The Witness Within

Questioner: Thank you Musa for that talk and as a follow up question to that, can you tell us why so many people miss their birthright and why we are so unaware of what is available to us and we go about our lives without fully taking advantage of our birthright and understanding what is available to us? Musa: There are lots of reasons. And the reasons are similar yet different for each of us. The...

May the peace of God be with you, may His grace envelop you and embrace you, may His peace integrate into your being and may you know that peace. As with most things, the path begins with knowledge. Knowledge is the light that sets you on a path. And like a light that knowledge needs to be used. Used on your own being. A candle can light the way for you or a candle can be kept in one place. You ca...

In society if our behavior becomes inappropriate, things occur that put us outside of society. For instance, if you break the laws they put you in jail. You’re not allowed to be with the rest of society. On the spiritual path it’s also like this, only it’s not visible. And people don’t understand the separation. In the physical society if somebody gets put into jail, they are behind bars, they are...

This is a path for lovers. The question though often is how does one become a lover? And how do you know whether you are in that state, or you are in some other state? Well, self love is the love that most of us know. The ego centric self and it’s total involvement with the self and the constant attempt to raise up and satisfy the desires of the self. But to be a lover is not so much about your in...

One of the five requisite duties of Islam is pilgrimage, the hajj. However, the other religions also have pilgrimage. And besides the hajj in Islam people also do smaller pilgrimages known as umrah, which is a pilgrimage to Mecca not during the month of hajj, but at other times during the year. For about ten years I took people on this smaller pilgrimage called umrah every year. And found a lot of...

In German there is an expression, “man ist was er isst,” which means — it’s a pun — translated in English, “You are what you eat.” But in German, “ist, i-s-t,” means “are,” and “isst, i-s-s-t,” means “eat.” So you eat what you eat, you are what you are, you eat what you are, you are what you eat! And we translate it into, “You are what you eat.” So, the point is, essentially, that which you put in...

The word kalimah, as in the first kalimah, means affirmation of the faith. It’s very similar to the word shahādah, witnessing. And the first kalimah in Islam, the first affirmation is Lā ilāha illallāhu Muhammadur-Rasūlullāh. The typical Islamic translation is, there is no deity but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God. I’m going to deal with the first part of the kalimah, Lā ilāha illallāhu. Th...

As we walk through the world we are constantly influenced by everything that we interact with. We bring outside influences into our being, consciously or unconsciously. We allow them to enter into our being and they have an effect on us. For instance, the mere act of opening a newspaper in the morning is allowing outside influence into your consciousness. How often have you opened up the newspaper...

There is a story that I like a lot, that I’ve probably told before, but I’m going to tell it now. It’s about group of boys who were working at a hazel nut farm. And they were gathering hazel nuts for the farmer and at the end of the day he paid them with a large bag of hazel nuts. And they were talking amongst each other as to how to divide this bag of hazelnuts. And one of them said, “Let’s go to...

Unless you could do addition and subtraction, it’s unlikely you’d be able to do multiplication. There’s a certain progression to things. And if we don’t understand that, we move forward not because of understanding things but because of ignorance and arrogance. Ignorance and arrogance combined take you to places where angels fear to tread. We need to be able to see the limitations of where the act...

This past week I turned on the television and I saw a vision on the TV of people appearing to be standing on water, a lot of them. In fact they weren’t standing on water, they were standing on the wing of an airplane, that was partially submerged and it just looked like they were standing on water. But it didn’t make it any less of a miracle. Of course everybody knows what I am talking about, and...