The Way of Muhammad
Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi
Affirmation
There is only one method by which you can approach the sufic sciences and that is to start, tabula rasa, by putting away the whole world-picture and value structure which has formed you until now and which is completely the result of your social and historical imprinting which you share with millions of others, whatever particular individuality you may imagine you have over and against those millions of others. You have an idea of how things are, and how you are, how things should be and how you should be. Interposed between you and reality is a functioning, fluctuating conceptualization of existence that, mingled with your personal emotional responses to event and personality, make up what you think is both 'you' and 'your world.'
Any idea of 'god' as an explanation of existence or an arena for your life-experience has to be set aside. 'Religion' (from the Latin - to bind together) as explanation or arena is equally false. Indeed, to mistake the name for the thing named, the category for the indicated, is to make tasawwuf impossible of access. Non-realities that have now crystallized in people's imagination as having some kind of dynamic actuality like history or class or individuality have to be set aside.
The subject of tasawwuf - Sufism - is you.
The subject of tasawwuf is reality.
Let us start from the beginning.
One.
The whole matter begins and ends with an affirmation of One.
But - it will be said- I am another, there is 'two', 'three', 'multiplicity'. John is not Arthur, nor Margaret, Anne. Precisely. It is because of the experiential multiplicity that the science of Unity exists. This implies, therefore, that as you are, you are not grasping the true nature of existence. It is like a perpetual fever, a constant hallucination. Things are multiple, alien and solid. There is not even continuity, yet we persist in it. I am the same one who was here yesterday after a night of dreamless sleep - at least everyone in today's 'dream' confirms this. Otherwise I would be mad. Idiotiki, in Greek, means private. My reality is affirmed socially, so I exist. Unless they are in my dream. Yet when I dream, the object seem insubstantial, awake they are solid and therefore 'real'. Real means solid. Yet I have physicists in my 'reality' who now tell me that solidity has no reality for them. The object is slipping away from me yet again, and forms are being proved out of existence and I am left holding onto a 'mental reality' in a vanishing world of forms which they tell me is merely dynamic space. The information about my 'real world' has become very odd and contradictory - at times even ironic. The person this world has appointed to assuage my inner anxiety, I observe, is in a worse state than I am. It is to this subject that tasawwuf addresses itself.
Thus:
If you desire to know reality you must know yourself. You are the key, the only key to reality.
You are nothing but a mirror of reality.
It is enough to reflect.
But, your anxiety - about what is on the horizon, and in yourself - stops you from calm and clear reflection. You desire urgent tranquilizing information saying 'it is all proved, everything is really all right, you exist.' Information has for the moment been set aside. Let us, however, examine a possibility. The possibility is that there is someone to trust about the very urgent matter of what life is about. Since we are not to be trusted, it must be some very remarkable sort of person. What would be the qualifications of a man to trust in this matter? There would be only one thing that would make him an 'expert' and that is that he knew how to live his life, utterly fulfilled, in radiant and expansive serenity that left space around him for his community and space within him for his own inner peace. Just as in the legend of Kurosawa's 'Rashomon', we are in a dilemma. In that story a woman has been raped and killed. Each witness tells what happened, but each one has given a version of the event from their own subjectivity. Each story is in the end a contradiction of the one before it. The lover, the bandit, the wife - each has been trapped in a private fantasy that insists on interpreting existence in a way that allows for their 'self-respect' to continue. Finally, a simple woodcutter who is 'out-side' the event, with nothing to gain or lose, tells what really happened. But by now the man who sought the truth dares no longer believe anyone, for he has ample evidence that people want their own version of events. When the woodcutter sees the man's dilemma, and what it has done to him - he no longer believes in existence as a dynamic functioning reality, it has proved to be a fragmented, subjective, ever-changing lie- the woodcutter breaks down and weeps. Humanly it is all he can do. Open himself completely to the man, surrender any idea of separateness, interest, dissembling - just give up, unresistant to that moment and its simple truth: his story. Then the man knows that he too has to give in, he has to shed his doubt and his distrust and even his own experience. Somehow life cannot have any continuity again unless there is affirmation of this encounter and its reality. And the two men weep. The moment has been tasted.
This is essentially the starting point of the science of tasawwuf. It begins with surrendering any vain concept that you can think or detector-feel your way out of the contradictions and pains of lived existence - and the surrender while actually to the Shaykh, is in truth to the Messenger, the one who is sent just for that, to tell you what reality is like, Muhammad, the Messenger of reality.
The necessary qualifications for this acceptance are these same simple and profound ones of his humanity and his deep sanity and his disinterestedness.