Subtitles: English, Russian, русский
Humbleness is the one golden ingredient in learning about ourselves and having a meaningful life leading to healing and happiness.
Sidi Farhat Jouini speaks about what it means to be humble, and how humbleness can direct the course of our life.
Humbleness is the first step to wisdom.
TRANSCRIPT
Happy to see you again today Marhaban. Most welcome Marhaban bikoum. Most welcome to you!
You know in Arabic, marhaban means you came to a big, wide place for you, and Ahlan wa sahlan means you came to your friends and family, ahlan wa sahlan, and you came to a welcoming place. Even though is a virtual meeting, it’s a blessed meeting. We hope, and we’re asking that this meeting be fruitful.
A’uthu billahi min ash-shaytani-r rajeem. Bismillahi-r Rahmani-r Raheem. Madad ya sadatina. We’re asking for support from those to whom support belongs, people of the spirit, people of realization, beyond names and beyond separation.
I had in my heart to… I’m realizing we’re speaking, we can speak about many, many elements of a journey or of exploring meaning for a meaningful life. On our way to what I call freedom of happiness, or happiness of freedom. But maybe it’s good to speak about pre-conditions, elements needed for this journey, as certainly it jumps right away to me.
The point it about the necessity of humbleness. Because most of our pain and most of our tears, even though sometimes they are necessary for our growth, they come from our arrogance, our resistance to see the obvious, our resistance to not to look into what’s disagreeable to us our insistence on believing sometimes in an illusion while truth is staring us right in our faces.
Humbleness is an ocean. It’s probably the most important quality leading to realization, or leading to growth, or leading to healing. It’s an ocean, because from every side you look at our life, you see humbleness under a different face Especially we see the necessity of humbleness and Also because there are degrees of humbleness.
Humbleness is the capacity to know our limits The capacity for me to say, I am one person. I have one opinion. There are many people out there and there are many opinions. And probably most of them are more, closer in their opinion to the truth than myself.
So from this angle humbleness makes us to listen, to learn about listening. And not just listening or trying to listen. It’s a genuine non-judgmental listening. Listening, not ready to answer back, not listening why we are planning our own resistance or our own version vis a vis what is being said. Listening as detached as possible and as truthfully as possible.
You know a good example we can take about this is like a judge. Now this is one element of humbleness about the capacity to listen and the capacity to know our limits. A good judge Is a judge who would come to court without present opinion. He or she got a case. They are, they have to keep their own personal likes and dislikes and personal opinions, they have to keep them outside. They have to sit and look at the plus and minus, at both sides of the case. They have to look at the law, the objective law, or to look as objectively as possible to the law, its spirit and its text. And then as detached, as much detached as possible and without any judgemental attitude, the judge would say, for this case, this is the decision.
That’s what we call an ideal judge. That’s what you call a fair judge. That’s what most people would say, this is a real judge, a real arbitrator. Well, we have to take that attitude in life. We have to sit in life, we have to look at people and listen, and know that there are many sides to every story. That’s one thing.
There are many hidden reasons. There are many scenarios. There are many possibilities, especially probably that we don’t know much from amongst these elements and scenarios and possibilities. If we take that attitude, a whole world opens, of meaning. A whole world of understanding, A whole new depth to every story.
You’d say what we don’t have time to sit and take all these measures. No, we’re talking about a mental attitude called humbleness. Knowing that we are not the only story on the block, we are not the only opinion on the block, that things don’t stop at us. So we try to see the other possibilities.
For this, subhanAllah, from the holy revelation, Rasul Allah Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam, said, Halaka man ra’a fiddeeni bi ra’ihi. He said, in matters of meaning and spirituality, will be cursed or will be lost, the one who relied on his own or her own opinion. What did he mean by that? He meant exactly what we’re talking about. He meant to try in front of the meanings of spirituality and meanings of the unseen, connection to the Divine, and especially connection to what of it is in our everyday life.
What is important for us to apply and to use, is not to rely on our own opinion. Surely our opinion, our eventual will, the choice of direction, is from us. But he meant to be able to look at outside of us, at direction, guidance, advice, interpretation, hermeneutics, exegesis. We have to accept light from outside of us. Because you are a subject. We are subjected, by definition. And we need in matters, such important matters as meaning, we need to look to what is truthful, that we generally in science, we call objective.
Truth. What is the truth? Versus what is my illusion? This will take us? see the point that we live in illusion. We think from our imagination. We generally reach to things through our imagination. Through our, what we are told about things. We reach out through the conditioning. Education, mythology of our own society, opinions of people around us, who’ve got influence on us, our educators. That is a body of a body of images, plus our own Imagination, our own thinking, our own our own personal images about things. That’s one thing.
Truth is… Truth is what heals us when we are sick. What gives us life when we are broken. What gives us direction when we’re confused. Truth is that source that gave us life in the beginning. And that’s why Muslims and Sufi people say Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oun. Verily we belong to the Lord and to Him or to it, we return. It means that Source of life that is the Source of Truth. So we are in our imagination, we are not in the truth. But we may allow the truth to come to us and we may allow to eventually become a vehicle of truth, by allowing first that we are maybe mistaken, that my opinion is maybe not right, that I have to learn. I have to learn. I have to listen. I have to understand. And for this, the first key is humbleness.
We can speak about humbleness for days. And Insha’Allah we’ll have a chance to see other angles of her humbleness, in our dealings with people, in our humbleness in allowing the Lord of Heavens, in allowing the Source of Life to come into our life, in allowing it to be acknowledged, and recognized. Because that’s the worst, the worst trap of egotistic arrogance is not acknowledging the very Source of Life.
How can our life be fruitful if we cannot acknowledge its very Maker? Acknowledge its very Source? When we don’t acknowledge something, it does not come into our lives. It’s as simple as that. And once we acknowledge it, we have to acknowledge it the right way. You have to acknowledge it on its conditions. Not on our opinionated conditions. Because that’s the trick of ego. Once we force the ego to accept something, it tries to reformat it, reformulate it. That’s another story.
Wa min Allah at-tawfiq. Al. Fatiha! May the blessing of this meeting be to those who taught us, our teachers, our parents, our ancestors, all the good ones, between east and west, beyond names and beyond separations, all the good ones who from their hearts are inspiring us to the ways of Truth.
May your day be a good day! May your day be a happy day! May these meetings be an inspiration for something to open in our hearts. Assalam alaikoum.
Beautiful ❤️ ?