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As salam alaykum warahmatullahu barakat the Shaykh taught us that we have an external life and we have an internal life. And reality is the internal life. The external life, that which is outside of us, is this illusory world. We will find our true nature by focusing internally. And wisdom will arise within us when we are capable of doing away with our attachment to the images and the projections that we have inside of our mind as to the outside world. In order to become still, in order to become real, in order to understand hak, one has to internalize the existence, internalize our existence. And true meditation comes to the point where the one meditating is meditating on the one who's meditating. When the connection between man and the creator reaches a union, and within that union we exist. Now, to get to that point, to bring ourselves to where we come to know truth, there is a process, and that process, in simple words, is to become pure, to become clean, to become without attachment, to become without obese to the world, but all of our dedication and all of our praise and all of our devotion is to God. Subhanallah. All praise is to God, which means that we give up all of our idols in the world. All praise to gold stops. All praise to power stops. All of our attachment to the outside world stops. When we cleanse ourselves of these external attachments, we become closer to Hak. A great Sufi saint of around the twelfth century proclaimed An al Haq, I am the truth. But in that proclamation, he was saying more than that, really. He was trying to make understood that God is everywhere. And when he said Analhaq, he was saying, God is within me as God is within you, as God is within everything. That understanding that God is within all of us and around all of us is something we should carry with us all the time. The Quran says, when there are two of you, God is the third. When there are three of you, God is the fourth. When there are five of you, God is the sixth. And so on, to let you know that God is conscious of you, that God is involved with you, that God is aware of you. You all know the phrase that Allah is actually closer to you than your own jugular vein. That's how close He is to each of us. So imagine our importance in creation if God deems it necessary, appropriate, to be that close to us. So we have to live up to the status that's been given to us. We have to live up to the understanding of who we are. And to do that, we have to understand the truth of who we are. And man is on a sliding scale. Man can and is capable of being the highest of all of God's creations, and he's also capable of sliding down and becoming the lowest of all creations. Man can go from being a worm to being transcendence, transcendent, and being real, being involved in hockey. There are a couple of technical terms in Sufism, Tanzi and Tashbi. Tanzi talks about the transcendence of God and how God is above and beyond anything that we can understand. It's that understanding. Tashbi says that God, Allah, is also manifest within the creation, and we can understand Him to a degree within that manifest manifestation in creation. The Sheikh is an example of Tashbi, where Allah is shown to us through the qualities of the Sheikh, through the qualities of the ones who have been brought to teach us, have been sent to teach us. Allah created man in his image. And the question, of course, is what does that mean? Because God is without image. And it means that his qualities have been brought into being within man, and man is capable of displaying Allah's qualities. So that is what we should be trying to attain. Attain the state of displaying God's qualities. So we have to purify ourselves, to allow our wisdom to rise, so that with wisdom God's qualities become apparent to us as to understanding what they are, then we incorporate them into our being, and then we display them, and then we act with them towards the rest of humanity. One of the qualities of a perfected man is that he treats other lives as his own. This is a very high status in creation. This is when man has reached perfection. And the reason it's such a high status in creation is it's at the state of unity. When you can see somebody else and you treat them exactly the same as you would treat yourself, you have transcended separation. You have transcended differences. You have transcended jealousy, arrogance, the need to separate, the need to be higher, praise and blame. You've transcended all of the low qualities. And this is one of the signs of a true human being and one of the signs of a sheikh. He treats everyone the same. There is no separation between the sheikh or an Insan Kamil and the people that he sees. There were a group of Sufis in northern Turkey. The order was called Halveti. And one of their practices was they would sit in front of each other and look into each other's eyes until the point came where they couldn't tell the difference between each other. They lost themselves in each other and they saw themselves in each other. They had transcended differences. They had transcended the separation that these individual bodies bring, and they had gone to the place where they were together. Now, to enter into this phase of existence, to enter into the point where these kinds of things occur, your attitude towards life has to be positive. You have to constantly be in a state where you are seeing positive occurrences and positive things in everything that happens. There's a story about a king in a small kingdom that had an advisor who, whenever anything happened, would say to him, whether it was good or bad, this is just a sign that something better is going to happen. And the king got used to him saying this. As a matter of fact, the king almost got tired of him saying this because his reaction was always the same. The king was very particular about his personal appearance, and he always got manicures. And one day, one of his assistants, a young lady, was giving him a manicure. And while he was being manicured, the great storm came up, and lightning hit the palace. And the young lady who was giving him the manicure got frightened and cut the tip of his finger off with a very sharp scissor. And the advisor who was standing right next to him said, This is only something that will make things better in the future. And the king was livid because his finger hurt, and he was tired of hearing the same advice over and over. So he sent the maiden into the dungeon and he sent the advisor into the dungeon. And they put bandages on him. And a couple of days later, they could take the bandages off, and he went hunting with uh some of his uh uh armed men. While they were out hunting, somehow the king got lost, and in trying to find his way back, he ran into a tribe who were barbaric and who were looking for a man to sacrifice to their god. Well, they jumped him and they took him to sacrifice him. They ripped his clothes off, and they were about to begin the sacrifice. The priest came out and they saw his finger was missing its tip, and they said, We can't sacrifice him. He's not perfect. This is an objectionable sacrifice, and they threw dirt at him and they let him go. Finally, he found his way back, and he was back in the castle. By now, his anger had dissipated, and he let his advisor and the young lady out of the dungeon, and a couple of days later, he's talking to his advisor, and he said, You know, I understand how cutting my finger helped me in the future and it brought on something better. But tell me, how did me putting you in the dungeon make you any better or help you in the future? He said, Well, if I hadn't been in the dungeon, I would have been with you. And when they caught you, they would have caught me. And since I was perfect, they would have sacrificed me. So it all turns out, but it turns out because God's plan for you is to make things better, and he puts you in situations that will make you better. There's a line that Rumi has in one of his poems that says, Look at the world as if it's fixed in your favor. Now, can you have that attitude towards existence? It's necessary to have that attitude towards existence. That attitude will allow you to free yourself of all of the qualities that are not godly. When you believe things are going your way, it's easier for you to be kind. When you believe everything is going to turn out fine, it's easier for you to be kind. But when doubt enters, when anger enters, when you look at things and worrying enters, it brings a cloud over your existence and it makes it more difficult to be able to purify the self because you have so many other things to worry about, so many other things to be involved in. And this is essentially what attachments are. All of the things that you worry about in life, all of the things that take up your mental energy, all of the things that take up your physical energy that don't have to do with understanding the truth of creation and understanding the truth of who you are are attachments, are attachments to illusion, because all of those things aren't real. And to get to the point where things are real, you have to begin by sacrificing your worries, sacrificing your doubts, sacrificing all of the gloom and doom that you carry with you. You have to be able to get rid of it, and you have to create a positive understanding within yourself for yourself, and this allows you to be able to move forward towards the truth. If one watches the attitude and the demeanor of the Sheikh, one will see that he is always positive and he is always in a state of praise for God, no matter what is going on. We watched our Sheikh when he was healthy, and in the last few years he became very ill, and he had various problems. However, he never sank into being sorry for himself, he never sank into depression, he always had this same attitude that God is great and God is merciful and God is taking care of the entire situation, and there's nothing that needs to be worried about. When we understand this, we can move in a much easier flow, and we can handle things that come at us without getting angry and without overreacting. We can understand that in the course of things everything will turn out. And we become people who assist other people when they are in trauma. If you're in trauma yourself and you're in a state of difficulty, how can you possibly aid someone else in a state of difficulty? One of the reasons we went to the Sheikh was because he was always consistent. And whatever our dilemma was, we could present our dilemma, he could look at it, and he could give us a response to that dilemma from an even point of view, from a godly or a transcendent point of view. So we individually have to walk through our lives with transcendent points of view. We have to understand things from above as opposed to from the drama of our involvement. When you're watching a drama from the outside, it's not the same as when you're living a drama from the inside. When you're watching, let's say, a movie or friends going through their own dramas, we can easily sit back and analyze the nature of the drama and how to unravel the insanity of it. But when we are involved in the drama, we're so deeply and emotionally tied to it that it's impossible to get distance from it and to understand its reality. The pain of what we're suffering becomes too strong, and we don't see a solution. There was a man who was a milkman, and he lived in a small village, and he would drive through the village, being pulled by uh pulling his cart that had milk in it, and he would deliver milk to all the people, and he had this one very large job. That held milk, and he would pour the milk into people's containers and move on. He got tired and he took the jog and he placed it down on a rock and he thought he would take a nap. And in general, he was a very kind man, and this is how he made his living. He supported his family and his mother. Near where he placed the jug down, there was a shepherd. And the shepherd also was a kind man, and from his sheep he supported his family and also supported his mother. One of the sheep ran over and knocked the man's jug over that was made out of clay and broke it. And all his milk spilled out, and his huge jug broke. And he woke him up, and the two of them began arguing. He said to the shepherd, This is your fault. You have to pay for my jug. And the shepherd said, I don't have any money. I can't pay for your jug. I can barely support myself. And they argued back and forth. And he said, I can't control my sheep. Sheep does what he wants. You shouldn't have placed your jug on the stone where you put it. And they argued and argued and came to no conclusion. So they went into town, they decided to have a judge decide the situation. And the judge for the town was the monk in the town. This was a Buddhist town. And they went to the monk, and the monk listened to both sides of the story. And he said to the milkman, he said, You never should have placed your jug on the stone. The stone wasn't flat, and uh any small disturbance would knock it over. And then he said to the other one, the other man, the shepherd, he said, You should control your sheep better. They shouldn't have gone over there. So right now we have a situation where both of you seem to be at fault. I think we're gonna have to decide this in the town square, and we're gonna have to bring the sheep and the stone into the middle of the town square, and I'll make a decision. So the sheep came willingly. The stone was large, it took 20 men to carry the stone. Finally, they got the stone in the town square. And the whole town showed up. And the monk starts by saying, We have the shepherd and the milkman. Both of them claim it's not their fault. So it must be the fault of the stone or the fault of the sheep. And the whole town had gathered because very seldom did they have this kind of commotion in the middle of town, and they all began to laugh and giggle. And then the monk looks up and he says, You are all having inappropriate thoughts. And because of your inappropriate thoughts, I'm gonna have to find each of you two copper coins, which was not a lot of money, but there were a lot of people, and they collected all the copper coins. And with the copper coins, he was able to give the milkman enough money to replace his jug, and he found a solution for the problem. But the solution was something only someone who had transcended the situation could find. They're unable to come to the kind of understanding that they come to over time. It's the way it is. We have to be able to be in that place that we get to over time by being calm and collected all the time. To be calm and collected all the time means we have to find a center within our own being, and we can't allow ourselves to be shaken from that center. We can't allow worldly events to have influence on us that take us out of our equilibrium, that take us out of our understanding of the truth. There was a uh man who had a teacher for many years, and he was his only disciple, and the teacher passed, and uh the man was telling him, the man was telling someone he had met about his teacher and how strong he had made the faith in him and how much he had taught him. And the man he was talking to says, You know, I'm psychic, and I can tell by uh being with you that your teacher was a false teacher. The man who was being talked to had many ways to react. He could have reacted angrily, he could have walked away, he could have gotten upset, but instead he said, My teacher may have been false, but the faith I have developed is true. He was able to maintain his equilibrium and understand what he had gotten, and understood that whether the teacher was false or not, what happened to him was positive, and the result was positive, and he had learned to be positive. We need to be able to understand that kind of positivity. In this world, there is a constant need to be in a positive state. There's a word karma which talks about or means the that which you have obtained through your actions within the world, the state that you've obtained through your actions within the world, the state that you carry through your actions within the world. And people talk about negative and or positive karma. Positive means that you've established a positive state within yourself. Negative karma means you've established a negative state within yourself. During the time of the Buddha, there was a young man in his mid-30s whose father had passed. And he heard about the Buddha, and he understood that the Buddha was the highest, the most transcendent of any priest in the area. So he went to the Buddha and he said, My father passed, and I want to guarantee him a place in heaven. So I'm coming to you so that you can do the appropriate rituals in order to guarantee him a place in the highest heaven. I bypassed all the lower priests and came directly to you. And the Buddha looked at him and said, I want you to do a couple of things. Go to the market and buy two pots. Put stones in one pot and buy butter and fill another pot with butter, and then seal the pots and bring them back to me. So he did it, and he came back to the Buddha after he had taken care of this. He said, Now go put both of the pots in the river that flows about a quarter of a mile from here. And then after you put the pots in the river, I want you to break the pots and tell me what happened. So he did that, and he came back to the Buddha, and he told him, Well, the pot with the stones in it, the stones stayed at the bottom, and the pot with the butter in it, the butter rose to the top. And the Buddha said to him, like that, no matter what rituals I do or anybody else does, the stones on the bottom are not going to rise, and the butter is not going to be pushed back to the bottom. This is the status that they are. Butter is lighter than water and rises. The stones are heavier and they stay at the bottom. It's like that with your father. His karma is going to take him where he is supposed to go. And no matter what amount of rituals I may do, we're not going to change the nature of his karma. Each of us has to do what's appropriate, and then we get the appropriate compensation for what it is that we in fact do. So your father's life and his status in heaven was determined by his actions in his life, not by the rituals that we do after he's gone. And this is very similar to something that the prophet said to his daughter Fatima. He said to her that on the day of judgment, it's not going to matter that your father was the prophet of God. What's going to matter is who you were and what you did. So each of us has to understand that we get no favoritism because of who we know, because of wealth, because of things in status, titles in the world. Everything is dependent on what happened inside of us. What were the qualities that we developed inside of us? Who did we become? How did we act? What is the nature of who we are? How did we relate to truth? How did we relate to God's qualities? Did we understand the nature of God's qualities and bring them into ourselves? Or were we constantly focused on the external world and our manipulation of the elements within the external world? This is the big lesson within our life. Why are we here? What's the purpose of this existence? What is it that we're supposed to do with our life? And the answer is we're supposed to come to know the truth. We're supposed to be able to tell the difference between illusion and reality. We're supposed to understand the manifestation of Allah in this world, cling to that manifestation, understand that manifestation, and become like onto that manifestation. We are supposed to become real. And the way we become real is through constant cleansing, constant doing away with all that is not pure, doing away with all the qualities that come from Satan, and clinging to the qualities that belong to Allah. And we are taught the names of those qualities. The Asmal Husna is a book that has all of the names of God and those qualities. We should take time to learn them, to understand them, to absorb them, to integrate them into our being, and then to act them out into the world. We should get to the point where we treat others the way God treats humanity, which is to maintain, sustain, and protect. When we can enter into that phase of being, we can become true man. We can become Insan Kamal, and we can get the rewards that the Insan Kamal has, which is to become close to Allah, to become close to that eternal truth that is transcendent beyond our understanding. And as we leave this mortal flesh, we'll begin to know the answers to those mysteries. If we have traveled this path in the appropriate way. May it be so for each and every one of us. Amin, Amin. Ya Rabbi Lalameen. Assalamu alaikum a rahmatullah barakat.