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.
