Abdal Hakim Murad – Healing Through Beauty Ramadan Moments 4
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Bismillah Alhamdulillah wa salatu salam ala Rasulillah while he was
so happy woman who Allah.
So we're moving deeper into this deep time.
And perhaps we noticed that as the coarseness is of our immediate
cravings are diminished. As the lower self gives up, on its usual
clamoring for treats of various kinds, that we see things rather
more clearly, than we used to, generally our desires and our
passions, the lower ones at any rate, or a kind of veil, they
diminish our humanity by interrupting normal course of our
angelic selves with various animal impulses.
We should find that our attention span in Ramadan is improved, we
should find that our close attention to things is
facilitated. And what I want to speak about is the somewhat
neglected
phenomenon of the showerhead.
So term in traditional Islamic spirituality, ultimately, organic,
which is to say, witnessing, seeing things, being attentive,
not just passively receiving the information supplied to us by the
senses, and by the sort of regurgitation of the memory and
the ego, but being actively attentive, in a state of hadoar.
And those who
are close to their maker,
find this endlessly delightful.
Modern Art, it might be said, is the kind of art in the absence of
truth of providing us with something that's always new. Even
though it's always about the meaninglessness of things,
standing beside the void and experiencing that vertigo.
But the arts of the traditional show holds the practice of seeing
things for Islam is the opposite of that. Because it is seeing
things with interest, not because of the paradox of their existence
and the meaninglessness of all things. But because of the light
that shines through them,
which is always new.
They say lotta Chlorophyta jelly, no manifestation of Allah comes
twice. Everything is new, called the Yeoman. Who if he shutting
everything in the world is the operation of a permutation of his
99 names. And their permutations are almost infinite. They're
indefinite, everything that the true believer sees, he or she
sees, not just as a mysterious concatenation in space and time,
but as a reflection of the perfect interaction of the divine
qualities. And so that person becomes Shahid, witness.
One of the great authors in our, you might say, heritage of Muslim
psychology
is somebody called Najmuddin Cobra 13th century
he was a chef at a scholar and Ashari, who went deep into the
spiritual sciences of Islam. He was from Central Asia, his
hometown, Olga Sanchez, in present day Turkmenistan.
He's buried there because unlike many scholars and people who had
the wherewithal to flee from the Mongols, he didn't flee, but he
stayed to defend his city and he died sword in hand in battle with
with the Mongols and is buried there in Oregon.
Before he died, he wrote a number of books, including a Quranic
commentary, which he was martyred before he finished it, but it's
still a remarkable and profound book. But another of his books is
called filaria Jamal, which is like the fragrances of beauty
where he talks about beauty as an indicator of truth, the allele of
Hawk
that is to say, one sees not the shadows, but the light that costs
the shadows in everything.
And this particular text was
something that despite the author's untimely end, very widely
disseminated
quadrant Najmuddin Cobra had as his nickname Valley dash, which
means like the saint factory, because so many people are
transformed by him. Sinners, if they saw him would would burst
into tears. They couldn't remain in their state. And so many people
were trained by him to very
high degrees.
People in the tradition of say Sharafuddin mannery, who's one of
the great Islam misers and healers of Bengal and Bihar.
Some of manner his works have been done into English and also one of
his pupils, who was Seaford in Bihar Z.
You can see the greatness of that age, the Mongols the worst
catastrophe in human history everybody massacred
babies including included nothing survived.
And 40 years after the martyrdom of Najmuddin, Cobra in the city of
Bukhara.
sayfudine Bukhara Z
meets the Mongol ruler, the grandson of Ganges Han Baraka Han,
the terror of the world.
And
something within him
his capacity to see not just the surface of things, but within the
ferocity of the believer touched the ruler. And after his encounter
this alchemical transmutation of the lead of the rulers soul into
pure gold, better Kohan becomes the first significant Mongol to
accept Islam and becomes a major champion of Islam, and his ruling
a major empire. This is the Golden Horde. They're not just in
Bukhara, but they're in Lithuania and Poland. It's an enormous
empire. His conversion is a major turning point in world history.
And Barraca Han is horrified by the destruction of the city of
Baghdad by who Lego is relative, the destruction of everything, the
destruction of the books, the burning of the city, the execution
of the Khalifa, it's like curtains for the Islamic world. And he
decides that he's going to use his great Mongol army in order to
protect the armor. So there begins a war between Hulagu and Belka and
Barraca Han through his heroism is the one who protects the three
holy cities, Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina from destruction and
massacre by the pagan Buddhist Mongols of hula girls a very
significant figure in our history. And
it's interesting that in that golden age, oppression did not
take the form of wild terroristic symbolic uselessness, but instead
took the form of the cultivation of a sharper perception and the
capacity to be Welly that would turn the hearts I mean Belka
Collins conversion is like nowadays say if Netanyahu converts
to Islam, some Sufi Sheikh goes to the Knesset and Netanyahu looks
into his eyes and he can't stop himself seeing the shadow. And you
can imagine the effect that would have on the world what would they
do in in Washington? But that was the upset that these people were
the Insight were able to do Najmuddin Cobra of this honorable
tradition. Rahmatullahi Ali has this book for what it had Jamel
it in which he tries to theorize out this question of show horde of
witnessing of seeing.
He says the showerhead means two main things. It means the one who
witnesses but also the one who is present.
Shahid is in Arabic somebody who was present at something shahidul
Holiday BIA as a hobby who was present at the Treaty of Saudi
Arabia. And that's very important to be in the moment to be fully
alert to the turgidity to the manifestation of the Divine Names
as these are combining and recombining in the luminescence in
any given moment to be fascinated by even mediocre seeming moments,
because everything is equally what Allah is doing. And to the people
of pure hearted Eman, they can see that and then have a board because
what Allah does because it's from him is never boring. Boredom is a
kind of veil of incapacity to see the unique extraordinary nature of
the moment.
So in his idea of shorthold, he has this idea of mizuna live
which I find particularly interesting has a lot of
subsequent influence. Mizuno vape means the scales of the unseen
that is to say if you look at something or somebody
when you just see darkness,
that is the shuffled, judging you, yourself has been weighed and
found wanting because if they're not Amara, the lowest sell so
If that is seeing,
and if you see light,
then your soul has been weighed. And you see what is positive.
And this comes from the Neff smoke in the soul that is at peace,
which is what we should all crave, who doesn't want a soul that is at
peace, particularly in this age of distraction and uproar. And this
is the function of Ramadan ready to give us that kind of
hamdulillah detachment, stepping back from all of those chattering
impulses, and focusing on the miracle of the moment.
So this means no vape is an interesting and important concept
that we are being judged when we look.
The Quran is constantly inviting us to consider the way the heavens
and the earth have been created. It's the scripture really of
nature, look at nature, look at life, look at the sun, look at the
moon, look at the
the miracles around you and be drawn through the surface of those
things into the source of those things.
But in our time, this can seem difficult. You're walking through
terminal five, in a hurry, there's an announcement. There's the usual
outlets. It's the opposite of Hodor. On short, and
attentiveness, everybody is being made money from through keeping
them kind of distracted, everything is there to make them
comatose, so that money can be extracted from them.
How does one deal with that situation, which is really the
condition of the modern world. This message, this stupid move
music, this advertising, this entertainment, it's all there to
take us from the miracle of the moment.
By seeing whatever there is where even in our low state, we can
still detect something of the light.
The great thing about the sheiks who converted the Mongols
was that they looked at them. And they didn't just see darkness, but
they saw light, they saw what they will call to be, this will maybe
their physical outward beauty, they saw something that the soul
can be nourished by. So this means No, they've this balance of the
unseen, which judges us. It's something we need to call to mind
when we see somebody else.
Is it the lower self that is operational? In other words, do we
immediately notice the fault in that person? Do we see
that baby is badly behaved? Or that woman is not properly
addressed? Oh, this thing is not good. That comes from the lower
self, almost always. Because the low self wants to find fault
because it feels superior.
Or do we at the first glance, the first witnessing see the best
thing.
That person is really looking after her child. This person is
actually being serious and reading a book, that child is very
beautiful. That's what the roof craves because the food of the
rock is beauty.
So this is helpful, we can go through the most distracted modern
spaces. And it can become a kind of spiritual experience a retreat
for us
convert Calvert that Andrew man, they say in the Horizonte
tradition, solitude in the crowd.
So this skill, which turns and again, he has this wonderful idea
of the soul having different colors, and we don't have time to
talk about this. Now. It's a particular symbolism that he uses
to capture the very, very difficult numinous states of the
soul.
The lowest self is black, because it's an absence of truth, just a
veil. And the highest self, he says is the green the color green,
which is life itself, which is paradise, which is prophetic. And
that nuff slow Welna. The soul that blames which is kind of the
conscience of the guilty conscience that knows that it
should have done something that knows that it should do something
they're kind of humanly, conscientiously alert human being
that may not be green, but is nonetheless on the way or aware of
what it ought to be. He says that's, that's the red self.
because red is the color of combat, it's blood, it's fire,
it's tumult, and that's the state of most of humanity. We'll have
these kinds of red lights within ourselves. Not many have turned to
green.
Not many have turned to green with the kind of verdant peace of the
garden
growing into our hearts.
So much more could be said about the for a healthier morale of
Najmuddin. Cobra is one of our great classics. And it comes
straight from the heart of his meticulous Sunday heroic tradition
and has transformed so many souls. And I think that in our array
Ah, where so much seems to be going wrong. We need to overcome
our instinct to blame and to find fault, which comes from our
insecurity and our desire to feel less bad about ourselves, and to
train ourselves to see as instinctively and as quickly as we
can, what is best in a situation what is best in other people. And
that should bring us the other should bring us happiness, because
we don't really get nourished by ugliness, even though the lower
self may be attracted to it.
The lower self with the remote control wants those channels
generally that have the kind of ugliest stuff in them. The horror
films, the inappropriate images, that's the liver cells, but it
doesn't, doesn't bring happiness. It could be a form of addiction,
but it can't bring happiness.
So this idea of these annual vape is there and I think in Ramadan,
it's a particularly good time to try and step back from the lower
self where the shell Tina are chained, and try to see what's
best and most beautiful in every situation in the masjid, to see
the best of people's behavior, to listen to the beauty of the Quran,
to try and make way for people to try and be patient to try and
overlook people's thoughts to try and be beautiful fasters and
inshallah our souls will move from being black to being red, to being
green in sha Allah, and therefore suited to the eternal,
transcendent abode BarakAllahu faecal will offer minquan with a
cappella Hosea Macomb was salam o aleikum wa rahmatullah wa
barakato.