Letters of a Sufi Master

 Mulay al-‘Arabi ad-Darquawi is the author of these letters published under the title Letters of a Sufi Master by Perennial Books in 1969. The translator was Titus Burckhardt.

The letters illume the receptive reader in divine light. “Let he who has ears hear.”

“We see besides that the spiritual aim is not reached by many works, nor by few, but by grace alone. As the Saint Ibn ‘Ata-Illah says in his Hikam: ‘If you were destined to reach Him only after the destruction of your faults and the abandonment of all your claims, you would never reach Him. But when He wishes to bring you back towards Him, He absorbs your quality into His and your attributes into His and thus brings you back by means of what comes to you from Him, not by means of what comes to Him from you.’”

“As the Saint Ibn Attah-Illah says in his Hikam: ‘God is not veiled from you by some reality existing apart from Him, since there is no reality outside of Him: what veils Him from you is but the illusion that there can be a reality apart from Him.’”

“As to this professor you told me about who is unable to find the state of presence, tell him not to look towards the past nor the future, to become the son of the moment, and to take death as the target before his eyes. Then he will find this state, God willing.”

These letters were probably written in Morocco somewhere between 1779 and 1823. For context, Mohamed had dropped His body in 632 AD and Meher Baba was born in 1896. In other words, creation had not had a major Avataric incarnation for about 1,150 years. 

But creation is never without the five Perfect Masters, and it is the five Perfect Masters who precipitate the Avatar’s Advent, and it is from these five Perfect Masters that the Avatar takes the reins of authority and power when He is unveiled and begins His Divine work for creation.  

When does He come? Every 750 – 1,400 years. Why does He come?  “Age after age, when the wick of Righteousness burns low, the Avatar comes yet once again to rekindle the torch of Love and Truth. Age after age, amidst the clamor of disruptions, wars, fear and chaos, rings the Avatar's call: “Come all unto me.” – Meher Baba

No doubt, John the Baptist was one of the five Perfect Masters who heralded the coming of Jesus. He said, “I baptize with water (truth), He baptizes with wine.” (Divine wine that has the power to intoxicate, to bring one to another level of consciousness—what the New Testament calls metanoia—change of mind to another level of functioning; metanoia—what was translated from the Greek into the English word repentance. 

So, Mulay al-‘Arabi ad-Darquawi, the author of the letters later published under the title Letters of a Sufi Master was keeping alive the Light—the Flame—of Truth in the dark before the dawn. Let’s look again at the first excerpt:

 “We see besides that the spiritual aim is not reached by many works, nor by few, but by grace alone. As the Saint Ibn ‘Ata-Illah says in his Hikam: ‘If you were destined to reach Him only after the destruction of your faults and the abandonment of all your claims, you would never reach Him. But when He wishes to bring you back towards Him, He absorbs your quality into His and your attributes into His and thus brings you back by means of what comes to you from Him, not by means of what comes to Him from you.’”

Is it not an affirmation that man cannot do, (Please see previous blog, Doing, Not Doing, and Real Doing.) and that it is God alone who does?

“As the Saint Ibn Attah-Illah says in his Hikam: ‘God is not veiled from you by some reality existing apart from Him, since there is no reality outside of Him: what veils Him from you is but the illusion that there can be a reality apart from Him.’”

As a young boy I began to ask my elders—my teachers, relatives, religious authorities—what is not God? You see, I had already come to the conclusion that if someone’s God had exclusions, then that God was a false God because wasn’t it said that God is infinite and eternal?

Yet, it seemed that all of the “Gods” of my elders had exclusions. One of their Gods excluded evil, one excluded shit, one excluded animals, and all of their Gods excluded the Gods of other’s religions. On the question of how to attain God there was no dearth advice, but again, without exception, they all maintained that theirs was the best, or the only, way to attain the Supreme Reality. Something inside of me rejected them all and I continued to seek. There must be those who knew, someone who knew—because they had experienced the Supreme Reality.

Kabir once said, “Until you experience it, it is not true.” And it was pretty obvious to me that my elders had not achieved or experienced the Supreme Reality. Of course, neither had I, and so I began to concentrate my efforts on what Saint Ibn Attah-Illah called the illusion that there can be a reality apart from Him—and there was certainly no dearth of opportunities for me to study.

Adi K. Irani, one of Meher Baba’s closest disciples, used to say, “A kiss and a kick from Meher Baba are one and the same, but still I prefer the kiss.” Don’t we all, but the real message hidden in his words was not that we had to learn to prefer the kick to the kiss, but merely to remain fully aware who the kicker really was. For if the kicker was not Him, then the kicker was something other than Him, something outside of Him, some reality apart from Him—and I came to realize that the awareness of Him as the kicker had to come not later, when the kicking was over, but while the kicking was taking place. I was certainly a long way from that…

“As to this professor you told me about who is unable to find the state of presence, tell him not to look towards the past or the future, to become the son of the moment, and to take death as the target before his eyes. Then he will find this state, God willing.” – Al-‘Arabi – Letters of a Sufi Master

“…unable to find the state of presence...” I assume that this is what Kabir is talking about when he says, “Because you have forgotten the Friend…”

But how is He remembered; where is He found? Though he is everywhere and in everything, apparently He is not found everywhere and in everything—“…not to look towards the past or the future…”— but in the moment, in the present; that is where He is found.

There is a little story attributed to the well-known legendary Sufi Mullah Nasruddin: “The Mullah is seen scurrying around on the ground under a streetlamp one night. ‘What are you doing Mullah; have you lost something?’ asked a disciple. ‘Yes,’ replies the Mullah, ‘I lost my key.’ ‘And did you lose it here—under the streetlamp?’ ‘No,’ the Mullah replied, ‘I lost it back there in the yard—in the dark.’ ‘Then why sir is it that you are looking for it here?’ ‘Because, the light is better.’”

One of the lessons here is that things are found in the light, not where they are lost. And where is the light? The light is in the present, in the moment, like the old book said, “Remember, be here now.”

And what about taking death as the target between the eyes? In mystical and yogic teaching the third eye is located between the eyes just above the bridge of the nose. The third eye is said to be the entrance to higher experiences—to God, the Friend.

And why death as the target?  In his book, All and Everything, after attempting for nearly 1,200 pages to, as he put it, “To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world,” Gurdjieff, in the form of the character Beelzebub, is asked the following question by his young grandson Hassein, to state in words “whether it is still possible by some means or another to save them (the strange three brained human beings who inhabit the planet Earth) and to direct them into the becoming path?”

To this question Beelzebub replies that the sole means for saving the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant into the beings of the planet earth an organ that would, during the process of their existence, cause them to constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of their own death, as well as of the death of everyone and everything upon whom their eyes or attention rests. Only that sensing of inevitable death could “destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them that has swallowed up the whole of their Essence and also (destroy) that tendency to hate others, namely, which engenders all those mutual relationships existing there, which serve as the chief cause of all their abnormalities unbecoming to three brained beings—malevolent for them themselves and for the whole of the Universe.”

“…tell him not to look towards the past or the future, to become the son of the moment, and to take death as the target before his eyes. Then he will find this state, God willing.” – Al-‘Arabi – Letters of a Sufi Master 

“The soul is an immense thing; it is the whole cosmos, since it is the copy of it. Everything which is in the cosmos is to be found in the soul; equally everything in the soul is in the cosmos. Because of this fact, he who masters his soul most certainly masters the cosmos, just as he who is dominated by his soul is certainly dominated by the whole cosmos.” – Al-‘Arabi Ad-Darqawi

No doubt there is a certain poetic beauty in this statement, also, an etheric light to the logic, but does not a question arise regarding the equation of the soul with the cosmos and not with God? Especially those familiar with Vedic teachings and the teachings of Meher Baba may find it puzzling. But in Sufi teachings, specifically in the English translations of Sufi teachings, the word soul has a different meaning. It derives from the Arabic word An-nafs, which is the soul as opposed to the heart (al-qalb). It signifies the ego-centric, passionate soul, much like the Sanskrit Jiv-atma of Vedic teachings. Upasani Maharaj beautifully defines Jiv-atma as “that pure celestial soul identified with the projection of the mind.”

So, in the Letters of a Sufi Master, Ibn ‘Ata-Illah says; “One of our brothers said to me: ‘I am nothing.’ I answered: ‘Do not say, ‘I am nothing’; neither say: ‘I am something.’ Do not say: ‘I need such and such a thing’ nor yet: ‘I need nothing.’ But say (instead) ‘Allah!’ and you will see marvels.”  Or, referencing the story of Mullah Nasruddin, one wastes time studying the illusory self in order to find one’s real Self—soul.

“As the Sufis affirm, there is no approach to God save through the door of the death of the soul (An-nafs). Now we see—but God is wiser—that the faqir will not kill his soul until he has been able to see its form, and that he will see its form only after separating himself from the world, his companions, his friends and his habits.

“One faqir said to me: ‘My wife has got the better of me’, to which I replied; ‘It is not she but your own soul which has got the better of you. We have no other enemy; if we could kill it, we would kill all our oppressors in one blow.”

In the Letters of a Sufi Master, in Sufi teachings in general, as well as the work of the Perfect Masters, effacement is given a prominent role in the process that leads to the attainment of the supreme reality.

“Dethronement of the ego is a necessary condition, according to us and according to the Masters of the Way, and in this respect one of them said: ‘The very thing you fear from me is what my heart desires.’” – Letters of a Sufi Master

“Do not give nourishment to all that arises in your heart, but throw it far away from you and do not be concerned with fostering it, forgetting your Lord the while, as most people do, thus going astray, wandering, losing their way in a mirage.”

The other evening some friends and I were watching the movie Bab’Aziz by Nacer Khemir. Bab’Aziz is the third part of a trilogy about Sufism, love, and the path to the Supreme Reality. It is a beautiful movie, I highly recommend it. Anyway, there is a scene in which a seeker is looking into a pool of water. “Why is he doing that?” someone asks. Another answers, “He keeps looking into the pool until one day he no longer sees his own reflection.”

We all look into pools. Situations are pools; people are pools. The worldly person looks at others and sees himself, but when the worldly person becomes a seeker, he longs to see God. God appears, when he disappears, when he ceases to see himself in everything and everyone.

A person once asked Meher Baba what kind of yoga He taught. Meher Baba replied that His yoga was the yoga of you go.

“As to what we are saying about the attachment of the heart to the vision of the Essence of our Lord, no one of us possesses it so long as his (passionate) soul is not extinguished, wiped out, vanished, gone, annihilated. According to the Saint Abul’l-Mawahib at-Tunisi (may God be satisfied with him): ‘Extinction is erasure, disappearance, departure, departure from yourself, cessation’: and according to the Saint Abu Madyan (may God be well pleased with him): ‘He who does not die does not see God.’” – Letters of a Sufi Master 

Adi K. Irani, one of Meher Baba’s first Mandali members and His secretary from 1944 -1980, often made the distinction between the spiritual path and the path of effacement. The spiritual path is what the wayfarer follows when he is guided by a yogi or spiritual teacher who has not achieved God Realization. Adi said that following such a yogi leads one into the experiences of the higher planes of consciousness.

On the spiritual path the wayfarer sees unbelievable things, visions, angels, heaven and hell, and becomes the possessor of great powers—even the ability to create and destroy whole worlds. The spiritual path gives one experiences of great pleasures and shows the wayfarer how to avoid suffering. Sounds good—really good—but there is one serious drawback; the allurements of the spiritual path are so alluring that the wayfarer can easily become caught in the  path’s enchantments, so much so, that the wayfarer’s progress to the real goal of God Realization is halted.

The Avatar and the Perfect Masters, knowing the eternal bliss of the Goal, take their followers through the experiences of higher consciousness blindfolded. In other words, the followers of the Avatar and Perfect Masters continue to experience the same old gross consciousness as everybody else, with one big, BIG, difference. The followers of the Avatar and the Perfect Masters have the presence of the Master with them in their life—they live in the atmosphere of the Master.

Once when I was leaving Meher Baba’s place in India I was kidding with Eruch, one of Meher Baba’s oldest and closest Mandali. I said, “Well Eruch, I’m leaving here now and you always have something special you say to us when we leave. So, I am leaving here now.” Eruch turned to me and said, “Brother, you are not leaving here, you are living here; your Father’s house is so big that you can never leave it, you only go from one room to another.” Now, it has been my experience and the experience of many others as well, that there is nothing more for us to do—for ourselves. What we do is for Baba. But also, in all honesty, there still remain many desires, the legacy of our impressions gathered over millions of lifetimes. This legacy of desires is what makes up the passionate soul talked about by the Sufis and it is this legacy of desires that must be effaced in the light of the consciousness of the master. Can one do it by oneself? The answer is—Can one jump over his own knees?

Farsho-gar:

Awakener of

Eternal Spring

Weary from lifetimes of journeying,

beaten down by wind and rain,

scorched by desert’s sun,

hungry,

thirsty,

unable to rest —

the wayfarer journeys on,

uplifted and sustained,

comforted and renewed by Your Gift

of Hope, and Love, and Faith.

Oh Farsho-gar,

Awakener of Eternal Spring,

with Your right hand You hold the cloth in the burning sun,

until its color is all but bleached away.

Then, taking the cloth in Your left hand,

You dip it in the Dye of Self,

and it emerges in radiant colors Divine.

Dipping and fading,

again and again,

until the color is fast,

the journey complete,

and the wayfarer Awakens refreshed

in the Garden of Eternal Spring. – Meditation and Prayers on 101 Names of God, Michael Kovitz, available at eladi-publications.com