133 - I have a Dream

(Dec. 2001)

Martin Luther King:

We cannot walk alone. As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. This is our hope.... With this faith we will be able to hew out the mountain of despair. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together.... This will be the day when all God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning "My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died...."  When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village, from every state, and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, [may I add Jews and Arabs?], Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

I had a dream. My hopes suffered a tragic setback - maybe yours have, too. Our hearts have been devastated: people killing each other, blowing themselves up, revenge, torture, leaving a trail of misery, of despair, the hordes of displaced refugees, contempt for human dignity.

Yet I still have a dream - a dream of peace. Is it likewise with you? Do you still hold that dream? Is it ok to dream wishful thinking? They call it ineffective, utopic.

Utopia was the dream of Thomas More (the title of his book published in 1516). He named it an imaginary island that might serve as a model for human communities governed by an ideally perfect social and political system. It reflects earlier idyllic political models, for example Plato's Republic. Also J. S. Bach described his music as a model for a human commonwealth: "each theme enjoying a range of freedom but each limiting its freedom in the interest of the whole." He added: "such is the harmony governing the motion of the stars."   

Perchance dreams do come true. We call it a miracle because it defies logic. But in mathematics, one chance in a million or even in a billion is still not illogical - just not very probable, but for the heroes, not to be dismissed.

There is a time in life when a passion is awakened in the soul, which gives the soul a longing for the Unattainable. Hazrat Inayat Khan (The Unity of Religious Ideals)

It is never in your pocket, but it lures you ever forward into breaking new ground - opening new horizons. This is the stuff with which the spirit of heroes is made. It challenges one to defy those albeit reasonable words: 'unpractical,' 'not feasible,' 'it doesn't work,' 'it cannot possibly work.' The answer is, 'What if it could? What if my assessment is wrong? What if what is judged impossible is possible? What if my belief, and your belief, and that of umpteen people makes what seems impossible possible?' Belief is an unaccountable force. However it can also operate as misconstrued and misleading obscurantism. Hence Hazrat Inayat Khan's injunction:

Shatter your ideal on the rock of truth.

As a soul evolves from stage to stage, it must break the former belief in order to establish the later, and this breaking of the belief is called by Sufis Tark, which means abandonment.

He who fights his nature for his ideal is a saint; he who subjects his ideal to his realization of truth is the master. (Gayan)

The ideal is a stepping stone towards that attainment which is called liberation. (Religious  Gathekas)

One needs to distinguish between belief and faith. Belief is based upon a holy scripture or the injunction of a believer, sometimes factual evidence; whereas faith is a kind of gut feeling, not based on evidence, a sense that everything makes sense ultimately and that there is splendor behind the existential, awry universe. This conviction overrides the proof of the contrary. It belongs to a higher knowledge. It is what Hazrat Inayat Khan calls "the reason behind reason."

Blind idealism can lead to the kind of intolerance that begets violence, persecution, cruelty, even torture (as evidenced in the Spanish inquisition), and in our day and age in the 11th of September massacre. The wager is to give priority to the minimum ethical decency, over one's impulse to pursue one's belief at the cost of human suffering. In the hierarchy of ideals, Hazrat Inayat Khan calls the paramount value: the truth.

It comes by rising above all that hinders one's faith in truth: the abandoning of the worldly ideal, the abandonment of the heavenly ideal, the abandoning of the divine ideal, and even the abandoning of abandonment. This brings the seer to the shores of the ultimate truth. (The Way of Illumination; Private Papers)   

Surprising words that aver their pertinence in the present world situation! Yes, as one becomes more aware, one's erstwhile ideal concedes to one its inadequacy. Here is proof that one has progressed. This is the dark-night of the mind of St. John of the Cross. In politrics (a word of my uncle Murshid Musheraf Khan), one easily confuses ideal with ideology: i.e. Nazi ideology, Communist ideology, racist ideology. Ideology begets hatred with its inevitable follow up of conflict, war, misery, poverty, uprooted refugees, the disruption of the fruits of efforts of dedicated people, civilizations built sometimes over aeons of time....

The present world conflict is triggered off by a tug of war. On one side, the ideology fostering material profit, profiteering (sustained by ever more sophisticated technology) which has the disadvantage of opening the door to ruthless, insensitive greed (affluence while people are sleeping in the streets), manipulation, perjury, ego-games, power-games, a degeneration in standards (drugs and alcohol), in morals a pursuit of ugliness in art (hard rock), slovenliness, facetiousness, vulgarity, crime, a lack of self-respect, making its victims and even subsidiary beneficiaries beholden to one. On the other side, we find a more traditional ideology that upholds age-hallowed standards of dignity, that criticizes what is considered a moral decadence, and condemns depravity, sacrilege, snubbing of the sacredness of religious transmissions, a contempt of strict religious prescriptions - the profanation of the sacred.

Among those adhering to the latter contention, called Fundamentalists (nowadays Islamists), some adopt extreme bigoted inflexible attitudes called fanaticism and feel threatened by the 'established' holders of power, spoiling it for those loyal to the prescriptions of their religion. Is there a way of reconciling these seeming irreconciliables?

Sufism teaches that spiritual progress and material progress are concomitant and that there can be no genuine or lasting progress until the spiritual quality is adopted.   

When dominated and repressed by the holders of power, when frustration reaches a point of uncontrollable emotion of desperation, it can explode, culminating in horrendous, preposterous, destructive acts as the inconceivable, uncondonable 11th of September outrage, triggering off a spiraling vicious circle of retaliation, then retaliation of retaliation in irreversible regress, while a dignified solution looms so obviously at hand for those who see the counter-productiveness of hot-headed retribution.

The nations of today stand in the quest of their own national benefit regardless of other nations. This has made the world a battlefield of continual struggle where life has become nothing but chaos.

Can you now hear the voice of despair at present? Can we measure how great must be the degree of frustration and anger for young men to offer their lives for freedom from oppression? Where there is suffering, where there is misery, penury, if the oppressed feel threatened that their grievances will not be heard or heeded, they will resort to terrorism to exercise pressure for their cause. Aggression is triggered off by fear, frustration, suffering. True, it is counter-productive. This very aggressivity puts the wrench in the wheels of conflict-resolution. The end does not justify the means; violence proves in the end to defeat its purpose, playing into the vicious circle of violence. There is here a misconstruction that needs to be unmasked on both sides. The communications breakdown is sparked by a lack of trust. Mutual trust is gained painstakingly by the on-going experience of working together, as Martin Luther King said. If one discounts one's memory of history, one easily stumbles into a Catch 22. The killings by the oppressed who feel maligned by a contempt of human rights is considered as terrorism, whereas killing the new terrorists by those comfortably and legally established who owe their position of power by themselves having resorted initially to terrorism is accepted as a legal act by dint of invoking the righteousness of their anti-terrorist claim against the terror that they themselves triggered off in the first place. There is no doubt that the human factor here is the criterion: respect for human dignity. 

Much as the counterproductive vicious circle of conflict in which the world is engaged seems inevitable, it is difficult to realize that the solution is right at hand. One has difficulty in seeing how it could work. Resort to force is shortsighted; it will never solve problems in the long run.

Christ says this clearly - it is peremptory. To St. Peter who sought to protect him from Judas's betrayal:

He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. 

Indeed, of what use would it have been if St. Peter had attacked Judas?

Yet one needs to take precautions to protect innocent people by taking appropriate measures so that the 11th of September outrage could not be repeated. Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan advocates:

Avoid the harm done by the enemy by taking precautions, facing it with strength.

He warns, however, that the strength of intervention should be resorted to

...only if one is sure that kindness and forgiveness will have no power whatever over the hard heart of the enemy, but on the other hand will make it worse.

Could one forgive the terrorists who committed such a monstrous crime on September 11th? Innocent people as hostages in hi-jacked planes turned into live bombs - innocent people fleeing the flames by jumping out the windows to their death! We can never forget this. Could one forgive Hitler or Stalin, and many, many heartless brutal beings? Could anyone have converted Hitler or Stalin by non-violence? By forgiving them? They would have scoffed at our naivety! Of course one cannot force one's forgiveness upon a person who does not recognize that he is guilty.

If we had not countered Nazism with strength, we in Europe would be living under a ruthless dictatorship with the ensuing damage to the values of our civilizations achieved at the cost of so much dedication, sacrifice and ingenuity.

Christ intervened with violence in the temple against the profanation of the sacred.

Yet the secret of breaking the pattern of the vicious circle of retribution and escalating retaliation is to bravely and trustingly opt for the reverse: kindness, forgiveness, but together with authority. One needs to take precautions to ensure, to prevent, that outrages to decent behavior do not reoccur, causing further victims "only if one is sure that kindness and forgiveness will have no power whatever over the hard heart of the enemy, but on the other hand will make it worse."

On the other hand, in some cases the way of kindness will disarm the opponent if we listen to their grievance and take heed of them as Gandhi said:  

The objective should not be to punish the opponent or to inflict injury upon him. We must make him feel that in us he has a friend. It is a means to secure the cooperation of the opponent consistent with truth and justice.

And from Ghaffar, sometimes called the Afghan "Frontier Ghandi:"

If one is really committed to non-violence one has to deliver one's self into the hands of one's enemy and try to convert him.

Forgiveness is difficult and obstructed by those who fail to believe in a peaceful solution. It requires implicit trust that this solution can prove effective.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:Forgive the enemy and forget his enmity if he truly wishes it. And take the first step in establishing friendship instead of holding in one's mind the pain of the past.

This is my dream, my faith, the policy I have arrived at dealing with my frustrations, my ultimate trust in the basic need of humans for peace and harmony which is disrupted when grievances are not dealt with and hatred and violence are aroused; the belief that there is a way of understanding, of kindness and mutual trust, of respect for human dignity and love. Do you believe this too? I believe that if one overcomes that psychological layer of resentment, one will uncover that core of the goodness that lies in wait in the depth of the human soul, which Hazrat Inayat Khan calls the divinity in the human being.

My faith is that with shared endeavor we can make what seems impossible possible. I hear that many kindred spirits think this way. Together we can build a force of peace in a disrupted and wounded world. It starts in our personal lives and snowballs in society at large at a global scale. Forgiveness starts by getting into the consciousness, the conscience of the 'other' (the 'other oneself'), where one sees his or her grievances, resentment, and struggle for self-esteem. Forgiveness is sparked by understanding, by withholding one's condemning. One hopes that one's love and forgiveness will diffuse the resentment of those whom one has offended, and who have offended one. I realize that it is difficult if one has been abused. How far can one go?  One needs to trust that eventually, in the long run, our trust in shared forgiveness will spread far and wide to build a beautiful world of beautiful people.

This is to wish you
A Happy Christmastide
And Blessed New Year.

The story goes that there was an old man called St. Nicholas, with a 'long' white beard, trekking through the snow in Northern reaches, whose joy was giving - giving presents to children so that as they grow up they may themselves give presents to kindly, giving people in the form of kindness and generosity (P.V. who likes highfalutin words says magnanimity, Ya Rahman).

That present is love. "We are tested in our love," says Hazrat Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan. This can be very difficult not only if it is a person who has harmed one, more so a person who has hurt someone whom one loves. So we are tested in the utmost. It is the message of Christ whose birth we celebrate at the solstice when light begins to increase carrying a message of hope.

This is my wish for the New Year: Hope - faith in the power of love.
