In the end, Sufism is a point of view that is going to either reveal life to you or enhance your illusions about life. The illusions can feel very beautiful, and it is easy to use the concentration practices of Sufism to make your illusions more practical, more popular— all sorts of beautiful things, actually. But there’s always going to be something that can crack that, like, for instance, a terrible diagnosis of cancer or even death itself.
So, we can enhance our illusions, or we can use Sufism as a practice to gain more and more strength all the time, more and more clarity so that we can open up completely to life and whatever life may bring. My recommendation? Open to life. The illusions are never worth it in the end. Something comes along and cracks it; that’s just the way life is.
We have a difficulty because there are so few enlightened, awakened Sufi teachers available to us right now. We have examples of how to be very effectively not awake, how to live in a not-awake state in the most effective, beautiful way possible. We don’t have examples of people simply living their lives awake.
We don’t even know how to see it because an awake person isn’t going to look like a beautiful spiritual teacher with their illusion firmly attached. Awake people are disconcerting and not necessarily nice and not necessarily beautiful.
We have a fabulous body of teachings coming to us from the Native world, and one of our practices, of course, is to learn to really listen. So, look for books that come from truly awake indigenous people and look for people who disturb you, rather than always looking for people who are going to make you feel better.
Really listening is much like suddenly getting a terrible diagnosis because we don’t always hear what we really want to hear. You know that you’re actually listening if you hear something that you don’t want to hear; otherwise, we’re just repeating the same thing over and over again, aren’t we?
So, in the end, we always have this choice: to choose to be more awake or to choose what feels safe.
You can choose to be more awake and less safe… because it feels like it’s less safe. It’s not necessarily less safe; it’s more safe to be fully awake. But there is this part of us, our habits, our habitually asleep nature that is afraid of letting go of its control, that we have to let go.
We have to let go of the thing that feels like it’s grasping onto us. But, no, it really has no grip at all. Die before you die; the thing that needs to die is not alive, it’s not real.
You are real. You are alive. Always keep that as your center of groundedness. You are alive, you are the one living your life. You’re the one who gets the bad news, you’re the one who gets the good news. You’re the one who can relax into reality and let it flow you through to wherever it’s going to go.
We can always choose the uncertainty of awakeness or the seeming safety of our illusions.