Summary
Kabir Helminski recounts an early awakening and his movement from Eastern practices into the Sufi tradition of Rumi. He explains Sufism as an experiential, relational path rooted in Islam, spiritual courtesy, inclusiveness, and responsible guidance.
Questions This Interview Explores
- What is Sufism, and how does it relate to Islam?
- How can a spiritual tradition honor other religions without claiming exclusive truth?
- What roles do teachers and community play in spiritual development?
- How should Quranic passages about violence be understood in their historical context?
- How can spiritual teachers challenge students without becoming abusive?
Key takeaways
- Sufism joins disciplined practice with love, self-knowledge, and heightened awareness.
- Traditional Islam has historically included and protected other faith communities.
- A spiritual path can be rooted in one tradition while remaining open to universal truth.
- Teachers and communities help transform insight into an embodied way of life.
- Authentic guidance may be firm, but it should arise from love and respect.
- Spiritual courtesy, or adab, is central to Sufi practice.
Transcript
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 430 of them now, and if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see all the previous ones organized in various ways.
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Okay, thanks. So my guest today is Kabir Helminski. Kabir is a Shaykh in the lineage of Rumi and co-director of the Threshold Society, Sufism.org. His translations of Rumi and books on spirituality, Living Presence and The Knowing Heart, have been published in at least eight languages. Living Presence, which I read cover to cover and we’ll be talking about a lot, is now being published in a commemorative edition. In subsequent years, Kabir was named as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world by the Royal Strategic Studies Center in Jordan. He’s toured North America as Shaykh with the whirling dervishes of Turkey, bringing Sufi culture to more than a hundred thousand people. His latest book is Holistic Islam. So welcome, Kabir. It’s good to have you here.
Kabir: Thank you, Rick. Thanks for inviting me.
Rick: Yeah, and as I often say when I do these interviews—and it’s very true of you also—I thoroughly enjoyed preparing for this one, reading your book in its entirety, the Living Presence book, and listening to quite a few hours of your talks. The impression I got in doing both of those things was a lot of heart, a lot of tenderness, softness of heart, which is a quality I very much admire, and a lot of wisdom. And I don’t think those two are utterly disconnected from one another, but the wisdom is expressed in words and the heart is expressed in feeling. They’re very intertwined, and that came through very nicely in your talks and your book. So I appreciate that.
Kabir: Thank you, Rick. Thank you so much.
Rick: So these interviews usually consist of two main ingredients. One is the person’s story—you know, how they kind of got to be where they are today. Some people dismiss stories; they say, “Oh, it’s just the story. It’s about an individual, and I’m so much more than that.” But it helps people relate. It helps people think, “Oh yeah, that’s kind of like me. I went through that, and yeah, look how he’s doing, and so maybe there’s hope for me.”
Another obvious ingredient is the knowledge or the wisdom that the person wishes to impart—the wisdom of a tradition or whatever they have gleaned from their own awakening. So hopefully we’ll cover both of those quite thoroughly today. Let’s start with your story. You’re about my age, I guess, late 60s, and probably went through some of the same things I did in the ’60s. I imagine you really got inspired by the vision of possibilities that you somehow stumbled upon during those times and then took it from there, following your intuition and your experience and so on. Is that a fair summary of what happened?
Kabir: Well said, Rick. There was an opening that happened for me one very cold night on a lake in New Hampshire, underneath magnificent stars, in which the worlds I had known dissolved and another universe opened up. I saw, as I expressed it at the time, the simple truth that it is—that it’s that simple: it is.
It is. It’s that simple: it is.
I had some good friends who also understood the nature of this “is,” and I think I’ve spent the rest of my life embodying that, finding ways to embody that truth that was beyond anything I had known, beyond any human formulations, beyond any religious theology that I knew.
Rick: Was there a bit of chemical assistance in that “it is”?
Kabir: It was a very pure chemical assistance. We’re talking now about maybe January of 1965, just to put it into perspective.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: This was at least a couple of years before the psychedelic revolution, so-called, that hit the mainstream. I was fortunate enough to have this experience under the guidance of some very wise people and to be held and protected in that exploration.
Shortly thereafter, I switched my major in college from literature to Eastern religions, and I spent a few years studying Sanskrit for two years. For a while, my focus was on the Far Eastern traditions. I met Baba Ramdas the week that he came back from India, and that also brought with it a certain grace, I think, that came from his guru.
But it’s a long journey, and I don’t want to bore anybody. There are a lot of details, of course. It began with this exploration in the Far Eastern traditions, and also living in San Francisco in the late ’60s, then coming back to New Hampshire in the early ’70s. You could describe it as something like a Zen school of hard work and mindfulness.
This was a practice that went on for a good two days a week of pretty hard physical labor and mindfulness. It was like a boot camp of mindfulness. After a while, I felt that my heart was in a bit of a straitjacket. There was quite a development of mindfulness and self-awareness, but I felt that somehow, when I looked at the relationships in this group, something seemed missing to me.
Though I was in a somewhat privileged position in that group, being one of the sub-teachers, one of the right-hand people of the main teacher, my wife, Camille, and I chose to leave. We didn’t know where we were headed. But before too long, we began to experience something of the Sufi world, first with some teachers here in North America, but quite soon it led us to Turkey.
In Turkey, in Konya, which is the hometown of Jalaluddin Rumi, I met a master there whom I recognized as my teacher, or whom I accepted as my teacher, and I found my connection with the Mevlevi tradition, which has been my spiritual home ever since, since approximately 1980.
This is Rumi’s tradition, and it’s a very broad, comprehensive tradition that involves all kinds of practices, from contemplation, meditation, chanting, whirling, or what we call turning, and also a great intellectual tradition as well. So I’ve been at home on this path.
In later years, I branched out a little bit. I was invited to be in a project called the Spiritual Paths Foundation. This brought me together with contemplatives in other traditions. For instance, over, I think, eight years, we did at least one weekend a year working with other contemplative teachers, like Father Thomas Keating.
Rick: I just listened to an audio this morning of you and Thomas Keating having a talk.
Kabir: Yes, yes, a great, you know, one of the great living Catholic mystics. Cynthia Bourgeault was another great voice in the Catholic—or in the Christian—world. She’s not Catholic. There were also various rabbis, including Rabbi Rami Shapiro, and people from the Ramakrishna tradition. We worked together in an interspiritual mode.
The beauty of this was recognizing our commonality, recognizing that while we had traveled parallel paths in many ways, we experienced many parallel experiences as people who, for the most part, were journeying outside the traditions of our birth and coming in contact with Asian traditions mostly. This included Rabbi Rami, who was a rabbi but also practiced Zen for ten years.
It was an interesting time in terms of discovering what was universal in our realization. Of course, I had always wanted that, and yet I didn’t choose to be a universalist. The reason for that is that every time I found a teacher—some of whom were extraordinary beings—claiming this kind of universality or claiming to offer a universal spiritual teaching, sooner or later it always seemed to me to become a one-man tradition.
So I’ve accepted being part of the Sufi tradition. I think one advantage of that is, if I call people, I’m not calling them to myself exclusively as a teacher. I’m calling them to centuries of a very refined and verified tradition of wisdom.
Sufism’s Inclusive Vision of Other Traditions
Over the centuries, this tradition, which has a universality within its own teachings and within its own framework, looks towards the infinite. Sufism and Islam—true Islam, for that matter—doesn’t claim a monopoly on truth. So it’s a wide enough framework in which to both be held in the bosom of tradition, under the auspices of the beings who we feel are alive and with us all the time, and at the same time open up to a vision that is inclusive and that can comprehend the truth, the value, and the beauty of other traditions.
Rick: Well, quite a few things I could ask you based upon what you just said. The first thing I want to do is extend my condolences for what happened in Egypt the other day. That was a Sufi mosque in which that massacre occurred, and I was reminded of that. Well, I had it in mind anyway, but what you said about claiming exclusivity of the truth—that was a horrible example of the consequences of that sort of attitude taken to extremes.
Kabir: Yes, absolutely. In reality, this is what some people have called the war against consciousness. It’s in every religion, it’s in every society—not to stoke up the idea, the metaphor of war, but in this case, a high price was paid. People paid with their lives for being part of a community that emphasizes love, tolerance, mutual understanding, and inclusiveness, and they paid a great price for it.
Rick: Yeah, the mystics have always had a hard time in most traditions, at least in the West. I mean, Saint John of the Cross was locked in a closet for 14 years or something, and Meister Eckhart was on the verge of getting really messed up by the Inquisition, but he conveniently died of natural causes. We can go into dozens and dozens of examples of people who are actually living what the founder of that religion was talking about and why he came out to talk, and yet, ironically, they are persecuted for actually having that experience that the founder wanted them to have.
Kabir: It sometimes happens that way, yes.
Rick: So help us—I mean, Sufism is a branch of Islam, and in many people’s minds Islam has a bad rap these days in the West because of things I don’t even have to elaborate on that have been happening. Help us distinguish between Sufism and Islam in general, because a minute ago you used the phrase “pure Islam,” or I forget if that’s the way you phrased it, but obviously
Kabir: Yeah.
Rick: there’s a beauty and a purity to it if it’s properly understood and appreciated, and I believe Sufism probably comes closer than any other facet or branch of Islam to recognizing that.
Kabir: Yeah, well, let me start talking about Islam first, and then I’ll bring Sufism into it. In these days, especially since 1979, when the Iranian Revolution happened and the Saudi monarchy reacted against it by increasing its propaganda efforts and exploiting Wahhabi Islam, a toxic Islam has been spread throughout the world that is not classical Islam; it’s not traditional Islam.
So, without even trying to talk about a pure Islam, let’s just be realistic and talk about traditional Islam. Traditional Islam began as a radical interfaith movement. It spread right at the beginning, and it happened so rapidly and so extensively because it took into itself other faith traditions, and it did not require or ever allow forced conversions. That’s absolutely forbidden under Islamic law, so if it ever happens, it’s a violation of Islamic law.
Christians, especially throughout the Middle East—most Christians were not Byzantine or Roman Christians; most of them were subgroups of Nestorian and sometimes Gnostic and so forth—did very well under Islam. The monasteries throughout Egypt and Syria flourished after the Arab conquest.
Just going on in history, in Spain and also under the Ottoman Empire, Judaism flourished and was protected. Islam has a way of including people of the book, and this is all part of the Islamic framework. The Quran says whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever, if you believe in a final accounting and live righteously, you’ll have nothing to fear from God. That’s a basic teaching.
Rick: And how does that juxtapose with the statement, “There’s no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet”? Or is that a mistranslation?
Kabir: There is no God but Allah, but Allah is not the Muslim God. Allah is—we could get into a discussion of what Allah means—but Allah is without gender. Allah is, even as the mystics recognize, Allah in a completely nondual kind of understanding, and this is justified even in the Quran.
So, Allah—we could say that Allah is not a God. And, by the way, everything I’m saying now, I believe, is supported by the Quran and even by a kind of orthodox interpretation. Allah is not some God outside of existence. Allah is the oneness, intelligence, and mercy of the whole of existence.
Allah is the oneness, intelligence, and mercy of the whole of existence.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: And it cannot be separated. I think that if we had this conversation, if we had time to have it in depth, we would quickly come to an understanding that the concept of Allah is that it is a unified field of being out of which all of this arises and is never separate. It is ungendered; it is fundamentally beneficent. This is Allah.
There have been 144,000 prophets that have come, of which Muhammad was simply the last, putting a seal—you might say the seal of authenticity—on all those other many thousands of prophets. To every community, a prophet has been sent, giving essentially the same truth, even if that truth is later distorted by human beings.
Rick: Which always happens.
Kabir: Which always happens. So, if you look at it—and really everything I’m saying is Quranic and pretty hard to dispute—this is the framework of Islam.
Traditional Islam was pretty good. I mean, no human society, and certainly no empire, is perfect, but there was more tolerance and, even in many cases, respect given to the other sacred traditions under Islamic law. So, this is Islam.
Now, within Islam, most people are born into whatever they’re born into. They don’t question what they’re born into; they don’t question their religion, their ethnicity, or, I would say, their nationality. But nations are a relatively recent phenomenon. Most people don’t question that; they just are what they are.
Sufism is the esoteric dimension of Islam. It is not Sunni or Shia. In other words, it doesn’t have anything to do with the doctrinal divisions. There are Shia Sufis; there are Sunni Sufis, and most Sufis wouldn’t pay much attention to these distinctions.
Anyway, Sufism is that intentional practice of consciousness, of higher consciousness, of self-awareness, of self-knowledge, of increasing our capacities for love, and of awakening our subtle perceptive faculties under the guidance of a tradition and a teacher, a master.
Technically—I mean, properly speaking, I don’t mean to sound dogmatic about this—but practically speaking, there are no freelance Sufis, because we view having the humility to accept a teacher, at least at a certain stage of one’s development, as part of the process of coming to be free of our egoism and our false self.
So, it usually involves a master-apprentice kind of relationship, and also a relationship with the community, because it’s a very relational spirituality, almost more than any other spirituality. Historically, Sufis have based the whole setup in community and in a respectful, loving relationship with brothers and sisters, with elders who are a little further along on the path.
So, the reality of oneness comes through this manyness. The reality of understanding our unity comes from the work of acceptance and humility, and mutual respect and service.
Sufism is almost never a tutorial or a practice for hermits. It usually involves—even the Shaykhs are typically married and have families and a profession. So, Sufism is not the profession of a Shaykh. Shaykhs almost always have their own trade, their own livelihood. So, basically, it’s the esoteric dimension of Islam.
Rick: Okay, good. Sounds like it would be fair to summarize by saying that Sufism has an experiential orientation, a developmental orientation, whereas the more conventional forms of Islam, or any religion, are more about what you believe and what doctrines you adhere to, and so on.
You may go on your whole life believing in things in great detail but not having any of the experience to which those things refer. So, Sufis are all about having the experience.
You may go on your whole life believing in things in great detail but not having any of the experience to which those things refer. So, Sufis are all about having the experience.
Kabir: Absolutely.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: Exactly.
Rick: And, just while we’re on the history of it, you mentioned 144,000 prophets, and Raymond Schuman from Olympia, Washington, submitted a question asking whether Sufism is a spiritual descendant of Zoroastrianism. When you said 144,000, I thought, wow, how far back does that go? So, maybe you could answer both those questions.
Kabir: Yes, yes. I wouldn’t say that Sufism is descended from Zoroastrianism, although we can recognize that Zoroastrianism had so much to contribute to the concepts of theistic tradition.
But the way we understand it is that the Prophet Muhammad was something like a tabula rasa. He was an empty slate when his prophethood began. That part of the world, Arabia at that time, was more or less without a deep spirituality of any sort, and so Muhammad was not influenced very much by Christianity or Judaism or any Arab religiosity. He began, you might say, as an empty slate.
Rick: As I recall the story, he got pretty heavily zapped by some angelic beings or something and then had this huge metamorphosis.
Kabir: Over 23 years, he began to have experiences of revelation, of some vast intelligence, something—a voice from outside of the human personality speaking to Muhammad and guiding him, sometimes even criticizing him.
That is the Quran. That was all recorded. It was in an inimitably beautiful language, and the final result is a profoundly coherent text.
Although I’ll admit that many Westerners approaching the text at first, especially while projecting their expectations onto it, and perhaps even their allergies against the religious conditioning of their backgrounds, get into a muddle reading it.
But a great scholar, a great Western scholar, Norman O. Brown, said that the West wasn’t really able to read the Quran until James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake. The reason he said that was that the Quran, like Finnegans Wake, is a language event. It’s not a narrative, it’s not a rule book, and it’s not systematic, but it is a language event that comes into human language and, in a way, blows it apart, and yet conveys something in that totally cosmic and yet coherent series of revelations.
So, it’s an unusual book. But it has been a book that has—and all the mystics of Sufism are deeply tied to the Quran and found within it a language for their deepest nondual realization. So, I want to underline that fact. It’s quite extraordinary in that way.
Rick: Okay, I have to ask, just because people afterwards might pose this question and I want to have you address it. What do you make of people like Sam Harris, who cherry-pick a lot of verses out of the Quran and make it seem rather brutal? Do you have an answer to that kind of critique?
Kabir: I do. I have an answer, a thorough answer. I wrote a chapter in a book about that, and all of the verses of the Quran that involve fighting have a context.
Sometimes—first of all, the context was that the early Muslim community was under assault, and for a while they suffered as pacifists. At a certain point, they were given permission in the revelation to respond with fighting.
The Quran says that while fighting is bad, if it weren’t for those willing to take up arms, churches, synagogues, and mosques would be wiped from the face of the earth.
So, it was defensive. And there are many verses in the Quran that say things like—you hear something quite scary, like, “Chase the unbelievers,” they’re called, “Chase them and slay them where you find them.”
Sam Harris, who I don’t consider really an intellectually honest person, if I may say so, I’d be happy to debate him anytime.
Rick: Me too, on other points.
Kabir: On many points. But then you find it says thereafter, “But if they stop attacking you, then desist.”
Rick: Right.
Kabir: So, I’ve looked at this, believe me. If I felt that the Quran had a triumphalistic, aggressive message, I would leave Islam. I would have nothing to do with it.
I’ve looked at it very thoroughly, and I’m convinced that you don’t have to look very deeply or far to find out that these verses that have to do with fighting are very limited in their context, and that Islam is not out to conquer the world and impose itself on the world.
Rick: Okay, good. Another question I want to ask you before we get too far: You mentioned community and the value of tradition and the value of having a teacher.
Many people will have read Irina Tweedie’s book Daughter of Fire, which I unfortunately have not read yet. She was Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s teacher, and, as I understand it, her teacher was a real taskmaster. I mean, he said things like, “You have to become like dust under the master’s foot,” and he really broke her down, and it bore fruit, obviously.
There are people, I think, who try to pose as gurus and behave that way who are not qualified to do so. I’m sure that Irina Tweedie’s teacher was qualified to do so, but that’s a little bit of an aside.
Is there any sort of particular teaching strategy in the tradition that is perhaps typified by her teacher, or does it really depend on the personality of the teacher and the student? Can it be anywhere from very gentle, sweet, and easygoing to really difficult, depending on what the person needs?
Kabir: I think Irina Tweedie’s situation is rather unique. I would say that from my own experience, there are occasions when an authentic teacher may confront the false self with itself, but abusiveness is not a part of Sufism. Abusiveness and even authoritarianism are not part of Sufism.
Adab and Spiritual Courtesy
We would rather rely on the example of the Prophet Muhammad in all matters related to character. It’s said that Muhammad never even embarrassed a person. He was that respectful. There’s an extraordinary teaching called adab, spiritual courtesy. This is at the heart of Sufism, and I’ve never experienced such a refinement of spiritual courtesy anywhere in the world as I have among Sufi teachers.
They can be strong; they can sometimes be anything. What can I say? In a way, there are no rules, but if it’s coming from love and if it’s not imposing on another human being’s will, it can be transformational. But we have no right to impose ourselves on another person’s will, number one. In general, abusiveness is not transformational, and it’s not part of Sufi teaching.
Rick: Okay, I remember hearing a story one time that Muhammad once cut the sleeve off his coat because a cat was sleeping on it and he didn’t want to disturb the cat. I love that story because I love cats.
Kabir: It’s a famous cat story. There’s an incredible and extensive teaching on animal rights that goes back to Muhammad, and there’s a whole, significantly sized book on animal rights in Islam. So this was unprecedented.
Rick: That’s great.
Kabir: Yeah.
Rick: So Islam, unlike Hinduism and even Christianity, didn’t have animal sacrifices and that sort of thing?
Kabir: No, I mean, it may sound that way because, for instance, at certain times of the year, on the pilgrimage, and sometimes before a retreat, you sacrifice a sheep.
Rick: And then everybody eats it.
Kabir: You eat it and you give it to the poor. But even the procedure for sacrificing a sheep has certain rules. I suppose it’s similar to kosher rules, but I know what the Islamic rules are. First of all, you need a very, very sharp knife. You cannot kill the animal in the sight of any other animals, and you say the name of God and do it with compassion.
Rick: Yeah, which is how Native Americans sometimes reverentially treated animals they had to kill for their sustenance.
Kabir: Muhammad even said, for instance—and I’ll just give you a simple example—you’ve been traveling across the desert with your camels and you finally arrive at your destination. It’s time for sunset prayer, and you’re supposed to take the times of prayer quite seriously, but you’re not allowed to pray, even though it’s a time of prayer, until you’ve unburdened your animals.
Rick: Right, nice. Okay, I’m going to shift gears here rather abruptly and read a series of questions that you put in an article that I read called Sacred Space and Conscious Community. I thought they were all great questions. I’m just going to read them and then have you riff on the answers. So here’s what you said:
If we have realized the non-dual nature of reality, if we have begun to perceive the interdependent nature of the self, the non-local reality of mind, what do we do now? How is this going to be embodied? What is the moral imperative if all is One? Is this a purposeful universe, and what is the purpose? Are states of compassion, aspiration, unconditional love, and ecstatic joy mere epiphenomena of our own electrochemical organisms or emergent properties within the field?
So I love that. I wrote the whole thing down. I’d like to hear you respond to it.
Kabir: Well, you know, the totality of my life is an attempt to respond to that.
Rick: Right.
Kabir: And I’m just barely figuring these things out and not necessarily having accomplished very much. I’ve been asking myself questions lately about how we can, in community, truly—and by community I mean not a commune, not a community where we live together, but a community such as we have here in Louisville—how do we become more of a community? How do we support each other? How do we create, perhaps, the economic structures that would benefit us all on a very practical level and allow us to live a life with more integrity and sanity?
So, this is: What can we do to increase our capacities for love, and what can we do to reduce whatever is in our hearts that keeps us separate in a false way from each other? This is an unending question. What can we do to solve our problems with love when problems arise, rather than with anger or withdrawing?
I think I could sum it up by saying a phrase I saw recently on a T-shirt: “Think cosmic, act human.” This is about becoming a full human being. That’s how I see spirituality. It’s much more than realizing those highly energized states of consciousness which we may realize in samadhi or some form of enlightenment. Having realized or experienced those things to one extent or another, how do we now embody that as human beings? How do we integrate this spirituality?
Think cosmic, act human.
I think Sufism is good in this respect. It’s a very integrated spirituality. We have 14 centuries of integration to draw upon. There’s still a lot of things to figure out in this world at this time, considering all the ways that our humanness is under assault, and considering that we now face an inflection point where, I think, as Catherine Austin Fitts says, we’re faced with a choice between a human or a non-human civilization.
How can we, as spiritual people, preserve our humanness and develop our humanness? Because I see humanness as something that’s infinitely developable.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: It’s not what we’re born with, but it is a potential because we are the hologram of the whole, and yet we haven’t realized that as we could. So our realization of it will be in our humanness.
Sometimes I’ve said that what I really appreciated about the human beings who have been our mentors is that they were the kind of people you would like to sit down and have a cup of tea with. The enlightenment that I experienced from these people in Rumi’s tradition, for instance, and in other Sufi lineages, was not some kind of abstract enlightenment. It was a very personal personhood, or human character, that was part of that enlightenment—not separate from it.
And yet human character is ongoing. It’s a work in progress. We’re souls in progress.
Rick: Yeah, this whole thing that you’ve just been saying is something that’s been growing in the awareness of the so-called non-dual community—the kind of people who speak at and attend the SAND conference—over the last five to ten years.
It’s shifted from “You’re not a person,” and hanging out in transcendence, and the world is an illusion, and that kind of thing, to, “Hey, wait a minute. You are a person, and you’re living a life, and you have to be more fully embodied and actually live this non-dual realization.” It’s not something to just marinate in; it’s something that has to be integrated and translated into the practicalities of daily life.
It’s shifted from “You’re not a person,” and hanging out in transcendence, and the world is an illusion, and that kind of thing, to, “Hey, wait a minute. You are a person, and you’re living a life, and you have to be more fully embodied and actually live this non-dual realization.” It’s not something to just marinate in; it’s something that has to be integrated and translated into the practicalities of daily life.
And just one more point I’ll make and let you respond. I gave a talk at this recent conference where I met you on the ethics of enlightenment. One point I made was that a teacher might be sitting up there claiming to have all sorts of wonderful subjective experiences and radiating a lot of shakti and spiritual energy and so on. But if you look closely at how he or she is behaving, would you really like to be like that person? Is that someone you could emulate and grow into, and would you like to grow into that person? If not, maybe you should leave. Anyway, that’s my point.
Kabir: I think it’s good to apply criteria. I have applied an even more basic criterion. Once, somebody was showing me, attempting to impress me with a video of their latest guru and the guru’s devotees. I watched the video, and afterward they said, “What do you think?”
I said, “Well, very interesting, but which of these people would you trust as a babysitter?”
Which of these people would you trust as a babysitter?
Rick: Good point. Yeah.
Kabir: So, the SAND community, which I very much appreciate—a wonderful group of people—has been on its own trajectory for over ten years. As you said, it has been moving from that undifferentiated oneness into an appreciation of the heart and what they’re calling embodiedness.
As you know, I wrote a book called The Knowing Heart to try to explore and express the cognitive dimension of the heart, because in our understanding, the heart is our greatest faculty for knowing—much more than the brain. I don’t mean the physical heart. I mean a quality within the human being that can experience relationship, that can sense the universe qualitatively, that can sense value. That’s all from the heart. It’s not from the intellect, and it’s not from the senses.
I see spirituality, or I would like to see spirituality, as the awakening, purification, and maturing of the heart, which is the most essential part of the human being. That’s a tall order.
Rick: Yeah. Well, one question I have about that is that, on the one hand, spiritual development does tend to refine and sensitize and make more subtle one’s heart and one’s faculties of all kinds. On the other hand, the world has a coarsening influence. Things are impacting us all the time, and you see people going to extremes of coarseness and just really becoming very hardened.
Spiritual aspirants don’t want to be like that. They want to be very sensitive and feeling, and you often hear people teaching this way: just feel everything and let it in. But there’s this kind of conundrum between being sensitive and being able to deal with the world. How do you cultivate the capacity to have both simultaneously?
Kabir: Yes, yes. The purpose—I mean, we are refining ourselves, and we want to be more refined and sensitive human beings. At the same time, that refinement is not opposed to developing qualities like courage, perseverance, stability, and inner strength. So maybe our purpose is to develop a whole spectrum of qualities.
You know what I mean: we who aspire to more consciousness have a transformative role in the coarseness of this world, and that transformation can happen when we are awake to being, when we are being true to that spiritual being, which is the heart and consciousness. Then any person who can sustain that state truly and with integrity and sincerity enters into the coarseness of the world and can have a transformative effect.
I saw something just this last weekend, and I can’t really go into the details of it, but this last weekend I was with a group of Sufis, and we were with one of the leading neo-Nazis in America, who came to a Sufi circle. He came to a Sufi circle because his son had joined this community after the community had helped the son. They got him out of jail, and in this community the son began to flourish.
There had been a big separation between the father and the son, and just this weekend the father had come to be with the son. The father and mother had come to be with the son and had to sit for three days in this Sufi community, listen to everything, and be part of everything we were doing. The son had on a T-shirt that said, “Love loves love.”
The father was someone who had actually gone to jail, I believe, for his role in—not murdering somebody directly, but being an accessory. Anyway, the mother was weeping through the course of the weekend. Her heart was opening. The father was letting down his defenses, and it appears that his state had changed.
This is an example of when the spiritual energy is near, it feels good. People who hate are in great pain, and they’re not feeling very good. The things they do that they think might make them feel better, like violence, don’t help the soul; they don’t help the heart. So bring a person like that into an environment where they’re surrounded by nothing but love and acceptance, and extraordinary things happen.
Rick: That’s a beautiful story. I heard a story recently about a Black man whose mission is to befriend Ku Klux Klan members to the point where they will give him their robes, and he’s collected a lot of robes now. He goes to places where they hang out, sits down, starts talking to them, and just one thing leads to the next. He gets them to the point where they say, “I’ve had enough of this. Here’s my robe.”
Kabir: Well, that’s it.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: What a beautiful work.
Rick: Yeah. I also heard you tell a story about how, in these Sufi gatherings that go on for long periods of time—I forget what you call them—there was a thing where people would bring invalids and mentally ill people and so on, just to sort of sit them there because it was a way of babysitting them. But once they had sat there for a certain period of time, after a while they would say, “Hey, can I go help in the kitchen?” or “Can I do this or do that?” It actually healed them just being in that atmosphere.
Kabir: That was an ongoing whirling ceremony, or a whirling retreat, that went on in that case for 40 days: constant whirling, not by the same people.
Rick: Yeah, taking shifts.
Kabir: Taking shifts. We read about this in Rumi’s time, and I never believed it until some friends in Turkey said, “Let’s do it.” At first they tried it for seven days, and that seemed like a monumental feat. I’ll admit that at first I thought, “It’s going to be a psychotic breakdown,” or, “You shouldn’t do this. This is too much.” But they went ahead and did it, and the results were just as you described.
Instead of people getting imbalanced or getting pushed over the edge, people were bringing catatonic people and people with emotional imbalances and just leaving them there. Just being in that energy of constant whirling—and I’m not going to say it’s merely the physical act of whirling; it’s the state of mind and devotion that accompanies it—is an act of love and the worship of the One. In that atmosphere, these emotional imbalances were healed in extraordinary ways.
The whirling ceremony
Rick: That’s great. I want to ask you about whirling in a minute, but first, a question came in from a gentleman in Tehran, Sahand, and this harkens back to what we were talking about earlier with the history of Sufism and Islam. Maybe you can answer his question. He said, “Do you believe that Sufism wouldn’t exist today if Islam had not emerged?”
Kabir: Yes, I believe so, and I’ll tell you why. Even though I recognize that there is a pre-Islamic tradition in Iran, in Khorasan, that I’m well acquainted with, which worked in communities and was profoundly mystical, I would say that the attributes of Sufism that we most appreciate today developed and came out of the example of the Prophet Muhammad’s character and behavior—the groundedness that he demonstrated, which became part of this mystical tradition—and also a very coherent metaphysical framework that makes it clear that we have a profound need for the divine.
And the divine—you know, let’s not underestimate what we mean by that word—but let’s say it’s the realm of value and unity that is inherent in existence. Above all, we need to remember that, serve that, and trust that. This is the essential message of the Quran as we understand it, and it was also the essential message that Muhammad embodied and always expressed.
So, there have been mystics throughout all time, and with great respect, we honor them. But with the Prophet Muhammad, I believe something new began in terms of an integration of that mystical state, so that it became the attainment of people who have a useful livelihood, who are engaged in marriage and family life. The highest spiritual attainments were no longer exclusive to people leading lives of solitude and ascetic practice, but became possible through the power of love combined with that purification of the mind.
Rick: Okay, so whirling. Everyone has heard of the whirling dervishes, and I heard you explain it in a rather interesting way. When you explained it, you said the left foot never leaves the ground, and I thought, “How in the world did they do that? You have to have your left foot on a Lazy Susan or something so you can spin around.” But then I tried it today after lunch, and I thought, “Okay, you just take your weight off the foot a little bit, and then you can kind of move around.”
But there’s a whole beautiful esoteric significance to every aspect of it, and it sounds to me like it’s a profound spiritual practice. So I’m sure people would like to hear more about it—how it works.
Kabir: Yes, yes. So, first of all, the intention of turning—what is called whirling; we call it turning—is to become closer to the divine. It is an act of worship and contemplation and meditation at the same time. As a method, it’s powerful and effective because, as we know, we can sit down in meditation and delude ourselves. We can appear to be meditating, and yet the mind may wander.
When you’re turning, you have an almost instant feedback mechanism, because if you’re not empty inside, if you don’t keep that interior space open and free of inner dialogue and free of daydreaming, you’ll lose your balance in the turning. So it acts as a mirror of our state.
When we turn, there are many, many different dimensions that have to be held in a single field of awareness. We start with the left leg, which, as you discovered, bears the weight on the sort of ball of the foot, the front of the foot. The heel does slide around, but it’s as if your pivot point is on the ball of your foot, and that symbolizes our being rooted in the eternal.
The Whirling Dance of Change and Eternity
The right foot is stepping 360 degrees, and each time, the person turning is saying, “Allah, Allah, Allah.” The right foot is in time; the right foot is in the world of change and transience. The left foot is an axis on which we turn, and it is the axis of eternity.
Then the arms are extended. The right arm is up, with the palm facing upward, receiving, you can say, the divine energies, the heavenly grace. That energy is coming through the right arm, passing through the heart, and moving to the left arm, which is palm down, bestowing that energy into the world.
Rick: I presume you would say that this is not just symbolic, but this is what’s actually happening, right? On some subtle level.
Kabir: Yes, on some subtle level. So it’s an act of service. It’s not an attempt to get oneself incredibly high and corkscrew out of the world; it is really an act of service to bring those finer spiritual energies into our world and our environment, so that even the people who are witnessing this ceremony, as well as those participating in it, will feel, you might say, the microvoltage of that pure vibration and be affected by it and have their souls a little more awakened.
Rick: How long do you go for?
Kabir: Well, in the ceremony itself, the ceremony has about 40 minutes of whirling, but it’s broken up into periods of approximately—
Rick: So that you don’t get tired.
Kabir: It’s not particularly so that we don’t get tired. It is because some people really could go for a very long time, could go much longer. But no, the pause actually has a more profound meaning than that.
The pause that happens between the four movements of turning is in order to bring oneself back to recollection and affirm—this is the language we use—one’s servanthood to the One, rather than to go and just dissolve in the One. It’s about keeping coming back and affirming that servanthood while still standing with the arms over the shoulders, like the letter alif, which is the number one, the first letter of the alphabet and the number one. It’s just saying, “One, one, one.”
There are four periods of turning. Each one—the first three—is an ascension toward ecstasy, toward intimacy with the divine, toward unity with the divine.
Rick: Let me just interrupt to ask: Is that the type of subjective experience one actually has while doing it—ecstasy, ascension, unity with the divine? Do most people experience that kind of thing?
Kabir: It is experienced, of course. Everybody has their own degrees of it, degrees and capacities for it. I’m not saying that everyone, or even the majority of turners, will experience absolute oneness in the third period, but that’s the structure of the ceremony, and it has its experiential truth.
Rick: Okay.
Kabir: So what’s interesting is that there are three stages of ascension, and the third and the fourth are called salams—four salams altogether. The third one is the most ecstatic. The music and the rhythm really carry you; it’s very blissful and beautiful and energized. That’s when, you might say, the limited self dissolves in the divine.
But then the fourth salam comes after that, and it’s slower, more majestic, and more sober in a way. In the fourth salam, it’s as if the turner is being given his or her self back. It’s as if the self is dissolved, and now you’re coming back to your selfness. It’s as if you’re being told, “Okay, try it on one more time. See what you do with it now”—a purified self, a new stage of the self.
That’s the sort of archetypal journey embodied in the whirling ceremony. The fourth salam goes on, and it’s actually quite beautiful and dramatic. By the way, all of this is accompanied by a very sophisticated classical music composition. We have many compositions—there may be 70 of them extant today—and each of them is like a symphony unto itself, with chorus and words of Rumi.
You come to the fourth salam, and at one point the music ends except for a single instrument improvising. It may be a stringed instrument, and it’s a very delicate, light, almost sparkly kind of improvisation. Meanwhile, the dervishes are turning, turning, turning. You hear the swish of their robes and their feet, along with this very light, improvised music.
It goes on, and you’re waiting for it to end. You know something is about to happen. Then suddenly the voice of the Quran reciter breaks into it and begins to recite a very majestic passage, typically the verse of the Quran that says:
To God belongs the east and the west, and wherever you turn is the face of God.
Upon hearing the Quran recited, all of the dervishes suddenly stop, back off the floor, and kneel down to listen to the full recitation of the Quran, which goes on a bit longer. It’s as if the whole ceremony has prepared them to let those words into their hearts. All of that emptying has prepared them to hear the revelation. So that’s the core of the ceremony.
Rick: Okay. I guess there are Sufi centers around the world. Are non-Sufis welcome to come and sit and observe the ceremony, or is it sort of a—you know?
Kabir: You know, we are told—we call Rumi our Pir. That’s the title. Pir means the source of the tradition, in a way. We say anyone who walks across the threshold of the Sufi lodge has been invited by the Peer.
Rick: Okay.
Kabir: So if you show up, you are welcome. Yes.
Rick: Okay. I have six pages of notes here. I want to ask you more questions, and they won’t necessarily flow in perfect logical order from what we’ve been talking about, but I just want to get them out there, and each one will stimulate some interesting conversation.
Here’s one thing I found in your book, Living Presence. You said, “It is our essential Self,” with a capital S, “which is our point of contact with infinite spirit.” I’m wondering what the distinction is. Some people would say, “Well, our essential Self is infinite spirit,” but you seem to be drawing a difference between them.
Kabir: Yes, yes, a very important, subtle distinction. When we use this term “essential self,” we’re talking about the absolute foundation of our witnessing consciousness, the self-awareness of ourselves.
Probably the best formulation or expression of this comes from the great Ibn Arabi, another great, great Sufi, Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi. He said:
My journey was entirely within myself, and when I came to the intimate presence of my Lord, my sustainer, I saw that I was nothing but servanthood without a trace of lordship, without a trace of sovereignty. I was nothing but servanthood without a trace of sovereignty.
What a subtle, nuanced formulation—to say that he was one of the greatest Sufis of all time, coming to that intimate union with the divine, yet experiencing his own I-ness at the same time as he experienced that all power, all agency, is vested in the divine.
So this is how we express it. Rather than saying, “You’re God, I’m God,” it’s a delicious and beautiful relationship to be in that servanthood, knowing that you’re nothing, that you are essentially nothing. But it may take a lifetime to arrive at that nothingness.
Rick: Good. Okay, next question. Again, from your book: “Many of our human attributes have atrophied. Through disuse, they have become latent faculties rather than functioning ones.” My question is, what are some of these latent faculties or human attributes that have atrophied? Are you talking about siddhis, or supernormal abilities, or are you talking about more natural human things, such as a really profound development of the heart, refinement of the senses, or things like that?
Kabir: I’m talking mostly about the latter, but we can’t really put any limits on it. I was trained by a teacher who claimed to be in a 26,000-year tradition. I challenged him from the Caucasus. I said, “How do you know? Why do you say 26,000? How can you say 26,000 years?” He said, “Because we can count.”
Anyway, that’s the procession of the equinoxes.
Rick: I was just going to say that, yeah—26,000.
Kabir: Yeah. So anyway, this is some people high up in the mountains of the Caucasus. It’s a real tradition; it exists. For five years, I was trained in that tradition as part of my Sufi training.
It was this man who said that for all this period of time, human beings have been losing their latent human capacities, so that those capacities have become more and more latent. In other words, we have them, but they’re latent. He defined Sufism as the awakening and developing of latent human capacities under divine grace and guidance.
He said, “If you left off under divine grace,” and I said, “What do you mean by divine grace and guidance?” He said, “Under the auspices of love.”
I said, “Okay.” And he said, “If you left out divine grace and guidance, if you’re only developing latent human capacities, that would merely be occultism.”
Rick: Yes. So you could be a psychic, or become a black magician who has capabilities but is using them for ill purposes.
Kabir: So the capabilities of human will, human perception, and human creativity are hypothetically infinite. I like to leave it that way. I would like to see that there’s no limit on what can be developed and awakened and made unlatent through spiritual practice.
Rick: This is an interesting point to bring out, because a lot of times spirituality is thought of more in terms of a subjective realization, which may or may not be that evident on the outside. You might seem to be kind of remarkable in certain ways. You might seem to be very loving, a Mother Teresa type or something.
But I think there’s a huge range of possibilities for what a human being can be. If we take some of the ancient traditions literally, such as the things Christ was said to have done, or the things Patanjali talks about in the Yoga Sutras and so on, it not only indicates that human beings are capable of much more than we now see them able to do, but it also raises really interesting questions about our relationship to the laws of nature.
If Christ really were able to walk on water, turn water into wine, or do any of those things—if he really did that, and it’s not just some kind of fanciful story—then how does consciousness relate to the law of gravity or to certain chemical laws that could enable something like that to happen?
Kabir: Rick, you’re bringing up an extremely important point, and I’m very happy you brought up this question. I would say that more important than developing extraordinary possibilities—which human beings are capable of, if you just look at the world of sports and many different areas, where people are doing unbelievable things—I think it would be more important to ask ourselves: Of all the things a human being can develop, of all that is developable in a human being, what attributes are of the greatest value to be developed?
We can spend a lifetime developing some rather peculiar and perhaps irrelevant things. There’s a story about a sultan who offered a huge prize for the person in his realm who could develop the most incredible skill. He gave his people a year, and then he held the contest.
There was one person who developed the skill of being able to throw a piece of thread all the way across the room and have it go through the eye of a needle.
Rick: Whoa, that would be a pretty cool party trick.
Kabir: Pretty cool. The sultan said, “All right, this man takes the prize. Now take him away and cut off his head, because anybody who is stupid enough to spend a year doing that doesn’t deserve to live.”
Rick: To spend a year doing that.
Kabir: Yeah. This is not a Sufi story, but anyway, you get the point.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: And so I think this is memorable. One of my teachers said, “If you have a horse and you wanted to develop that horse to be the best horse possible, you wouldn’t treat it like a cow. You wouldn’t say a good horse is a fatter horse,” you know.
To know what is most developable in a human being and worthy of development, this takes wisdom. Maybe it even takes revelation. Maybe it takes some profound supernatural source to give us a little guidance, to keep us from wandering too far astray into different nonsensical things that we might pride ourselves on developing.
Rick: Yeah. I have a friend named Dana Sawyer who’s been on BatGap a couple of times. He’s been to India 20 times, speaks fluent Hindi, and everything. He’s been all over the country, and in his travels he’s always looked to see if there’s anybody who actually is able to do anything extraordinary, or if they’re all just sort of magicians.
He concludes that pretty much all of them are. They have all their little tricks, like you can put a walnut under your armpit and squeeze it and make your pulse stop, and things like that. But he met one guy who was actually capable of swallowing a live snake and then regurgitating it, and it wasn’t a trick. So, just an example of something totally worthless.
Kabir: He takes this year’s prize.
Rick: Yeah. All right. Okay. Another abrupt segue here to our next point. You said, “The false self is unable to perceive the meaningfulness of events and is unaware of the divine mercy operating in every detail of existence.”
I liked that one. It jumped out at me because I like the notion that the divine permeates and orchestrates every particle of existence and has a sort of merciful agenda, even though it may not seem like it at times. But in the big picture, in the long run, that’s the trajectory of the divine intelligence. So I’d like you to elaborate on that a bit.
Kabir: Yeah, this is very important. I would contrast this with an attitude we sometimes meet in spirituality, or in certain spiritual teachings, that the human story can just be dismissed, that ordinary human emotions are garbage or irrelevant or trivial.
Rick: Yeah, we were talking about that earlier, in terms of the way the nondual community was ten years ago.
Kabir: Right, and that, you know, to focus purely on the transcendence and to just regard the human story as unimportant. Now, it may be that sometimes a teacher will take that approach. I was just with one of my very dear students, and she said to me, “You know, I remember so well that day when you and I were traveling in a bus across Turkey, and I spoke to you for about an hour. I told you all about my sorrows, and I was feeling very sorry for myself. I told you my whole sad story, and you listened quietly for an hour. At the end, you simply said, ‘It’s a story, and it’s your story. Forget it.’”
Rick: You said that to her?
Kabir: Yeah. Forget it. Just forget it.
Rick: Right.
Kabir: Well, I said that to her at that point, and that was right. Apparently, she’s now telling me that it was very important to hear that.
I would also say something very different and equally true, which is that if we are awake enough, every detail of our story is imbued with mercy. There is a purposefulness in our lives that we can discern. I guess the distinction here is that this woman was telling me her story. We write our stories, and many of the stories we write are nonsense. They’re a falsehood that we’ve created. I think that’s what I was pointing to. But when you get down to the truth of every individual human life, every detail is imbued with divine mercy. This is a sort of fundamental axiom that—
Rick: It takes a little bit of philosophical juggling to really reconcile that with some of the things we see happening. I mean, these massacres, or children born with horrible diseases, and so on, and the Holocaust. How do you respond to that kind of critique?
Kabir: The way I would respond to that is, first of all, let us look to our own experience and not imagine what it’s like to be a child with some disease. Let’s be honest and look at our own experience, because we all have enough grief and suffering to look at.
Now, in every situation, no matter how painful, no matter how great the loss—and let’s call this a postulate to be tested, not to be believed—there is the possibility of a channel back to infinite mercy, to infinite grace. Within every experience is the possibility of finding the comfort, the blessing in the pain. The blessing that is found in moments of extreme pain is sometimes the greatest blessing, and sometimes what really shapes character.
In other words, these are soul-making events, but they’re more likely to be soul-making events if we are awake and if we have trust in the divine to find the blessing that’s in that pain.
So this, too, is really very much at the heart of the Quranic revelation, which says that the nature of reality is fundamentally compassionate and merciful. The Compassionate, the “Rahman” in Arabic, means that existence is being created, overflowing as an act of divine compassion. The infinite divine is breathing all the worlds into existence as an act of bestowal and beneficence.
Within this existence, every witnessing agent can experience the mercy, or the “Rahim,” which is the channel back to the One. So that’s always there in potential, and sometimes the potential is only fully realized when we are in extraordinary pain or loss.
So this is the balance of existence. This is not to deny the extraordinary pain and suffering, but there’s also another postulate, which is that we will never be given more than we can bear. But every human being and every witnessing being that has free will can go either way. We can either become embittered by the suffering of life or become spiritualized by the suffering of life.
In that way, it’s not as if the divine is necessarily creating all this suffering in order to cook us. In fact, most of the suffering is created by human beings through their own free will and their collective evils, which require of us resistance, courage, mercy, and service.
But the suffering of life that is inevitable, such as disease, death, and loss, and that cannot be avoided even if everybody were being kind—that suffering that’s inherent in the nature of existence is still always a channel, an element that contributes to the perfection of the soul.
Rick: I’m sure some people might argue with that, but I think you’re right. I’ve interviewed a few people for whom suffering was their primary path. There’s a woman named Shruti—you can look this up on BatGap—who had some medical condition that caused so much pain that she would literally black out on the bathroom floor from the pain. She attributes what she went through to having been very instrumental in her awakening. And that’s just one example.
Kabir: I just want to respond to what you said about there being some people who might argue with me about that.
Rick: You can get into philosophical debates about it.
Kabir: Yeah. I don’t know. I would just say it’s not something to argue about. I would refer people to their own experience and ask them to find out for themselves, honestly.
Transforming Pain Through Acceptance and Consciousness
When you are in that pain, how are you going to deal with it? When you’re in that pain, to what extent can you transform that pain or transcend that pain—not through denying it? I mean, there are certain principles; you will get nowhere through denial, but through acceptance, through consciousness.
When you are in that pain, how are you going to deal with it? When you’re in that pain, to what extent can you transform that pain or transcend that pain—not through denying it? I mean, there are certain principles; you will get nowhere through denial, but through acceptance, through consciousness.
Rick: The next point I’m going to raise is somewhat related to something you were just saying about freedom of choice, where we put our attention, and steering the course of our life this way and that.
You say, “There are, however, ideas of a higher order that originate through contact with a deeper reality, and if these ideas are learned and thoroughly assimilated by our intellects, then their significance may be transferred to the subconscious mind.” It reminds me that if you eat junk food all the time, then junk is going to be what builds up your body tissues, and it’s going to result in various health problems.
What you’re saying here, I think, is that contacting a deeper reality and having your attention there gets assimilated by our intellects and is then transferred to the subconscious mind, much the way what we eat is transferred to our tissues. It becomes part of our deeper makeup and governs the day-to-day course of our life, even if we’re not consciously remembering all these things that we’ve imbibed.
Kabir: Yes. A simple example of this would be learning gratitude. I remember many years ago, the first time I heard about gratitude as a spiritual possibility. I was maybe something like that, and I had had a religious education. I was raised as a Catholic. Honestly, no one ever told me about gratitude, which I believe now is the foundation of all virtues.
When I first heard about it—in fact, it was my own shaykh, Süleyman Dede, a Mevlevi shaykh, who first expressed the value of gratitude—it was such a new idea. It’s shocking to think of it now, that that could have been a new idea.
But since that time, gratitude has been more and more of a practice. I’m still working at it; I’m not grateful all the time. But it’s become more of my natural response to the world and to events. It’s almost second nature to be in that state of gratitude for everything—for everything that comes, everything that happens.
That took time and a certain training of the mind, so that you don’t immediately resist, resent, or complain.
Rick: Is that because of what we were talking about previously, divine mercy? I mean, because if you really, in your bones, have a knowing that everything is divine mercy, then you’re going to be grateful for whatever happens.
Kabir: That’s the metaphysical foundation of it, yes, but it also has to be experiential. You have to have enough experiences of the truth of that to be convinced of it.
Rick: Yeah. I haven’t asked you much about your personal experience, and some people are reticent to talk about that. Buddhists are reticent to talk about it. But you’ve been doing this for decades now. What has it done to your day-to-day, hour-to-hour, twenty-four-seven state of consciousness?
Kabir: I recognize in myself a personality self, or an egoic self, that has its reactions, its preferences, its annoyances, its pleasures—all of that stuff. And then I recognize in myself another aspect of my being that is deeper, that is prior to all of that stuff. More and more, I live with these two in relationship.
The primary one, which is the deeper one, I choose to call the essential self. It’s closer to the divine qualities of patience, gratitude, forgiveness, and so on. It exercises an influence on the personality level, both to restrain it when necessary and to cultivate the personality as an instrument of expression.
It’s almost like an actor would cultivate a role, but it’s not just a role. The social self, the personality self, is there to engage in relationship with other people, and you have your own intrinsic qualities that are personal to you.
I’m basically somewhat of an introvert. Even though I do as much teaching in public as I do, I’m basically an introvert. I don’t particularly like attention, but I find myself in that role. So I have my own attributes, and that essential self is living more and more in a state of trust: less fear, less jealousy, less resentment. This seems to be where the process leads.
I also think that if I were to put this into a more theoretical framework, I would say that I believe—or I say I know—that everything that I am, all of my best qualities, I wouldn’t even call mine insofar as they move through me, are sourced in something else. They are sourced in the divine source. To use a simple, fairly neutral term, they’re sourced in the Source.
I have no gratitude, I have no patience, I have no power of forgiveness, I have no strength. All of these things are sourced in that Source, and to the extent that I can activate those things, they gain expression through me.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: So I see my life as really the awakening and expression of those divine qualities in everyday life. I also see the most immediate practice for me, the constant practice, as removing the obstacles to love—everything that gets in the way of the simple, nonjudgmental state of being in relationship to everyone in this world and everything in this world.
Rick: Yeah. An analogy I would use to describe what you just said is that all the things we use in our daily lives that run off electricity don’t work without the electricity. Light bulbs don’t create light without electricity, refrigerators don’t create coldness, and so on.
The qualities that these things are designed to display can only be expressed if they are plugged in properly to the electrical source. It’s the same with human beings, except the analogy is simplistic, because the Source we’re referring to here is an infinite repository of all sorts of beautiful qualities.
It’s not just pure, plain-vanilla oneness. There are all the laws of nature, all the qualities of nature, everything in the whole universe. It resides there in seed form and gets expressed, manifested, or channeled through the various instruments of the divine that we regard as the world.
Kabir: Exactly. So we can think of the divine, spirituality, or consciousness as plugging ourselves into the outlet of divine energy.
Rick: Yeah. And there are all sorts of beautiful qualities that can radiate through us once we’ve done that.
Kabir: Yes, yes. Yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that. There is a fundamental energy that is fundamentally electromagnetic, and it runs on a spectrum from sexual to spiritual. It’s all fundamentally one energy, and people sometimes get confused about what to do with that energy and how to use it, how to transform it, and what to use it for.
Rick: Yeah. And this sounds a lot like the Hindu or Tantric ideas of Kundalini energy and the various chakras that it can rise through and so on.
Kabir: Yes.
Rick: So my previous question was about attention and where we put our attention, and how the qualities that we imbibe through where we put our attention get ultimately digested into and stored in the subconscious mind. And there are a number of other points you made about attention that I thought would be worth elaborating on here. You said it could almost be said that a human being is whatever his or her attention is focused on. And I guess another way of phrasing it is that whatever we give our attention to grows stronger in our life.
Kabir: Yes. So imagine—I mean, that’s a pretty absolute statement that I made—but I think I would justify it by saying that if we could truly give our attention to the divine, we would reflect the divine. Rumi says, “If your thought is a rose, you are the rose garden.” So whatever we hold in our attention, we become.
Sufi practice involves working with the divine attributes through the divine names that are in Arabic and also present in all the languages of Sufism—Turkish, Persian, and so on. A Sufi or a Shaykh will give a student a certain divine name to focus on. Maybe it’s a quality that needs strengthening in them, like awareness. Maybe it’s something they have naturally and you want to develop it even more. Or in some cases, it might be an attribute—for instance, a person may be very shy, and you want to give them some strength, so you give them an attribute related to divine strength.
So it’s as if we live in a world of qualities, not just a world of things. The senses and the mind know the world of things; the heart knows the world of qualities. If we focus our heart on these different qualities, then we make those qualities more real in ourselves. They become part of who we are, part of our character, part of our very being.
So the qualitative development of the human being, which is going on in many ways unconsciously, can also go on in art. When you read a great novel, for instance, or listen to music and are inspired by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” the soul is developing qualitatively. So this would be an interesting approach to spiritual education: to think of it in terms of the qualitative development of the human being through the heart.
Rick: That’s a very interesting approach, and the point that comes across is that it’s cumulative and not necessarily instantaneous. So there is going to be an accumulation over time of the qualities to which we give our attention.
Kabir: Yes, yes. And we can live our lives this way. I mean, what else is there to do?
Rick: Yeah, really. Continuing on this theme, you say we not only need attention, we also need balance: balance between the narrow and the wide, the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual. And this brings up an interesting point. Maybe you can riff on this a little bit. On the one hand, we need routine, habit, training, and so on to accomplish things. You can’t reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something. So routine work is involved in almost every occupation and everything else we do.
But routine can be very narrowing to awareness, so it has to be counterbalanced with unboundedness. With that deeper foundation of unboundedness, routines are no longer binding. So there’s this sort of boundless-and-boundaries seesaw balance that is achieved.
Kabir: Yes, yes. Our practice, for instance, has its routines and its unboundedness. The routine in traditional Sufi practice, for instance, is ritual prayer five times a day.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: And the ritual prayer is the same thing again and again and again, in a certain series of postures. But the wisdom in the ritual prayer is that there’s also an element where you have the option to recite verses of the Quran that you’ve memorized, which are your own choice. So theoretically, you can add those particulars, those unique choices, into the ongoing repetitive ritual.
Also, the beauty of the ritual and its repetitiveness is that it becomes a reference point. As you travel through stages or depths of awareness, your experience of that repetitive ritual changes.
Daily Prayer as Remembrance
Meanwhile, this is something in Sufism that you do five times a day, and maybe it takes you five or ten minutes each time. It doesn’t take a lot of time. Between those times of ritual prayer, you’re living your life, but because you have those inflection points in your day where you’re called to remembrance of the divine, the periods in between have more remembrance within them.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: And you’re living your life. Sufis don’t spend huge amounts of time in meditation. They don’t see meditation as the purpose of life, or even as the primary means of reaching realization. I mean, it has its place—don’t get me wrong. There should be a certain measure of it. There is meditation in daily Sufi practice, and maybe it’s a half hour, maybe it’s an hour, plus the ritual prayer and chanting and other things.
But rarely do Sufis, except for limited periods of retreat—which might be forty days long, and that’s pretty long—spend huge amounts of time in meditation.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: But generally, it’s considered to be a perfectly comprehensive spiritual practice to pray five times a day, to be in a state of remembrance in between, to do some zikr or chanting, and then to live your life in remembrance and to have that freedom for your relationships, for your creativity, and for whatever your free will chooses.
But it’s all, in a sense, contained in that matrix of regular ritual worship.
Rick: Well, you don’t take a shower all day long either, but you take one at least once, and it keeps you clean. You’re cleaner all day by virtue of having taken it. And maybe if you do a lot of physical work, you take a couple of them, and each one kind of reestablishes cleanliness.
Actually, a better analogy might be dyeing a cloth the way they used to do it in India. You dip it in the dye, bleach it in the sun, dip it in the dye, bleach it in the sun. Each time it bleaches, it loses its color, but it gets more and more and more colorfast through that alternating practice. Eventually, it can’t lose its color in the brightest sunlight.
Kabir: Yes, yes.
Rick: Okay, continuing on the theme of attention, I picked out all these quotes from your book that I liked. This was a good one: “Competition between the higher and lower energies of our psyche.” I think a lot of people can relate to this. “When we feel centered, the higher energies of our psyche are able to organize the lower energies and lend them a coherence that they normally lack. At the same time, however, the lower energies are able to disorganize the higher ones and introduce into them something of the incoherence of the lower levels.”
So this is kind of a tug-of-war thing that can happen. Well, you elaborate before I say anything else.
Kabir: Well, our spiritual practices are a way of centering ourselves. In Sufism, we think quite explicitly, for instance, about the ritual prayer. There’s a moment when your forehead touches the ground. That’s a moment of complete, total bodily, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual submission—submission to the oneness. It’s a very single-pointed practice.
So imagine practicing that again and again and again. It’s like focusing right into the deepest center. All spiritual practices can be like that, and we often talk of the dimensionless point within our own being. “Dimensionless” means it’s nowhere, but we say it’s within ourselves.
If we could place our attention on that dimensionless point within our own being, we would have connected to something that is profoundly magnetic, and it induces coherence in our emotions and in our thoughts.
So this is the idea. It’s actually interesting for people to hear what’s going on when they see Muslims standing, bowing, and prostrating. What are they prostrating to? First of all, they’re not prostrating to a hierarchy. They’re not prostrating to a theology or a concept. They’re not prostrating to an institution or church. They are prostrating to the infinite.
The most common synonym for Allah is Al-Haqq, which means “the real.” So the real and Allah are synonymous; they’re prostrating to the real. Now, they’re praying, ideally, roughly five times a day. So imagine there are five waves of prayer, of ritual prayer, circling the planet at all times. Got that?
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: Can you imagine? There are people bowing and prostrating to the real—five waves circling the planet at all times.
Also, they are oriented toward Mecca. In other words, their intention is to orient themselves to an empty cube in Mecca. There’s nothing in that cube, and everybody knows there’s nothing in that cube. That, too, is the dimensionless point.
Now, if you were to place yourself in that empty cube, these five waves of humanity in worship circling the globe—all of those souls would be, in a sense, all meeting themselves there in that empty cube.
So this is an energetic phenomenon, by virtue of connecting into that emptiness, that purity which is the divine alone. And Islam is—one of the beauties of Islam is that it’s very fastidious about not allowing any idols: no human idols, no theological idols. It’s a kind of trust in the divine and the divine alone.
And that’s what people are bowing to. That’s what people are bowing to in themselves. That’s what they are remembering. And the Quran, Islam, teaches that the greatest practice is remembrance of God: “For truly, in the remembrance of God, hearts find tranquility.” That’s the essence of the whole thing.
For truly, in the remembrance of God, hearts find tranquility.
Rick: Nice. Of course, that idols thing was taken to an extreme and distorted—the cartoonists and that whole thing. We won’t even get into it. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about that fundamentalist attitude.
All right, so I have a lot of notes here still, but we won’t have time to do them all. Here’s one that is a little different from the other things I’ve talked about, which I thought was interesting. It’s one of the sayings transmitted by the Prophet Muhammad: “God says, ‘Take refuge in my mercy from my wrath; take refuge in me from me.’”
And I thought that was cool, because I think that, in a way, God is all there is, really. I mean, if God is omnipresent, then how can there be anything other than God? And if there is something other than God, then He’s not omnipresent; there’s a hole in Him. So the whole notion of taking refuge in me from me just intrigued me.
Kabir: Well, it could be confusing, intriguing and confusing, or it could be evidence of this non-dual reality that I’ve been trying to point to. But let’s take this apart a little bit.
In this cosmic existence that we find ourselves in, we can recognize that there are qualities of wrath, or stringency and power, on the one hand, and on the other hand there are the qualities of beauty, mercy, compassion, and tenderness. So we have two great categories. Let’s call one the attributes of beauty and the other, traditionally, the attributes of power.
But with that power is also destructive power—the wrath, not as a personal emotion, but as that which just blows things away. And so, it would be false and overly sentimental to ignore that wrath and stringency as an aspect of reality. It is part of the makeup of reality. There are hurricanes and earthquakes, just as there are tropical breezes and beautiful forest ponds. So this is the situation we’re in.
But the teaching is—and this is said in another Islamic saying—“My mercy prevails over my wrath.” In other words, my mercy is the bottom line. Everything finally adds up to mercy. Even the wrath is just mercy with a little veneer of wrath.
Rick: Kind of like a strict parent who really loves you.
Kabir: Yeah, it’s all love, and even the strictness is an aspect of the love and will bring you back. Sometimes it brings you back to the straight path; sometimes it brings you back to reality. So that’s how it’s viewed.
Now, it’s kind of a charming and scary way to say it, you know—what you just read: “Take refuge in me, in me, from me.” So that’s just a very sobering, very direct way of telling us that the refuge is always possible, and that’s called Rahim. That’s the mercy quality that I was talking about before. There’s always a channel back to the mercy in every moment, in every circumstance.
Rick: Yeah, here’s a quote that I think relates to this. I think this is from the Quran: “The unsuspecting child first wipes the tablet and then writes the letters on it. God turns the heart into blood and desperate tears, then writes the spiritual mysteries on it.”
Kabir: That’s from Rumi. It’s the same idea. That’s some poetry of Rumi, and that says it very well, doesn’t it? It’s even more poetic.
Rick: Relates to the whole suffering thing we were talking about earlier.
Kabir: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Okay, well here’s a nice wrap-up point for something that we discussed earlier also, that you wrote in your book: “Presence allows us to open to the suffering of the world. Compassion is being able to feel the world’s suffering without being drowned by it.” I love that.
Compassion is being able to feel the world’s suffering without being drowned by it.
Kabir: Yeah, yeah. Well, all I can say to that, Rick, is that presence is a human attribute to be developed. It is perhaps our most fundamental and important spiritual attribute, because everything we will ever attain, everything we will ever truly know and experience, will be experienced and known more fully in presence.
Presence is that comprehensive self-awareness. I want to define it; it’s not just some vague term. Presence is a state above our thinking, our feeling, our sense impressions, and our behavior. It’s a comprehensive state of self-awareness that gathers all of those other kinds of experience—thought, feeling, and sensing—into a single field of awareness. Also included in that is our direct spiritual experience.
So this is what’s absolutely necessary in order for us to be able to receive the divine wisdom and grace that is always showering upon us by the very nature of reality itself. Reality itself is showering the conscious witness with qualities, insights, meaning, and beauty, and there’s no greater work than to awaken the presence to be aware of that.
Rick: Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that you wrote this book 25 years ago. I mean, if I had written anything 25 years ago, it would be a far cry from anything I would be capable of writing today, so pretty good.
Kabir: Well, thank you.
Rick: Yeah. Here’s another point or two on presence from your book: “As we learn to make our home in consciousness or presence, we feel more freedom within our circumstances, even without changing them.” I like that one.
And again, the word presence, but in a different context here. I find this one interesting: “Within ourselves we are surrounded by presences. The saints and masters are here within us, as is the presence of spirit.” And you alluded to this elsewhere, too, earlier in the interview. Do you feel that the saints and masters who have died still exist in some form and are kind of overseeing or helping humanity?
Kabir: Yes, that’s sometimes very tangible, something we’re aware of. Personally, I feel that we owe so much, for instance, to the presence of Rumi. I think there’s no other explanation for the kinds of transformation that I’ve witnessed in others than that there is some kind of flow of an influence, a blessing, that comes from certain sources.
These qualities, or these presences, are eternal; they are not bound by time and space. So there are morphogenetic fields—qualitative morphogenetic fields, to use Sheldrake’s term—which makes sense if you’re aware of what it means.
And so this is such an important part of spirituality. It’s one of the reasons why our respect for the traditions should humble us and make us more receptive, and not as independent and impractical as we Americans are. We shouldn’t go too far with that and neglect that we need help and that there is spiritual help.
Rick: Nice. Okay, here’s a final quote from your book. This would be a good one to end on: “This divine essence is nearer to us than our jugular vein. The divine face is everywhere to be seen; its qualities surround us.”
Kabir: Yes, yes, and that’s straight from the Quran.
Rick: Is it? Okay, great.
Kabir: Yeah, that’s an example of the mysticism of the Quran and how close it is to the surface. I mean, it’s right there; it’s explicit. The Quran is a deeply mystical text, and wheresoever you look is the face of God.
Rick: And that kind of quote should give everyone hope and inspiration. I mean, the divine is not somewhere far off, in a place that we couldn’t reach. It’s nearer to us than our jugular vein; it permeates every cell in our body, and it’s just a matter of tuning into something that’s already completely within us.
Kabir: It’s infinitely near, and the word for saint in our tradition is wali. Wali means the one who is near to—in this case, near to God. A friend is a wali. So the saint—we don’t have a word like “saint” that comes from sanctus in Latin. The meaning of the equivalent of a saint in the Islamic Sufi tradition is the one who is the friend of God because of being near, near to the divine.
Rick: Nice.
Kabir: That’s a nice way to conceive of it.
Rick: And we can all be that because we are—we’re all near to the divine. We just have to become aware of our nearness.
Kabir: Every human being. And everything I’m saying—nobody holds the franchise on this; that doesn’t belong to any one religion. Truth is truth.
You know what Muhammad says? It’s so beautiful. He says, “Truth is the believer’s lost camel.” Meaning, when you recognize it, you recognize it as your own, like nobody would mistake the lost camel. “I know that camel; that camel is mine.” So truth, wherever you find it, is your lost camel.
Truth, wherever you find it, is your lost camel.
Closing reflections
Rick: Nice. Well, on that note, let’s end. I’ve really appreciated spending this time with you, and I think people really appreciate—
Kabir: Likewise.
Rick: Yeah. The book that I’ve been quoting from mostly here is—what was it, Living Presence? I’ll link to it from your page on batgap.com. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s full of good stuff, and I’ll also link to your website and anything else you want me to link to.
Kabir: There’s one other book I’ll mention. I mean, there are a lot of—
Rick: I’ll link to that one too, but what’s the other one?
Kabir:The Knowing Heart.
Rick:The Knowing Heart.
Kabir:Living Presence and The Knowing Heart are almost like a pair.
Rick: Okay.
Kabir:Living Presence is more universal, but The Knowing Heart is more explicitly about the Sufi tradition. It’s pretty universal too, but it’s about the heart. It’s also about the Knowing Heart and about the issues of bringing an ancient tradition into the contemporary world.
Rick: Great. All right. Well, I hope this has been—I hope a lot of people will be introduced to you through this interview, and I think most of the listeners to this show would really enjoy reading your books or tuning in to what you’re doing in whatever way they can.
Kabir: Thank you.
Rick: Yeah.
Kabir: I appreciate the time you’ve taken, Rick. I think this is the longest interview I’ve ever given, and I appreciate your allowing the depth—God willing, there may be some depth in this—or at least the amount of time to do justice to some of these ideas.
Rick: Well, that’s what I try to do. I’ve got nothing better to do, really, except my wife says I have to chase down the UPS truck because something very important that we needed, and he didn’t leave. So I’m going to do that in a minute.
But in any case, I love to do that with these interviews: prepare for them as much as I can during the week, and then spend a couple of hours going as deep and as comprehensively as possible with the person, so that people can really get more than just dipping their toe in.
Kabir: Well, thank you. I feel like it was a really good dialogue between us. So thank you so much.
Rick: Thanks. So let me just make a couple of quick concluding remarks, and then I’m going to go chase the UPS truck.
This is an ongoing series, as most of you watching will be aware. Go to www.batgap.com and just check out the different menus. You’ll see everything that we have to offer, all the past interviews, and the upcoming ones that are scheduled, and so on.
So thanks for listening or watching, and thank you again, Kabir. We’ll see you all next week.
Kabir: Thank you.
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