Becoming the Stillness Between the Breaths December 10, 2016 - Afternoon Session #2 Murshid Wali Ali reads from Murshid Sam s Sangatha: Lessons on Malikiyyat, the School of the Master: Toward the One, the perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty. United with all the Illuminated Souls who form the embodiment of the master, the Spirit of Guidance. Strength as an attribute of God is different from strength as an attribute of man. In man each attribute may appear as separate, and in God all the attributes, the Sifat-i-Allah, appear together. The Power that is in the universe is not apart from the Love and Beauty and Justice and Compassion and all other attributes. In the region of Unity they are together as one, but in the worlds of manifestation they became as if apart. The phrase Allahu Akbar which is most important for people who seek Mastery or who serve God in the path of Mastery, may of course, be translated as God is Great or God Alone is Great. But this is only the surface or shadow meaning. The very sounds have their imprint. The sound Akbar is not too different from the sound rock in English. A rock may appear very strong yet a tiny shrub may be able to split it. Why? Because the shrub contains the life-force and it is in the life-force and not in the Prakrit alone. Sufis differ from Hindus who place the Power in the Shakti or mother-side of God. The Sufis say the Power is in the Jalal, which is to say, the masculine aspect. This may be demonstrable. In his day Jesus Christ was called Master or Rabbi more than Messiah. He did exemplify the work of the Master and also the work of the Saint and also the work of the Prophet. Moses more exemplified the Master, yet in the books of the Bible more attention is paid to the teachings then to the person. Walis are theoretically of two types, Jalali and Jamali - Murshid Wali Ali interjects: You understand, this is about a wali jalali, those that are on the path of mastery rather than on the path of sainthood or those that want to orchestrate circumstances as the instruments of God. The saints are the ones who are resigned to everything; they accept everything and see light through that surrender. Murshid then continues reading the Sangatha: Walis are theoretically of two types, Jalali and Jamali and in the path of the Master we are concerned with the Wali Jalali. No doubt in history and in fact we cannot always distinguish, and sometimes the difference is one of function. A very compassionate and kind person may cover his attributes with his forcefulness and again a very forceful person may not show it. In the Taoist teaching this would be that the show of force might mean the absence of control or the existence of a very limited amount of power. And in the Chinese Tai-Chi the power is collected but not used as the generality conceives the use of power. In these teachings always Wisdom is the dominant note even though the world sees the manifestation of powers.
Despite the emphasis on Jalal in the school of the Master, this does not mean womankind is excluded. True, when the woman is Mother, it is a different line of development. Many women have been saints, are saints, but they are seldom Maliks. One must learn to repeat the Jalali Wazifas with wisdom and to use all power with Wisdom. This of itself requires much restraint and the need for the development of Insight and other hidden faculties. Murshid Wali Ali comments: You can t do the jalali wazifas with your ego and that s what these poor folks are doing when they shout Allahu Akbar and burn some innocent person up is they re imaging that they have this power of God in their ego to do and it s a gigantic mistake. Murshid continues reading the Sangatha: The Darood on the path of the Master is Allahu Akbar. When it is audible it is known as Wazifa and when it is in thought it is known as Fikr. On the path of the Master one has to learn to practice. It is a path of action, not of philosophy. And of this we read: People call them Masters, but they are in reality pupils; for, in point of view, no one in the world is Master save God. Man s privilege is to become a greater pupil. Thus there is the story of a sage in India who called everybody Murshid. He had reached the development where he saw the Divine Light in everybody. When one can see and appreciate this Divine Light, actually, not symbolically, then one can read the Divine Message in the person. And, as there is more of this Light in the humanity than in the rest of creation, one can learn to observe it most in people. Orpheus and Jesus Christ have been pictured carrying lambs. This is one aspect of the teaching. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together. It is only the lion-hearted who are capable of carrying lambs in this sense. Tasawwuri is a scientific, esoteric way of following in the footsteps of the wise and awakened. By so doing one is able to attune. If one has to become strong, he must also become wise. To feel: Allaho Akbar as In Peace is Strength (or Power) one has to perfect acquiring peacefulness. One way to do this is by the perfection of akashic breathing (Murshid Wali Ali comments: That s what we were doing as the ether breath. ), so that the breath becomes most refined. When it is able to reach all the centers, they become alive; they become centers of power and light, actually, not symbolically. The next phase is sympathetic attunement to the wise. Hercules may be regarded today as an Archetype. But the head of the Spiritual Hierarchy of all time, called Ghous-i- Azam, was Abdul Kadiri-Jilani. By attunement to him, by walking in his manner, by imitating his habits, one really is proceeding on the path of the Master. Murshid Wali Ali comments: These qualities of jamal and jalal are alive in male and female. It s harder for women to do it because they are mothers because they have to be tender in that way. Someone
asked, Looking at Samuel Lewis life, did he ever have any sexual relationships? Did he ever have any-? Ah no. As Gavin Arthur said, I think he was the only virgin I ever met...... He didn t have that kind of zzzz connection, you know but the hardest thing he ever did was become Sri Krishna in the dance and have that and bring out the love nature and do (arm gestures) because he d never done this in his life. So that really for him was the hardest tassawuri, but he did it so beautifully; and when he got into it, he did the flute of Krishna. When you think about Krishna, what do you think about? Do you think of jalal or jamal or Kemal or what? You think of jamal? Do you know that he fought a war; that not only did he mastermind the war to protect the dharma, he said, I ll only do it as a chariot driver. I won t actually do it, but he told them everything to do and he was quite in charge of the whole thing because he had to be because circumstances to protect the dharma required this, and this what he did. So he was all of it. He had the story of his youth with the gopis and all the rest of it, and you have the story of him as the advisor to Arjuna and the whole family in the Mahabarata. It s a beautiful, beautiful story, and Krishna is way more than just the love figure with the gopis. But that s where we know him; that s where the Sufi poets picked it up... so Krishna, who is the voice of the Bhagavad Gita- which was the first collection of all the teachings in one book in a complete form- he s now known primarily in groups as well, he s the one who danced with the gopis. And that s what Murshid did with his women disciples too; he would put them in a circle and each one would be he would dance with each one... Almost every other spiritual teacher I knew of got in trouble crossing the line with people sexually. That was never Sam s problem. But what he would do, he would take this tremendous body of energy that he had right here (indicates the back of the hips) in the spine and bring it up. It was all about raising people s energy up until you got them really high... And who became Radha in his dance? Taj. Taj who was then Jamila and that was before she met Pir Vilayat and became the mother of the Pir of the Inayati Order who is Zia...But just to say, we don t know what the roles mean that we take on. They arrive to us in different forms and we can t always judge by outer circumstances. Ya Dhal Jalali wal Ikram chanting This is a very good wazifah to practice with to be able to work with the jalali phrases in a way that is not ego centered in which you re trying to put forward your juice. This is not about that. This is about invoking the omnipotent power and so you have to be really empty of self in doing it and just give yourself over to the power of the sound that is coming through and not any sense that you re doing anything. Of course ikram means karim, or generosity of heart; but it s also an elative like akbar which means more than you could imagine. So it s generousness of heart more than you could imagine. Jalal is just the divine omnipotence and power of God so it s both. It s both the power and the generosity of heart, and so you get this tremendous embodiment....
Murshid did it in the manner that he d received in Pakistan because in Pakistan and India, the dh of Arabic, Ya Dhal becomes Ya Zal. They said the z sound instead of the d sound, like instead of dhikr it s zikr....i just want to say Murshid mentioned Abdul Qadir Jilani... he lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago. How is he still the head of the spiritual hierarchy? Because they don t disappear - those beings they re there in the inner worlds. They re like stars in the inner world, you know, but they re not separate stars. They re part of the body of the One Being; so if you are attracted to that Buddha land or that star, that presence, it s still there. And as he said I have my foot on the neck of all the Walis the Walis are all the saints meaning that you know not that gee I m so great it s just that that s the way it is...... Sam would say, I can do this and I can do that. People would say, What an ego! But he said, But I did do this and I can that. And if he would criticize something, he wouldn t be criticizing you, he would be criticizing that quality in you and there would no blame on you. He would always say, The first thing is don t react. And then he would maybe lay into you about something, but if you didn t react, you would just feel tremendous energy and blessing and good will towards your manifestation. Murshid proposes to lead the Ya Dhal Jalali Wal Ikram wazifah briefly before going into Allahu Akbar... (They begin)... Now wait. Stop! Before you go any further. Become empty before we go into this. Become totally empty. Ya Dhal Jalali Wal Ikram chant. (Silence after the chant).. Just breathe into that. That was beautifully done because people were pretty much empty and you could see the power in the sound rising, but it wasn t a power of egoness. It was just power as it comes from the Source. Murshid said he was on a retreat in Pakistan in the tomb of Mian Mir in Lahore and he would have discourse with the saint, which was often what happened for him in those dargahs. He (the saint) was giving him instructions on how to bring together the Sufis in India and Pakistan because now it was separated. One of the things he told him in the instructions was the real meaning, the inner meaning of Allahu Akbar was peace is power: all power comes from this absolute condition peace. That s how this song developed from that. Allahu Akbar, Ya Salaam song Now in line with the teachings on mastery, let s take up this practice from Murshid and Hazrat Inayat Khan: In unison with the will of God, we will to have peace....it s not about saying it; it s about breathing it and entering this state that we are feeling here with Allahu Akbar and Ya Dhal Jalali Wal Ikram - this state where you can be totally empty of self and feel that you are participating in this expression of divine strength, peace, power. Here it s peace, so breathing peace into the air of our relations on our planet earth here. Let s go from this inner place in unison with the will of God. Find that
peace that is the source of all power and breathe from that place with confidence feeling all of your brothers and sisters from all over as a part of this process. (Silent meditation.) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ So now if you were to do this as a walk of mastery from the way Murshid Sam would do it, you would come from this place of surrender of self, of coming from that primordial peace, that original face of being and maintaining a total sobriety, no reactivity. Whatever is in the scope of your heart is the universe that you re functioning in, that what you re aware of, what you care about, that s where your focus is is where your energy is going. So you just look into it with that same quality that Quan Yin has, that the Divine Female has of accepting all of these conditions. You re not judging the people, the conditions, or anything, but you are breathing peace into it. You are molding it by just your breath in participating with the energy of all of these people; and your breath is a very powerful vehicle, whether you know it or not, and sometimes you do come to know that it is. Then when you re breathing in harmony and you ve set the ego aside in the intention that is there, it can have a tremendous amount of power. There s a tremendous amount of power just in thinking it will have a tremendous amount of power. When the dances started in this room, Murshid Sam said, They will go all around the world. I guarantee it. And the reason is they don t belong to me, they belong to God. They re for the benefit of all and not for some particular individual purpose. And they have gone all around the world; they continue to be actively done in more than 30 countries. That s not just because he said it, because it was the power that was in it and the power that was in it was unselfish and it came from that place of What can we offer to ease the pain of humanity? What can we offer to raise people up? So if you re doing this walk, you re just doing the meditation we just did, only you re moving, and by putting it into motion you re indicating an activity and not simply a reflection. So that s always important. I mean if we were going to concentrate on the earthquake that hit Pakistan recently, we d send blankets there too. We wouldn t just send prayers some activity that connects with some contemplation. So we re not going to do that now, because the time is eating up and we got into it from a sitting place. Om Nama Shivaya Dance Shiva Square Dance excerpt Murshid reads the practice & commentary of Lakshman Joo from the Vijñana Bhairava [#109]: The Supreme Lord is omniscient, omnipotent and all pervading. I myself am He or she or that. By such a firm meditation, one becomes Shiva. [Murshid] When you say omniscient, omnipotent and all pervading you ve got God there for every philosopher. You don t need to add a lot of bells and whistles. Let s see,
omnipotent - all powerful; omniscient - knows everything; all-pervading - nothing is separate from it that s God. By such a firm meditation, one becomes Shiva. You see the Hindus were not embarrassed with the idea that a human being could be a manifestation of God. It made people very nervous when people were thinking of Jesus in that way. It s something between the different cultural relationships to it. You still have it today. [Murshid tells of daughter s hajj in Mecca and the picture she took of obelisks with signs saying Do not pray here, a result of the narrowing concept of Islam of Wahhabism that separates God from people. He then told of Murshid Sam s discussion with a very critical conservative in Pakistan to whom SAM finally said, Okay, I ll continue in this conversation on one condition: Before either one of us says anything, we say Bismillah, ar-rahman ar-rahim, and the other person couldn t do it he couldn t invoke loving compassion & mercy then continue his condemnatory speech ] People forget. They forget the compassion of Buddha, they just go for the intellectual side of it. They forget the compassion of Allah; they just go for the legal side of it. They re afraid of entering the inner sanctum. In this book and in the work of the Sufis and all those that are truly mystical people in all the different religions it s all about coming into Oneness. There s no separation. And that s what this is about. And now I m going to give you his [Joo s] interpretation because it will help you get into it: In fact, Lord Shiva is all full of knowledge, full of action and allpervading.... Concentrate on Lord Shiva for a while. Murshid comments before you do this, before you start trying to say I am He, God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all-pervading and I am He,...concentrate on Lord Shiva for a while... Then after a while, when you have fully concentrated on the awareness of Lord Shiva, put that awareness in your own consciousness. In your own individual being, think that your individual consciousness is one with that of Lord Shiva who is all knowledge, all action, all-pervading. In this way, when your mind and awareness are firmly established you become one with Shiva. So just take a minute at the beginning to just dwell in your consciousness on Shiva. Get Shiva clear in your being: all-pervading, all knowing, all-powerful, but feeling it in relation to you. Feel all that power that is embodied in Shiva...After you ve reflected on it, now you feel it, now you bring it into your own consciousness and know that you re not separate from that, that you are that. You affirm that that is your essence; that your atman is that Brahman. (Meditation) [Spoken during the meditation]: All-pervading, all powerful, all knowing, I am That. I am that being. I m not separate from that being. Incorporate that my understanding of myself. I become That.] ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So that s a taste of just coming into oneness with Shiva. It s hard to do if one doesn t have an inner, cultivated relationship with the being. I mean all-pervading, omniscient, omnipotent okay that s God, I mean I can do that with God, but what is God for me? What is God but a concept? How much of God have I experienced to know God as a friend, let s say, or God as an inner experience, rather than knowing God as some belief system? It s penetrating through the symbolism of things to the essence that is where realization is really felt. So we want to always keep wanting to cultivate that essence, even when we fall short. Because then in the infinite scheme of things, our intention has a tremendous part to play in our success....murshid reads a Rumi poem... I circle your nest tonight, around and around until morning when a breath of air says, Now, and the Friend holds up like a goblet some anonymous skull. I am filled with you. Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul. There's no room for lack of trust, or trust. Nothing in this existence but that existence Don t forget the nut, Being so proud of the shell. The body has its inward ways,the five senses. They crack open, and the friend is revealed. Crack open the friend, you become the all-one. You see Shiva here? It s all about becoming the All-One, whether you take the wazaif or you take through yoga, you take it through religious ritual which you enrich with the depth of your attention and your stillness in your meditation or your prayers. There s so many ways to do it, but it s just a matter of being true to one s intention. As Murshid Sam used to say, I m entitled, I m allowed to be positive (meaning very jelali, very assertive of will, very masterful like, not just waiting for things to happen, accepting and adjusting, taking charge of the atmosphere) I m allowed to be positive, he said, because when I sense that I m off-key, I m out of line, I can drop it in a minute. I m not attached to it at all; put my head on the floor, empty out, and start fresh. And since I can do that, I m allowed to be positive. Think about that for a minute. What allows you to be positive? You might make a mistake by being positive, but if you re quite willing to acknowledge it, to empty yourself of it, to put your head on the ground and represent your own emptiness before that
which is absolute and true, then you can start fresh. If everybody of goodwill is afraid of asserting their will because they might be wrong and they might make a mistake and they might hurt somebody, who s going to be asserting will in this world but people who don t care about that? So, take it to heart that there s something in it for you to proceed with sincerely no matter whether you re Shiva-like or not in terms of your being, you can take this step forward in this way and be in unison with the will of God in whatever form it takes. I m not saying one form is right; I m just saying this is a yoga system that is monistic and everything mystical is monistic. There is a Oneness that is all pervading, that is both transcendent and inseparable from creation. That s the reality and so we look for that in our practice. A student shares that the Shiva meditation was so far above him as he even has trouble imagining being one with an omniscient, all-pervading, all-powerful being, so that even taking the first step was difficult, whereas with compassion, he can imagine compassion. Murshid responds: Yeah take the first step. You can take the step of compassion. The path of compassion is great; the path of awakening the heart is terrific. So many of these practices I haven t gotten to them are all about that. Consider the fullness of everything that is is your own body of bliss. You can do that because you re in touch with happiness, you re in touch with love and joy so that you can imagine your body in this infinite space being full of bliss. It s like Papa Ramdas. He said Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram constantly with the sense [that] he saw Ram in everything. His state was a state of tremendous joy and happiness because he saw through it. World as God is one of the books because he sees through the It s like someone asked Buddha, How can you be the head of this world? Look at this world: it s so screwed up; and that s when he put his hand on the earth bearing witness and he says, Okay, bear witness. And then they could see the world the way that he saw it with the depth of the reality that is behind appearances....that compassionate function is always there and it can be a central light for us because if we can awaken the heart, we can enter into the great bliss. For example, if you were doing the Milarepa mantra, the one you might be doing is Aham Mahaa Sukham, Aham Mahaa Sukham I am the Great Bliss, I am the Great Bliss. [repeated a few more times] I ve been doing Milarepa; I ve been trying to enter the consciousness of Milarepa as a way of entering the Buddha consciousness of my own essential being, so that s why I say I am That. I affirm it. I affirm I am not separate from it. We can say God is the only being when we say the Sufi invocation, but do we really mean that? Can we really see that? Can we live from that and when we don t see it, can we still see it in what we don t see? (Murshid tells a story of how when he was a boy, the Rabbi couldn t answer his question about why God caused Pharaoh s heart to hardened which then resulted in a plague. This caused him to feel all this religion is a bunch of junk. ) But the truth is God is not separate from any action. In the depth of being, it is all an activity of the One and Only Being, the eternal activity of the One and
Only Being. And if you have the eyes of a Papa Ramdas or a Milarepa or a Mary or a Quan Yin, then you can see through that glaze to the essence that is there. If you identify with that essence, you become an embodiment of it more and more and just saying that, making that affirmation itself is like making that intention. You re not going to be tested: Okay, I m sorry, you re only 17% of the way there....so, it is all God, but there s compassion and there s love, there s harmony and there s beauty and there s this tremendous oneness of feeling that makes for great joy and happiness and being together and that s what the bodhisattva is here to do to help people awaken, because everybody has the possibility and there s no point in judging people or saying they re so below you in their understanding to even talk to like people did in this election so partisanized. Everybody is sacred in their depth, but if you can t deal with them, you can be a fudo; you can be a Jalal, you can take the path of mastery, you can burn up the ignorance as long as you don t care if you re burning yourself up in the process, as Murshid Sam said. You can be an instrument of the divine wrathful deity in that way, because it s really the Spirit of Guidance. All the illuminated souls provide this body of living consciousness that is enduring and interacting in the world and we draw from that. We can draw from that wisdom; we can play a part in helping people awaken, because it all comes down to our relationship to our ego and how tied up we are with it and how narcissistic we are about ourselves. So, if we can address that in ourselves, we can address that in humanity through our breath, through the radiation of our heart, through our intelligence in our communication, through not being triggered just by random acts of violence, but instead to go deep and to look deep and to come from that deep place and not to back down, to speak truth to power and not to be afraid, because God is allpowerful and so whatever happens, you can burn yourself up in the process. Everybody doesn t have to be a martyr, but sometimes you re put on that path to do that. So I m trying to defend the jalali in a certain way, because I want to encourage people to be more expressive in their own power and take the chance to be powerful and not to just worry that you might make a mistake. Because if you do make a mistake, you acknowledge it before Reality and whoever else that you need to you put your head on the floor, you empty out, and you start fresh. So then that gives you permission to be powerful, to act, to express and not just wait until you re 100% sure. You won t be 100% sure until you ve actually done something. (Murshid winds up the session.)