Sohbet March 23, 2025: Souls, Heart, Batin

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Transcript

Sohbet 23March, 2025

Souls, Heart, Batin

I'm going to read from Secret of Secrets for a little bit and maybe talk about this as well.

So, this is one of those books that if you keep reading it, it changes and it becomes a completely other book that you haven't read before.

And then you read it again and you go, oh, that's different.

This is Chapter 3, The Places of the Souls Within the Body.

Of course, this is by Hazrat Abdul Qadir Al-Jilani, our peer, The Places of the Souls Within the Body.

The place of the human soul, the soul of life within the body is the breast.

That place is connected to the senses.

Its business is religion.

Its work is to follow Allah's precepts.

With these precepts, Allah keeps the visible world in harmony and order.

That soul, acting upon the obligations set by Allah, does not claim its actions as its own, for it is not separate from Allah.

Its actions are from Allah.

There is no separation between I and Allah in its actions and devotions.

To meet his Lord, let him work righteousness, and in the worship of his Lord admit no one as partner.

Allah is one, and he loves that which is united and one.

He wants all worship and all righteous acts which he considers as devotion to belong to himself alone.

Therefore a person should not take other people's approval or rejection into consideration in their actions.

Neither should their actions be for worldly benefit.

They should be solely for Allah's sake.

Yet states such as seeing in this visible world the proof of Allah's existence, manifestations of his attributes, the unity within the multiplicity, the truth behind appearances, and closeness to one's Creator are the rewards for these selfless righteous acts and devotions.

Yet all these still belong to the world of matter.

From the ground under one's feet up to the heavens, so also to this world belong the miracles that may appear through one, for example, walking on water, flying in the air, traveling great distances in a very short time, hearing sounds, seeing images from far away places, and knowing hidden thoughts.

The place of the moving soul is in the heart.

Its business is with the knowledge of the spiritual path.

Its work deals with the first four of the beautiful names of the essence of Allah.

As in the rest of the twelve names of the essence, these four names have neither sound nor letters, thus they cannot be pronounced.

Allah Most High indicates this, quote, say, call on Allah or call on the beneficent by whatever name you call on him.

He has the most beautiful names and Allah's are the most beautiful names.

So call on him thereby.

Allah's very words point to what should be a human's principal occupation, to know the divine names.

This is the knowledge of one's inner being.

If one obtained that knowledge, one would reach the level of divine wisdom.

This is where the knowledge of the name of unity is complete.

Our master, the prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, says of the divine names, quote, Allah most high has 99 names.

Whoever learns them enters paradise.

He also says, knowledge is one.

And people of knowledge made it a thousand.

This means that the name which belongs to the essence is only one.

It is reflected as a thousand attributes to those who receive it

The 12 divine names are within the origin of the confession of unity, la ilaha illallah.

There's no God but Allah.

Each of them is one of the 12 letters in this phrase.

I'm going to stop there and just say a little bit about that, and then we'll maybe talk about it as well.

The idea of unity in all of the teachings that we have, no matter where we talk about it, it's about becoming a whole person, becoming unified and a unit, integrated as a whole.

And the trick is that we've got trillions of cells.

They all have different jobs to do, and they keep us alive.

At the same time, though, it's very easy to get broken up into all these different pieces that we have to then energize by following that little section of ourself to complete something, whatever we're deciding to do.

How do we make ourselves whole is by realizing that there is a unit, that this is a whole one thing, and that when they're talking about Allah's name is One, they're saying this is a way of understanding and being close to Allah by bringing all the different bits and pieces together and realizing that it's one unit, that it is, we're here to help us and Allah see the world as it is, that the truth is in that unity.

And at the same time, for each person, it's a different version of the big oneness.

So there's the micro unit and then there's the meta unit, which is all of the universes in all of their unified aspects, which, you know, physics is still trying to puzzle that one out.

It keeps, it keeps boggling their mind and that only 95, we know about 5% of what the universe is.

The rest of it is kind of like, we don't know.

Dark energy, dark matter.

We don't know why the galaxies stay together.

Well, the answer is love, but that's something else.

That's another way to look at it.

So where do you find unity in your life that helps you bring these disparate bits into one whole being?

Where does it make sense for you to see that this is a unified vehicle you're riding around in?

Shake, are you referring to a particular moment or more of an activity?

It can be any of these things.

It's looking at what helps you bring all of this together into a unified whole.

What helps you?

For me, it seems that it's all the different activities like you're mentioning that you get kind of caught up in, like shaking the bottle and then stopping long enough for everything to settle brings it back to unity because I guess the consciousness regathers to a point instead of being split amongst many different thoughts and thought processes and desires.

It seems to me like you stay still for too long and the water gets stagnant but if you're shaking it for too long then it becomes too turbulent and incoherent so you just need to, for me that's what works, a little bit of stillness and a little bit of stoppage.

I second that actually, when you said that I was thinking about in the moments when let's say I'm doing a meditation and I actually can focus on my breath long enough to tune out all the other distractions and everything that are on the top of my mind and maybe going further sometimes there's a sense of everything's going to be okay and those are times I would say I would feel closest to unity.

Everything is okay.

In other words, it seems that Allah's got everything in hand and we'll only try and mess it up if we try and take control.

Yeah, definitely more of the latter.

Things I feel are not okay when I'm like, oh, what about this?

Oh, well, you know, all those concerns.

Yeah.

I think of the breath as a great way to bring yourself back into your body and into balance because what you're both saying is that the idea of being whole is also being in a flow of being in sync with the universe and with Allah and that the breath may be, think of it as a metaphor for what the actual state of everything in the universe is, which is in a state of flow or a wave, if you will, that everything, everything in the universe is a wave.

It's a vibration and everything has a frequency.

And I think that helping us breathe, reminding that we breathe and that there's an inner inward and an outward, that this is a flow that keeps us alive.

If we stop breathing for too long, there ain't no more in matter land.

So how do we keep remembering to come back to our breath, if you will, for you, for your Suluk, what keeps you joined with Allah and working towards this unity?

Was that a question to me?

I would say everybody, and I want to just keep exploring this a little bit and to open it up so that you can see that everybody has their own way of approaching this.

There's no right way except the one that works for you at this time.

It may change later.

I mean, for example, for you, Rosie, when you're doing, working on the loom, that brings you...

Yeah, because there's so many things, you know, it's color and shapes and movement.

And because my teachers are indigenous, it's all about precision.

There's a right way to do everything.

And if you're not doing it the right way, you take it out and do it over.

Yes, that's for just about any art.

Yeah, yeah.

I was, when you posed the first question, my first thought was nature, but then that quickly evolved into breathing and taking a breath.

And what I experienced at that moment was, oh, I'm taking in all these bits from all over the universe, and, you know, so it was just suddenly everywhere was coming in to me, here in the physical.

It's kind of like, whose breath was this that I'm just taking in now?

This has traveled around the world many times, this breath.

It's been revivified by the trees and the flowers and the fungi.

And then I take it in, I put it out and send it on its journey.

That's a meditation in itself.

Then I would like to continue in this kind of sense, as was mentioned in there, it talks about the inner understanding of Allah's names.

So I'm going to read from the name and the named Al-Bateen, the hidden one.

His existence is both manifest and hidden.

He is apparent because the signs of his existence are visible, even to the blind.

But his essence remains hidden from us.

If there is an artwork, there is certainly an artist who created it.

If there is a creation, there certainly is a creator.

If you exist, he exists.

But to truly know the creator is not possible for the creature, because the knowledge, the mind, the understanding of the created one, are limited.

Therefore, their comprehension has only a limited range.

Allah Most High is eternal, infinite, without a beginning or an end, inexhaustible in His knowledge and power.

To expect a temporal, limited existence to understand and encompass an eternal and infinite concept is absurd.

Is it possible to fit an ocean into a bucket?

Yet although a bucket full of water from the ocean is not the ocean, it is from the ocean.

The manifestation of Allah's attributes in His creation is like that bucket of water.

Not He, but from Him.

His hidden essence is like the ocean whose depth and breadth are infinite, unfathomable.

To know the essence of anything, no matter how small, to know its totality outwardly and inwardly, to penetrate all its secrets, is practically impossible in every case.

Its essence and its advanced state today, and in what we imagine it will become tomorrow, always ends, and always will end, in impotence and amr.

Of everything in creation, we are closest to ourselves.

Has humanity been able to know and understand itself?

And that's why the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, ordered us to contemplate Allah in his attributes and forbade us to speculate further than that.

Only Allah knows his own essence.

We have no power to conceive of it.

Those who have pushed their minds to go further have either lost their wits or fallen into the chasm of disbelief, faithlessness, and attributing partners to Allah.

To open one's heart to receive the manifestations of this divine name, a believer's inner state and outer appearance should be the same.

One should avoid sinning, whether the sin is visible to others or not, and one should at the same time avoid trying to discover the sins of other people."

I'm going to stop there because it does go on, but I'd like to think about this in regards to yourself and how much, there's a strange question, how much do you know yourself?

Because I think of it that we have like, just as there's an outer world, we have an inner world and that if we are outwardly looking all the time, we're not familiar with this inner world.

And yet I think it's as different and strange and exotic and explorative and mysterious as the outer one.

So how much do you know yourself?

Okay, that's an open question, kind of begin to think about this in a way that allows you to go exploring.

So what do you, what have you found in there?

Some of us have found oceans, great oceans that could drown in, skies and earth and caves and your dreams are part of that discovery, finding just who you are.

This is open ended as a, not linear, but lateral kind of approach.

What comes to mind when I say this, that you, how much do you know yourself?

What comes up when I say that?

For me, a lot is definitely teaching me the more you know, the more you don't know.

I've been getting a lot of Haqq lately and it's like, oh, I didn't know that about myself.

Oh, I didn't know that either.

Oh, there's more.

Yes.

There's been a lot and I know that there's a ton more.

Isn't it interesting, somebody described it to me as, it's the expanding sphere of ignorance.

That you start, it works like this.

You start like this and as you learn something, it grows a little bit bigger, but that hole is what you don't know.

What you know is what's surrounding it and then as you grow no more, the sphere that's inside the donut hole gets bigger as well.

So yeah, I've been discovering that more and more too.

For example, even books and movies I've read and watched, I watch them and go, oh, I completely missed that.

I didn't understand that at all.

I wasn't even mature enough to grasp the metaphor and then it's kind of like, oh, I think I'm becoming an adult.

I get some of the ideas with this now.

Huh.

OK. But now it's kind of like, I'd like to start over again.

I'd like to, like, do I get a reboot?

Because I reached a certain understanding that I know so much less than I thought I knew.

But, yeah.

I think you do get a reboot, because I wanted to echo what Rukaiya was saying.

Because when you first asked the question, I thought, well, it's something new every day.

You know?

It might be just a little tidbit, but, oh, oh, I never looked at that that way before.

Oh, I never, never realized I felt this.

Oh.

So, I think with every one of those moments, it is like a reboot.

The perspective, whether you want to say shifts or broadens or expands, you know, it's another different angle.

Facet.

Well, that makes me think about what it was talking about being limited and that accepting that that's the state of things and that if we understand, well, there's only so much that you can pour into this that, you know, you learn something new, you makes it more room for the next thing to fill up.

And with every new thing, it makes more new things possible.

I'm thinking in terms of when I encountered, I might encounter something new and think, wow, I've never thought about that before.

I almost don't have any place to put it.

It doesn't really relate to anything, but take it in and then something else comes along that does relate to that.

And so it makes more understanding possible, more.

Which would then mean that ignorance is logarithmic.

Oh, wow, yeah, I just wrote that down to, oh, okay, see, I didn't know that.

That's that's very cool.

Thank you, shake.

Yeah.

He's laughing, yeah, well, he was really good at math was just sort of reflecting a little bit of what we know and what we don't know and yeah, sort of what Rosie was saying resonated about something new every day, but it happens, but I think about the outer, outer self and I think, well, you know, what do I know and yeah, you know, I know, I like ice cream and I like coffee.

I know, I love my family and all those things and it just made me think about also that what you said about filling the cup and, you know, we sort of come into this world and we just add things, you know, from cultural family and society and then we think we know a lot of stuff, but, but then when, you know, when I relate that to the inner world, which is, I think it's probably more into what reality really is and I don't know a lot and yeah, so it's, it's, it's a bit, just made me think about the disrobing and one needing to disidentify slowly to be able to, to know more about the inner, inner stuff.

I don't know if this is too much of a tangent, but you had asked, this kind of ties into something you'd asked about before, which is, you know, thinking about if we have past lives, then who are we?

And I don't know, it's something that's been on my mind recently.

It's like, what, then what is Rob?

What is Shiki Rahim?

What, like, what's the boundary of all the things that I think are my identity and what's not that identity?

And what I've actually matters in terms of that identity.

Okay, good.What I hear you asking is, what is the soul?

If it can wear different bodies and lives, then what is that?

Now, I'm saying this, you know, in Islam, you know, they don't really talk about whether there's reincarnation or not.

But when I asked Sheikh, you know, he said, is Allah able to do everything, all things?

I went, yes.

And then he went, well, I said, yeah, okay.

So, that means that I believe, my end experience is, sure, that we are learning.

Now, this is just what I've gotten from all of this, and having talked with Sheikh and hung out with everybody for a while, is that the soul is passing through different levels of education and learning about the universe.

And I don't know how long this goes on, but maybe it's forever kind of thing.

And that this awareness is invisible in relation to matter, but to other souls are maybe visible.

But the experiences I've had show that we have migrated through many different lives.

And there's some people that are starting, and this is just how I'm looking at it, that everybody starts out at the beginning, you know, like in a race.

You start at the beginning.

You don't know anything.

You haven't any experience.

And over time, you gather these experiences until you get to, say, towards the rather end of a cycle of learning about stuff on Earth.

Earth is a great place to learn things.

Sheikh would say, you have everything here, the positive and the negative, the good and the bad.

Some of it's, you know, gold and some of it's dog shit and paper bags.

You don't know because it's all in paper bags.

How do you know unless you open it up or have had experience knowing which is which?

So I think it's a continuous school for souls and that whatever we're given now isn't necessarily how it's always going to be in relation to like being male or female or tall or short or whatever.

It can be all different things for the experience of learning Allah because there is no end to Allah.

And maybe as regards being a soul as part of our experience journey to be here at this moment and then to be there in another moment.

What do you think?

A postscript, this is why I think everybody's on their way to Allah.

Everybody's just at a different starting point.

And that we have no right to be condescending or denigrating to anybody because we were there too.

And somebody must have shown us compassion and empathy because here we are here now.

So pay it forward.

So that doesn't answer your question, Robert.

But it's just that's where I wonder, you know, about what the soul is.

Is it a continuous experiential awareness that's been around for a long time?

I mean, it kind of did.

I mean, at least maybe as well as as could be given that the way I asked it.

Rosie is thinking deeply.

Well, yes, I, I do.

I can't really say I believe in reincarnation, but I know it's not it's not an abstract concept to me.

I yeah, I know that that is the way things work.

And I've been thinking recently in my own personal work on me about the corporeal soul, the Jusmani rule.

And something came to me recently, I don't know, in the last six or eight weeks that in, in this world at this time where, you know, most of us are, at least in our daily lives, pretty much disassociated from the natural world.

You know, we're in these buildings, we're in these cars, we're doing all these things that are manufactured and this and that.

And we end up disassociated from, it's kind of like spirit and body are two separate things, you know, and they're spoken of that way, body, mind and spirit, body, mind and soul.

And it occurred to me that I needed, where I was at that moment, to invite my Jismani Ru into this body and really, really inhabit it and to be more in touch with what's going on in the body and how things are balanced or imbalanced and how the Jismani Ru feels about things and get those senses and sensory processing, get that in tune with the corporeal soul.

So that's something brand new for me that I'm playing with and thinking about and experiencing, kind of like getting the soul into the skin and muscles and bones and, you know, let it really live in this body, you know, instead of being too busy.

Do you feel you fight it?

No, no, I don't feel that, but it's just more an awareness and a partnership.

Yeah, that hadn't come to me before.

It's like that the idea, as I said, of welcoming the soul into the body and really living with the soul in this body, let it inhabit it, let it, you know, let it really experience things and experience things with it, you know, and be aware of it and conscious of it.

Yeah, I think to get to that, you first have to deal with the family and social, cultural paradigms that tell us how to think.

And that we have to, we have to kind of move beyond those, because if we're looking to others for affirmation, or, or, or that we want to look good for other people, we're not going to be checking in with the heart.

We're going to be thinking about, you know, do I have enough makeup on?

Is my hair proper?

Am I wearing the right kind of clothes?

Do I have to wear those high heels again?

You know, the idea is you first have to deal with what you have right now, and then one at a time, remove these encumbrances to become aware that none of that matters, that that's not what's important.

What's important is being present.

And be part of being present is being aware of our breath, that that's kind of like that's the foundation there.

And the breath puts us, I feel like it puts us into a kind of synchronous flow or wave with the rest of the universe.

When we fight that is when we have difficulties in connecting.

And when we can remember, and to begin to do it as part of our own awareness that there's times that we go out and there's times that we come in.

I asked Sheikh again, you know, how do we deal with work?

Do we do Zikr when we're working?

What do we do?

Are we supposed to connect with Allah?

What's supposed to happen?

He says, when you're working, you work.

When you're done, you go back to being with Allah.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay.

It doesn't mean that you can't every once in a while come back in and take a breath and go, I'm here because Allah wants me to be here.

If he didn't want me to be here, I wouldn't be here.

I was fortunate that my last job that I had for 17 years, which people would think was a very dry job, but it was easily apparent to me that I was there to help people.

And so I easily saw the good that I could do and the comfort that I could bring with my knowledge, by helping them to handle the things they needed to handle.

So Allah was right there in the office.

That's when you come into a realization that you're where you're supposed to be.

Sometimes it takes a bit of a fight and wrestle and struggle to come to that place.

This is actually the third thing I wanted to talk about today, which is how important it is to know the life of the Prophets.

Because they were like us, human beings, dealing with problems.

How each of the Prophets dealt with these problems is a model of behavior for us to pick and to understand and to choose and to think about and reflect on.

And my suggestion is, get to know one of the Prophets.

It doesn't matter who it is, whether it's Job or Joseph or Jacob or Mariam or any, you know, whoever you feel closest to, to get to know them really well.

As a matter of fact, that is what the whole point of the Maqams is, is that each Maqam is, what would I say, regulated, controlled, overseen by one of the Prophets.

Your job is to get to know that Prophet.

How do you do that?

You read sacred texts, whether it's the Torah, the Prophets in the Bible, the Gospels, and even if you want to go into the Tibetan Book of the Dead or whatever the sacred texts are, there are Prophets there that will show you a great deal.

Now, what Rosie's talking about here is what I get from reading Joseph.

And he was put in jail for doing what he does.

And he was doing it because he is a Prophet of Allah.

How long was he in jail?

He was in there for 12 years.

And there was a, you know, I believe at the beginning, it was it was rough for him.

But then after a while, it became accepted in a way that I'm with Allah.

Allah is with me.

Who cares?

Because he was doing work for Allah.

He was interpreting dreams.

He was helping people.

Until, you know, Allah said, Great.

All right, you've done your job.

Now you're going to be working as an agricultural engineer for Egypt, because we're going to have a bad time.

And we need stuff piled up so that we can take care of the drought that's going to happen.

So part of learning surrender is learning to be where you are and understand it to its depth to its complete understanding.

And when you do, Allah will go, You got it.

Excellent.

Time to move on.

Let's go to the next job.

Now, it may come in a different kind of story for you.

For me, one of the ways that that happened was I was fired.

I was not pleased with that.

I felt really bad.

But at the time, I couldn't say a thing.

Allah just shut my mouth.

And I was like, but there was nothing I could say.

I there was so much I wanted to say.

But it was kind of like, just shut up.

Don't say anything.

Everything's okay.

You did what you're supposed to do.

Now we're moving on.

I'm gone.

Okay.

All right.

But why?

Why is this I'm carrying my stuff out, you know, in the cardboard box, turning the keys back in.

But it was, I could see it was the end of that journey.

And so part of our job is to learn what we need to learn from where we are at this moment.

That's hard.

That's it's hard to be present.

And what I'm suggesting is reflecting on a lot through your breath is one of the ways to help bring you back to being with your heart and being present and putting yourself back into the flow and also oxygenates the blood if you have any kind of cortisone or a general adrenaline pumping through.

Okay, He's a below him and I should on a regime.

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.

Alhamdulillah rabbil Alameen.

Ar-Rahman ar-Raheem.

Maliki Yom Adin

Yaqna b'duwa, yaqna astayin.

Idana sirata mustaqim.

Sirata ladzina namta alaykum.

Hayr al maqtoobi alaykum.

Walad daalin.

Ameen.

As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh.

Thank you, Sheikh.

Thank you, everyone.

Sure, thank you.

Thank you all for welcoming me.

Good to see you, Rosie.

I always love to meet you.

You're welcome, everyone.

Have a great week.

Bye.

Bye.