After centuries of focusing more on scientific pursuits than spirituality, how can we best approach belief in the Unseen?
What does authentic spiritual belief look like, and what are the traps?
TRANSCRIPT
Ahlan. Salam alaikoum. Allah Allah, Allah Allah, Allah Allah, Azeez Allah. A’uthu billahi min ash-shaytani-r rajeem. Bismillahi-r Rahmani-r Raheem. La hawla wa la quwwata illa billahil aliyyil atheem.
Welcome to you. Welcome to all of us together, in those moments of sharing from the teachings of our masters and from the traditions of wisdom, of the Noble Revelation, the whole dynasty of revelation, through all the great ones who were the most appropriate teachers.
Every time humanity got into forgetfulness, they reminded gently, softly, gently. Their main tool is love, it’s understanding, it’s forgiveness, it’s pointing the direction and giving people time and giving people stages.
You know, in the last couple of hundred years, as humanity, as a whole family of humanity, we followed the path of excluding the Unseen under the name or the guise of experience and laboratory, and scientism and positivism and pragmatism.
We excluded anything we cannot analyze with our senses or cannot control and watch and observe. And up to a certain point, it was, you know, we had some good results in materialistic development and in many… I guess, in urban life.
In material life, we gained many giant steps. And then, we generalized that exclusion of the Unseen. We generalized it, and it became our new faith, even though faith is by definition to believe in something you don’t see.
But our new faith is exclusion of the Unseen. And through this exclusion, we excluded the most obvious signs of the Unseen.
And we got to the most laughable, you know, myths like actually proposing that all this universe is by accident, all this magnificent balancing everything, all these complex systems we observe in ourselves and in the horizons.
Billions of galaxies keeping their minute balance, moving at such speeds in empty space yet keeping everything, you know… Billions and millions, millions and billions of elements have to be taken into consideration for that balance.
And then in ourselves, our different systems living together, own nervous system, digestive system, emotional system, physical, physiological system, psychic system, all living together. And from the simplest creature, like the mosquito, if you observe the mosquito, it’s an amazing universe, Amazing. And we still would say that all of this is accidental. So how many accidents?
Obviously it does not make sense. Obviously it does not make sense. You may call it arrogance, or you made call it stubbornness. But it’s not logical and it’s not good intentioned seeking of meaning, of meaningful understanding.
Now, we are going back to believing. So all those elements we lost connection with, energetic world, spiritual world, angelic world, divine world, even demonic world – it’s also unseen. We lost control and we lost connection and we lost knowledge. And we lost guidance.
So now when we’re going back, we’re going back with much good intention but very little knowledge, and very little guidance. And therefore, you notice today that people talking about spirituality, they’re making so many mistakes, trying literally to reinvent the wheel. So it’s spirituality without religion, and it’s feminist spirituality without masculine spirituality, and it’s spirituality of reconnecting to prehistoric times but not taking into account that spirituality was a teaching, a tradition, a dynasty of teaching, a revelation.
The most fundamental tool to reconnect to those teachings is humility, good intentioned humility, and firmness into seeking the right knowledge. But us, we are looking into everything and also, in a very subtle way, we don’t want to leave our comfort zone.
So okay, we believe in the Unseen, but I believe in what my mind tells me, what my imagination tells me, what my creativity tells me, and at the end, we end up in the best case, we end up recreating mythology, following illusions, following imaginary roads.
Or worse, we may connect, because of lack of guidance, to lower energy. Because lower energy is just waiting, if there’s an opening, to move into our space. Before we did not believe that there is satanic or demonic energy. And now, we don’t know how to differentiate. So demonic energy moves in. So today you find people interested in witchcraft, interested in sorcery, interested in… All of this under the guise of interest in the Unseen. Or you find people, under the name of esoterism or even mysticism, connecting to any kind of energy.
So this as a solution is like moving from acid to fire, because before we tried to keep level with our mind and we refused the Unseen. But we stayed within the realm of materiality. Now, we’re going into the realm of the Unseen, but like a blind person. So we are connecting to all kinds of dangerous sources in the name of esoterism.
So we are between two things. At best, we are losing our time and we are also losing our good intention of finding our path, by connecting to illusion. Or worse, we are connecting to what’s literally anti spiritual and anti divine. Because we are in a world of duality. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever forget that.
We’re in a world ruled by duality. So if there is day, there is night. If there is good, there is evil. And if there is a wish to connect to the Divine, there is a possibility to connect to evil, if we don’t have the right guidance. If we don’t have the right guidance.
So somebody would say, ya what duality? Don’t we believe in unicity? Unicity, that is the realm of the Divine. We believe there is the realm of the Truth. Truth is One. The Divine is One. Eternity is only eternity in the Truth.
But in our world today, of day and night, us as humans, we move between, within duality. So there is good and bad, there is paradise and hell, symbolically at least. There is upper energy and lower energy. So every time we move into something without guidance, we face that danger.
Somebody would say, no but I have guidance. Who is your guidance? Who is your guide? Oh, I found this guru lady or a man from some… this line or that line.
The problem is, from early already, there was proper guidance through the Noble Revelation, and there was fake guidance. False gods are not from today only. False teachers are not from today only. It’s from the beginning.
From the beginning, you had Abel and Cain. You had the believer and the one following ego and passions and vanity. And one made effort to connect to the Divine, and the other one followed easy ways to connect to his ego. And from that time, we had these two lines running. And many, many teachings come from that false temple tradition. Because from the very beginning, evil did not come from corruption of good teachings. No.
From the very beginning, there were teachings of righteousness and fake teachings from the fake temples. From day one. The first fake temple was built by Cain (Qabeel, we say in Arabic). Cain, the older son to Adam, peace be upon him. Peace be upon Adam, obviously. And Cain from day one followed ways of shaitan. And from Cain until now, you have false temples, false lines, and for false teaching to succeed, it has to pose through the same, many of the same characteristics as the right teaching.
False teachings always take you to let go of your responsibility and submit to control. And that’s different from submission to the Divine or submission to the Noble Revelation. Submission to the Noble Revelation is fighting the ego, by submitting to Divine pedagogy.
But submission to false teachers is letting go of your capacity to grow, and staying within your comfort zone, and accepting the control of another person over you. And obviously, after it involves benefiting in dunya, benefiting in wealth, benefiting in… It all becomes a story of wealth and politics and social games.
The Holy Revelation came to free us from all of this.
So we started by excluding the Unseen, and the Divine, and when we accepted to reconnect to it, through lack of guidance we are in fact reconnecting to our ego, because our ego also is unseen. Ego. From small connections, you know, these people… all these funny games of full moon witchcraft… to ways of corruption, of ways of continuing to exclude the Divine from our lives. Through false answers.
One of those ways is all these people who tell you “I don’t want religion, but I want spirituality.” This is like somebody telling you, “I don’t want the flower or the rose, but I want its smell.” No. They come together.
There are false religions. Yes. And we have to look at our way, to look at the right thing. But real spirituality is to be found only within righteous teachings of the Noble Revelation, of real religions, real religion.
Because if we talk about a dynasty of revelation, it means it’s been more or less the same teaching, same teaching through the good ones and concluding with the Crown of Revelation, Sayyidina Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam.
Today, you know, these teachings, these teachers, they have deputies. That is, they have people who inherit the spirit of that teaching, and they are relaying it to people.
Their sign is they do it for free. Because truth is too precious, and it’s given for free by the Divine. And it’s relayed for free, as we see in Mawlana Shaykh Nazim and in all teachers we grew up with.
May insha’Allah these words find an echo in our hearts, and we’ll be able to benefit from them insha’Allah.
We present the benefit of this meeting to the souls of our teachers, our parents, all those who have rights upon us and, in this time of pandemics, we present our prayers to the healing of all, everybody, the whole of humanity, and our healing also from the future, from other difficulties, for healing for hearts, minds and bodies, for the healing of our beloved ones, but also those we don’t love, because that’s real forgiveness, it’s wishing healing for everybody, and wishing happiness for everybody, and wishing eternal happiness for everybody and right guidance for everybody.
May Allah azza wa jalla give us right guidance. Wassalam alaikoum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.