Minute with a Muslim #097 – I Think I Saw God

Some people take drugs. Some people take psychedelics and they have experiences. And they want to say that these experiences are divine right. And this is well known within left culture, leftist culture, then North American Europe, right? You start to get interested in Buddhism, you start to get interested in Eastern religions, you take some psychedelics, and then you have your experience with God, how do I know that that's not the same experience that the prophets had or the saints had or stuff like that? Well, let's leave it an open ended question. How would you know? How would you know that it is, there's a sort of emotionalism and a sort of empiricism that's at play here. And we

need to be sure that we put our sensory experience within the right scope, okay. sensory experience is extremely important. It's the basis of a lot of our knowledge and a lot of our ability to come to conclusions about things, but it's not everything. Okay. Just because you feel something doesn't mean it's really there. There's all sorts of things that we can perceive centrally, that either aren't there at all. Okay, or maybe we're misinterpreting that. Okay. And I would put it to the person who has the psychedelic trip. Okay. How do you know that? That's not the devil? How do you know that it's God that you were in communion with. And there's many, you know, apocryphal stories

we have we have one story in our tradition, I think. I'll call that a Gilani. And I don't know if this is authentic or not, but the story is sort of amusing. And it's also instructive, right? The lesson was instructive. So we can treat it as a fable, where he had a dream, okay, or a vision. And there was this figure that appeared to him and claimed to be either the Prophet Muhammad SAW them or claimed to be Allah, and told the shape, you know, you have reached such a high level of worship, that you don't have to follow the Sharia anymore. You don't have to pray anymore. You can go ahead and drink wine, and go ahead and you know, fornicator sleep around and all this sort of stuff. And

the sheikh knew right away that that was the devil, okay. And he called a mountain he had his ways of how he fell. And that devil was shocked is like, how did you know? And he said, I've tricked so many holy men with the same line? How did you know that I was actually the devil. Right? And the point of the story, for our purposes is how do you know, right? That's like, one of the most tricky things for a human being is the neffs. As the ego as the self, a law says, in the end of sort of Kath, who's the biggest loser, the person who spends their life thinking that they're doing good, but in reality, they're not. So to put all our eggs in one basket, and to double down on sort of our

sensory experience and our empiricism and our sort of subjective experience to put too much credence and that is very dangerous, because we have a conflict of interest, right? Human beings with their egos have a conflict of interest. It serves the self to interpret those things as being close to God, having experience like prophets having an experience like the saints, okay, and it would be embarrassing and against the self to say, maybe this is a red herring, maybe this is a dead end. Maybe this is a false pathway. Maybe it seems like I'm benefiting. It seems like I'm progressing spiritually, but really, it's just another trap. So we need to be very careful. And at the end of

the day, all true faith is about submission. It's not about the elevation of the ego. It's about the submission of the ego, okay, it's in following it's not in leading Sutton pioneering a new path. It's and following and submitting and true faith is a happy medium between affirmation and challenge, okay. It's not just about telling you that everything that you feel and everything that you experience is sacred and good. It's got a healthy dose of you need to change. You need to think about it differently. You need to step up