SPEAKER_00 0:01

Asalam alaykum warahmatullahu barakat. Once I was at the Aegean Sea and as I was traveling down the road, I saw a waterway that was created from the sea into this large area that was sort of cordoned off. And it was it looked like a lake, it wasn't, but it had corners to it, and these corners were high, and the water was being pushed into that area. And essentially, what they were doing there is they were making salt, they were bringing the salt into an salt water into an enclosed area, so the water would evaporate off and the salt would crystallize, and then they could mine the salt. And one of the things that they would do, I learned later, was they would add some already pure salt to the salt water, which would help it form crystal salt. One of the things that each of us individually has to do is we have to crystallize Allah's qualities within ourselves. We have to go through the process wherein we absorb these qualities and we make them permanent within us, where they crystallize within us, where we become like those qualities, but not on a conceptual basis, not on a mental basis, but in reality. These qualities have to become part of who we are, and by that occurring, there becomes a change in the nature of our being and in the nature of who we are. And this all of it begins with faith in the one God, with faith in the unique nature of the one God, and with understanding the omnipotence of the one all-powerful God. So what we need to absorb within us is a belief system that is very powerful about our understanding of God. And if you read the stories of the prophets, you will see that they are often put in incredibly difficult situations so that their faith is in fact tested. Now, one of them, of course, is the story of Abraham when he was in a situation with a king who had decided, because of various reasons, to throw him into a fire. And the fire didn't touch him because of his faith. And when the angels came to help him, he said, I only rely on Allah. And eventually he was put out of the fire. That this world was not all that exists, that this world that our eyes see, that our ears hear, that our nose inhales and smells, that our tongue tastes and that our fingers feel, is not the beginning and end of creation, is not the beginning and end of all that there is. There is an unknown beyond what we can see, hear, touch, and smell. There is another dimension to existence. This dimension is not a physical dimension. This dimension is a dimension that is not manifest in a physical form in the way that we interact with the world. So it can easily be said that our senses are our contact with illusion. Our senses are the way we understand illusion. Our senses are what create illusion on our behalf, because our senses deal with that which is temporarily manifest, and we treat it as if it were real, and it were and as if it were everlasting, and therefore we create an entire illusory framework and belief system for ourselves that we live our life in, and that our life depends on. Now, the Holy Ones have bypassed the belief in this physical world, they don't depend on it for their existence, they don't depend on it for their understanding of reality. They are beyond it in a very real way. They understand that life is a gift that can be taken at any moment and is held in God's hands. And that which manifests in this physical world as difficulties for this life and as dangers for this life are actually Allah's way to show us that this life is not real. And this life within this manifest world needs to be treated at a distance from ourselves. We need to push its influence away from us so that it doesn't overwhelm us and we don't overreact to it. So that all of the different difficulties and all of the different dramas and all of the different scenarios that enter into our life are not given too much importance, they will change, they will move on. Nothing in this existence is permanent, including the situations that you're in. If we look back over the years of our lives, and we remember all of the different traumatic events that we went through, and we look at how at the time that they were in play, how they overwhelmed our being, and they brought us sorrow, anxiety, grief, fear, will notice that in time they passed, and that which we had given so much of our attention to, that which we had given so much of our mind, our attention, our overwhelming sense of being distraught because of what was going on, went away. The difficulty somehow passed. Now, can't we learn from that about Allah's mercy? Can't we learn from that that no matter what situation that we are in, Allah's compassion and mercy will pull us from that situation and take us to a point of peace? So once we know that, once we believe that we become different. But in that belief system has to be the understanding that all of this is but a temporary situation, and eventually it all disappears, and something else comes in its place. This body disappears, and something else will come in its place. And what is that something else? What is it that displaces this body once it disappears? And that is our light body, that portion of us that comes directly from Allah that was breathed into us at the time of creation, and that stays with us and stays with us beyond this body. As Rumi would say, death is a time when we change our shirt, when we now take on a new persona, a new way of being. Now, in order to take on this eternal way of being, to understand this eternal way of being, while we are in this body, we have to accomplish certain things in order to go on to the next step, to the next stage. And that is what the crystallization of Allah's qualities are about. We come from Allah and we return to Allah. But if we don't have Allah's qualities within us, how can we return to Allah? How can we go back to that which we are not? So we have to, in this lifetime, be very conscious of the fact that we are working towards purification of ourself so that we are worthy of claiming God's qualities and bringing them into ourselves. Now, in the same way that when men are making salt, crystallizing a salt bed, the sheikh, the jnana guru, the man of wisdom, God's representative on earth, the Khatub, crystallizes us. He gives us part of himself so that we can become like that. And as we become like that, we crystallize ourselves into reality as opposed to maintaining a life within illusion. The life within illusion will disappear. The life within illusion can't be sustained and can't be maintained. It's not within its nature. It is not the way things happen in illusion. Look at history, look at your immediate history, look at the people you know, look at the newspaper every day, and what is consistent within the media, within the newspaper. People are constantly disappearing from this earth. People are constantly leaving this place and giving up whatever it is that they had. Wills and estates are a big business. Taxation on inheritance is a big business because people lose their ability to control what they had because they're no longer here. Well, the time will come when this body of ours will no longer be here. But if we have taken the time in order to crystallize God's qualities within our being, then we are on a trajectory towards eternity. We are on a trajectory towards God's power and God's reality and God's hak and hakikat and understanding that reality. To understand that reality, to understand the nature of that reality, we have to find peace and contentment within our own being. And we have to find that peace and contentment without reliance on the manifest world. So we need to get our sustenance not from the manifest world, but from the world of Allah's qualities. So we have to change the way we are, the way we ingest. We have to go from ingesting food to keep us going, to ingesting God's qualities to keep us going. Our maintenance should be through the ingestion of compassion, through the ingestion of mercy and justice and truth and love and kindness. We have to change from trying to be powerful to being in a state of surrender to that ultimate power. We have to give up the competition between ourselves and illusion and enter into surrender between ourselves and reality. Everything in this illusory world is in a constant state of competition. Everybody is trying to outdo everybody else in this illusory world. That's why we can't find peace here, because everything in this illusory world becomes a struggle. We have to go to that place beyond struggle. Allah has no difficulties. Allah says, be and it is. For Allah, there is no obstacle that He can't overcome. We need to go to that place where there are no obstacles that we can't overcome. And that is not within this illusory world. That is in the world of reality, where by taking on Allah's qualities, we enter into the eternal state. We enter into Hakikat. We enter into Marifat. We enter into Sufiat. That state beyond all of the states within illusion. That state that is beyond all of the suffering, fear, anxiety, and difficulties within this world, because we look only to our relationship with God, and that relationship is one of kindness and love, an overwhelming grace, and a majestic overflowing of to use the proverbial milk and honey as a metaphor for the nature of that relationship. We need to be able to enter into that state of unity with the truth of existence and everything else around us. Gandhi in India was known as a Mahatma. Mahatma means great soul. And one time Gandhi was giving a speech at a school, and you've all seen how Gandhi dressed. He would basically wear a modified pair of shorts and maybe a piece of cloth over his shoulder, but almost no clothes. And one of the children, after he finished talking, said uh to the Mahatma, He said, 'I see that you have no clothes, and it must be difficult for you. I can have my mother bring you a shirt and a pair of pants.' And he said, and Mahatma said to the boy, he said, Your mother is going to have to make millions of shirts and millions of pairs of pants because I will not wear these until everybody in India can wear a shirt and wear a pair of pants. So his connection to all of the people in his country was such that there was a unification between himself and all of them. He didn't see a separation, and he couldn't take something on for himself unless everybody else got it also. This is one of the reasons he was called a great soul, because he understood the unity within all mankind. And he tried to emphasize the nature of that unity and the nature of the understanding of that unity. He was also a pacifist, which meant he was not going to do things that were contrary to God's laws in order to accomplish what it was he was trying to accomplish. He wasn't going to kill in order to obtain freedom. His methodology, if you know a little about his history, was he would go on a hunger strike. So he would impose difficulty on himself as opposed to imposing difficulty on others. And the nature of his being was so powerful that people reacted to him and eventually acceded to that which he wanted, which was freedom for his people, so that they had the right to maintain their own way of life and find their own truth. Now, right now in America, each of us has that freedom to maintain our own truth and to find our own sense of reality. There is no coercion in the United States. There is no coercion in religion. There is no coercion in belief systems. There's a complete freedom to allow us to believe in the way we think is appropriate and in the way we think is right for us. This is a very large advantage to the way things used to be in this world. And it was part of the founding principles of this nation. And according to my Sheikh, it's one of the reasons that America has prospered and become such an important country in the world. And for those of you who are aware, it's also a place many people from all over the world want to be able to establish their existence. Now, because of the sense of freedom that we're given, we are given the freedom to believe, but we are also simultaneously given the freedom not to believe. So we who are not under coercion have to make individual decisions on behalf of ourselves as to the nature of our existence and as to what it is that we want to accomplish with our lives. Now, America is not only a place where people can find spiritual freedom, it's also a place where economic advancement is available towards people. It's one of the easiest places in the world to start a business. It's one of the easiest places in the world to run a business. In many countries, this is not an easy thing to do. So people are often at a crossroads situation. Do they go towards the economic side of life or do they go towards the spiritual side of life? What is going to capture their existence? What is going to be the driving force in their life? The media, the newspapers, the politicians in America at the present time are focused almost entirely on the economic side of existence. They are not focused on the social, on the spiritual side of existence. If you want to talk about fake news, all news is fake news unless they tell you the truth about man's relationship with God and about man's relationship with eternity. Everything else is irrelevant, and everything else is besides the point. So when you have an entire media that's besides the point, when you have an all of all of your pundits are talking about things that are besides the point, it's very difficult to find instruction, to find discussion about things which are not besides the point, which are about truth. So to find instruction about truth, to find a place where truth is held as the thing of utmost importance and held as that which is treated with the deepest respect is very rare. Most of us went through our lives unable to find truth, unable to see reality. Understanding that all of that which we were taught when we were young and as we progressed through school was beside the point. There was something else that was much more important than everything that we were told about, yet we couldn't find it. I was 26 when I ran into the truth head-on. And all of a sudden, I found somebody who was talking to me, who actually knew what they were talking about, who actually understood the nature of existence, who actually understood what dilemmas were at the core of my distress. So we are all walking through this world, we are all in the midst of distress and difficulty, but there's nobody or hardly anybody around who has a cure for this difficulty. They give you solutions, but these solutions aren't able to relieve the deep distress that humanity feels. The solutions, like Marxism, tell you that if we are given economic availability, if we are given economic independence, then all of our difficulties will go away. It's a lie. There are those who tell you if you sit and talk about your problems endlessly with a psychiatrist, your problems will go away. It's a lie. The only truth that is out there is the truth that if you give your life over and surrender all of the ignorance that's been fed to you your entire life and believe in the fact that all is one and that there is a unity in existence, and you are part of that unity, and you have to surrender everything that you know up to now in order to find it, you'll begin to make headway towards the truth. But for almost everybody, that is too difficult an assumption because they've spent a lifetime building up answers that don't answer the dilemma, and they've hold held on to these false answers as if their life depended on it, and in truth, their life depends on giving them up. So this is the state of humanity. This is the state of the world. In much of the world, religion is not even allowed. In other parts of the world, coercion is religion. In other words, do what we tell you, or else you're in difficulty. In very few parts of the world are you free to choose. And in the parts of the world where you are free to choose, the answers are that are that are given to your dilemmas are answers that only make your dilemma worse. So for those of us who've finally found the truth, finally found the real answer to existence, we have to concentrate on that. And we can't let the entire strata of belief systems that have no meaning influence us. We have to be able to act within the world yet not believe in the world. We have to act within the truth and believe in that. And we have to reinvigorate ourselves constantly because the entire world is fighting against that truth because of the satanic influence that tell you that power and fame and wealth are the nature of your answer, when in truth they are the nature of your distress and the nature of your dilemma. So we need to understand the nature of our dilemma if we're going to find an answer to our dilemma. And we have to be very, very honest about what that dilemma is. And a big part of that dilemma is the fact that we have bought into what's entitled the American Dream. And the American dream for most people around the world is the opportunity to become wealthy, the opportunity to have great economic freedom, as if that's going to resolve your problems. And it's not. And that faith has to become so strong within us that illusion can't lessen it, that illusion has no effect on it, that our interaction with the manifest does not alter it. May it be so for each of us. May we go grow strong in that truth. May we go strong in that belief system. May we grow strong in our knowledge that Allah is always with us. No matter where we turn, no matter where we look, He walks and He walks constantly with us. He is with us at all times. He is always with us and within us. And with that deep uh with that deep abiding faith, with that deep certitude and determination, we will find our way towards the truth. Amin, Amin. Ya Rabbilal Amin Asalam Alaykum a rahmartu la wa barakatu.