The Witness Within

The mind is our closest and most constant companion. We have lots of friends who know a little bit about us and who spend time with us and have known us for different portions of our lives, but our mind has known us since we were born. And depending on the acuity of our memory, it remembers all that we’ve been through or at least a pretty good portion of what we’ve been through. And it highlights...

We live in a world of form, and each of us is encased in form. Yet we are told that reality exists in a formless state, that He is beyond form and description. The Quran prohibits the use of images. The Torah prohibits the use of images. And many of the Protestant churches don’t use images. Why the prohibition against images, and what’s the meaning of this prohibition? Our attachment to form is so...

I grew up in a small town, a farming community. And while I lived there, that little place to me was the center of the universe. I thought that’s the way things were, and all examples of everything could be found within the confines of the small town that I grew up in. Travelling was something we didn’t do very often. And when we did, what today is considered a short excursion, at that time was a...

The great saint Rabia said, “I don’t desire heaven, and I don’t fear hell,” a well-known iconic statement. What’s it mean? In the understanding of things at the end of times, people are going to be doing things for two reasons and two reasons only. They are going to be looking for rewards, a desire for reward, and in response to fear of punishment. So, the motivations for people’s acts are going t...

We speak of this life and the next life. We speak of the time before this earthly body occurred and the time after. This body as we know it disappears. Well, if we are talking about times before, during, and after this body; we must consider what is the function of this body in our existence and who or what were we before this body and who or what are we after this body because we are all very con...

At the center, at the core, at the apex of religious belief in Islam is the statement of faith, also known as the kalimah. And it is “La illaha il Allah; Muhammadur Rasul-Allah.” What’s interesting is that there are two sections to this, and the second part, “Muhammadur Rasul-Allah” means Muhammad is His Rasul, is His Prophet, is His Messenger, is the one who brings the understanding of the way. A...

Recently in Camodia during the reign of someone called Pol Pot in something called the Khmer Rouge…Khmer is an ancient name for Cambodia, and rouge means red. That was to signify the new coming of the new ideas they were bringing into Cambodia which were essentially Communist or at least their idea of communism. There was a group who felt very strongly about their ideas. And they felt that they ne...

We live in a world where we understand things through our perceptions. Our perceptions are limited, so the understanding that we can have through our perceptions is a limited understanding. However, we have other faculties besides our senses. In addition to our senses, we have the ability to have faith, to believe things that we don’t see, hear, taste that we sense in an entirely different way. An...

In the world there are information sources, institutions, individuals, media types, various forms of media, that claim to give you information. And when we’re born, we’re born into all of the existing media outputs that exist in the area where we grow up, where we’re born, where we live. We’re taught to accept these information outputs as legitamate. For instance, as a child you’re sent to school,...

There are a lot of phases in life. We start out as absolutely dependent infants, and we move on. Some of us change phases as we move on. Some of us get stuck in phases as we go along. It’s been said that you can’t really begin to study and/or understand mysticism until you’re about 40. It’s also been said that if you don’t start when you’re young, you’re never going to be agile enough to begin whe...

A lot of people spend their time studying scripture, and they become experts at scripture and what’s involved in scripture. Some even get to the point where they memorize scripture and can repeat the words in the books. However, those words have to be applied. Those words have to be used for some end. Even though those words of their own are holy, that holiness has to be taken and used by humanity...

Imagine if you had a job, and your boss sent you somewhere to accomplish a specific task. And when you got there, you got involved in about ninteen other things and came back and then told the boss, “Well, I did this…this…and this, but I didn’t do what you had asked me to do. If the boss wanted that one thing done and that was the most important thing to him, what’s the use of the other things tha...

In this world we make a lot of assumptions. A lot of these assumptions are based on what we are taught and the way our culture views certain things. Essentially what the culture does is it prioritizes things. It considers certain things good and certain things bad, certain things high and certain things low, certain things successful and certain things unsuccessful. And we as individuals, because...

It’s very difficult to conceptualize what we can’t see. It’s very difficult to imagine what we’ve never encountered. Even though people explain things to us and tell us that this is the way things are, it’s difficult for us to incorporate ideas into our being as if they were real until we somehow are able to fully grasp them and integrate their meaning into ourselves. For instance, when people say...

In religion there is often a difficulty between the form and the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the spirit. And there are those who are very much in the form. And the ones who believe very very strongly in the form see those in the spirit as apostates or heretics. They see them as a danger to their well thought out world that they’ve put together and that they’ve described and th...

“Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there — heaven.” Those are the words that start an old spiritual. There are more words to it, but that is the refrain. It’s an interesting refrain because talking about it isn’t the same as doing something about it. There are lots of implications from the refrain, but I’m going to choose to use that implication. “Everybody talking ’bout, nobody going there —...

Among young people, videos games is something that a lot of them do. And there are different types of video games. But one of the consistent genres is the war game where you are the shooter, and your perspective in this game is essentially looking through the barrel of a gun or rather over the sight of a gun. And you keep going through rooms with this perspective. So, you’re constantly seeing ever...

Freud is generally considered the father of psychology. What is psychology? Well, when Freud came along, all of a sudden people in the medical circles began to think about the psychological makeup of their patients and what they could do to help people who had no apparent physical ailments but had really difficult psychological ailments. They locked a lot of these people up. Of course, in the begi...

There are still Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museums in the world, and a few days ago I passed one. There was a loudspeaker in front of it trying to draw you in. It was talking about the lizard-man, who had had his entire body tatooed as a lizard, and he only had a little bit left to go. And he would be a lizard entirely. I thought this was interesting. If you tatoo yourself in a certain way, you be...