"Meetings with a Sufi Master of the XXI Century”
A`oodhu billahi min ash-Shaytaani 'r-rajeem. Bismillahi 'r-Rahmaani 'r-Raheem.
Nawaytu 'l-arba`een, nawaytu 'l-`itikaaf, nawaytu 'l-khalwah, nawaytu 'l-`uzlah,
nawaytu 'r-riyaadah, nawaytu 's-sulook, lillahi ta`ala fee haadha 'l-masjid.
Ati`oollaha wa ati`oo 'r-Rasoola wa ooli 'l-amri minkum.
Obey Allah, obey the Prophet, and obey those in authority among you. (4:59)
As-salaamu `alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuh.
After this nice music, I do not know what to say. It would be better to continue the music. (laughter) It is an honor for me to be here tonight; this is a nice event, a nice group, and a nice country. Thank you for hosting us here in Chile. Tomorrow we will return to the United States and have an event in Michigan on Saturday. Then on Monday we have an event in Washington, and then we are flying to London for an event there. From there we are flying to Morocco and then coming back to Chile. After ten days, we are traveling to Istanbul, then to Lebanon, and then Cyprus, then finally back to Chile! (crowd cheers) We hope that we see you soon.
We are all gathered here in one room, but in reality we are not. In our mind, everyone is in their own room. From a psychological point of view, everyone has their own room in which it is not easy to break into. Teachers, professors, maestros or the like, try to go into that room that everyone has built for themselves in their minds. Each one of us thinks differently; this is the greatness of competition and intelligence. If all of us thought the same way, then there would be no competition or intelligence. Competition makes us to improve ourselves and to evolve to a better life.
If God did not make us to be competitive, we would be like vegetables. That means we would be like sheep, following only the way we know. They go in the morning to the mountain and in the evening come back to the house. But competition makes us compete with each other for the benefit of humanity, not for its destruction! That is why each one of us has our own square house that we built for ourselves in our mind, in order to reflect on what we are feeling and seeing.
We have to open these walls that block the mind, not to wait and be unproductive in the community. Today, why do people take all kinds of different drugs? To make themselves high, because they do not want to remember anything about their day or night; they are running away from competing in intelligence. Someone is taking marijuana, someone else is taking heroin, and another is taking cocaine. And I did not see anyone with remorse, no. They want to run away from their own life, because they have, in their own minds, built fear of everything. And that fear in the “self” is what is stopping them from being able to crack these walls and open up to the community and society.
A saint said, Ra’ytu Rabbee bi `ayni Rabbee, “I saw my Lord with the eyes of the Creator. I saw my Lover with the eyes of my Lover.” Because with our physical eyes you are unable to see beyond what your mind tells you. That is why teachers try to guide people, to get them to come out of their kawkua, “cocoon.” Everyone is inside it; first it is a worm, but later it becomes a butterfly. That means, first you have a personality inside a cocoon, where you are enclosed within these four walls. But if you are able to open it, you become a butterfly and begin to fly. That is why that saint said, “I saw my Lord with the eyes of My Lord,” and, “I saw my Lover with the eyes of my Lover,” because to give high respect to what you love, you have to see the lover through their eyes.
If we want to see with our eyes and yet we are still struggling, our eyes are not going to give us a perfect vision. If someone has cataracts, they go to an eye doctor. What does the eye doctor with this new technology do? He sends a beam of light, a laser, and takes that cataract out. Healers have this laser beam through their eyes. They send it to the patient whom are their students in order to heal them from their problems. For that reason, messengers and teachers came from every part of life, from the first father and first mother (a), to guide humanity to what is good for them.
Throughout history, from the very beginning there has been a struggle between good and evil. Both good and evil were present and thus, there was a struggle. It was between two brothers, Cain and Abel. Why did Cain kill his brother, as religion tells us? Because he was not happy with what his brother did. Abel sacrificed a big ram for his Lord; he was the good one. The bad one, Cain, looked from among his sheep or goats, and found the most skinny and frail one with no meat. It was so sick that you wouldn’t even like to touch it. He gave that as a sacrifice to his Lord.
This is a story to teach us that even between brothers, one is generous and a lover, and the other is not. When you love someone you give the best for them, man or woman. When you hate someone, you give the worst! Although they both came from the same womb, Cain gave the worst, as he was built out of hate, and Abel generously gave his best to his Lord. Therefore, God accepted from Abel and did not accept from Cain.
So the devil killed the angel, as Satan brought Sayyidina Adam and Eve (a) down from Paradise. We face that struggle all the time in our life. Because of too many problems around the world, many people, especially in this century, built up fear and have become fearful of anything that comes to them. Fear develops in a person the feeling that they cannot overcome their struggle. So when you see an obstacle or a danger approaching, instead of facing it, you begin to defeat yourself and you run away and withdraw, as your inner fear tells you that you cannot overcome that danger.
For that reason, we see many people getting sick because of building that fear within themselves. You can cure any sickness you see in your life by overcoming yourself and saying to yourself, “No, I can overcome this sickness!” That declaration will overcome the organs that have been poisoned. We have been given a mind that knows what is good and bad. People run here to listen to the music as they feel happiness from it, but they also have to keep happy in their lives in order to overcome their fear. Everyone here must have a fear of something. If you focus on it and tell yourself, “I am going to overcome it,” you will destroy it!
That is why Harvard University has a medical discipline or approach named, “Spirit, Mind, and Body.” Even in psychology (not in psychiatry, which means you are completely gone), in order to get people to move forward, one of the most important thinkers or wise men said, “In order to destroy the struggle and fear within you, you must follow four principles.” We try to make our students experience these principles everywhere around the world. The first one has been described as as-samt, “to be silent.” Just now when they were singing, some songs motivated you to clap and express your excitement, but some songs, in the way you recite them, made you silent and you focused on your heart. Your “self” has been taken within that love and energy produced by that song and the singer, who is giving it in a very nice way. For example, in one of the songs, it says:
O my Lord! I am patient.
But patience has limitations, and these limitations are blocking me from seeing You.
It is enough that You are blocking me.
Take away these limitations, borders, and obstacles!
I cannot be patient any more.
I am away from Your love!
I cannot see You. I cannot hear You. I cannot sense You.
O my Lord! Give to me as You give the trees,
The drops of water as dew every morning, give it to my heart!
With every wave of the ocean,
make my heart a wave swimming in Your love,
the Ocean of Love!
When you are immersed in that kind of poetry, singing, writing, or putting it together, you feel that silence within you. When we experience silence within us, it gives us the momentum to overcome our fear. When we fully understand that fear is blocking us from being silent, then we have to throw it away to overcome it. So how do we throw it away from our self? The first principle is to be silent. Even if people are speaking together, only listen, and focus through your heart.
The second step is as-sim`a, “to listen.” After being silent, now listen to yourself or others around you. Ask them, do they hear and listen when their self speaks to them? Your self speaks to you, and too many khawaatir, thoughts, come to you wherever you are. Every time you go to bed and want to sleep, you begin to have a lot of thoughts until you finally fall sleep. Your wife might push and say, “What are you thinking? Talk to me,” or the wife might be the one thinking. (laughter) People are always thinking. Even when you go to church, you listen to the priest, but most of the time you don’t hear anything he is saying because you are focused on your thoughts, and it is the same if you go to the mosque or the synagogue. (laughter)
Try to listen to what your mind is saying and when you listen, balance it. Say to yourself, “Is it a good thought or is it a bad thought?” The best example is when you play chess. You and your opponent are both silent. Then you begin to listen to inspiration; what moves must you make to win?
Then the third step is an-nazhar, “to observe,” to open your eyes well to what is going on both around you and within you. Look inside, do not look outside. The most important element is inside. It is said, “Go inside to your inn.” Go in, I-N, to your inn, I-N-N. Go inside yourself, to your home. Everyone has a home within themselves. So when you begin to observe your inn, your home, you will find many things, perhaps things you are struggling with, or you might find fears that you are trying to overcome that have built up within yourself.
So after these three different principles; to be silent, to listen, and to observe, the fourth one is al haraka, “to move.” Tell yourself you have the power to move. After silence, listening, and observing, you have built your courage, then you can move. People today don’t follow these principles. They move directly and then fall. It might be a false inspiration they follow that will make them fall down. But when you think well through these four principles, every move you make will be a correct one that helps you overcome your obstacles.
Countless teachers around the world, in millions of books, and all of the universities teaching spirituality and speaking of good character and good manners, are under one topic: how to be happy and live a very decent life. Everyone is looking for a happy life, which requires something that can build you up in order to make you feel happy. What makes human beings happy? We ask ourselves, “What makes us happy?” The happiest time is when someone is in love with someone else. Can you sleep at that time, when you are in love? Everyone wants their lover to be near them. Throughout this entire world, whatever people are going to say is built on love. I will give you a very simple example. Go and put two birds in a cage and observe what they do: they will sing love songs to each other, like Romeo and Juliet. So love for yourself, for your partner, for the community, and for the country is what we are looking for.
Despite all kinds of facilities this technological world has produced to ensure happiness, still people are depressed because they have built fear within themselves. That is why teachers or healers guide you to one light. People think there are too many lights. Look in this room where we are all sitting together. If there were holes in the ceiling, you could see beams of sunlight coming inside this room, shining on everyone. And if that light was coming through a hole like a prism, you could see different colors and everyone would have their own color. People would say, “I have red,” “I have blue,” or “I have green.”
We have seven main colors, but in reality, every color has its own infinite number of colors, because every color is changing slightly and making millions of colors. If you take the walls away, what will happen? All of us would be under one color. There is only one light, not two, or three, or four, or ten: that is the one, true source. If we can zoom that inside our heart, like healers zoom it inside their heart and send it out to heal people from their fears, then we can overcome our fears and illnesses. There is not a single illness that has no cure; every illness has a cure, even cancer.
We will end here today with a story.
My sister was a doctor and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband and my brother are doctors, my other sister is a pharmacist, and I studied medicine. When you are a doctor, you think like a doctor. When my sister was diagnosed, the decision was to remove her breast. The decision of our guide was not to undergo an operation. “We will heal you,” he said. But she insisted on doing the operation. After ten years the cancer came back. They did chemotherapy and still she died at the age of 50.
My aunt was also diagnosed with cancer and doctors wanted to operate. She was asked to stay at the hospital overnight and have the operation the next day. So that night at around three o’clock, we drove to see our teacher and saw him waiting for us. In spirituality we call that “telepathy;” they can read the mind from far away. We were surprised to see him. He said, “Go back immediately and take your aunt out from the hospital, I will heal her.” We followed our teacher and did as he instructed. We went back, stole her from the hospital, and took her to our guide. He sat with her for half-an-hour, reciting on her. I was surprised, and I will never forget that day. He told her, “If you don’t do the operation, with what I have blessed you, you will live for 30 more years.” She was 55 years old when she got sick and died at 85 years of age!
So there are remedies for every sickness when you overcome your fears. He gave her encouragement and motivation to overcome the fear. The next day he said to us, “Her belief is what cured her.” What really cures you is not only the healer, the healer is like an intermediary. But in reality, what heals people is their belief. When you believe in what the healer is saying, you overcome your fear, and so it is from you.
That is why anyone who is struggling can go through these four different principles, which will give them power to overcome their fear and then they will discover that they have been healed, and that sickness never returns. There are many incidents, we cannot mention them all, where we saw how people have been healed.
One day a lady came from New York to New Jersey to see me. She had two children with her, one and three years old. She came to me crying and said, “I have two children and my husband left me. They found a tumor and said I have only one year left to live. They want to operate but have told me that it is going to be difficult and that I am going to die.” I am not saying I am a healer, but I am at the threshold of healers. I am a normal person, I might be lower than anyone here. I am saying that I am nothing, zero. So what I have learned from our teacher, I focused on her and read on her, and blessed her. Three days later she went to the hospital to schedule the operation. They were shocked to see nothing there, it was gone. No one knew what had happened; it was a miracle and they could not understand it.
There is one sitting up there. He had back pain and went to two famous doctors in America. They said to him, “You have to undergo operation for your back. You have three vertebrae that are weak. You cannot carry more than one kilogram, you cannot travel, and you have to stay in bed until we do the operation.” He is up there and carries the luggage for broadcasting. That luggage is more than 35 kgs. Doctors were surprised at how that happened.
I told him, “Don’t travel.”
He said to me, “No, you blessed me. I am going to travel, I am alright.” He has been traveling with me since he was checked by these doctors. He went to Indonesia, Malaysia, and now he is here. From here, he is going to travel to Morocco with me. So it is not me, it is determined by your belief, to overcome your fear and believe in yourself! However much your organs are sick, that belief will overcome it.
Music gives you a way to feel happy, but masters give you a way to believe in yourself. When you have that experience, you will overcome your fear, and when fear is overcome, there will be no more problems. Why do people demonstrate against their governments? Because they are afraid of the government. But when they overcome that fear, they will see that the government will change. So when you demonstrate against the government within yourself, you will destroy that fear within you.
May God forgive us and let us all raise our hands and say, ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illa-Llah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan `abduhu wa habeebuhu wa rasooluh. ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illa-Llah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan `abduhu wa habeebuhu wa rasooluh. ash-hadu an laa ilaaha illa-Llah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan `abduhu wa habeebuhu wa rasooluh.
(Ayatu ‘l-Bay`a is recited.)
May God bless you all. Thank you very much.