The Witness Within

What is the natural state of man, and where should we set expectations for ourselves? And what should we expect of our fellow beings? What should the standards be that we have for ourselves? In religious services in various religious institutions there are those who minister the flock, and then there’s the flock. So you have the one who leads the service and the ones who partake in the service. Bu...

When Bawa came he taught us about a monastic life outside of the monastery. There was no monastery except for his home. We lived in the world, we married and had children, but he spoke to us and he petitioned us and he implored us to live as if we were within a monastic setting in the world. And that’s the interesting aspect of entering reality in the way that we were taught. The monastery is some...

The story of Jesus according to the Christian tradition was that he taught until he was 33 years old, and then he was sentenced to be crucified by the Romans. And they in fact made him carry his own cross and then crucified him. And he died on the cross. And in that death he healed the world. Now, that’s a very interesting concept. The man considered the son of God by the Christians passed from th...

Psychologists talk about the influence of genetics and the influence of environment. And all of us live in some kind of an environment, and that environment has some kind of influence on us. When they say environment, they’re not talking about the temperature. They’re talking about the parent, the parental units and their influence on us and the cultural biases and those influences on us. So, each...

When Rumi met Shams and Shams took all of Rumi’s books that he was carrying with him and threw them in the river, at that time Rumi was considered the penultimate scholar of his region. He knew more than anyone at that time or at least that was how the people viewed him. And he was the one that people came to as the authority on things, yet he was now confronted with this semi-mad-appearing Afghan...

When a baby is born into this world, it has this incredibly soft skin and this amazing newborn smell, other than anything else that exists. You might even say it’s other worldly. And the experience with that baby becomes other worldly. And a baby is capable of taking you to other worlds, other spheres, and other consciousnesses. Whatever state you’re in, if somebody puts a newborn into your arms,...

Recently, I was travelling in the East, and I saw a young couple whom I knew and I was seeing them again. I was actually at their marriage, and about five years had passed since their marriage. And I looked at them, and it was evident to me they were a real couple. This was not people who were just hanging out together. These were people who were truly married to each other. And I said that to the...

If we go back into the spools of our memories and think to when we first discovered that there existed within us a yearning to know reality, a yearning to know who we are, an understanding that that which surrounded us and that which we were told was normative was in fact just an accepted script that was put in place because the people putting it in place knew nothing more than what that was, that...

In different phases of our lives, we have different possessions and certain of these possessions become very important to us. When we are a child, we might have a favorite blanket or a favorite toy. As we grow we gather different things, things we need, things we like, things we don’t need, things that are popular, things we think we should have. Now, imagine if you accumulated all of the things t...

Once I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled, and they shot me up with Novocain. And my tongue also became numb. Unbeknownst to myself while I was under the Novocain, I had bit a hole in my tongue, not a big one but enough so that when the Novocain wore off, my tongue was throbbing in pain. And that pain sort of disrupted everything I was doing to the point that it overwhelmed my consciousnes...

Bawa has told us that the world is full of hypnotisms and magnetisms, and what does that mean? What are these hypnotisms and magnetisms. Essentially, when you are going on this path, there are things that pull you off, things that take you away from the straight route, from the straight path. And they do it because of your inclinations. Now, your inclination is attracted to something that gives yo...

Somewhere in the progress of civilization, man came to the conclusion that he couldn’t trust other men. And to assist with that understanding, they established police forces. And the purpose of these police forces was to monitor the activities of people to make sure that they didn’t do things that they weren’t supposed to do. Soon after police forces were developed, jails were developed because th...

We’re going to do something different today. I’m going to read a song by Bawa Muhaiyaddeen from his new book called “Life is a Dream.” It’s called “I Had a Dream,” and it was written in 1946. I had a dream I had a dream about casting off my cares Closing my eyes And sleeping without sleeping

As one travels throughout the world, one runs into different political systems, different religious systems, different cultures. One of the things that people notice as they travel throughout the world is that religions change in different parts of the world. People view their relationship with God within a certain framework that is different from one place to another. In addition, there are diffe...