Let's get back to Mysteries of
Mysticism, away from the dubious arena of chapter and verse.
Your motto of trying to
understand the truth by seeing with the eyes of the heart
is indeed the first step toward mysticism. There will come a
stage, you'll see, when you will believe that man is responsible
-- I mean you and I are responsible -- for the condition
of the society in which we live, whether we're caught up in the
web of politics or in the clutches of the fundamentalist
literalism that passes for religion.
To find out if there's God or if
there's no God, I say ideas have no meaning whatsoever.
Whether you believe or don't believe, whether you're a theist or
an atheist, it has no meaning; so we can forget all about kufr,
kufaar and kafir. They are only words, and,
literally or metaphorically, the word, any word, is not the thing
it represents (although you and I know the Koran actually wants us
to remain apart from the Christians and Jews).
To find out -- actually to find
out the fact of how to become one with the mystical Beloved -- you
need all your energy, your complete, total energy, energy that is
not spotted, that is not scratched, energy that has no twist, that
has not been made corrupt.
Truly
to understand,
to find out if there's such a thing as the reality that man has
sought for so many millions of years (let's not deny that Islam
was born only fourteen centuries ago), one must have energy --
energy that's completely whole, energy that's uncontaminated by
human thought.
For example, most of us spend our
life in effort, in struggle, and the effort, the struggle, the
striving, the denial, is a dissipation of that energy.
Man, throughout the historical
period of our young religion, has said that to find that reality
or God -- whatever name he may give to it -- you must be a
celibate; that is, you take a vow of chastity and suppress,
control, battle with yourself endlessly all your life to keep your
vow. Look at the waste of energy! Of course, it is also a waste of
energy to indulge. And it has far more significance when you
suppress something in keeping with the dictates of religion, as in
the case of kufr, kufaar and kafir.
If you look with the eyes of your
heart, you will observe that most people waste their energy either
through denial, or through a vow of chastity (or jihad, for what
it is worth), or in thinking endlessly about sex or friendship
between married men and women under the umbrella of culture or
tradition under the canopy of heaven with the romantic moon in
full bloom.
I am saying that you and I
are responsible for society.
The psychological structure of
society is far more important than the organizational side of
society (yes, you can say Organized Religion if you like). The
psychological structure of society is based on greed, envy,
acquisitiveness, competition, ambition, fear, or on this incessant
demand of a human being wanting to be secure in all his
relationships, secure in property, secure in his relationship to
people, secure in his relationship to ideas (yes, even ideas
concerning religion, faith and spirituality).
That is the structure of society
that one has created, that you and I have created. And society
then imposes this structure psychologically on each one of us.
Come to the mosque, pay fitrana, and so on. Greed, envy,
ambition, competition, all that is a waste of energy, because in
it there's always conflict -- conflict that is endless.
Mysticism, then, is the
reintegration of the fragmented self that is forever in conflict,
either through the words of a book, the authority of a person, or
the idea of God.
Mysticism puts an end to to
the ignorance of the ages that we all suffer from.
Rashid Mughal
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