cultural limitations
to delve into
the mysteries of the
unknown. These people, he
tells us, recognize the connectedness of all humanity
with God, and never
separate oneself
from others through
doctrine or
scripture, and how the
essence of their
truths is "compromised
when interpreted by us, fallible men and women who read
them."
At this point, just as one
began to light up, Masud took the unforgivable liberty to "briefly
summarize what [he had] covered
until now. First . . . ;
the second stage . .
. ; the third
stage . . . ; the
fourth stage . . .
that of mystics who . . .
have truly found The Beloved"
-- among them "why I think [Einstein]
was in Stage IV . . .;
Jelal-ud-Din Rumi
from a book named SEARCH
FOR THE BELOVED by Jean Houston,
Rumi's pyrotechnical
encounter with Shamsuddin Tabriz who
leapt over the wall of
tradition to set
ablaze some of Rumi's sacred books
and Rumi remarks, "The God that I've
worshipped all my life appeared to me today in human form"; Rumi
and Shams
are blissfully happy
and gay until sadness creeps in through
a chain of events that is open to countless interpretations.
So much for
the mysteries of mysticism.
Rashid Mughal
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