The Wise Man and the Serpent By

Opening

"Peace be upon you and Allah's mercy and blessings."

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

"Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and blessings and peace be upon the most honorable of the prophets and messengers, our master, our patron, and our beloved Muhammad, and upon his family and companions, all of them."

Inshallah, in this blessed place in Trebiz in Germany, we are going to be honoured with the opportunity to dip into the ocean of the Masnavi, this great Darya, this great extraordinary effusion of the soul of someone who is so closely linked to the inward as well as the outward greatness of Hazrat-e fakhri alim Sayyidina Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), who is Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi, and to attempt a brief Dars of the Masnavi Sharif, inshallah.

We will be looking at one of his well-known stories, which is a story that, even though it comes to us from a distant century and a distant place, is something that cuts to the heart of what every one of us is about as a human being, and we will see its relevance in due season. And this is from the second volume of the Masnavi, lines 1878 onwards to the end of the section. This is the story of the man, the noble man, the Amir, who saw somebody into whose mouth a snake had slid, and we'll see the symbolism of this as we go along.

The Story of the Snake

An intelligent man, a person of aql, was riding along on a horse when he saw a snake going into the mouth of a man who was asleep, and in some versions of the story, some of the commentaries, the man is asleep by the roadside underneath a tree, and he sees this dreadful sight.

And the rider, the one who was on the horse, saw this terrible thing, the snake going into the man's mouth, and make haste to try and stop the snake doing it, but he didn't have a chance, he didn't have a fursat to do so. He was just too late.

Since he was well-supplied with intelligence and intellect, he took out his stick, his mace, and struck the guy who was sleeping several times. So he's not able to move the snake, but he starts hitting the sleeper.

And the guy wakes up. He's being beaten by this stick, by this soldier, this officer, and he's driven away, and he finds a place underneath a tree. So he's chasing him, and he's underneath the tree. A lot of apples had dropped from the tree and were rotting, and he tells the man into whose belly the snake has gone, he says, you who are in the grip of pain, start eating these apples.

And he stuffs the man with apples. He pushes these rotten apples into the poor man's mouth, so many that they start to come out again.

And the man starts crying and saying, I've not done anything wrong to you. You've not suffered any injury at my hands, so why are you doing this? Why have you pumped on me and woken me up with your unpleasant military stick, and you're forcing me to eat these rotten apples?

If you have some kind of, if you've got a bone to pick with me, if you've really got it in for me, some kind of ancient feud and challenge, then just take out your sword and stab me and shed my blood, just do away with me.

How inauspicious, how ill-omened was that time when you first saw me. Happy certainly is that person who's never seen your face.

I've done nothing, I have no guilt, no sin, I've not done anything good or anything outrageous. Even the mulhidaan, even the people who have no belief, would not regard this as being ethical or decent behaviour.

Blood is pouring out of my mouth together with my words. Oh Allah, ay khudaa, I beseech you, give this man, this wicked soldier, the retribution, give him his punishment.

So every moment he is coming up with some new curse, he's completely outraged, being chased round and round the tree by this strange soldier who's hitting him and forcing him to eat these rotten apples, and he's cursing him, and the rider continues to beat him and says, keep running around in this field.

With the rider who was as quick as the wind and with the blows of the mace following him, he kept on running, he had no choice, and sometimes he'd stumble and fall down on his face.

He was full of apples now, and getting exhausted, and his whole body and his feet and his face became covered with a hundred thousand wounds. And for the rest of the day, until the sunset, the rider keeps on chasing him round and round the tree, forcing him to eat these apples, until at last, he starts to vomit, and he throws it up.

So all of the things that he'd been eating, all of the good things and the bad things, came up from him, he vomited it up, and at the end of it, of course, the snake comes out, along with everything else that he's been eating.

The Symbolism of the Snake

So what is the symbolism here? Well, as you've probably guessed, the symbolism here is that the snake, the maar, is the ego, the lower self. Now, the snake is a symbol that's used in Mevlana Rumi for that aspect of the lower self, which is deceitful and sneaky and plays games. It's not really there in our Quranic account of the fall.

It's not the snake that causes Eve to tempt Adam, but still, the snake is a symbol of the human possibilities that are represented in the self through animals, and others would be donkeys, lions, goats, and so forth. There are certain animal qualities that are exemplified in animals that we find represented in our literature as particular virtues or vices or human-type personalities.

So the snake is one of the lowest, because, of course, of all the creatures, it's the one that stays closest to the ard, to the dunya. It kind of slithers along. It doesn't have any possibility to rise above the ground, and it wriggles, it squirms. It doesn't have any istiqamat, or going straight.

And one of the ways in which Mivlana develops this image is that when you see the snake that's within you, this black snake, which is your lower possibility, the envy, the biliousness, the cruelty, the selfishness, the appetite, that part of you, the dark part, the part that stays close to the ground, the worst thing you can do when you've detected such an animal, such a reptile within yourself, is to feed it.

So often we find the image of one giving a snake milk to drink. This is quite common in the masnavi and the divan. And he says, beware of feeding the lower self, because if you do so, then it might grow, and the snake, when it becomes larger, can turn into something like a dragon, ajdeha. It's as if the snake is a kind of junior dragon. And when the dragon is there, there's very little that can be done, and you're just completely in the group of a nafs al-amara, and you're a kind of hard-hearted gangster, egotist CEO who makes his money from asset stripping, torturer, whatever it might be.

Those lower, furionic possibilities within us are due to the fact that instead of trying to deal with the snake within, we've been nourishing it. And instead of doing so, we need to be starving it, not giving it what it wants. What it wants is to be gratified.

Each time you say no to one of the ego's impulses, it becomes hungrier and becomes weaker. Each time you say yes to one of the ego's impulses, it becomes a little bit stronger, a little bit bolder, and next time it's going to be harder for you to deal with it. So that's the image that he's using.

The Nature of Humanity

And Mevlana quite frequently talks about this snake that we have within us. And in a famous series of verses where he really talks about the meaning of the nobility of Bani Adam, Allah says:

"- We have honored the descendants of Adam. (Quran 17:70)"

Mevlana says, yes, through the ruh that is within us, but the clay also contains that dunyawi possibility.

This is the (هَدَيْنَاهُ النَّجْدَيْنِ - We've guided him to the two paths. (Quran 90:10)

As well as the angelic, there is the demonic. Human beings are uniquely amongst the orders of creation caught between those two possibilities. So sometimes he uses images such as human beings are half honeybee and half snake. That is diagnosis of the human condition.

We have the capacity to be diligent and to gain sweetness from creation and to produce nutrients to creation. We also have the possibility to be poisonous and to be base and to be slimy base entities in creation.

So we have enabled the descendants of Adam because he has the ikhtiyar. And actually some kind of free will is important for Mevlana. This ikhtiyar, this capacity that we have. However illusory, however theologically difficult, however nowadays scientifically difficult it might be, we do have this capacity to choose. And it is in this that our nobility consists.

The fact that we are, half of us is zanburi asal, the honey bee, and the other half is the maar, the snake. We actually have the possibility of changing that balance. We have both within us.

But because of this ennobling, whose original sign is

- Adam received the words from his lord and he relented towards him. (Quran 2:37)

We have the capacity through this mysterious, paradoxical, impossible thing called free will, ikhtiyar, to discipline the snake, to starve it, and to nourish the honey bee so that that becomes our basic identity. So that that becomes our basic identity and is habitually what we are.

Because our definition of akhlaq, khuluq in the singular, is an established condition in the self from which noble actions proceed without any need for forethought. If you think before acting virtuously, you're not virtuous. It's only spontaneous virtuous actions in which virtue consists.

So if you're going to be instinctively a person who always reaches for what's good in each situation, who always sees the best in every individual, who always detects the fragrance in any corner of God's earth rather than following the lower, snake-like part of us which always looks for what is dark, what is disagreeable, what sheds negative light on other people and their intentions, then you become a honey bee.

And just like the miracle of the bee that produces sweetness from just flowers and the earth of creation, you too can bring about this miraculous transformation.

The Fish Metaphor

Another image that Mevlana uses is we are half snake. And he also uses the image of the mahi, the fish. He says, human beings are like fish. This is a useful image.

And what he means is that we have a natural abode. The natural abode really is the ocean. And the ocean in Mevlana is always an image of the limitlessness of the divine mercy.

That's our natural habitat. Taken out of it, we don't really flourish. And the fish has in its deepest instinct and nature the desire to return to the water, take a fish out of water. And all it can think about is it's

craving to return to the water.

And thus is it with human beings. Take us away from what is holy, what is beautiful, what is virtuous, what is in line with the true nature of things. And we kind of flap about and gasp for breath and behave in a generally disagreeable way.

Why is it that we have those bad akhlaq? It is nothing other than the fish slapping itself around, damaging itself, damaging others even, because its sole thought is to get back into the ocean. That's why the fish does that.

That's why human beings behave badly, because they're away from the ocean of holiness, they're away from the world of purity and the abode where there's no dimension, bilamikan. And therefore we behave in this strange and aberrant and unnatural way. So fish is another nice image that Mevlana uses.

So in some of his prose works, for instance the Fihi Ma'afihi, Mevlana says man is a mixture. His recipe is that there is passion, shakwa, within him. There's also akhl.

And this is usually translated as intellect, but in Mevlana akhl means something a bit more than our contemporary understanding of intellect, which basically just means cerebral capacity. It means the ability to be wise and to detect the existence of the true nature of things and to find the golden mean and the true just balance in everything. It doesn't just mean the mind is some kind of computer.

So he goes on to say, he is half angel and half beast, half snake and half fish. His fish pulls him always towards the water and his snake pulls him towards the dry land, because the snake doesn't deal with the water and if you throw the snake into the water, that's not its natural habitat. That's where the snake will start thrashing around and will drown pretty quickly.

The snake exists for the dry land and the fish exists for the water. We have both of those possibilities within us. So whenever there is any disturbance within the human soul, whatever its outward explanation or manifestation it might be, it's because of this inner battle.

The lower part of us saying, let's slither around on the dry land and the higher part of us saying, hey guys, let's go back to the ocean, which is actually our true homeland. The ocean is the original divine source, the context of the Rosy Allast, the day of Am I not your Lord? And the ocean is, again, this is so common in Rumi, where you find treasures.

Because we look at the ocean, we see the surface and if you're not a creature that dwells in the ocean and has experience of being in the ocean, you'll think it's just ripples on the surface and not so interesting. But beneath the surface, there are so many wonders. There are pearls and there is coral and there are amazingly beautiful things to be seen.

And thus is the true world, the real world, which normally we don't see beyond the surface of things. Even though we think we see things in three dimensions, in fact, we only see as far as the surface of things. We don't see the metaphysics behind the physics.

But an infinitesimal distance behind the surface of things, there is the true world, there is the Malakut, there is the world of Maana, beyond the world of Hiss. And in that world, all kinds of wonders happen. Space and time don't quite behave in the way we would like them to. Karamat become normal rather than occasional. Everything becomes prophetic and a world of vision. So the ocean contains these pearls.

The Test of Faith

Let me give you one more of my sort of Rumi quotes about these animal images. This is in another of his books, the Seven Gatherings, the Seven Sessions, Majalisi Sabah. So he says, Allah tells us, in the way that I wish to make my treasure manifest, this is the Kuntu Kanzan Mahfiyah, that also I wanted to manifest your capacity to recognise that treasure.

So Allah has two desires, as it were, two iradas. First of all, to make his treasure manifest. In other words, the potentiality of the plenitude of his nature manifest, so the world exists. So also he wishes to make manifest the human capacity to recognise that treasure.

Even a lot of scientists now say, understanding the material world has two big dimensions. First of all, understanding what it is. And secondly, understanding what it is to understand it. The strangest thing in creation being that there is a human subject that can look and actually make sense of things, observe things, human consciousness.

So there's two hidden treasures, in a sense, that Rumi is speaking about. Just as I wanted to manifest the purity and gentleness of this ocean, so I wanted to manifest the high aspirations and growth through the gentleness of the fish and the creatures which dwell in the ocean.

Hence they may behold their own faithfulness and manifest their desires.

A famous verse from the Qur'an. Do people think that they will just be left to say, we believe, and they are not tested? (Quran 29:2)

There is always a test, there is always a sign. There is always the increase and the decrease of faith. And there is always the need to differentiate between what is truly a virtue from what is actually a vice. And this becomes a subtle thing.

So he goes on to say, There are hundreds of thousands of snakes which make the claim that they are in fact fish. They indeed have fish forms, but their reality is that of snakes. So there are some human beings

who seem to be outwardly, or even in the kind of religious walk that they walk, to be part of the world of the La Meccan, the limitless ocean without shore.

But in fact the inward reality is something else. And this is a perennial warning that the sheikhs give us along the path. Always judge with your deepest intuition. Don't just judge by people's capacity to tick formal boxes of exoteric religion. You can tick all of the boxes of exoteric religion and still be a snake within. And such people are legion.

So he says, There are hundreds of thousands of snakes which make the claim that they are in fact fish. And the same goes for the virtues, because it's quite possible for any virtue in fact to be a secret vice, if the intention is not correct.

So even if we see in ourselves or in others something that really seems to be courage, or generosity, or hospitality, or self-sacrifice, or telling the truth, whatever it might be, the outward form of that might be one of these fish, its natural home might be the ocean. But its inward reality may well be something very perverse. And that may even be veiled from the person who thinks that he has these virtues. There's no room ever for complacency or for justifying the self.

Even Sayyidina Yusuf, who was given that amazing temptation, says:

- I'm not trying to claim that myself is innocent. The self is always commanding to evil. (Quran 12:53)

Even in that amazing moment when he was almost seduced and all of that could have befallen him, and he says no, he does not attribute that no to himself. But it's the proof of his Lord. And he himself recognizes, despite his prophetic perfection, despite the fact that he has given victory over the shaytan, over the snake within, he is still humble. And that's the sign of ikhlas, which is one of the tricky things.

Because, as the Holy Prophet tells us (صلى الله عليه وسلم):

- that ostentation is the hidden idolatry or polytheism. (Hadith)

And shirk is a big word, but it's the one that he uses (صلى الله عليه وسلم) because if you are outwardly practicing something that looks wonderful and pure and good and compassionate and merciful and generous and hospitable, but inwardly you are doing it because you hope other people will admire it, or because you hope you yourself will admire yourself, then you have got more than one qiblah.

You're not doing it for a wahid, a qahar, you're doing it for him and also for him and for him and for her and for the self. That's why the word shirk is used, which is a very subtle thing. And half of this path that Mevlana is talking about is trying to get us to recognize that there are idols within.

Idol to that, well, I'll probably never see an idol of hubal and allat in my life. That's not really on my horizons of possible spiritual threats. But the idols within are subtle and difficult.

This is why it's described as more hidden than the creeping of a black ant on a plain rock in a moonless night. (Hadith)

Really difficult to see that scorpion within, that snake within. It's imperceptible. And this is one reason why the two most common images in our literature for the lower self, that which is kind of poisonous and which bites and which hides under rocks, a sort of base demonic efreet within, the two most common images are the scorpion and the snake.

And those are also used in the hadith to indicate the torments of the grave. The torments of the grave is about scorpions and snakes. Why? Because if in this world you had allowed those things to dwell within you and you'd never really taken steps to kind of chuck in some antiseptic and to fumigate it and to call in pest control and deal with it, you live your life with those pests within you, then they're going to continue with you when you're in the pretty unimaginable barzakh world beyond the grave.

And this is just something, a kind of internal zoo that you have cultivated in your life by feeding them and you have to deal with it in the akhirah. And this is just part of the divine justice.

Allah was not unjust to them, they were unjust, they brought darkness to their own selves. (Quran 9:70)

The Role of the Spiritual Teacher

So you can see now what this story is about. The story is about the fact that the guy wakes up, somebody's hitting him, he doesn't know who he is, and forcing him to eat these green apples. It's a weird scenario.

So with the teacher, the real spiritual guide, a lot of the time you don't really know what he's doing. He might just be sitting there or might give you a look or might tell you to clean up the toilets. It sometimes can seem arbitrary and strange.

In fact, he's got his stick and he's just beating him again and again and again. Not because he wants to hurt you, but like a good physician, surgery might be painful, the tooth extraction might be painful, but that's not what he's trying to do. He's actually trying to get out, to make you vomit, to get rid of this pollution that's within.

So this person who seems to be the bane of our existence actually turns out to be the one who's our healing and in whom we can find deliverance from this catastrophe of going through our lives with these kind of parasites within us, which is certainly going to obstruct any hope for real inner serenity and happiness.

When he saw, the man vomits up the snake, and he sees the snake, he falls on his knees in front of that kind and compassionate man. Suddenly he sees what it's all about. Ah, there was that thing within me. I

understand why I was being bitten up. So as soon as he saw that big, ugly, hideous, horrible snake in front of him, all of his suffering went away.

All of his grief and his pain and the bruises vanished. He no longer cared. Just as if you come out of the dentist and he's pulled out the tooth that's been giving you pain for a long time. Okay, it might ache a little bit, but are you going to complain about that? Not really. You won't even notice it. You're so happy that the tooth has gone.

And the same for surgery and any other major medical operation. There's going to be after effects and side effects, but who cares if the sickness has been done away with. And even though it really hurts, you go to the dentist and you're sincere in thanking him for having carried out the operation.

It's just an irony of the human condition. He said, you are like the Gabriel of divine mercy. One moment he's been a thug beating him up with a stick and the next moment he's the Gabriel of divine mercy.

You are the one who is responsible for all of my good fortune. How blessed was the hour when you saw me. I was dead. And now you have given me new life. You were chasing me as a mother chases. In other words, the mother that's trying to stop the child from falling off a cliff or running onto the road.

It was that kind of chasing. And I was running away from you like a donkey running away from its owner, like the donkey. And here's another of Rumi's famous animal images.

The Donkey Metaphor

And we seem to be looking at a lot of them today. That one aspect of the self is there is the snake. There is the scorpion, but there's also the donkey. We are often donkeys. And in most religious traditions, the same kind of human archetypes exist. The donkey is stubborn. The donkey is difficult. The donkey must be brought into obedience. And hence, the donkey is often irrational and very much in the grip of its lower possibilities.

So Rumi often speaks of the Cheshmehar, the eye of the donkey, and says, close the eye of the donkey and open the eye of the intellect, what you really are. Stop seeing things in terms of your desire to get stuff out of other people and out of creation. Don't scan the world looking for treats for yourself.

Close that eye and instead open the eye of looking at the world in terms of looking for what is luminous and what is bright. And because light is the instrument of physical sight, you can see how well this image works. You can look at the world whenever you open your eyes, if you're not blind, and you can see things in terms of the darkness and the shades.

Or you can look at exactly the same thing and you can see the light that produces the meaning of the darkness and the shades. These are two eyes. And sometimes in our tradition, we say that the Antichrist has one eye because it's not capable of moving from the perception of the shades, the zulumat, the

shadows that constitute the differentiate of the world, towards seeing things in terms of the light, which is the one, which is the divine name, al-Wali.

Allah is the protecting friend, the guide of those who have iman. He takes them out of the shadows into the light. (Quran 2:257)

Ibn Arabi uses this imagery a lot. The Qur'an speaks of Allah bringing us out of, we can't do it ourselves, it's through his ni'mah, his grace, out of the shadows into the light. Shadows, they're always in the plural. The light is always singular in the Qur'an.

Because the differentiate of the world, which is the consequences of the shadows thrown through the refraction and differentiation of his 99 names, are multiple. If you only see the shadows and you don't see the light that is shedding the shadows, then you've kind of misunderstood what it's all about.

Which is the problem of a lot of, say, contemporary science, where they look at all these physical constants and the protons and the nucleus and the Higgs boson and it's all amazing, but they don't see the unified ground of it all that is actually generating this complexity and this masterpiece, this extraordinarily vast panoply of time and space.

They don't see it as the consequence of a single principle.

- Except for those who do intuit that, well, this must come from something, there are principles that must have established these constants. (Quran 17:87)

But if you only look with that eye, the eye of the donkey, that will be what you see. And the eye of the donkey functions, it sees the world, and it can operate materially. But the other eye, the eye that the dajjal does not possess, is the eye that enables us to see things in terms of the light that generates the differentiator in the first place and take away the light, what a shadow is going to be. That's the relationship between the creatures and the creator.

We think this world has gone on for billions of years and it's so cool and these physical laws can't be overthrown, but without the light, what is the meaning of the shadows? So we need to recall this.

So the ego as a donkey, the lower self, our normal selves, our non-Adamic selves as donkeys, and we need a bridle for the donkey. That's another of his common images. In other words, we need to pull it back. And this is common in... Bosiri, for instance, has the image of the lower self as a stallion, the wild horse, a bronco.

How are you going to ride it? How are you going to progress through life on yourself when yourself is craving this pleasure and that pleasure and backbiting and jealousy and all of that? It's kind of not restful. But... Who's going to help me control this wild stallion? Where are the reins that are going to enable me

Finding the True Teacher

We are what we do. We are what we desire. And if we're honest, most of what we desire is dubious. And even the things that are not dubious that we desire, we may desire them for dubious reasons. We are in a mess. We're caught in this morass.

We see things with this donkey's eye. So what's the solution? Well, the message is to find the teacher because the teacher may well be able to hit you so hard and stuff you with apples and do other weird things that actually you kind of get rid of it. And you can finally experience the true dhikr Allah and the... With the remembrance of Allah, the hearts find peace back to the ocean.

The fish back in the ocean can calm down in its natural element, its native habitat. And we can stop slapping around and feeling desperate and being dangerous back to the ocean. But to find the teacher means we have to find a teacher who is not asinine.

That is to say a teacher who is not like a donkey. And the Qur'an has warned us explicitly, we have it in Revelation, that we are to beware of religious scholars who are like donkeys carrying scrolls.

This was a trap into which some earlier communities fell.

MashaAllah, so many books being carried by donkeys. In other words, despite the immense wisdom of that community's texts, some of the leaders were still in the group of their passions. There is no guarantee in studying kalam and tafsir and hadith and fiqh and aqidah and all of those things that you won't still be a donkey at the end of it.

And actually if you are a donkey, who knows all of that stuff, you are much more dangerous because people will assume that you are practicing those things and it has turned you into a donkey. And there is a lot of this in the world today. People are looking at the Muslim world, Muslim communities and seeing this, that and the other and say, oh, it is because of all of that religious stuff they are doing.

That is very dangerous. So that is why the Qur'an warns us against being like the community which had leaders that were like donkeys carrying scrolls. That is really a catastrophe.

And Imam al-Ghazali in his Kitab al-Dhamm al-Ghurur in the Ihya ul-Madin specifically warns us against the ulama al-suq, the ulama who are outwardly meticulous and punctilious in following their religion but actually full of rivalries, narrow-mindedness, suspiciousness, attacking, attacking, attacking, criticising, criticising, criticising, which is all from the rawah al-nafs, not from a genuine zeal for Allah's religion but because of an insecurity, anger, envy, resentment that just makes them hypercritical.

The sign of the true scholar in the time of difficulty is that he tries to make things easy for people and he makes allowances for everybody to the extent of what is a possible interpretation in some view of sharia. The sign of the scholar who is not responding with this spiritual wisdom to the crisis of the age and is still a donkey is that he's always looking for new things to forbid.

Even though people are weak, he wants to find more things to forbid them. And that's a sign that the donkey is prevailing because there's no wisdom there, there's no mercy, no compassion. The intellect's eye is not open.

The donkey's eye is looking at everybody and just sees the people in the majlis and all it sees, that's wrong, that's wrong, she's wrong, that's the donkey. And unfortunately, this is something that is common. And Mevlana, who had his own problems with some donkeys amongst the ulema of his day, most of the ulema of Konya loved him, of course.

He was the Friday imam of the Ala'uddin Mosque. But some of them weren't really happy with his kind of ecstatic and rather radical critique of a certain type of formulaic religion.

The Essence of Religious Knowledge

So here's, this is an explanation of some external, mainly kalam scholars. He knows the attributes of every substance. It's a kind of kalam differentiation. But when he tries to explain his own substance, he's a donkey.

He says, I know everything that the sharia allows and disallows, but how is it, a woman, that you don't know whether you yourself are halal or haram? He's got so many fatwas about this and that and the other being lawful or unlawful, he doesn't know whether he himself is halal or haram. You know the value of everything in the market except your own value. And that's idiocy.

The essence of all religious knowledge is this, it all boils down to one thing, to know who you are going to be on the day of judgement. Ultimately it's about the self. It's not about your judgements of other people that it's going to be effective.

Allah is ahkam al-hakimin, he's the best of judges. He's not going to consult you at the judgement seat. It's between Allah and each individual soul.

So pay attention to yourself, judge yourself, sort yourself out, because you are the one who is accountable for yourself to Allahsubhanahu wa ta'ala and the others will have their own separate reckoning.

So, yes, lots of stuff about donkeys. He talks about the donkey of Jesus, for instance, that some people see Sayyidina Isa, Jesus, alayhi salam upon him be peace, with his donkey, and they're more interested in the noise and the apparent physical usefulness of the donkey than they are interested in Sayyidina Isa.

They listen to the donkey's braying just because it's louder and they're not listening to his sweet discourse. So that's another human aberration. And it is human nature and we can't deny it.

If you open up a television nowadays at random, 999 times out of 1,000, it's going to be something that caters to the kind of donkey within us. Whether it be reality TV or stupid advertising or inappropriate images or whatever it is, it's the donkey that is what they're advertising for. And maybe once occasionally you'll see something that is about a higher possibility and dignity and sacrifice and charity, but not so often.

The Path to True Happiness

So let's not be complacent that the advertising people have done their research and they know what we like. Okay, so we get back to the Masnavi text. The donkey runs away from its master because it's just a stupid donkey.

It doesn't know that it belongs to the master, the master is going to feed it. And the owner runs after the donkey because the owner wants to look after the donkey. And this is similar to the relationship between human beings and their creator.

We run away from him because we're really stupid and we want to follow our egos. Allahsubhanahu wa ta'ala is pursuing us, not because he needs us, but because of his rahmah. He seeks him not because he's going to profit from him or lose from him, but because he wants to look after him.

In other words, he's afraid that a wolf or some other wild beast is going to rip him apart. That's why the owner wants to reclaim possession of the donkey. Whoever sees your face, the donkey owner, is happy, felicitous.

Whoever comes to your abode, will be, comes to your abode, suddenly will be a person who rejoices. So now he's speaking to the army officer who's been beating him up and he's praising him. Whoever sees your face, the donkey owner, O you whom the pure spirit has praised, how many stupid things I was saying back to you.

In other words, all the curses and all the implications and the complaints that the sick man was saying to the one who was pursuing him. This is what human beings do when they complain about a teacher, whether it be a child complaining about the school teacher or a spiritual seeker who doesn't really understand the nature of his guide and thinks that things are a bit rough or difficult or the guide hasn't understood properly.

Or the human being protesting about aspects of God's religion or protesting about duties that he has to perform or protesting about the weather or protesting about any other misfortune that might befall him in this world.

That is the donkey complaining to the donkey owner on the basis of a misunderstanding of what the donkey owner intends. That unfortunately is the case of those who are not, in the true sense, in Islam, complete submission to their Lord. That's how we, as stupid donkeys, should be when we return to our merciful Lord rather than running away when the Lord is trying to look after us, saying we don't want those apples, stop hitting us.

No, the reality is that the Lord has a wisdom which we haven't understood. So, love for the teacher. Love for the teacher is important.

Not just recognition that the teacher is a teacher but love for the teacher. And this is an ongoing sunnah and it is an essential part of our way in Islam because to follow the teacher is to follow the one who is following one who is following one who is following the founder. Insofar as he is a legitimate teacher, he is in the footsteps of the chosen one.

So something of the beauty of the Mustafa, something of his authority, something of the prophetic charisma, something of the majesty of the Holy Prophet, something of the wisdom of the Prophet with his Sahaba, has been inherited down the years to the present day and is there in the one who is sitting on the minbar, the one who is sitting in the place of authority and teaching.

Even if it be only fragmentary, the prophetic light is so great that just experiencing some tiny spark or fraction of that is more important than anything else and is sufficient, inshallah, to illuminate your life.

So that is why it is not just a question of obeying the teacher and accepting that the teacher sometimes is going to beat you when you don't do your homework, but actually loving the teacher because what service could be greater than to call somebody to vomit up a snake?

Well, the only service that is greater than that is to find somebody who can encourage one to get rid of one's lower self, the lower possibilities, the donkey, the snake, the scorpion, all of that.

That's what we all desire. In our happiest moments, the time when the spirit is at peace, not moments of agitated sensual happiness, but times of real serenity and reconnection with what we really are, that happiness only comes about because we are in a state of detachment from the lower self. We've said no to the cravings.

We've turned off the devices. We've started to tune into and log on to the needs of others. We start to go through the streets instead of instinctively noting the faults of others. I wouldn't wear that. I wouldn't have bought that. That child looks ugly.

Whatever it is that the lower self, the donkey, craves instead to see the best in other people. That child is beautiful. That person is modestly dressed. That person is being helpful. That person, whatever it is, to scan, to use that radar so that the eye of the Aql, the Chashmi Aql, is active and to see the world in a different way.

It's the same old world with plenty of shadows, but to see it in that way, always to see the best in others is part of this way which Mevlana is reminding us is the way of the Chosen One because it's part of having a good opinion and looking for Allah's signs.

One of the meanings of the commandment to look at Allah's signs and to look for Allah's signs, which is a fundamental commandment of the Holy Qur'an, is that in every situation you look to see where those signs might be. In other words, you see the best in every situation. You see what is holy in every situation.

You don't look at a particular image in the world or listen to a particular sound or smell something or whatever the sense experience might be in order to see what in it is distant from the Lord, to see the shadows. No, you want to see the signs. And that is a key to iman.

That is a way to enhancing one's inward life. To the extent that we see Allah's signs, iman is increased.

In the creation of the heavens and the earth are created and the succession of night and day are signs for people of understanding.

So, to the extent that we see those signs, not just the outward two-dimensional surface of the things, but our inner wisdom can intuit the meaning of those signs. Even if we couldn't put it into words, we see the sunset or some other stereotypical wonder of nature and something happens within us, maybe we could write a poem about it, but it probably wouldn't do justice to the magnificence of the moment, that those situations are the forms of nourishment that cause the self to stop to be itself and to return to its true nature.

And that is where the fish resumes its life in the sea and realizes that it was in the sea all along, because any idea that you can actually be out of the totality of the Haqq is a kind of misunderstanding. Everything, the distance, is just a kind of human point of view, a subjective thought. Qurb is the reality. Allah describes himself as Al-Qarib in the Qur'an, but never as Al-Ba'id.

There are so many other oppositions, Al-Qabid or Al-Basid, or Al-Rafi' or Al-Khafin. Many of the divine names are in pairs, but not this one, where he says:

When my slaves ask about me, say, I am near.

Not once in the Qur'an, I am distant. No, he's not distant, he is (أَقْرَبْ إِلَيْهِ مِنْ حَبْلِ الْوَرِيد - Closer to us than the jugular vein).

Closer to us than the jugular vein.

But we are something else, we are distant, and that's as a result of our seeing with this donkey eye, and not to see things with the true eye, the eye of the heart, which is that with which we were born.

So, the love for the one who teaches us to open that eye, so we can see everything in terms of whatever is most beautiful in a given situation, how wonderful that would be.

So, we have this idea of this teacher who can be a surprise, that because we don't really know ourselves and what's wrong with ourselves, the most mysterious thing we ever encounter is the self. We think we understand other people, but the self is weird, so probably we haven't understood other people, so on what basis do we judge them? Well, we do it anyway.

But the self, this low mysterious thing with the snakes and the scorpions and the higher possibilities, the honey bee, is so mysterious that any successful treatment of it is also likely to be mysterious.

And that's why the believer, when he sees or she sees misfortunes in creation, says, maybe this is the blow of mercy. Maybe the sickness, this bereavement, this financial loss is there because I need to have a particular snake ejected. I may not understand how that's happening.

Maybe it's just a punishment. Allah give us protection from Allah's punishment. But let us assume that the divine physician has not lost sight of us and our needs, and therefore every misfortune that we encounter, we ought to be experiencing as and interpreting as a sign of the divine mercy, the blow that brings us to our knees.

Very often a real tauba, which turns out to be the most precious and luminous moment in people's lives, is caused by some disaster, some traffic accident, some bereavement, some cancer diagnosis immediately thumps that person into waking up, and it turns into a thumping that succeeded where nothing else could have succeeded.

So this is essential that we love these guides. And there's a hadith in which the Holy Prophet, alayhi salatu wa salam, is reminding us of the importance of the guides who are the heirs to the prophets, where Mawlana talks about the hadith that says:

that my ummah is like Noah's ark. (Hadith)

And so he has to say:

I and my companions are like Noah's ark. Whoever boards it or clings to it will find a future.

When you are with a spiritual teacher, you are very far from ugliness. Night and day you will travel in a ship. Protected by the spirit of that captain who is a bestower of spirits, you sleep in the ship and you still move on.

Do not violate the commandments of the prophet of your time. Do not rely on your own abilities and your own chosen path. Even if you are a lion, if you travel the path without a guide, you will just be somebody who sees himself astray and ultimately disgraceful. Be careful.

Fly only with the wings of the guide. Then you will see how his armies come to your assistance. And the example of Al-Khidr is one case that the ulama will give.

Al-Khidr's instructions to Musa seemed strange to Sayyidina Musa, but there was a hidden wisdom that Musa, despite his prophetic perfection and his possession of the tablets of the law, had yet to discover.

And so it is, for instance, with that extraordinary alchemy of souls that we find between Mevlana and Shams Tabriz. Because if the strangest thing in the world and that part of the world that presents a possible opening to the world of reality and the world of spirits is within ourselves, not in the stuff of matter, which is just a solid carapace, but within ourselves, because the ruh, which is from the command of the Lord, is within ourselves, then it is the case that that aspect of creation that most surely signposts us on to the real world is actually the human signpost.

So we can see the sunset and the seas and everything, and we can be awoken or at least aroused spiritually by that. But a stronger sign is actually the sign that is a perfect human being. Or sometimes, in a terrible way, in somebody who is absolutely in a disgraceful situation and whose disgraceful situation reminds you that actually we weren't meant to be like that and can also jolt you with a kind of tulba.

But much more effective is to meet somebody who is a guide, who has been refined, is a spiritual sage, who can just by looking at you help to sort you out. That is the precious thing. And that alchemy of souls is to do with the mystery of one human mystery, the ruh, encountering another mystery, another ruh, which is why our love for another human being will be slightly much stronger than our love for a cat or the sunset or a particular city.

Love for another human being is of a different order. Why? Because there is a stronger divine sign, a stronger tajalli of the divine qualities in another human soul than anything else you'll see in creation. And love is nothing other than the recognition of beauty and perfection and hence the presence of the sacred in something else.

That's what it is. More likely to be present in somebody else. What's in all, we can still love people because of aspects of beauty and perfection that exist in them.

So with Rumi and Shams, we find this strange experience that they were drawing this mystery out of each other in this kind of strange alchemical relationship. It wasn't even a teacher-pupil relationship. It's something deeper, stranger.

It's more like a profound spiritual friendship that they were nourishing each other and the honey continued.

The Teaching Without Words

Okay, so he's now talking about... This is a long speech that Rumi puts into the mouth of the teacher who is trying to explain why he didn't explain to the man why he was beating him and stuffing his mouth full of rotten apples.

He says, if I'd even given you a hint of what I was doing, your gallbladder would instantly have turned into water because you would have been so terrified. If I told you what that snake was like, you would have been so frightened that you would have died.

The Holy Prophet said, Mostafa said, if I was to tell you correctly the description of the enemy which is in your own selves, even the gallbladders of heroes would burst. Such a person would neither be able to walk nor return to work.

Neither would he have the strength even to continue praying nor would he have the strength to continue fasting and then namaz. He would become so useless that he'd be like a mouse hypnotized by a cat, unable to move. He would be as terrified as a lamb confronted by a wolf.

Such a person would be so terrified that he would not be able to make any plans or even move. And that is why I treated you without speaking. I am silent like Abu Bakr al-Rababi.

I handle the iron like David. Abu Bakr al-Rababi was somebody, a well-known musician who used to be a disciple of Rumi, who was said to be such a great musician that just the sound of his music, even without words, would make people weep. The quality of great traditional musicians in the near east, like Farabi is said to have been such a great lutenist that he could make people cry or laugh just from his music.

And even silence sometimes with a great musician in this tradition is said to be enough to get people into a great musical state. So he's a great Rabab, great Rabab player. And Dawud, of course, famous for his singing and just the beauty of the voice of Sayyidina Dawud al-Islam was enough to provoke repentance even without listening to the actual words.

So yes, he proceeds:

How is it possible to explain the actions of the Divine or the actions of prophetic wisdom or sainthood to people who are in the state of sleep? How is it possible to assess or to predict or to interpret the love that ensues when people see what the work of prophecy is really about, taking them out of their lower selves into a kind of garden, a paradise in the spirit? How is it possible to explain that?

He says, when you raise your head from this sleep that you're in, that's when you'll understand it.

And Allah knows best what is right.

In other words, he's now closing with the image of sleep and wakefulness, that the person who is in the grip of this lower eye is actually in a state of false consciousness. He's not really using his inward faculties in the way that they're designed.

He's doing something one-eyed and abusive. Whether or not he takes himself to be doing it in the name of ostensive religion is not really the point. If ultimately he is a donkey and he sees things with the donkey's eye instead of being like the honeybee, then he is in the state of false consciousness.

He is in the state of slumber and sleep. And this idea of the (غَفْلَة - ghafla) the sleep of heedlessness is again an axiom for Mawlana. That is our condition. We are (نَائِمِينَ - na'imeen). We are sleeping.

We are not fully alert. We're not fully awake. We're in a kind of somnambulant condition. Not fully present in the moment. Daydreaming about the past. Fantasizing about the future.

Not being (ابْنُ الْوَقْتِ - ibn al-waqt). Not being in the state of true (درويشي - darwishi) which is being so detached from material pleasures that we are actually fully in the moment and belonging to the moment. That the forms of the world take us away from the world.

And an indifference to the sensual possibilities of the things that are out there except in what is halal and therefore settles the soul rather than agitates it. A detachment actually makes us more in the world. And this is why we speak of the virtue of (خَلْوَةٌ دَرْ أَنْجْمَنْ - khalwa dar anjuman)

Solitude in the crowd. Which is a semi-permanent state in the world of the tariqa. Which is that because you are in the crowd but not in terms of the usual jostling of egos but only scanning for what is beautiful and scanning for opportunities to be of service you are as it were a stranger in that crowd but you are still part of the crowd.

You are still Bani Adam but you are a kind of ruby amongst the rocks. And this is how the Anbiya were. This is how the Awliya are required to be.

This is how the real person who is surrendered to Allah the true Muslim is supposed to be. In whatever situation he finds himself with human beings whether they are believers or unbelievers or saints or sinners he knows there are always good things there that he can identify and focus on. And he knows there are always things that he can be doing for those people and he will be scanning for that in every situation.

And by doing so he actually belongs to the situation more fully than the person who is in a state of denial and denigration and despite. If you are with people and your instinct is to be kind of critical of them you are not actually with them. But when you are with them at the same physical distance maybe in the same

social situation and you are looking for ways to be of service to them and looking for the correct adab in that situation you are really very close.

You are in a huddle with them. And this is why in the context of married love physical togetherness is only a kind of outward image for the inward togetherness that comes from the mutual status of Libas. And there is a deep wisdom in this.

There is one aspect of this sign:

One of his signs is that he created spouses for you from amongst yourselves so that you can experience the wonderment of being drawn out of your own selfishness in the service of somebody else and acknowledging the karamah that Allah has placed in the other. (Quran 30:21)

That is also a path of spiritual transformation.

Conclusion

So the lesson of all of this really is to remember that in whatever circumstance we might find ourselves we are never off the hook. We can never be on holiday from this fundamental human need to get rid of the snake within. At least acknowledge that we have it and probably not just the seven deadly sins but a whole bunch of snakes within ourselves to be aware that we are carrying that rubbish around within us.

And as Mevlana says to get into a spiritual zone where we are with people and truly with them. In other words, we actually recognize their value we recognize their humanity we recognize their needs and we find our happiness in spotting their needs and seeing if there is anything anybody can do for those people. Or if all they need is as the Holy Prophet says a smiling face or some kind of positive human interaction that we give them that form of nourishment in that situation.

And places like this are always important in our civilization in that they represent a kind of laboratory where this takes place in an intensified form. Where the adab and the quality of human relations are the subject of a very fine focus at the hands of the Sheikh, at the hands of his assistants.

The dervishes are on the Safinat Nur they are traveling together in order to experience the joy of true human fellowship. The happiness that the Sahaba had amongst themselves was partly due to the fact that they had been liberated from the suspiciousness and the tribalism and the false divisions imposed by the Jahiliyyah and found themselves Ibadullahi Ikhwanah as Allah's servants, as brothers.

Which is a wonderful experience for any human being. So, happiness is what we all seek. Let us find true happiness in Mevlana's vision of recognizing the demon within and loving those, whoever they may be even if they're not teachers but anybody whose presence with us gives us opportunities not just to obey the snake but to open the eye of the heart.

Let's be grateful for those people because this is a way of mu'amala. Our religion is a way of engaging with others. It's only through engaging with others that we can hope to be transformed.

If we're on our own but with ourselves which is usually pretty bad company. So may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala insha'Allah open our hearts and open the hearts of the Ummah to this teaching and to give us something of the reality as well as the words of the Masnavi of Mevlana Rumi and insha'Allah to make us people who are devoted to the text, regularly consult it, spread it insha'Allah and internalize this meaning which is that we'll only find our true happiness and sa'adat insha'Allah in the daareen, in the dunya and the akhira through this idea of looking for others, looking out for others, looking after others and putting the self, number one, last. This is the sabil al sa'adat.

Closing Dua

"May Allah bless you, pardon you, and peace and Allah's mercy be upon you."

الْفَاتِحَة