amin suhbat bismi- -r-rah - circle group · prophets, with very little deviation. ... mystical, the...
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Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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Cycles of Time: the Universe Created and Re-Created Seeking the Time of Perfection through a Transformative Process
Dinner blessing: O Allah, You shower upon us such blessings, and we are not grateful
enough for the food on our table, and the peace around us. We don’t hear bombs
going off; we don’t see fires blazing. We don’t see people injured by war; we don’t
see poverty or misery. Yet we take everything for granted. We take our friendship
for granted, our love for granted, our families. So many people have lost one if not
all of those, and we ask You, Allah, to be merciful upon all humanity. Give us real
guidance and good leadership, Ya Allah. Reveal to us the inner truth and bring peace
upon this earth, Amin.
Suhbat: Bismi-Llāhi-r-Rahmāni-r-Rahīm We have been drawing some parallels
recently in the discussions of ta’wil. There are a group of philosophers, Sufis, in the
traditions, who talk about cycles of time. It is not uncommon to discuss cycles of
time in the mysticism of all paths. The Hindus talk about approximately 385,000
year cycles, and having 34 of those cycles. Actually, within certain Islamic circles,
they talk about 360,000 year cycles, and 360 of them, which is 130 billion years.
What is said is there are seven of those cycles. Each cycle has its Adam and its
prophets, with very little deviation. Allah creates and re-recreates the universe. The
seventh of those cycles is when the Mahdi comes, and there will be no more of those
cycles, at the end of those 130 billion years. That puts evolution and all kinds of
things into a nice… Allah made it so it all works. Subhāna-Llāh.
Those six cycles represent the very dominant cycles of the message being revealed
to humanity – Adam (as), Nuh (as), Ibrahim (as), Musa (as), Jesus (as), Prophet
Muhammed (sal). See how nice and orderly it is? In every cycle, the same lesson is
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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taught to humanity. In every era, the 7th Imam or Anwar rises in rank from the
composite of what has come before to be the Prophet Mohammed (sal), or the
Messenger. So each era gives rise to the next messenger, in a sense, of refinement.
You see the message gets refined in certain ways. Hazrat Adam makes an error,
falls, and repents. His line is carried on by these sets of twins who are born and
intermarry. Then Seth and Nūh comes, who has a disbelieving family. Then Ibrahim
(as) comes, who has a believing family, but a disbelieving parent. Every aspect of
human possibility takes place. You have an orphan in Musa (as).
Then each one, as I said the other day, has an adjunct with them. Harun is with the
Prophet Musa. The adjunct actually manifests as the teacher of those teachings, not
the messenger. The only time this pattern changes is in the seventh era. The Shi’a
call it the seventh imam, but it’s really the 12th imam. The prophet who is a
messenger doesn’t reveal a new religious law, but publically fulfills or manifests the
mystical, the esoteric truths outwardly. What is in the batin becomes clearly
understood in the dhahir. Nothing new comes, other than the newness of the
realization of what is hidden. Just like the Shi’a have a “hidden imam,” we have khafī
and akhfā, the hidden and the most hidden. What is most hidden moves its way
outward through the refined self.
If you look marocismically, before the end of the world, there is an era that comes of
pure spiritual clarity and knowledge. The Hindus call it, in their cosmology, the
Golden Age, Satya Yuga. There is a time of pure spiritual knowledge. That pure
spiritual knowledge is so pure there is no need for any “law,” because law is there to
keep the world and people in order and intact. But when people have been given the
insight, and can see the truth, there is no need for law. Now, the Shar’īah becomes
the sharh again. It becomes this broad boulevard, well-trodden path, upon which
everybody is walking.
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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When you look at the goal of an individual, a society, or a group of individuals,
whether we call them Muslims or yourself or self-realization, you see that people
are searching for this time of perfection, this time when everything is just fine. It
manifests independently in the life of a seeker, in the sayr ul suluk. It manifests
collectively in the mysticism of religion. It manifests in this day and age, in the inner
teaching of Islam, and ultimately in this period of truth and light that comes before
the end of the world, where the essential Truth/ Haqiq is given by Divinely guided
messengers of the prophetic chain. It becomes the gnosis or knowledge of everyone.
That’s what we pray for. That’s what we meditate for. That’s why Allah says,
“Remember Me and I will remember you,” and in the hadith qudsi, “Know thyself
and you will know thy Lord.”
If everybody knew themselves, then Allah’s Presence would be obvious. All of this is
based on revelation, tahlil, of Qur’an. It’s through this process of seeking that a
person uses the capacity of reason and intellect to, in a sense, be “born again.”
Christians call it being born again in Jesus, but this born again is a kind of khalq
thani, a second creation. We are told, “Die before you die.” We are born again, or
awakened in Allah. What goes along with this is the fact that no one can attain this
on their own; hence, you have a line of gurus in Hinduism, or roshis in Buddhism, or
shaykhs in Islam, or priests. However it is, you have those processes. That’s because
at the core of every one of these traditions is tarbiya. There is an educative process.
In essence, it is ta’alim.
We all need teachers, guides. A person who visited me yesterday asked, “Is it
absolutely necessary to have a teacher?” I said, “Well, you are a doctor. Was it
absolutely necessary for you to have a teacher?” This person had just told me about
a mentor she had who she loved very much and was still working with. I said,
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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“Well, you had a surgeon-shaykh!” Yes, it’s absolutely necessary. It’s the way the
system is set up. Only when we initially turn our attention to the guidance of the
prophets, of the shuyuk,h or Imams (I’m using it in the Shi’a sense, not as the imam
in a mosque sense) that’s when a person can partake of the blessing of the madad,
the support, and maiyyat, accompaniment in love of Allah Swt, or the Divine support.
Those teachings that one receives are in themselves attenuated of the revelation of
the revelation. What I speak, what the shuyukh speak, is not coming from us. It may
be tweaked this way or that way, and appropriate for this time and place and the
people. But it is the revelation being re-revealed in a way in which we can find our
own salvation through the knowledge our teachers teach.
In accord with this prophetic tradition that runs through all of the major religions,
you see it is revelational, not intellectual or rational. In fact, one of the things that
happens when you read the Qur’an for the first time is it doesn’t make any sense.
This story doesn’t follow that story; this sentence doesn’t follow that sentence. You
want to read it like it’s a story book, but you have to read it in a totally different way.
You have to read it for the moment, and with some understanding of the language.
You have to read it for its revelatory nature. What is revelatory is not always linear
and rational.
Allah Swt and the principles of spiritual worlds and physical worlds are not able to
be comprehended by reason. Allah tells us that in the Qur’an. We are told by the
Prophet (sal), don’t try to understand Allah. Nūh is told the same thing: there are
questions you don’t ask. If you ask them, you become like those people who doubt.
That doesn’t mean you can’t understand the answer. It means that internally you
can come to the answer, not just through rational or reasonable questioning.
Things can change within you. What you find in these teachings is that they are
universal; they address the whole universe. The Qur’an addresses the whole
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universe. It tells you about the stars, and dimensions you cannot see, and beings
you cannot see. It tells you about paradigms. It tells you about atomic structure and
time and space. Everything in the universe is discussed in Qur’an.
The intellect has the capacity to strive to grasp it, though it can’t be grasped by the
intellect alone. It can only be grasped by the intellect in conjunction with the heart.
When you realize that, there are certain things you begin to realize. Let’s take the
example of Lawhim Mahfūdh, the Book that everything is written in. Is it written
sequentially? If everything is written in that book, it’s written at one time, at one
instant. Is it written over time? Abul Hasan is going to be born; I’d better write a
chapter on Abul Hasan? I see Khaled’s spirit coming; I’d better write his life story.
Does Allah have a bunch of angel scribes writing all this stuff out, hoping they don’t
get behind? It all happens at one time, all at one moment, all at once—ibda,
excelling in creativity. All at once, bang! It’s the big bang theory called “kun faya
kun.”
All at once, all those cycles are in existence. Now they will be played out linearly, but
they all happened all at once, which is also the reason why a person can have an
epiphany all at once, and grasp huge amounts of knowledge at one time. Whatever is
in the universe, is also in the individual in potential. Everything, of course, has its
origination in Allah Swt, but it is manifest step by step gradually in this process of
what some might call “emanation” (Ibn Araby called it that); or causation,
proceeding from the mind of Allah Swt, which is a strange kind of a statement, into
creation, in accordance with taqdir. In this case, taqdir means not fate, but ordained
by Allah.
The first thing Allah really does in this creation of this capacity is create the capacity
to be conscious: the intellect. It’s all united / tawhid in Allah by this original, single
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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act. Allah is called al-Mubdi, the Originator. We see it played out in creation all the
time. We see it on a subatomic level, when the egg is fertilized by the sperm. Snap, in
a moment, [there are] two separate entities. Those entities come from one entity,
the Originator, al-Mubdi. This is described in Qur’an as “al-badi al samawati al
‘ard” of the Divine Amr, which is also identified in the imperative term as kun / be.
The Originator of all the worlds from the moment of kun faya kun.
It’s said that just as you and I have an intellect and a consciousness, it comes from an
aspect of the Divine, which in very limited terms you would call the Divine Intellect.
It’s not the same, of course. What begins to happen is, as this creation gets manifest,
Allah also along the way gives us more and more volition, more choice. The more
that is manifest – the beings that are created, eventually coming to the human being
– comes to choice. How do we know this? The two things that distinguish Adam and
Hawa from anything that has been created before is their knowledge of the names of
things, and the fact that they can choose. If you think of every positive thing and
negative thing that ever happened in your life, it all has to do with choice.
The choice is based either on some desire or apparent knowledge that will
theoretically benefit you, if it’s not so wrapped up in just pure desires, fears, or
anxieties. See how nicely this all fits together? The fact that we have choice, even
trickles down in the public venue, where people who don’t have choice have no
liberty or freedom of choice, even on the social, political level. It’s all consistent.
People who have no choice, no freedom, they struggle for their freedom. A person
who has knowledge, which can lift themselves up from their lowest nature, struggles
through the seven stages of their nafs. Each one of those stages is characterized by a
prophet. Each latifa is characterized by a prophet. Each stage of universal
development is characterized by a prophet, as well as each cycle.
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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One has to ask what the motive is. The motive has to be a kind of force that pulls you
back toward your Creator, sayr-i-Llah / moving toward Allah, realizing sayr-fī-Llah
and sayr-ma’-Llah, that you are moving with Allah, in Allah. The first cause, ilā (as in
lā ilāha illa-Llāh), of the world is this word, this order that became united with a
universal consciousness. What do you call someone who causes something?
Causator? Mu’il illat al illal. What does this have to do with us? It has to do with
something hidden. We say an occluded imam; the hidden truth, the hidden self, the
khafī and the akhfā. There is something hidden within us that we wish to discover.
Not everybody wishes to discover it. Most people don’t. Then there are the people
who went to California looking for gold in the 1840’s, too.
There is just something that drives some people to find out what the truth is. That
committing of oneself to a journey has also a name: it’s called “ta’til.” It is a
commitment to seek out the Divine Essence, the Divine Presence. Some say it’s just
a kind of hidden form of tashbih – a word I don’t know how to translate. It means we
have within us, if you allow it to be stimulated, this real desire for knowledge. We
are back to tarbiya. When you really stimulate that in the educative process from
childhood on, a person never stops seeking. A child who is raised in a good way, who
is given an education that is not just a didactic education and memorization, but is
taught creative thinking, and questions the universe around them, never stops
seeking.
That person is the one who represents what Allah tells us He is seeking: the seeker.
When a person seeks as a murīd or murīda, eventually Allah calls them by another
name: murad. He calls the person to him. First you are seeking, then He calls you to
him. The murīd becomes murad, affirmed by Allah Swt. With that, other things
develop: a certainty of knowledge; a certainty of your role in life, of what you can
accomplish; a certainty that the tools and everything you need are available if you
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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look for them. Whatever you are doing, whatever your profession, it’s like you can
work magic, because it’s already there, already present in creation, just waiting, like
the fruit, to be plucked from the tree. But most people truly don’t care.
Seeing Allah is impossible; we know that. But seeing the manifest indicators,
pointers, isharat of Allah Swt, is everywhere. You can’t see Allah, but everywhere He
has left his mark—pointers. Good geometry: follow this one, and that one, and this
one; very soon, whether on a curve or a straight line, you will arrive. It’s just good
geometry. Of course it is; because He invented geometry. So we depend on our real
knowledge, not just on our personal experiences, because they are mixed in with a
lot of preferences, fears, doubts, worries, pains, struggles, and joys. We rely on our
real knowledge by learning how to understand the analogical and metaphorical
truth that Allah has placed in the text called the Qur’an.
We understand that by a transformative process within ourselves. I have been
calling it the “magic decoder ring.” You can decode what is going on in front of you
and what is transpiring in your life if you have the courage, and if you have the
degree of separation from the physical / material world enough that you can stand
the pains, the vicissitudes, trials and losses, even though you don’t want to. You can,
because the greater journey, the jihad al akbar, is within you. Yes, it’s wonderful to
have everyone around you find and healthy, and people loving one another, and
caring for one another, and serving one another, and having our families and our
community. This is wonderful. This is an incredible blessing we should thank Allah
for all the time. We should never forget to thank Allah Swt for that. But what can
you sustain beyond that? What can we choose beyond that?
We realize at a certain point that there is a need for the human mind to have
guidance, mu’alim. Mu’alim doesn’t just mean teacher, it means Divinely guided,
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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spiritual guide, a person who knows, and who is able to distinguish between what is
true and not true, lasting and not lasting. The essence of the divinely guided
teaching is a kind of refined tarbiya. It’s a kind of knowledge that is always related
to the whole, the macrocosm, to the universes. It’s always related to tawhid, always.
So you feel eventually that “wheresoever you look, there is the countenance of
Allah”—just that little ‘āyat in Qur’an. Not that “God is everywhere,” but you really
begin to understand that “wheresoever you look, there is the countenance of
Allah.” That’s the essence of this special ta’alim. You are not only in that Presence,
but everything is a metaphor for it. Are you still with me?
Think about if you looked at life analogically as opposed to unequivocally. You look
at this (picks up his tea glass with tea) and say, “This is tea.” Unequivocally, it is tea.
You’ll know it if you taste it. It has something sweet in it. But, the beauty of tea, the
story of tea (which some of you may remember) is all a metaphor. How it’s grown,
how it’s made, how it had no value until someone dried this bitter leaf – the whole
story of tea makes it a story about the transformation of a human being into insānu-
l-kāmil. You see? One looks at it analogically, not just equivocally. Am I enjoying my
tea any less? No. Is it any less tea? No. I’m still enjoying this cold tea… freezing cold
tea! But it’s telling me something, if I’m tuned to it. Do I have to think about it? No.
Do I have to be conscious of it when I’m immersed in the analogy, or the metaphor?
I don’t have to think, “Now I’m going to drink my metaphorical cup of tea, and I’m
going to enjoy it, and think about all that it means.” That’s fine as a process to learn,
but eventually, it’s all there. The whole thing is there.
You and I have met people that, when you meet them, they are full. Every word they
speak, the liquid in their eyes, the sweetness in their voice, they are full, like my
mother in law. They are overflowing. Why? They couldn’t tell you. What are you
thinking that makes you say something like that? Nothing. Grandma said to me this
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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morning. “Last night I talked about you a lot. I was telling everybody about you.”
What is she telling? Is she telling about a man who is shaykh, who has a community,
who is teaching people? No, she’s talking about a process, something she sees in me
that maybe I don’t see in myself. But it carries the message of what is most
important to her of Islam. That’s what she is sharing in that form – an analogy, a
metaphor. We are all metaphors. That’s why when you make decisions in your life,
and choices in your life, whatever it is, for your children, who to marry, where to be
buried, whatever it is, it has to be in a greater context to fulfill the whole purpose of
your existence. And you only arrive at that through practice.
The only thing that is unequivocal is Allah. Allah is not a metaphor for anything. The
only one Truth there is, illa-Llāh, is Allah—unequivocally true. Allah is Haqq. If you
want to go get a marriage license, you have to go to court. The person stamps it and
makes it valid. The person is empowered to stamp that and sign it, and that makes it
valid. Allah is the One Who validates everything in this universe. All truth is made
valid by al-Haqq. All peace is made valid by as-Salaam. All compassion is made valid
by ar-Rahman. Everything in the universe, if you push it all together into one big
ball, is made valid by Allah, Who is beyond anything. He is the Validator of
everything.
What is it we are doing? We are on this journey to validate the knowledge of our
own existence. We have been validated, but we are trying to discover our
authenticity. It’s like an orphan seeking out their parents, to validate one’s own self.
Look how people try to validate themselves in the world we live in: with material
things, power, money, fame, name, information, knowledge. But Allah has given us
the essential validation by saying very simply, “He makes the truth valid, and the
falsehood invalid (void).” How? That’s a big story, because we have to talk about
life, and death, and what comes after that. The essential answer is that when we are
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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created, we are created essentially good, in fitrah. That goodness is attracting Allah
to us, and us to Allah. That’s the GPS. You follow that essential goodness. You learn
about that in your tarbiya, your akhlaq, your ‘aqida. You learn that and strive for
that and teach it to your children. When you make a mistake, Allah has an eraser,
called astaghfirh –Llāh, tawbah, and you keep following the fitrah. That’s the GPS
that takes you there.
You eventually discover that what emanates from One is only one, not two. Why
didn’t Allah Swt create Hawa separately from Adam? Because from one comes one
comes one comes one. What’s one times anything? The same number. That was a
great discovery in mathematics, only next in importance to zero. This unity of Allah
Swt is not just a unity of the number one, of a whole, of the sum of a species, or an
individual, or multiplicity. Allah says in Qur’an, “On the Day when the spirit and
the angels will stand in a row before Allah (meaning rūh).” It means that at the
end of the day, every “one” that Allah created stands in one line, before one truth,
and one reality. We say, “every one,” don’t we? Even in English it carries.
I don’t know how this helps you; but I hope what it does is begin to build a basis for
understanding not only how deep these teachings are, but that you have the
capacity to think and to reflect upon such thought. What it will reveal to you about
yourself is a level of potential most of us never even approach. Most people couldn’t
care less. Yet you still have all these religions, and sects, and groups of people within
these religions, who represent something they have never thought about, have no
understanding of, have no comprehension of its depth, no sense of the journey they
are on, and no sense that they are committing not only shirk, but they are
trespassing horribly on other people’s lives. And they are taking responsibility for
people’s lives, a responsibility they can’t even take properly for themselves.
Shaykh Ahmed abdur Rashid January 5, 2013 www.circlegroup.org Saturday Suhbat
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So we have a big task, if nothing else, to keep this knowledge alive; if nothing else, to
be able to keep our brains and hearts active in such a way we will save some of this
knowledge. Some of it will die; some of it will pass, at least out of our capacity. But
we have something to save, and the only way you save it is by living it. How was the
Qur’an compiled? Some people scratched it on clay; some people put it on
parchment. Some people had it in their memory. You couldn’t go down to the local
Barnes & Noble and pick up a copy. Can you see Hazrat Adam going down to the
Barnes and Noble and picking up a copy of, “The Idiot’s Guide to Islam?”
There is something very attractive in prophetic tradition, something very
interesting. If it wasn’t so, how would we, for so many thousands of years,
remember these stories? If I whisper a story to him, and he whispers it to the next
person, and we go around the room, we don’t have to go very far before it’s a totally
different story. And that’s here, now. You have stories floating around for 6,000
years, being told over and over again, and never lose their veracity. How is that
possible? Do you know how it is possible? It is being revealed over and over again,
because you heard it from the time it happened. You were present when it
happened, and you are remembering that. So it’s very easy not to forget something
you were present at. It’s not just a story being told; it’s a reminder. That’s how
humanity remembers these stories. Why do you find them in the depths of the
Amazon, and in Islamic and Christian and Judaic stories? Why are you hearing only
one story? Because there is only one truth, one revelation.
So what? So if you really care, if you really want to understand and get to that point
of beginning, you have to come to the ending, which is where I’m at right now. You
have to come to the point where you at least commit not to stop searching, not to
stop seeking, no matter what. What is the adage? “Only he who seeks, finds.” Plenty
of people think they find; but only the person who seeks, finds. How do you know
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the difference between someone who says they have found, and someone who has
found? Humility and gratitude. They are always acting humble, and speaking with
gratitude. Those are the great people, and this is the Path.
Question: Hanifa. I was wondering about the seven cycles, and seven eras in those
cycles. We have all been here before. Have we all been here before together?
Shaykh: Why not? The real question is, are we here right now? If there’s only Allah,
how can we be here, and where is Allah? Did you dream the other night? Did you
have a weird dream? This is a week of strange dreams. It was the kind of dream
when you get up, and go back to sleep, the dream comes back. That’s right. Life is
but a dream… (sings). It’s just a dream. We are all playing around in the mind of
Allah, dancing and thinking we are somewhere else.
Hanifa: Is that why, when we hear the truth, it seems so familiar?
Shaykh: Yes, it becomes familiar and clear. And you can live this life, knowing that
beyond it you are living a whole other life. There is a whole other reality. Some
people get a glimpse of that in this world. Some people leave this world, seeing it
before they leave the world, alhamduli-Llāh. Pray to be one of those. You want to go
out of this world peacefully, not screaming and kicking. Asalaam aleikum.