Becoming the Stillness Between the Breaths May 28, Afternoon Part I

Transcription

1 Becoming the Stillness Between the Breaths May 28, Afternoon Part I We want to start not only with our joy in the Divine Presence but our gratitude for the Divine Presence in its manifestations. Certainly the zikr is a fantastic manifestation of it. It is a totally democratic way of saying that here is this person who was illiterate and became the voice of God in the Qur an. He wasn t a special person. He was a human being. And the message he left was La ilaha illallahu, nothing in truth exists but God. Everything is transient except that which is never born and never dying and eternal, transcendent as well as ever present...which means that everything is accepted as part of the Divine Being. We can also have gratitude to the human being who is Prophet Muhammad who brought the zikr forth and of course the Sufis who made remembrance of the zikr a centerpiece of their practice. So here s a version of it.. Inayat Khan s Zikr (sung) We ll continue with the zikr with the fikr of the zikr in thought as we do the very traditional movement of sweeping the head across the heart and bringing it down into the heart. So on the la ilaha you re exhaling and you re letting go of everything, all our attachment to everything that is transient, including our whole idea of ourself. We re just letting it go we re becoming that emptiness. So that s the emptiness at the end of the breath, really, in the Sufi practice. With the la ilaha you are inviting that emptiness. And then when you re saying the El you re throwing the there s one metaphor of drawing the arrow and you throw the arrow down into the heart as you inhale. El Allah Hu You re casting that down and what you re doing is you re wiping away the rust of the heart and you re throwing this deep power that comes from that emptiness right into the depth of your being so that you can receive it fully. So we ll just continue that fikr for a few minutes. Exhaling La ilaha, moving the head, sweeping across the body [left to right], bringing it up to the top, then as you we pause, and then you inhale on the El Allahu, and throw the arrow into the heart. And again from there, continuing sweeping. Now eyes open, doing this for a few more breaths.. Let s just complete this by doing the darood of the Prophet Muhammad. When Murshid SAM says darood in all of his writings which he does incessantly because it was his default practice and it was the one he always came back to for him that was breathing the Toward the One with the Sufi Invocation. always remembering to come into oneness, to return to unity. And that s what he put forth as the darood. Traditionally darood is to the Prophet Muhammad, and it is really wishing peace and blessings on him. This is a practice Inayat Khan gave to Rabia Martin whose picture is over here. She was his first disciple, the first murshida, the first Samuel Lewis s one who introduced him to Sufism. He gave her a whole series of practices because she had a special calling and this was one of them that he gave to do many times a day which is the darood of the Prophet. Somehow it didn t get passed on. Always there was such a tremendous resistance to Islam and to Muhammad in the world that Inayat Khan moved in, especially in Europe and also true in America, and especially in England and so that in time that emphasis on Muhammad outwardly was really replaced by Jesus in a lot of his talks because you know Jesus is another Rasoul and

2 one that people were prepared to accept. But it hurt his feelings when people totally loved him and rejected Muhammad because it s like he said in his family. They love me; they dislike Muhammad. I ate Muhammad. I ingested Muhammad. I am Muhammad. What are they talking about? We see the same thing in our culture today. But Muhammad is really greatly loved and greatly honored because he is the. When you trace any of the chains of the Sufis back through all of the various teachers and they re very branched out, but they all converge on the same place which is Prophet Muhammad. So I thought we would just do just a few minutes of this darood. We don t have papers or anything to give you like we did for the God Is Breath classes as we were running through, but we will send you some things afterwards including this darood and some other references to these texts and so on. I think I can give it to you now. The words are really very simple: Allah huma sallee alah Saiyedeena Mohammedin wa alah alle Saiyedeena Mohammedin wa barik wa Sallim which means basically Saiyedeena is fully honored and Allah give all blessings, all peace, all honor to Muhammad is just our gratitude. It s like you re feeling through the whole bloodstream or line of beings that carried forth a teaching through transmission, through realization, not conceptually as much as by experience. So let s just learn this darood and offer our gratitude for this prophet. [Murshid teaches the darood which is then chanted. Salleh and saiyadina are given as alternate spellings during the teaching.] Just take a few moments to feel this gratitude, blessing, peace, thank you.. The practice I want to do, and this is one we did the other day in the afternoon for those that were here. In Paul Reps it s stated very easily. I did this practice for many years. Murshid used to take these Centering Exercises that are at the back of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and he would take up one or two maybe at a meeting or he would tell us to read them and to pick one or two to meditate on. This one for me became the one that I really liked to work with. Now I find with the other texts I see more to work with it in, so I m going to read it. This will be familiar to some of you. We can just do it like this, then I want to bring in another factor into it. #8 Reps: Attention between eyebrows, let mind be before thought. Let form fill with breathessence to the top of the head, and there shower as light. Let s try that. I think I ll just go to the Radiance text Here s what he says Roche: Rest the attention easily in the forehead, In the eye that is made of light. Cherish the delicate energies glowing there. Allow attention to inquire upwards, into the Radiant space above the head. Wali Ali: And that s the important part to get. I can t find the Lakshman Joo thing at the moment, but that s what he says: you ve got to breathe all the up through the crown of the head

3 to the body of light that is above the head. That s something that isn t as clearly implied by what Reps wrote, so this is something. I always used to feel this, but it was kind of coming from a showerhead right here [indicating the top of his head], but if you have the showerhead right here [indicating ~8 above his head] you have a different perspective. Allow attention to inquire upwards, into the Radiant space above the head. The small self enters into delicious omnipresence. This it remembers and knows as its truth. Wali Ali: Well that s saying a lot. That s like saying, OK, awaken. And that s what we re looking for is to overcome our attachment to the egoic condition which is very limited and transient and understand that we are the real self. If we can see from the vantage point of the real self, and feel and act from that vantage point, then we are in a state of God realization at the moment. Allow attention to inquire upwards, into the Radiant space above the head. The small self enters into delicious omnipresence. This it remembers and knows as its truth. Gradually the luminosity of that truth Fills the body to overflowing As it rises through the crown of the head Into a shower of light. I think that is sufficient. So let s try this again. Again you re going to first rest in the Agna, in the third eye center, let mind be before thought. It just goes, let it be, before thought. That s its original condition. Focus on the breath. Be totally one pointed in the breath. Feel it rising all the way through your body, through the crown of the head and showering as light as you exhale. We ll continue this, but you re not just anchored in the third eye. As you breathe up through the crown you understand your relationship to this body of light, this superconscious body, all inclusive. ~ ~ We begin to become aware of this body of light above the head, identifying with that, perceiving from there. Opening the eyes Continuing the practice Just becoming present. Let me stand and demonstrate something right now. We call it the spin of Pluto because if you know the astrological yoga, what we ve been doing is exactly what you do if you re doing the Pluto concentration. In that practice you want to identify here with the body of light above the head. It really stands for the group consciousness, the individual entering the grand consciousness of all. So if you were going to turn from there you would place your attention here [indicating about 12 above the head] as we ve been doing. You just turn and you know it s like you re giving off light from there, but you re not identified down here at all. [Murshid spins to the left.] So ordinarily Murshid wouldn t have very many people do that as an individual walk or turn, but he would have it done as a group practice. I think we re going to do some work now with some of these some combinations. How many people here I m expecting a large majority have done some detail work with astrological yoga practices of Murshid SAM? That s the majority. And how many have not? OK, 3, 4, 5 people. So you ll just have to jump in. What he

4 used these practices [for] on the planets not to teach us astrology, but to teach us about ourselves and the ability to concentrate. And he used the psychic elements of astrology, the various attributes that were connected with the planets as a way of allowing us to see that we have all this capacity. We have the capacity the be the Sun; we have the capacity to be the Moon, Mars, Neptune, Venus, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, Mercury.. Did I leave anything out? Whatever it is, we have that capability and in seeing that.. Some of us think that we re really shy and we don t have all this Sun energy, but to know that you can turn it on when you wish to, and you can also turn on the moon when you wish to, and any of these other qualities to show that you have a gigantic range. It all depends on how you breathe and how you attune in order to manifest it. I thought we would work a bit with that astrological yoga. [Holding hands in the circle] We just start out going, Allah [looking up] Hu [bowing]. This is a love call. [Murshid moves to center of circle; circle continues with chant.] Now if we were going to do the sun, breathe in through the right nostril. You fire up, fire here, fire the heart. [Right Sun spin.] Now if I wanted to add Pluto to that, I would be aware of the Sun and at the same time also be aware of this [indicating space above the head], because it would be like raising the Sun up to another higher pitch. [After group does Sun-Pluto spin] Some people got that very nicely. Some people added a few elements to it. What Murshid SAM used to say is I have the only school in the world where you can pass by flunking. If you re not getting Sun-Pluto you might be getting Uranus-Pluto or Mercury. I saw several [gestures quickly]. Pluto would tend to slow down the Sun, and the Sun would tend to be edified in its light by Pluto s influence. But let s say you were to combine Pluto with the Moon, what would happen? The Sun gives an aspect of mastery and the Moon gives the aspect of. well, what you would get is a trance kind of state basically someone who is very much in tune with the whole unconscious world and will speak from the trance condition, but doesn t really have a present consciousness with it. It s like someone who is really kind of at the mercy of that state and becomes then washed in it and speaks from it, and it s a very oracular kind of state to be in. So if you re doing something like this with the Moon you would want to really say, OK, but I m really not going to get out of control here, because there are so many ways in which you can do the Moon. The Moon can be just simply receptive and takes what s given, you know like whatever the force is you go with it. Or the Moon can be very responsive and take what s given and mold it like a ship that has a sail up but can tack and can go a different direction from what the wind is blowing. I m not going to present Moon-Pluto because I don t want to trigger something in people because this is a one-day workshop. It s not like I can be with you then tomorrow morning, we can go over what happened in your dreams and all that kind of stuff. I m just suggesting these have different influences. Now if you were to connect it up with Uranus, what would you get? If you had the Sun and Uranus OK, so here s the Sun. [Doing spin] Steady, right? Positive. Giving off beneficent rays. And then, what did I say I was going to combine with? Uranus. When Murshid wanted to give a walk which would bring out He had karma walks and dharma walks, and the karma walk would be to give you a rhythm that would mean that if you could establish it, you would have success in your daily life. And a karma walk might be something like Sun and Moon combined. It would depend on your chart, but also in just what you see so if you combine Sun

5 and Moon this gives you a very stable condition. You know you re right in the middle: if a situation asks you to be positive, you can be positive; if it s asking you to have really big ears and really listening well and responding you can do that. But if you wanted it to kind of speak to your trajectory in life and your dharma, your soul s purpose, then he would always combine something with Uranus or Neptune or Pluto. Maybe a couple of them depending on how skilled you were. Suppose then we combined Sun and Uranus Uranus being like the realm of the jinn, the powers of mind. It s like Silicon Valley: lots of brilliant people, but where do they come from? What box did they get out of sometimes? And that s Uranus. You don t know where Uranus is coming from. It comes from outside of the box, and it goes out and it comes back and you might have some insight like Cantor had in mathematics that you could quantify the realms of infinity and work a whole mathematical system from infinity. He was scorned by mathematicians and professionals for years and years and disgraced and then in the end he becomes the keynote of mathematics. People are often ahead of their times because they re Uranian, because they get things, but then they re out of touch with society and the establishment and they can t get their message across. But then in the end you depend on them for your insights and your progress. So here is the Sun-Uranus. This is the thing: you can practice concentration. You can find out things about yourself. There s no wrong way to do it. If you re doing it wrong, you re probably doing something else right. Jesus said, In my Father s house are many mansions, which is very bad grammar but it just means there are so many gateways into the Truth. Rumi says thousands of ways to bow and kiss the ground. That s what we honor. This is just ways of learning more, more ways. What would Moon-Uranus be like? Sun-Neptune? Neptune is really easy to do. You re breathing a refined breath and you re focusing your awareness in the crown center. We ve been doing a lot of focusing up there, so I think we re kind of ready to do that. So if I m doing just a pure Neptune walk, it s like of like follow your dream you know. Only trouble with Neptune is where are your feet? You can have a big ideal, you can be following your dream.and be just like the fool walking right over the cliff in the Tarot. So Murshid used to say you have to watch out for Neptune plop plop in his elegant way. So you ve got your head up in the clouds and you miss a big mud hole that you just stepped into. So that s where if you bring the Sun into Neptune you have this sense of being present right here, very focused, very Toward the One, and yet you have this quality of idealism and the awakening of the crown that is a part of it. This gives a balance to it, so that would be a perfect dharma walk for somebody who needed this influence in their life. So it would be a refined breath, a little more in the right nostril than in the left because you re working with the Sun, centered in the heart and the crown. [Doing the walk] It s the same, only you just can feel your feet; you re right here; you have a purpose right here in the world.. Keep the heart and the crown awakened. Feel the refinement of Neptune, the beauty of devotion, the dream and the straightforwardness and strength and earth wisdom of the Sun. You want to bring that ideal right into the midst of your work and not just make your work buh buh buh, but you have the ideal that is informing it and making it beautiful and more beautiful. Sun-Neptune has a spin. Very beautiful, very on-the-earth at the same time. So that s another combination that could really work very well for some people. If you re somebody who s going off the deep end, have your imagination all the time and things on earth are not working so well for you, this might be a very good combination for you to work with in your breath and in your

6 rhythm. This is a whole subject unto itself, but I just thought that one practice was so reminiscent of the Pluto practice, I thought, well we ll just conflate those two. Anyone with something to share? [Response to question re dharma walk] It s a rhythm. It s a rhythm you adopt, you adopt in your breath, so when in the morning you re pacing around, wondering what you re going to do at work, you get that rhythm going. It s just a rhythm that you take in with you by practicing it. You see that it s going to be available for you. Suppose you were a very kind of stuck person and you were extremely kind of afflicted by your Saturn. You have a lot of Saturn but you couldn t get anything done because you didn t have any initiative. You had a lot of Saturn. But suppose then, what would happen if you combined that with Uranus? We learn in all the different schools that by combining the opposites you come to the Oneness. It s very true when we re working with the wazifahs in Sufism. You take the ones that have an apparently or opposite meaning, and you do the two of them together, and you come into a balance. God is the only Source of Life; God is the only Source of Death. There re wazifahs for that, you know. Saying it over and over again: God is the only Source of Life. God is the only Source of Death. God is the only Cause of Life. God is the only Cause of Death. Wait a minute! It s all God. After a while you get into seeing; you have an equanimity around the opposite. And often you find that there is a quality that includes both of them. In a lot of the Sufis schools in various ways you do practices that are opposites to come into a unity. But it s true in all the schools...saturn, Uranus and Venus conjunct. Sam Lewis had that same thing. So they re things you deal with. He d say, Oh yeah, I fall in love every thirty years. We could go on for days like this.but I just wanted to bring it in a little bit to show us flexibility of. [Responding to question about Pluto which student had always heard of as associated with the underworld.] I m framing it the way Sam Lewis framed it. He chose to emphasize the positive aspect of the quality. Pluto is the total consciousness: conscious and unconscious. That s why you can do Moon-Pluto, you go right into the unconscious. It invites you to go right into the unconscious and you become a voice of the unconscious. You can become a voice of the unconscious. But Murshid saw it as the group mind, as the commune, as that aspect where the individual can set aside their grasping on individuation or individuality into the greater wholeness so that if you then can attain an equanimity in a consciousness that is vast in that way, then that is Pluto. So he would have the whole circle set up being [reaching upwards].. So let s do that. It would be a good way to frame this. It s really very simple: instead of finding that body of light directly over your head, let s say that s it [pointing above the center of the circle], somewhere in the vicinity of that lightbulb up there is a body of light that is not like that lightbulb. It is just simply the light of the Soul that we are tuning to, this great sphere of light which is omniscient, omnipotent and in a Plutonic way we feel like the ray of Sun is coming right into our crown. So all of us are like a maypole you ve got the little things you re carrying around We re like rays. So that s what I want us to attune to: to feel this light that we all share and that we re all rays of this light, and breathing with the awareness of Pluto. Visualize everyone else; we re all here together. You can do this with eyes open, or partially open.. Really get anchored in this breath.. And then we retain this concentration as we move. We do one full circle of the room, sidestepping to the right, Toward the One. [Slow chant of Toward the One.] Just stay in this breath for a few moments.

7 So that s one way of getting a feeling in the group for Pluto. It s a way in which you can help transform communal society into a place where people work more and more together and without so much problem between egos. I want to do a Dance now. If people are devotional in a certain way they re very willing to put Muhammad up as Rasulallah, Messenger of God, but Murshid SAM was extremely intent on conveying Muhammad Abdullah as a way of seeing that Muhammad was the Bodhisattvic type. He was totally the Bodhisattvic type: he didn t put himself up above anybody else; he was a human being. He had this gift of his relationship with the the Spirit of Guidance which came in the form to him of the Angel Gabriel and the voice that filled the Qur an. He had this gift. But what did he do? He would eat last at meals. He knew if he ate last everybody else would get something to eat. When they were trying to defend themselves to survive, the people from Mecca who were afraid they were going to destroy their business by having a religion of one God, they were attacking with horses which they didn t have. Someone came by grace from Persia named Zalman or Salman and said, How we fight horses there is we dig trenches. They d never heard of that. So they went out there and Muhammad was the first one in the day was out there digging the trench, and the last one in the evening was out there digging the trench. He was just totally modest in his way. He did not put himself or his ego first and he served God in all people. So when they were successful in withstanding the attempt to overthrow their religion so that they could survive which was the only criterion for something being a genuine jihad was that you fight so that your faith will not be destroyed. Then they took Mecca and they were totally generous to the people that they had conquered. So this was a demonstration of Muhammad Abdullah. Ya Muhammad Abdullah Dance Just follow this by attuning to this quality, feeling sympathy of heart with this quality and wanting to walk in the footsteps of this example. Drop hands and just breathe this way. When your breath and your feeling get right, just begin to walk with this feeling of Muhammad Abdullah. Each step you re taking you re offering a blessing. This is something really on the inside so. when you feel it on the inside You know the first Muslims were Quakers. They were forced to live outside of Mecca in an isolated community, and Muhammad would come into town everyday and recite from the Qur an and see who he could persuade. Everyday there was a woman when he would walk down the street And he was scrupulously clean. He wouldn t even eat garlic even though it was popular in the culture because he had so many interviews, he didn t want to make a bad impression. He was representing God. There was a woman who would always take the slops from her kitchen and all the garbage; when he would walk by she would throw it out her window at him and often hit him with the crap, and he would just keep on and ignore Then one day these aren t made-up stories; these are stories that were observed, written down Then one day she didn t throw anything out. And he said, Oh, she must be sick. So he went inside, he went up, and she was sick. He came there to see if he could offer her some solace, and so her heart changed of course. That s just an example of the way he was. It s like the mother who came to him and said, Prophet, my husband is gone and the only thing we have are our date trees maybe it was figs but I think it was dates and he eats all the dates and that s all of our family income. What can I do? Would you talk to him? And he said, Come back in two weeks. And she says, OK, Prophet. I ll be back in 2 weeks. So she brought the boy back in two weeks and he said to him, Don t you know your mother depends upon these, and your

8 family. You should not eat them out of respect for her, and so on and so forth. And he says, OK. Thank you, and he left him. And the woman says, If you don t mind, could I ask you a question? Why didn t you just tell him that two weeks ago? He says, I m very fond of dates. I had to quit eating them for two weeks to be able to tell him that. And that s the way he was. That s the Muhammad of history.