Rūh and Nafs: Contravailing Forces of our Being And the Proportion of Good Actions of the Center/Qalb First, I want to begin tonight in honor of the birth of Imam Ali (ra). I want to tell you what he told his sons, Hasan and Hussein (as) on the occasion after he was struck with the poisoned sword while he was at prayer by Ibn Mujeen, a Kharajite. He said the following to his sons, and I read it to you. It s his will. And think about the world we live in today. My advice to you is to be conscious of Allah and steadfast in your religion. Do not yearn for the world, and do not be seduced by it. Do not resent anything you have missed in it, or claim the truth. Work for the next world, oppose the oppressor, and support the oppressed. Did any of you hear the President s talk today? You should if you have not. One of the most honest talks I ve heard a president give in a long time. I advise you and all my children and my relatives and whosoever receives this message to be conscious of Allah, to remove your differences and to strengthen your ties. I heard your grandfather (peace be upon him) say, Reconciliation of your differences is more worthy than all prayers and all fasting. Who was that grandfather? (Rasūlu-Llāh (sal)). Fear Allah in matters concerning orphans. Attend to their nutrition and do not forget their interests in the middle of yours. Fear Allah in your relations with your neighbors. Your prophet often recommended them to you, so much so that he would give them a share in the inheritance. Remain attached to the Qur an. Nobody should surpass you in being intent on it or more sincere in implementing it. Fear Allah in relation to 1
your prayers. It is the pillar of your religion. Fear Allah in relation to his house. Do not abandon it as long as you live. If you should do that, you would abandon your dignity. What is his house? The Ka ba. Persist in Jihad in the cause of Allah with your money, your souls, and your tongue. (Do you hear sword in there anywhere?) Maintain communication and exchange of opinion among yourselves. Beware of disunity and enmity. Do not desist from promoting good deeds, and cautioning against bad ones. Should you do that, the worst among you would be your leaders and you will call upon Allah without response. O children of Abu Mutalib! Do not shed the blood of Muslims under the banner, The imam has been assassinated. Only the assassin should be condemned to death. If I die of this stroke of his, kill him with one similar stroke. Do not mutilate him. I have heard the Prophet (sal) say, Mutilate not even a rabid dog. This was in the 40 th year of the Hijra in the early hours of the morning of the 19 th of Ramadan. He was struck with a poisoned sword by the Kharajite Ibn Mujeen (may the curse of Allah be upon him) while leading the prayers in the masjid at Kufa. He was martyred on the 21 st day of Ramadan, and buried in Najaf al Ashaf. He was born in the house of Allah, the Kaaba; and martyred in the house of Allah, masjid at Kufa. The Lion of Allah, the most brave and gentle Muslim after the Holy Prophet himself began his glorious life with devotion to Allah and his Messenger, and ended it with his service to him. And do not speak of those slain in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive but you perceive it not. 2
I wanted to start with that because it is his birthday today, the 15 th of Rajab. Yesterday I talked about the nafs and today I talk about the rūh unless you don t want me to. Since it s the opposite of the nafs, we should talk about it. The nafs is always pulling us down to the earth, the rūh is always pulling us toward the heavens. The characteristic of the rūh is that being near to Allah Swt [is the rūh] is always reaching for even more closeness and nearness to Him; and the basis of this hope and aspiration in our hearts is this intense love of Allah Swt. This love is not only the result of the nearness or the awakening of the power of the rūh, but it is the very essence of the rūh. Allah says in Qur an, I have made him and breathed into him My spirit. So the nearest thing to Allah is his breath, and his own spirit, which is the rūh. This love of the spiritual self for Allah, one of our guides has told us, has three aspects: our dependence on Him, which gives us a sense of humility; resigning ourselves to the Will of Allah and inclining ourselves toward His praise, toward His worship, asking Him for His blessings; and the other is to please Allah. That is, to spend our energy, to sacrifice and make our efforts for Allah in performance for what Allah wills us to perform that we find in the Qur an and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (sal). Then, of course, it is to move toward Allah and try to come to a sense of union with Allah, even though that is fully impossible in this world; nonetheless, to become a mirror of His nūr, and to want to perfect our self so that we can become that kind of reflection. The rūh guides us, as we say, upward toward the Divine heavens, metaphorically, because it evokes in us a sense of purity and refinement, beauty and light, resonance and harmony, and balance. Consequently, as the rūh begins to dominate in our lives, it makes a person really have disdain for things that are impure and gross and ugly, dark and discordant, and contrary to the Will of Allah. To the point where a person 3
really can become angry in the presence of those attributes that are contrary to their own nature, because of a strong desire to change the situation, or change others, to transform those lower attributes, to remove them like they are impediments to the path, and destroy them. Since our spiritual self is not totally turned toward Allah Swt, but as we move and become more aware of the power of the rūh and its influence over us, we have to be very careful. These negative things that pull toward the selfishness and world, toward what is ugly and foul and destructive, immoral and unethical, create in us some of the time anger. Since the rūh is, by its own nature, a mirror or reflector of the Divine Qualities, and the seat of the assimilation of the manners of Allah, what happens is this kind of an interesting bifurcation. By nature, we reflect the Divine Qualities. As we develop, we have more sympathy and more kindness and more consonance with those qualities that we see in others. If we see even an iota of compassion, mercy, or love, caring or kindness or sweetness in others, it evokes those qualities in us. We, in turn, evoke it in others. It comes from Allah saying, My Mercy prevails over My anger. But that statement tells you that there is both. When you see ugliness, destruction, oppression, misery and intolerance, the hate of one being toward another, bias, or whatever it is, it brings anger. But when you see a flicker of goodness, it becomes mercy. In that way, it also reflects the Divine Qualities and Names of Allah. From these qualities, you get this kind of effulgence of selflessness, sincerity, and generosity, which in effect is an outpouring of love. When the rūh is enlightened or strong, of course, you get this kind of spiritual light that comes. It not only gives to other souls, but it also absorbs the light and strength from others as well. In the suhbat, the company of good people, in the tariqah, where you have people gathered together for the sake of Allah Swt like we are tonight, you contribute to each other s 4
development, to the flowering of the plant and the fruit that grows in that environment. At the same time, we have a deep upset and aversion to those who cover themselves in darkness, and who lie and are evil, and who are enemies of Allah Swt. That aversion can at times turn into anger, even violent anger. But even in the anger and intense disgust that a person near to Allah has toward the darkness it can be the darkness in another human being, or in the world; it can be ugliness in the attitude of one human being, or even a small quality of that ugliness in another human being that is covering over that compassion, mercy or light even in that, there is a mercy. The mercy in that is that in your anger you want to see a transformation of the dark or evil qualities into light and good qualities. So at the root of it is the hope for a person s freedom or salvation, whatever you want to call it. The nature of the spirit is of course the nature of the mercy of Allah, because Allah breathed it into us. The nature of rūh is the Mercy of Allah, but it becomes covered over by greed and selfishness. Someone who is near to Allah our shuyukh, the shaykh, the leaders will become so very angry at the darkness they would see in others. Understand, it is not anger at the person, but at the darkness, the evil that they see; hence, Imam Ali said to kill the assassin with one blow, and not to torture him. As one develops the rūh, it also has knowledge and insight. That knowledge and insight comes displayed as intuitive capabilities. It s the nature of that intuition to have a vision or direct experience of that Divine Presence. The reaction or the dynamic of the rūh has this intuitive quality. It often manifests as a kind of overwhelming awe, an awesomeness of the Divine that others don t see. It is not necessarily in the vision of other individuals. 5
Even though we may not see what someone else sees, the intuitive self perceives certain spiritual qualities in other human beings, and acts on that intuition. When one becomes very confident in that intuition, and the person is acting on that intuition, you can t explain it rationally. You can t really say, I m making this decision, or seeing this possibility, because X, Y, or Z has happened. And when that happens, this is the decision to make. It s not a logical imperative. As the rūh develops, as our awareness of that latifa develops, and as we see through that latifa more and more, we become more settled and more embracing of our intuition. When we are asked why we think this or do that, there s no answer because it comes from within ourselves. This is the rūh of the spiritual self, which is constantly shedding light on the qalb / heart. The rūh is trying to pull the heart always toward the love of Allah and always away from the attraction of the world. The nafs wants to capture the heart because the heart is so strong; and the rūh wants to pull the heart back so that the love is for Allah, not the love of this world. The passion is for the light and the truth, not for the lower nature. The desire is to be free of the attractions and the things that limit us, and all the darkness and prejudices and biases that we find in the world. The nafs is trying to say that this is the nature of the human being. This is the pull of the rūh. In the Qur an, Allah, referring to Rasulallah (sal), talks about these pulls. The lower self is trying to preserve the earthly existence; and the spiritual self, which is the house for aspiration toward the Divine, pulls us like a tug of war. These two opposite forces of nafs and rūh attract us upward and then downward, upward and then downward, over and over. We say that on the left shoulder is the negative force, and on the right shoulder is the positive force, and in between is the head. In between is the heart. The metaphor has been the ruler who has two advisors. The one on the right is a saintly advisor, a more ascetic person who is 6
always exhorting the ruler to remember Allah and love Allah, and to come near to Allah and uphold the dīn, and to be merciful and just to others. You just heard that in the will of Hazrat Ali. The other one, on the left, is the vizier who has to make sure there are necessary goods in the territory, who defends the borders against the enemies, and who has to protect all the assets of the king. By nature, that person is sort of greedy, plotting, cunning, because his ends are all protecting the wealth and power of the king. It s not just evil. There is this worldly reality. I was thinking about this when I heard the President speak today. A woman challenged him and challenged him. He was very kind to her and very tolerant, even praising her for speaking up to the President of the United States over these policies of Guantanamo, and drones, and things like that. He said, basically, this is America and this is what should happen. But very few people caught the subtlety of what he was saying, which was the impossible position he is in. If we do this, then the lives of the innocent people who were killed will haunt me and my generals for our whole lives. We ve never heard a George Bush say anything like that. He said things like, but if you don t defend against these attacks, then you are abandoning your responsibility to the people. If you do, and you have this damage, then you are criticized for that and rightly so. You listen to the speech; it s very subtle and very powerful. He s like the qalb being pulled in two directions. What business do we have holding people without giving them a trial? The prisoners are now on a hunger strike for 200 days. We are forcefeeding these people. How can that be right? They shouldn t be held, he said, but the political issues get in the way of doing what s right. Are we going to define ourselves b y these kinds of actions? And he defended the right to kill an American citizen who had abandoned the US and was actively plotting against it, but he virtually apologized for killing his son and others who were caught in the crossfire. This is 7
that pull. It was not so easy to know what was right and what was wrong, sometimes, like when you have a political and social job like the Prophet (sal) had. He was not just a religious figure who could sit easily in a temple or mosque somewhere and preach. He also had to make decisions daily, political and governmental decisions. By the way, the President pronounced every Arabic name exactly correctly. So I m sure people will call him a Muslim. This metaphor is, if the ruler abandons himself totally and permanently to the saint, he ll become so absorbed in the contemplation of Allah that he will have no desire left to set in order the affairs of his kingdom. If he has to be rightly guided in the conduct of his great office, he must continually be receiving knowledge and light from his mentor, and he must be inspired by him when managing the complex business of government. He may even entrust himself entirely to the saint for a period of spiritual training, after which he will then engage his purified talents in his hereditary duty. His companionship with the saint will provide him with universal principles of truth, and goodness, and the servantship of Allah, which he will have to apply to all the various situations confronting him during the administration of his affairs. On the other hand, he cannot ignore the rapacious and artful minister through whom he has orders executed in the kingdom. But unless his greed and pugnaciousness and the precept of his righteousness and benevolence the king has received from the saint, the minister will continue to be a cruel tyrant, filling all his neighboring kingdoms with terror and loathing, and violating the sanctity of their possessions and their honor. When properly disciplined and controlled, however, the energy, the resourcefulness, and worldly wisdom of the minister becomes his valuable instrument in the carrying out of his just and beneficial measures. 8
In other words, the buck stops here. You have to know who is advising you, and understand that by their position they will have a certain attraction to power in the world, while they are trying to protect the kingdom, the king, the wealth or the borders of the country. But if you give yourself totally to that concept and that philosophy, you will become this tyrant. It s not just, you let that man be a tyrant and you let the other man be a saint. Quite the contrary, the person in the center has to keep the vizier or minister who is protecting the country from becoming too dark by that job; and the saint, he has to keep grounded so that his advice and blessings apply to the reality of the world. This is not only the job on the large macro level, but it is the job of every shaykh. And it should be the job of every child and every parent, to a lesser degree. Who has to choose? The question is, politically, phrased in the idiom of the day, Was Barak Hussein Obama, on the day of the birth of his namesake s father, speaking from the heart? And he was, in my opinion, as much as a man in that powerful position can be. It s the heart that has to choose. It s the heart that is in the center, qalb. We begin with the heart, because the heart has to look to the nafs, to the rūh, to the sirr, to the khafī. It has to find its place in the center, because it is the heart that is choosing. This is the responsibility of choice. The responsibility of choice lies with the heart. The whole drama of human responsibility or answerability for one s actions is enacted in the heart. If the heart is cold, then the result will be cold. Then the leader will be a war mongering tyrant, empire-building, hegemonist, perpetually at war, which the President talked about. Thank God someone finally talked about the perpetual war, which I ve been talking about for the last 15 years, this neo-con mentality of perpetual war. 9
If he is inclined more toward saintliness, he will abandon his sense of responsibility to the world, and won t care what is happening, and won t be making good decisions. So it must be balanced. But, this idea is very good: always spend some time with the saint, with that saintly side of your being. Spend some time in muraqabah, or physically with the teacher, the guide. Spend some time there, then come back and turn your attention to your duties. Then spend some time. It s what I call applied Sufism. If you have just applied Sufism without the meditation, without the identification with Tasawwuf, with the Tariqah, what would you have? You would have no sense of duty and responsibility to the world, to the orphan, which are physical and metaphorical. Here we have a heart/qalb, which is receptive to both the influence of the rūh and the nafs. And it has the freedom to accept whatever influence it wills, because Allah gives us that freedom whatever amount, how much proportion. Upon this we have the foundation to build our purpose in life how we execute our purpose in life, and how we apply it in life, with these kinds of choices. How much we are pulled by the nafs, and how much we are pulled by the rūh [is determined by] what are we choosing, and what is the proportion we are choosing. In the course of this weighing back and forth, choosing between the whisperings and suggestions of the vizier, and the prayers and admonitions of the saint, the wali, the awliya-llāh, we develop character; we develop personality. Our qalb develops a very distinct character and personality. A characteristic nature forms a combination and proportion of these qualities of the rūh and the nafs. And that s who we are. That s why when, over a period of time, things degenerate in society, society doesn t have any more the ability to generate or create that balance. And then what? 10
Nafs, rūh, and qalb. That s it. And it came exactly on the day when the President was demonstrating this in a very practical way to us. I didn t set it up like that. I didn t know what he was going to talk about today. But it tells you something. If you don t have the love of Allah, you don t know how to love. That s the story of nafs and rūh and qalb. Question (Isa): I was thinking about the left and right shoulder and wondering about how it relates to encouraging good and forbidding evil. You mentioned last night that you have to speak about it to people. Shaykh: Are you making the analogy between the left shoulder and the right shoulder, and the minister and the saint? Isa: Is that it? You also said the minister has to do what he does, that it s not necessarily evil, but it s his job and responsibility to care for the kingdom. Shaykh: Two things. One is, as your intuition comes and you see the darkness and light more clearly, you can even develop such a degree of upset about that darkness that it can create anger which of course you ve never seen in me, but you can imagine what it might be like. When you see that kind of anger, it s not anger against a person, but against the ignorance and darkness and self-destructiveness of the individual. If you see it in the world and you see the negative forces that are trying to bring down the just king, let s say, then you need someone who sees that and advises. So the leader has his advisors, whose attention is always to the world, always to the society, to the money. In those people, you have ideologues. They are in that position because of an ideological reason, trying to promote something to try to manipulate the king to get their way. Then you have some people who really understand the king or president or leader or whoever, who clash with those people 11
and struggle for power with those people. They see the darkness in that ideological or selfish or greedy approach. The other people have been so much in that world that they become greedy and acquisitive and power hungry and oppress others. Their morality and ethic goes away. We saw that in the previous 10 years. It s not like I m saying anything political. Wars are fought. Hundreds of thousands of people die. Towns are destroyed, etc. etc. etc. Then there is the other side of it where people are trying to give good advice. You can t just say it s religious advice, because you can have ideologues on that side who are really on the worldly side. They just pretend to be on the Divine side. They re saying, No matter what we do, it is right. God is on our side. But you do have the good people, few and far between, who are not attached to that world. They can actually pull the heart toward what is good. In doing that, they keep the balance, and keep the center from being pulled down, or the leader from being pulled down. They have to resist the negative and still do the work. That is the head between the two angels on the shoulders, or the heart in the center of the body, between the pull of the rūh and the nafs. The pull of the world is extremely strong, because you are living in the world. The pull of the world to the spirit before it took body there was no attachment. But it was being pulled into the body into the womb of the mother. Then begins the challenge to raise the child in the way it should grow, so it does not stray from it, as it says in Deuteronomy in the Torah. That s the struggle of life, and the blessings of life sometimes are strange. Some people never have that problem. The Loris don t have that problem; and sometimes you pray that they have that problem in the future. There are certain children who are blessed. Ayla is blessed in this way. In a way, you have more time to work with this. You are not racing against time of the ego developing so much. In strange ways, the blessings come. 12
In the same way, the khanaqah, the community, the tariqah stands in the center. Unfortunately you don t have a very good leader, but I m the best you ve got. At least, we can explain this, and try hard, hard, hard to hold the center and incline ourselves always toward the good in our work in the world and serving humanity, in our public health work, and civil society work, and all the rest of it. Let those who say we are serving the politicians or whatever say it; it doesn t matter. You have to try to help people make good choices. What are good choices? They are good choices for the soul. Isa: On both sides, you also have to look at the actions are but by intentions of each? Shaykh: The good actions of the center, of the heart, hold the person, the vizier who is dealing with the world, from falling into the abyss of being totally corrupted, because he is living in a world of corruption. The pull of the world to some extent holds the saint from becoming so distracted or abstracted, like a majdhub, that his advice has no verity to it. So the center, the leader, prince, the king, the president, can t benefit from that advice, and things become disbalanced. When you have the theocratic mentality, it is problematic; or if you have the faqir who is so far out, they can t help anyone. But if you have the spiritually enlightened individual who is balanced, they will always help to keep the center. The same thing is going on inside every one of us in a microcosmic role. Question (Neelam): You also mentioned what are we choosing, and what are the proportions. What do you mean by proportion? Shaykh: The proportion is very important: how much time you spend on this, how much time you spend on that, how much of your attention and energy. Do you think you can get away with sitting once a day, once a week, once a month, never sitting, 13
never doing your prayers, never doing your prayers on time? It s all proportion. That s how much you are going to be attached to the world, how much you can be dragged down. It may have to do with your disease that you get. It may have to do with how you treat others and how they treat you. It may have to do with the decisions you make, and how it may adversely affect your life or someone else s life. This is why the Prophet (sal) always prayed for mizan, mizan, mizan people of the middle. But if you don t do these things, it catches up with you eventually. What is the proportion? I don t know. What is the intensity of your prayer? How sincere are you? You can tell yourself that you are one of the people who only has to do the prayer very quickly and get back to work, because you are so absorbed in the spiritual world that Allah is working through your hands and walking through your feet. You are Mother Teresa. But she spent long hours in prayer, and long hours in service. That s why Hazrat Ali said, don t leave the Qur an. Study the Qur an. Study the Shar īah, and the Hadith, and do what you are supposed to do. Neelam: I kept thinking about when your nafs crosses a line, and it opens up and makes it easier to cross the next line. Shaykh: Yes, of course. Everybody knows that. Once you open up Pandora s box, it s hard to get the snakes back in and close the box absolutely. But if you repent, Allah forgives you. If you depend on the forgiveness of people, well, you might spend your life waiting for that. But at least you know that Allah forgives you. Question (Basheera): I m trying to understand the effect of adab on the whole group, and how it would affect a larger 14
Shaykh: My talk on Sunday was on adab. It has a very strong effect. Adab is extremely important. It s your own adab that is most important. Judging the adab of someone else let him who is without sin cast the first stone. If your adab is not good, obviously you are going to be pulled toward the world. It s all interrelated. If you are trying to tell yourself, Oh, look, see how this is related to this and that, save your energy. It s all interrelated. If you really see it and it has an effect on you, that s good. We all find it exciting to see how things are linked together. When you see quantum physics linked with Tasawwuf and majaz and all that, it s very exciting. Why is it exciting? You start to realize there is only one truth. It is all linked together. Push here, it reacts there. Drop a stone in the pond, it radiates outward. Why is it exciting? It makes you feel that you are a part of the reality. The more you discover the linkages, the more you should be trying to be the qalb. We start with the qalb and we end with the qalb. You say, No, we end with nafs. We really end with qalb. Indirāj an-nihāyah fi l-bidāya. Our beginning is in the end. We begin where others end. Asalaam aleikum. 15