=kit039.txt

KIT 39 - Spiritual Power

When doing the Dhikr, you become a living pendulum. The point at
the top of the pendulum where it is attached to the ball remains
unchanged. So in the Dhikr, one pole of your being is moving in
time and the other pole is beyond time, in a timeless state. It is
during the time you hold your breath and attain a very peaceful
state without any nostalgia or desire or impulse or will or
consciousness that the memory of having existed prior to your
birth comes back again, re-emerges. In that state you are in a
perfect state. You represent the Divine Perfection.

Consider the physical world as being derived reality, expressing
the reality far beyond the existential state. So you look upon the
physical world as being an expression of the reality of your being
which is beyond form and time and space. It is in that condition
that you can look upon your life with a new view, whereas if you
identified yourself with your personality, you would not have an
overview. It would be like what you see when walking in the
streets as compared with being in a helicopter and having an
overview of the lay of the land. So the secret consists in
remembering the sublime condition of your eternal being and having
the courage to identify with it, overcoming the force of gravity
that pulls you down into identifying yourself with your
personality.

Now, you have to keep yourself upwind, afloat on the upwind
currents, keep yourself aloft. Clearly, this is not introspection
because introspection is judging things from one's personal
vantage point, which is limited. If you tend to slip into your
personal consciousness, there's no point in continuing; you have
to let yourself be carried aloft and identify yourself with Ya
Qaher, which is your Divine inheritance, your Divine status.

This process is illustrated by the Dhikr. The Dhikr is a pendulum.
In the movement of the head, you make a circle but you reach out
from the circle just like the sailors do in the Navy, throwing the
sound to measure the depth of the sea. They make several circles
and then get the advantage of the rising force to throw the lead
at the end of the rope so it will reach its apex of the parabola
and then fall into the sea at a greater height. That's what one
does in the Dhikr. At the end of La ilaha, at the ha, you have
lifted yourself right up. Then you plunge into the illa. So you
haven't descended. what you have done is that your consciousness
has awakened in the course of the ends of time from the state of
unity - Ahad - into the existential state, or rather, God has
awakened through you. Your awakening is part of the Divine
awakening, discovering aspects of Him/Herself that come to light
in the existential state. Splendor becomes beauty in the
existential state.

Now you watch your whole life like a film. They say that people
about to die can see their whole life in front of them just like a
film. You can see your personality evolving in the course of your
life; you can see the circumstances. As long as you don't identify
yourself with your personality then you can approach it
objectively, as it has evolved, and by so doing, you'll gain great
wisdom. First of all, you notice how the events in your life had
an impact on your personality. I would take a particular event
that was particularly traumatic and try to remember it. Remember
how you felt; remember the kind of personality you had. Perhaps
you were a teenager or a child. Remember how you thought at the
time, how you felt at the time, what your values were at that
time, your intentions, your motivations, and then recall an event
which had a traumatic effect upon all those constructs. For
example, it shattered your illusions. Your illusions were built
upon your limited thinking, your mental representation of the
world. One calls that mental constructs. As Pir-O-Murshid says,
"Shatter your ideals upon the rock of truth."

So our ideals, our ideologies are our constructs that we make with
the best of ourselves and finally, we have to re-think our
concepts of life in terms of the feedback. What Pir-O-Murshid is
saying is that wisdom is born out of the interfacing and
intermeshing between our inborn, inherent knowledge and the
cognizance we acquire by coming to grips with the feedback. The
feedback is as if you are registering an event. You are trying to
figure out why it happened or what it means. That's a kind of
earth knowledge, knowledge of the earth. But you were born with an
inherent knowledge. The flashes of intuition that come to you when
you know something but don't know why you know it or where that
knowledge came from are examples of inherent knowledge. You are in
touch with knowledge from your deepest essence. So that's the
transcendental knowledge.

For Pir-O-Murshid, wisdom is the result of the encounter,
interfacing, intermeshing of those two knowledges, two forms of
cognizance. He calls that wisdom. So there you are, a young
person, facing reality of life which turns out very differently
from what you expected and this has a traumatic effect upon you.
It shatters many of your preconceived ideas and if you have lost
the battle, you have not known how to preserve your faith in the
meaningfulness and splendor behind the universe, so that it is
only your constructs that are shattered, which are your own
product and which are limited. Try to remember, were you shaken in
your faith? I think many of us are shaken in our faith when
incongruous things happen to us which just don't make sense and
which seem to be so very cruel. One wonders how there could be
God. We are tested in our faith. The weak people rest their belief
in reason. The strong people will maintain their faith, despite
proof of the opposite. That's spiritual power.
    
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