THE SUFI WAY OF SELF-UNFOLDMENT
(Excerpts Only)

By: Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri

Chapter 6
On Awareness

There are primarily four clearly definable levels of consciousness. One is that of wakefulness; another level is sleep; another is that of the dream state. Every level of consciousness has its boundary and limiting factors. And when we move from one system to another there is an interphasing zone. For example, there is a brief interface between being asleep and awakening.

The fourth dimension of consciousness deals with the essential natures of life and death and their source. We all know that we will die, and this experience is entirely different from others. As far as the body is concerned, we have borrowed the minerals for a few years from the earth and then we return them by final burial. What happens thereafter we cannot describe or prove.

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Discrimination and integration

Awareness and discrimination are the keys to intelligence, to awakening, to living fully. When you are fully aware, it means that you are living that consciousness totally. To be fully conscious in our state of awakening means being an integrated, whole and gathered being. Full and available energy is equal to being totally alive and aware. It is not, as we see practiced in most religious systems, the continual inner conflict between the judge and the judged, the observation of one person by another. How can you say, 'I did a bad thing'? Are there two of you – one judging the other? If there are two, that means there is no unified center from which you are observing. That means the inner vessel which contains you is shattered. It is for this reason we immerse ourselves in the various roles which we play in this world. But in order to switch over from role to role there is a tremendous break within us.

What do we do to bridge this gap or stop this conflict? We have to take a powerful medication: it may be drinks, drugs or any other form of sedation which does not cure. Because there is inherent conflict, there is no one center of consciousness; because the vessel is broken, we have to patch it up. At present, the level of consciousness on which we function is in tremendous chaos. The 'I', the being, the individual, is confused, and oscillates between sets of values.

This crucial issue of awareness and discrimination is constantly referred to in the Qur`an: 'Don't you see, can't you comprehend, can't you hear?' If there is an observer and an observed, then you are in conflict. If you take the normal or practiced ethics of, for example, Christianity, or the Islam of today, there are the judge and the judged. But how can there be two within the same individual? How does this dichotomy arise? It comes about because the individual is not yet awake; he is not even on the level of consciousness of being fully awake physically. He is shattered.

What should be understood is that awareness implies gatheredness, oneness, beingness and full alertness. You are whatever it is you are doing. The reason we are not totally aware is because we have allowed ourselves to wallow in all the bad habits of the past, and therefore we are wrecks, we do not know whether we are coming or going. We are walking in one particular direction, yet our face is turned towards another. Then when we trip, we say it was bad luck or the pavement was slippery. This is nonsense. They asked the Prophet, 'What is a Muslim?' He said, 'It is a person who surrenders his face to Allah'. What does this mean? The implication is that the direction of the face is the direction to which we are turning, towards our actions. If we have abandoned hankering after the fruits of action, fear of the future, and all other psychological aberrations, then that action is a pure action. This is what is called dedication to God. It is towards and for the absolute, it is for totality, and not for any specific personal purpose.

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The beginning of awakening is simply seeing yourself as an integrated, full being. We talked about the integration of the world. The whole world is one. So how about you? You must also be one. From that centralized oneness comes full awareness and discrimination. From the one comes two. This is where the dilemma really begins. Nothing exists, be it material, thought, or otherwise, except in one of two forms or models: at the abstract level (for example, good or bad) and at the physical level (for example, hard or soft). Every mode or form has its root in the opposite. The truth is as rigid and as dear as the laws of gravity. Everything in this in this life is governed by laws. The reason we do not see them is because they are superimposed upon each other, and their sum total is the present reality.

We are governed by that absolute Reality which we call God. The object of being alive is to impartially take cognizance of that. If you do not see that, if you only look from an individual's colored point of view, then there is no start. The storage area of each individual's mind is colored differently, and therefore each person colors reality only the way he likes it. There is nothing wrong in seeing things colored; this is also real, since every system perpetuates itself. Every system perpetuates itself because there is nothing other than perpetuity, totality, permanency in Reality. But this human entity, the body – mind – intellect, lasts only for a lifetime, and that is all. Life as such continues.

Pure action

At the moment, most of us are reacting. We have a certain concept of life, a so-called past, mind, intellectual familiarities; and we have, so far, tried to be in an environment which matches all this, so that there is the least friction. This search for peace or minimizing friction or conflict motivates us in every action. This is the matching game that we talked about. As a result of that, whatever we do is a reaction to the stimuli which come from the outside. But what is action? What is pure action? Pure action is that which we all wish to perform, or want to carry out. It is that state of the creative being – musician or ballerina – which is spontaneous and joyfully free. Why do people go through all the trouble to have a little hut without telephones somewhere by the sea and far away from everybody? So that for two hours a week Mr. Smith can sit quietly and hope to be in that inspired state. What does that mean? It means he wants to be in a state where he can act purely; he wants pure action. This is that state which all of us aspire to in different degrees and according to our past experiences. It is for this reason that we love the child. We say, 'Look at him, he is so spontaneous'. Why should adults not be spontaneous? with the wisdom of a grown-up being, not with the child-like foolishness of a man at the age of sixty-five running around with a hockey stick? What is happening in most of our societies nowadays is that we do not grow up inwardly. We only become old and die. Pure action can only stem from pure awareness. It is up to the individual to put this reality to the test in everyday life.

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Everything we observe is in two. Everything we see is in two. Chapter 55, The Beneficent, in the Qur`an addresses the two types of Creation in detail, and there are many other references to this separation. Whatever we can see in this life, in the consciousness of awakening, is in one of two forms or norms. Much confusion arises as to why there are two, because man can only accept one. We are born in order to reach Divine Unity, in order to reach the Unity through diversity. The more the individual is unified inwardly, which is again nearness to the state of total awareness, the more he can discriminate and see duality. The more you are aware the more you begin to see the scintillating, unifying pointedness of existence. Then your actions begin to be pure. The more you are in gatheredness and unity, the more you can discriminate. The more we become alert, the more we become inwardly single-pointed, the more we observe, the more we can see.

There is dynamic interchange – you are one with the cosmos, you are the microcosm, you have everything within you. If it is not within you, how would you comprehend what is being said? It is all within you, but on a micro-scale. You are the scintillating star, you are the drop in the ocean. But there is only one drop, only one short lifetime, and if you fritter it away, you will not understand it. It is by diving within yourself that you can really understand its inherent perpetual everlasting nature, which we said is akin to, or has come from, what we call pure light; in other words, from God. You owe it to nobody but yourself, but this knowledge can only come from that inward yearning.

Outward practice as a path to awareness

Within every system of knowledge there are certain practices which must be performed. Unless the basic reasons for them are understood, these practices may appear to be only superstitious or ritualistic. We shall explore this in more detail in Part II, but let us look at some of them briefly here.

We must first bear in mind that Islam is a road towards inner freedom and abandonment. It is the abandonment of the 'I', the arrogant ego, attachments and desires. It is a system of elimination, doing without, of veering towards freedom. It is essentially based on going through certain exercises in order to make awareness habitual, spontaneous, and total. This is the reason for the prayers.

The five prayers always begin with Allahu akbar (God is greater). This is the highest state of the awakening of the individual, in that his first thought is that something else is greater and it is to be sought. At first we think that wealth is to be sought, because it is power which brings about a measure of freedom. But any intelligent person able to accumulate money finds that it is not sufficiently satisfying, it is not the greatest thing. There are still many goals and objectives in life which are not possible to acquire with money alone. Whatever we have attained, be it recognition, reputation or property, we may think it to be the ultimate; but, if we are alert, intelligent, and endowed with sufficient courage and opportunity to indulge in the experience, a saturation point will be reached where we find that the particular goal does not fulfill us. We may reach a state where we find nothing that we veered towards, nor all the objectives that we sought, to be totally fulfilling. So we call the ultimate objective God. That which we do not yet know is akbar, greater than anything that can be perceived or conceived of. So the beginning of the prayer is submission. You must be in tune with it from the very start, otherwise it becomes mere superstition, without real lasting meaning. It will be a practice without a deep base.

The meaning of fasting is not understood by most people. Fasting is, among its many other virtues, a reminder of one's habits. You may have a habit of constantly picking at the food on the coffee table, as most of us nowadays do. Conscious abstention shows us just how much we have been imprisoned by our habits. It shows up our self – it illustrates our pseudo-dependence on all these useless habits. Fasting calls the bluff of the self. Like prayer, fasting is a deep shock to the entire system. We have to use crutches in order to rehabilitate the individual to his fullest potential. That fullness is based on pure and simple beingness, which we call awareness. And from that awareness comes spontaneous discrimination. That is why we say the Sufi is a person who does not cause himself any harm, and as a result of that he does not cause anybody else harm.