2 - Mastery - the Effect of Retreats

As we plunge deeper and deeper into retreats at the Abode, we become increasingly amazed at the effect of mastery on human transformation. The sheer determination that it takes to reverse the human machine, which is coming through from inside represents a remarkable victory of the will, with the result of unleashing intense magnetism. And it is this energy that shifts consciousness from its commonplace setting. Of course, meditation is the art of learning how to use the human focus of a universal will to mobilize that universal will in all its infinite scope. Eventually, the forces of life take over to set up a tidal wave of transformation. However, though will acts as a catalyst, it is ecstasy (the energy of the psyche) that avers itself to be the driving force. People of great accomplishment have performed feats of mastery. Murshid says that if you are not making a success of your undertaking, the chances are that you are not in control of yourself.

Yet mastery is subject to much controversy in the Sufi Order and in general. Most psychologists since Freud warn that inhibiting impulses, frustrating desires, and withholding anger, will damage the psyche and make a person up-tight, crestfallen and timorous. Protesting this view, a few teachers have been departing from the characteristic mastery of traditional schools to promote an epicurean permissiveness. The sluices are wide open, indiscriminately; everything goes. Public opinion is outraged.

In the nick of time, psychologist Carol Travers, in her book: Anger, The Misunderstood Emotion, points to the danger of simply giving in to anger. She says that by so doing, one escalates anger possibly to the point of a tantrum; it takes over. One may become an irate, inconsiderate and insufferable person.

Murshid took a balanced view of this problem. One is sometimes faced with the choice between wounding one's psyche by withholding an emotion or blowing a delicate situation by behaving simply in an uncouth manner, showing a lack of sensitivity and refinement (rather like an elephant in a glass palace). This behavior can sometimes do violence to a person in his/her self-esteem. In this case, just as it is not always advisable to mollycoddle the body, but rather expose it to the seasons, even so the psyche will get strengthened by rough handling it, provided one does not overdo it. However, while the ascetic orders practice detachment and desirelessness to effect liberation, the Sufis see the whole universe as the divine nostalgia for self-discovery, the actuation of potentialities, proliferation, inventiveness and evolution.

If, as the Muslims affirm, "La ilaha illa 'llah," it is all one being, since there is none other than God, then what we believe to be our desires are extensions of the overall divine desire, albeit narrowed down by the limitation of our personal perspectives, maybe distorted, possibly eviscerated. Rather than quash an impulse, Murshid advocates harnessing it like a yachtsperson harnesses the wind to blow the sailboat where he/she wishes it instead of where it wishes. Rather than disperse the energy of anger in an explosion of fury, one could make use of that energy in an implosion: gaining an ongoing sense of dignity and sovereignty that imposes respect.

The trouble is that mastery easily becomes a feat of proving oneself to oneself or to others, especially when challenged. It is the stuff that makes the mountaineer, the athlete, the fireman, the hero, the yogi. Besides, people and fundamentalist institutions have a way of making one feel that one should do this or that; one often "shoulds" oneself. One finds oneself in a bind when pushing beyond the boundaries between stress and overstress. The bind is in the mind. One fears being humiliated in one's self-esteem, reproved, punished or even dismissed if one should fail. At a certain point, something has to give. If one has a vulnerable mind, one slips into schizophrenic behavior; if a strong mind, one could have a heart attack or cancer.

A perspicacious person will notice that he/she is more vulnerable to overstress when pitting the personalized will against odds doggedly and stubbornly. One must regard the natural trend of the formative processes within us that prevail upon us to stop hitting our head against the wall and get into synch with a will of a more universal and impersonal scope calling for attention from within. One could easily slip into cussedly "doing one's thing under the banner of mastery, unaware of it's effect on others. It is because the dervish musters the will of which his will is the extension (what we call the divine will) that the mad elephant will obey him. If he were to apply his personal end of the cone, of which the divine will is the big end and his the small, the dervish would be killed by the elephant. Such is the divine power that sparks one when, to quote Murshid, One discovers in oneself the same power that moves the universe.
