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Asalamu alaykum warahmatullahu barakat. In uh the scriptures there is the story of Adam and Eve. And God created Adam. And then from Adam he created a mate for Adam. And they were in the Garden of Eden, paradise. And prior to the encounter with the apple and the encounter with Satan, there was a communion that went on between man and God. And this communion was without effort and was continual. And for those of you who know the story, which is almost everybody, um Satan was able to induce Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, which was forbidden to Adam and Eve. And upon Eve being induced to eat, she then gave it to Adam and Adamate. And everything changed. All of a sudden, this communion that existed between Adam and Eve, and God and Allah, which was continual and without effort, disappeared. And the sense organs within them that were involved in this communion no longer functioned the way they did. And they were reduced to their sensory organs, which sensed the creation, but did not sense the creator. And since then, man has been struggling in order to recreate that which was primal, that which was archetypal, that which was at the beginning of the creation. And man has been constantly trying to find methodologies in order to bring back that state of purity that sensed was able to commune with the creator. And the way this has been done has been in various ways. But let's talk about the difference between that communion and that state of non-communion. The first thing that we're told is that Adam and Eve, upon eating the apple, all of a sudden felt their nakedness, and they were ashamed and covered themselves. Prior to that, there was no shame, and they didn't have to cover themselves. So what transpired? What happened in that moment when they ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge? What occurred that altered things? From being in a state of purity, they entered into a state where they disobeyed. From being in a state of constant surrender, they entered into a state where they listened to outside influences that brought them into a state where they lost that status of surrender. And it happened because they were induced to do something that they knew they shouldn't do. They violated what had been told to them. All of the difficulty that goes on in our lives. If we are in a state of constant communion with Allah, with the qualities of Allah, then we are in a state of that which is eternal, because Allah shared his qualities with humanity. In order for man to be able to commune with God, he had to be involved in God's qualities. And when he lost touch with God's qualities, he lost touch with that which is eternal. And therefore, his life became limited. That which was eternal now had a span to it because it wasn't connected to that which is eternal anymore. It now was only cognizant of the elemental, the creation. And the creation was not created to be eternal. Creation had a span. So we now, who understand some of this, and who've had teachers, prophets, katubs, holy ones sent into this world to guide us, have had it explained to us that we now have to revert to the way we were at the beginning, to that state where communion existed and where there was a direct connection between man and God, and man had that capability. But once the separation happened, other separations began to happen. And the various stories of man through the scriptures depict those various separations. The first one is Cain and Abel, and one brother killing the other brother because of jealousy. Well, that couldn't have happened when there was union with the Creator, because in union with the Creator, those lower aspects, those satanic aspects, can't and would not have occurred, but they did occur. So since that first separation happened, now there are constant new separations that continuously go on within humanity. There's the separation of race, there's the separation of language, there's the separation of religion, there's the separation of borders and countries. They're all of these separations that man has created, and very often these separations are created with the intention of convincing people that these separations somehow help you get closer to the Creator. The religions will tell you that they have the one and only appropriate and correct methodology of returning to the Creator and of returning to that state that used to exist prior to the separation. There was once a conference of religious leaders, and there were two groups, basically opposed opinions. One was arguing that you had to have a religious structure, and you had to believe in that structure, and to support that structure, and to segregate yourself from everyone else within that structure. Separate yourself from other others and follow your own way. Others argued that there are many ways, and all of them can lead to that communion again, and it's not necessary to separate yourselves from others, and they went on like this and on and on. And then a lady stood up in the middle of all of this argument, and nobody knew who she was, and she says, she stood up and she said, God is at the center of a circle that has no circumference. And the explanation was that God is at the center of everything, He is everywhere, but there is no edge to divinity, so there can't be any circumference to this circle. And they all listened intently and then they broke for lunch. And this understanding that Allah, God, is everywhere, and that there is no end to it, there is no circumference to this circle, illustrates that if you begin drawing circles around your group, you are somehow limiting the nature of divinity. And so every time a group draws a circle around itself, it's not bringing itself into relationship with the Lord, but it's excluding itself from the truth of its relationship to the Lord. And so each of us individually has to understand that we can't draw circles around ourselves. We cannot find the truth, we cannot find our communion with Allah if we separate ourselves from the rest of humanity. If we separate ourselves from other people, we have to have within us the ability to accept each and every person and in the way that they do things. There was a shepherd who was guiding his sheep, and he was singing as he was doing that, and his song was went something like this My God, I love you so much. My God, I want to wash your feet, my God, I want to comb your hair, my God, I want to weave clothes for you, and he went on and on like this. Uh continuing to find analogies between God as if God had human form. Moses was walking by and he heard this, and he went up to the shepherd, and he said, Don't you understand what you're doing? You're limiting the nature of God. You are taking your own conception, your own idea, and you're making that to be the creator. The creator is beyond conception. The creator is beyond your mind. The creator is beyond what you can conceive. And the shepherd, who understood this was Moses, began to cry and was heartbroken, and he ran away with his flock. A little while went by, and Allah came to Moses and he said, What have you done to my devotee? What have you done to break his heart? What have you done to the one who was committed to me? He may not have understood the true nature of that commitment, but his heart was opening up and coming towards me. You have to go to him and apologize to him and tell him that he is finding the way to the truth. Moses went to look for him, and much time went by, and finally he found him. And he was still with his sheep, but now he was in a state of silence. And Moses apologized, and he said, and the shepherd said back to Moses, I have entered into a new state. It's a state that words can't describe. It's a state that is beyond language to comprehend. It is a state that is beyond words. And the shepherd left. Paradise can be with us if we are open to it, and the gateway to paradise is love. There was a man who listened to a Sheikh speaking, and the Sheikh was speaking of paradise, and then the Sheikh left town, and the man decided that he was going to find this paradise, and he began to travel. And he traveled all day until the early hours of the morning, and then he had to go to sleep. And to make sure he kept going in the right direction, he set his shoes pointed in the direction that he was traveling. Well, during the night, Satan turned his shoes around. And so he started, when he woke, he put his shoes back on and started traveling back in the other direction. Eventually, within about eight, ten, twelve hours, he got to his home. And there was his village and his house and his wife and his children. And it struck him, I have always been in paradise. There was nowhere to go to. And the entire world seemed to revolve around that space in time. That space in the universe. When we finally realize that God is always with us, that God is always around us, that God is wherever we are, we can stop our search and surrender to what we have already found. We don't need to run to look for God. There's the story of Nasr-Din, which I've told before, about the entire town had decided to go on Hajj. And so the entire town had gathered all their things together and they were traveling towards Mecca to find God. And Nasr-Din stayed behind. He was doing certain things. And then he looks around, he realizes everybody left. Everybody has left town. He got on his donkey and chased them. And his donkey was going at full speed. And after a while, he finally caught up with them. And when he saw them, he said, It's an emergency, it's an emergency. And they said, What's wrong, Nasradeen? And he said, I lost my donkey. And he said, You're sitting on your donkey. And they said, Well, what are you doing? You're all looking for God. Where are you going? Where has he gone? Just as he was on his donkey, God was with all those people all the time. And they didn't need to go in search for him. A great sheikh called Jami was on his way to Hajj and he ran into a dervish. And the dervish asked him, Where are you going? And he said, I'm going on Hajj. He said, You don't have to go all the way there to find the Kaaba. You can circumambulate me, and you'll find that true space. And this was the truth. That dervish had entered into that space where the Kaaba was within him. And whoever circumambulated him, it was the same as going on Hodge. We need to be cognizant of and have faith in the fact that God is with us. Never left us. Man leaves God. God doesn't leave man. And when we can grasp that and live our life with that understanding, in that faith, then at that point in our existence we can find the truth. And there are methodologies for doing it. Zikr, the recital of the names of Allah is always available to us. That recital of the names of Allah creates a direct connection between ourselves and the qualities that are God. That formless entity that exists, that is beyond that which is form. That formless entity that is beyond creation, that is beyond death, that is beyond the conception of our ordinary senses, that portion of existence that is formless and eternal. And if we can concentrate on the formless and the eternal and repeat the holy names of the formless and the eternal, we can return ourselves to that station that existed prior to the separation. So our lives should be based on the intention that we return to that station that existed prior to the separation, prior to the falling away from the truth, prior to the time when man chose to separate himself from God. God didn't choose for man to be separated. Man chose on his own to be separated. And in that choice, he created his own demise. He created death. He created his time limit because he left the nature of that which is eternal, which was reality. He left reality. And when he left reality, he left that which comes with reality. So illusion has a time span. Illusion has a birth and a death. Illusion disappears. Illusion doesn't stay constant. Reality does. And for us to become real, we have to enter that stage where we stay constant, where we are not subject to the vagaries of what goes on in illusion, where we are not subject to the vagaries of what goes on when things change. There is a constancy and a consistency in reality. Love that is real love is consistent love and doesn't love because of what we get from it. So when we have grace-filled love, love is unconditional. When we have conditional love, love depends on what we can get out of it. And immediately you can see the separation. Egocentric love loves because of self-interest, because of what the self can obtain from that relationship. Unconditional love loves the way God loves. God gave this life and loves the life that He gave. And He loves it because He can commune with it. And everyone can share in the transcendent qualities that belong to Allah. And when the archetype was created, this was the purpose of creation. When the Nur emerged from Allah, the Nur and Allah communed with each other. And the sharing of Allah's qualities reverberated within the universe. When man was created, this nur, God's light, was put into man. And then in the beginning, it continued with that reverberation and with that communion. When man broke the surrender, that communion ended. And now man has been spending eons and eons and eons trying to return to that state of communion that existed at the beginning. So each of us needs to understand our purpose in creation. And our purpose is to know our creator. Our creator created us for that purpose. He wanted a creation who could know him and that he could know. And quite simply, to understand what that means is to know someone real, you have to be like them, like unto them. So he wanted to create a creation that was like unto him. And he did. And it was like that until man broke that bond. But now we are in the state we are in. And there are those of us who choose to not chase this world, not chase the treasures of this world, not chase the things that illusion has to offer, but who looks for reality, who looks for truth, who looks for understanding, and a connection with the true reason for our creation. And if we can concentrate, if we can put ourselves into a place where our intention and our determination is to create that place, we in fact will be assisted in moving towards that. We have innate wisdom within us, each of us does. And that wisdom is brought out within us based on the status and the nature of our intention. So if our intention is transcendent, we will get wisdom equivalent to that intention and that, and what that intention needs. So the wisdom to become transcendent comes by the intention to be transcendent, the intention to find communion. So intention induces wisdom. Intention induces the innate ability within ourselves to find truth, but our intention has to be pure. Our intention has to be for reality, and our intention cannot be motivated by greed, by desire, by self-motive, and by egocentric characteristics, we have to do away with all of those things within our being in order to find truth. And quite simply, if we look at what greed and anger and jealousy and these low qualities all have in common, they are about separation. They are about what makes us different from others. They put others in a lower position and ourselves in a higher position, believing that by using the standards of illusion and that which is accumulated in illusion can somehow help us in truth. And in truth, it can't help us, because all that we desire in this illusory world will go up in flames, will disappear, will dissipate, will be destroyed, because that is the nature of illusion. And when we can understand the true unity of existence, the true communion between ourselves and our Lord, and the inclusionary nature of all of this with all of the rest of humanity, then we can transcend out of this separation that existed since the beginning. To do this, we have to understand the nature of how we work and the reciprocal nature of existence. In our mind, as long as we hold differences, we will be excluded from reality. In our mind, as long as we hold hatred, we will be excluded from reality. In our mind, as long as we put people in places that are lower than the way we hold ourselves, we will be excluded. The golden rule is very simple: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There is a sameness, an empathy in the way we have to react to others and the way we expect them to react to us. We have to do away with things like disdain, with things like hatred, with things like animosity. As long as one thinks in terms of animosity, one will stay in illusion. As long as one thinks in terms of disdain, one will stay in illusion. Until equanimity comes over our beings, we will stay in a state of illusion. So do we really want to enter in that state of truth and communion with our Creator? Because if we do, then we have to intend unity, unity with man and unity with God. And as long as we separate ourselves from man, we separate ourselves from God. So unconditional love has to enter into us. We can't judge others. What we need to do is love others. We can't make determinations as to others. What we need to do is love others. I was once with a a group of people, and there was one man who began criticizing certain people and just kept on criticizing this one and that one. And one of the other people in the in the room uh opined and said, Pretty soon you're going to be telling us who's going to heaven and who's going to hell. And it's like that. These things are not for us. What is for us is to love. And as our love grows and our love becomes inclusive, Allah will include us in his reality. Allah will include us in his truth. So as we are inclusive, so shall we be included. As we love, so shall we be loved. And these simple understandings are at the core of true movement towards reality. So when we pray, we need to ask that we understand inclusivity, that we understand empathy, and that we are able to love all of humanity and stop separating ourselves from mankind. Once this occurs in us, we become different beings. All of the difficulties that have come to us will disappear. Those who have hatred will live a life of hatred. Those who have animosity will live a life of animosity. Those who look to harm others will have a life where they are harmed. We need to be in a state of pure love, and then nothing can touch us. When we are in a state of acceptance and unity, illusion can't touch us. Illusion can't influence us, and illusion can't sway us into despair and into difficulty, because we know that God is here and everywhere, because we are with Him here and everywhere without exception. So, inshallah, may we all be put into that place where we understand the reality of existence, the reality of our connection to our Lord, and the eternal nature of Rahman and Rahim, the eternal nature of Latif and Kabir, the eternal nature of that which has no form, but that which is a constant outpouring, reverberation, and resonance of truth. May we all be able to touch that truth, feel that truth, and inshallah become that truth. Amin, Amin. Ya Rabbilal Amin. Asalamu alaykum or rahmatulla wa barakat.