Sufism and Tasawwuf - Naqshbandi Sufi Way

Do Not Let Evil Overtake You

Mawlana Shaykh Hisham Kabbani

14 July 2012 Manhattan, NY

Sufi Cultural Event at the Church of the Apostles

As-salaamu `alaykum wa rahmatullaahi wa barakaatuh.

It’s an honor for me to be here tonight with all these beautiful faces, like flowers in a garden. May our Lord always keep us in a beautiful garden like this one. Peace upon you all. I don’t know where to begin and I don’t know where to end. We know we live but we don’t know if we exist, as the philosophers and the Sufi people said, “Everything is a mirage; you think there is water in the desert, but when you reach it there is no water, so don’t always consider what you are seeing is the truth as it might not be the truth.” Perhaps what you think is the truth, or perhaps it is not the truth. That is why it is a confusing situation we live in, and I’m not speaking about the country or what is outside it, but about the self, about the “inn” in ourselves, the place that our Lord God is looking at, where our lights are.

God says in many religious texts, “I am the Light of everything.” And there is also the saying, “Neither My heavens nor My earth contain Me, but the heart of My Believer (the good one) contains Me.”

There is a container that holds that Light with which we exist. We cannot make real existence ourselves, as it is something that comes from outside us. Scientists are trying their best to know precisely when the soul of the child reaches the womb of the mother and they cannot discover it, although they know in a precise moment that reality reaches the mother's womb. We are saying this for us to understand that we did not come to life by ourselves. There is a Commanding Area, there is Someone. Who is the Most Powerful One sending these souls into every human beings in the womb? Look at the greatness! Every day, how many mothers give birth around the world? Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? We cannot know, but we know that new babies are born in the millions, and in the millions deceased people are leaving.

Who is that One Who is sending the soul in and taking the soul out? Can anyone do that? No one can do that except the One that controls us, Who gave us intelligence and the power to live.

Once I was sitting in front of my Master and he asked me, “Do you exist?”

I said, “Let me think.”

He said, “No, you cannot think. This is an obvious question: do you exist?”

I said, “You know better.”

Surrender; render it back to him.

My Master said, “O my son, the one who exists can give life to himself and say, ‘I am immortal,’ but no one can say ‘I am immortal,’ because everyone is going to die. How long do you live, 60, 70, 80, 90 years? Then you go into the grave and after two years there is nothing left. Does it mean you no longer exist? Only memories of you exist, but you as a human being no longer exist. So how can you see yourself as powerful, wanting everyone to listen to you and accept you, and yet you cannot control the soul in your body? You might be going at any moment!”

O Believers! O good people! About ten years ago some scientists wanted to know about some Prophetic explanations, some things mentioned by the Prophet (s). There are many prophetic miracles. For example, it is said in Islamic belief and in Christianity and Judaism that God will send people back from death as we believe in a Day of Resurrection.

When Allah orders them to come back, He sends a heavenly rain over the entire earth and every drop of rain will reach a person who died in order to bring him back to life. The tradition says that the drop of that special rain will reach the existing spot or part of the human being that doesn't die, the coccyx, `ujb adh-dhanab. It is a small bone in the lower back and the Light of Existence is in it.

Ten years ago, some scientists wanted to check if that is correct and they realized that tradition was mentioned 1500 years ago when there was no established science. So they took the coccyx of someone and exposed it to extremely high heat and pressure, until it became completely burned, then they examined the remains and found one cell was still living! They determined that life was still going on in that human body. Then they did another experiment where they crushed that bone into powder, which they examined and found a cell is still living in it! These experiments were done in Egypt and confirm that a person dies, but his Reality of Existence continues in that bone. When God resurrects everyone from death, it will be from that small bone.

O Believers! Today is a time of confusion and people are in a deep struggle between good and evil. Every one of us is struggling; you cannot that is not the case. Everyone here is struggling. It is a theory that all of life contains struggle. Abel and Cain struggled, good against evil, then Cain killed his brother. That is from the first generation of human beings on earth. There was the struggle between King Nimrod and Abraham (a), the Messenger of God and the father of the Abrahamic faiths, and that king threw him in the fire and God saved him. There was the struggle in the time of Noah (a) when God sent the flood, which they are still studying and recently found fish fossils dating back to that flood on Mt. Ararat near Azerbaijan; that showed the sea reached the highest level of the mountains. That flood was a struggle between believers and unbelievers.

Then after Noah and Abraham, look at how much Moses (a) suffered with the Children of Israel from Pharaoh’s oppression five-thousand years ago. That too was a struggle between good and evil. Jesus (a) came and they took him to kill him, and they did not accept him, and one of his student’s betrayed him: a fight between good and evil. Prophet Muhammad (s) was abused and tortured by his own family, and that was struggle between good and evil. Even today we are struggling between good and evil, but there are ways out of that struggle. When you struggle between good and evil, don’t get depressed! If you get depressed evil will take over. That is like cancer and if you think too much about your sickness then you die quickly. Try not to think too much about your illness, then you will live longer. This has been tried with many patients. Some people who have cancer come to us and we give them advice to follow, and afterwards some are cured and live longer.

Once I was traveling to the Far East and a doctor from Holland called me and said, “My Master wants to see you.”

I was surprised and said, “I never had contact with you. How did you hear about me?”

He said, “We have dreamt about you and through dreams we navigated the Internet and we found your name, so my Master wants to speak with you, but not on the phone. Come and visit.”

I said, “I am leaving to Singapore and cannot change the ticket.”

He said, “Don’t worry! If you accept, we will change your ticket and you can come from the Atlantic side, first to Holland to meet with our Master, and then go to Singapore.”

I said, “As you like.”

In spirituality, when something comes to you ‘out of the blue’ follow it, because that means it is meant for you to follow. If you don’t follow it you will fall into a mistake, so I followed. We follow like a ship in the ocean with no engine that sails according to the wind. So go according to the wind! If the wind goes left, go left, and if it takes you right, go right. Surrender! In spirituality, the most important thing is to surrender to your Master or to yourself and think well, but don’t be depressed, as that will take you somewhere wrong.

So they took me to Holland and from there they took me by helicopter to a village where they conduct experiments in holistic medicine and homeopathy. The doctor told me, “Tomorrow you are going to meet someone who is very famous, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” who is a very big guru for Hollywood actors who come to take his advice.

I said to myself, “Well, I might find some actors and actresses in his university!” but we didn't find them! So the next day Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came and met me, and asked me to sit opposite him. I quickly realized that five people around him were rectors and presidents of American universities and they were his students.

He told me, “We need help from you.”

I said, “What kind of help?”

He said, “We need you and your teacher to teach our people how to cure by Divine Names and Attributes, to use those Special Names to cure sicknesses.”

In the Islamic tradition, we use Allah's Ninety-nine Beautiful Names and Attributes in different codes and sequences to cure people.

He told me, “We have statistics from five different universities and we conducted experiments in France, Germany, Luxembourg, Holland and one other country, and we found that in Islamic spiritual medicine that we could cure eighty percent of illnesses, but we need to find the spiritual medicine to cure the remaining twenty percent.”

I asked, “What illnesses are they?”

He said, “Asthma, cancer, kidney failure, heart illness, etc.”

I asked, “How did you know how to cure by these Spiritual Names of God?”

His 74-year-old representative said, “I went to Egypt to study medicine and sometimes I saw people standing in lines to go to some shrines, and they went in because they were sick, then they met someone there, a very simple person who recites on people, and they were cured after a few days. I learned from that one and many others that these Beautiful Names and Attributes can cure people’s illnesses.”

All of this is not difficult. That is easy, when you are able to control yourself and send that light from your forehead into the patient who is in full meditation to you and you to him, then he is immediately cured.

So they said, “We need to learn how to cure more difficult diseases.” So we gave them some Divine Names and recitations, which until today they are using to treat patients. So what I want to say is, don’t fall into depression if someone has a sickness that cannot be cured. You can cure yourself, as long as you are not depressed. When you fall into depression you cannot think anymore, then slowly evil power will enter and make you worse and worse, until you are completely gone. So as much as you can, open yourself up, empty yourself, as long as you open up and express yourself you will find everything becoming normal and you are living a good and happy life. Just now when these beautiful musicians sang, they gave lights and life to us.

Don’t look at negative issues! Look at positive issues in life and then you feel uplifted. But when you look at negative issues, you are going to feel depressed when you see something wrong. When you go to work, try not to look left and right, because there is too much negative energy that affects your body and your spirit that will give you a heavy burden, and when you arrive to work you will not be happy with your managers, your boss, your co-workers, and will end up in a situation that you don’t want to be in. So always ask, “O my Lord! Grant me to love everyone and grant me support!”

A desert Bedouin came to Prophet Muhammad (s) and asked him, “O Muhammad! When is the Day of Judgment?”

Prophet Muhammad (s) said, “That is a long travel; what have you prepared for that day?”

The Bedouin said, “I have nothing; I didn’t prepare anything but one matter.”

Prophet Muhammad (s) said, “What have you prepared?”

The Bedouin said, “I love you and I love my Lord!”

Prophet Muhammad (s) said, “That is enough! You will be with the one whom you love.”

Loving someone is what is accepted from you. Show love to people, not hate. Today, instead of looking at those who love us to increase that love, we look at those who hate us, which only increases hate! Love brings happiness and hate brings disasters! And in us there are too many different bad manners. In one book, I mentioned seventeen different bad manners that we need to drop from our hearts, the main root of which is anger. When you get angry you cheat, lie, conspire, and have malice towards people and you do all kinds of badness. Today with so much negative energy around us, people are so involved in anger, depression and bad manners. Try to block all that!

There is a system in your body that blocks any negative energy that approaches. When you overcome it you succeed, but when you surrender to it, it will ride you. Don’t let negative energy ride you. Don’t let anyone with bad manners and bad energy stop you from doing good. There are a lot bad people in this world that stop us from doing anything good, because we get depressed and angry.

Too many parents come to me and say, “My son or my daughter is too angry.”

I ask them, “Are you angry with each other?”

They say, “Yes.”

So I say, “Of course that anger reflects on the children and that’s why they get angry.”

May God, the Lord of Heavens and Earth, and of Abraham (a), Jesus (a), Moses (a) and Muhammad (s), be happy with us! We are in a church and we ask the Lord to be happy with us. This is a church for all religions; it doesn't close the door. Keep your doors open and whoever wants to enter, let him in. Give anyone who comes to you a smile. It is a saying of the Prophet (s) that if you smile in the face of your brother or sister it is as if you gave a charity. When you are serious and angry and so poison-minded, you don’t show anything but bad manners and hate.

May our Lord forgive us and bless us with our saying, “Ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illa-Llah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan `abduhu wa habeebuhu wa rasooluh.”

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