This is one of the worldly delusions. We find that the richer someone is, the less inclined they are to be generous. One cannot be rich and generous. In the third world, you will find the hospitality of some people is so great they will share anything they have, yet a rich person will guard themselves and protect what they have at all costs. We have conditioned ourselves in this way. Richness does not bring happiness, which has nothing to do with material gain.
If a person has embarked upon the Path and has been given some practices, then he or she is continuously expanding while they sustain those practices. But that in itself is not ‘it’, there is more to the Path than that. If you just expanded in that way, you would become just like an angel but the Beloved didn’t make humans to become angels – He wants us to be higher than angels, in terms of our understanding Him.
Angels don’t know the dark side of the cosmos and these other attributes of the divine. All an angel knows is that he is submitted, the Beloved is pure love and that he is in love with the Beloved. Angels don’t know reality but humans are given that opportunity.
Negative Energy
That’s why we experience negative energy. It’s there to influence us, sometimes giving us the delusion of enjoying things in life. The harder you practice the spiritual Path, the more you find your shadows or entities becoming stronger and negativity trying harder to distract you. But there is a purpose in that and it’s not really that gloomy, though religion sometimes expresses it as such by talking about evil.
In Sufism, we take the view that good and evil have both been created by the Beloved, everything is created by Him and there is a purpose within that. Once you begin to ascend higher and expand positively, negativity tries to disrupt that.
The ordinary person who never remembers the Beloved, functioning in an automatic way through work, sleep patterns, seeking to deceive others for monetary gain, they demonstrate what is really happening in our society. We are constantly seeking to get one over on each other in order to get a bargain. But what is a bargain? It means that you have someone else’s hard work, free of charge. If this is happening, the negative energy is quite happy, because the lips of this person will never remember the name of the Beloved, or feel him, because he or she is so preoccupied with their own life. Yet at some stage the Beloved will try to wake anybody up from this state.
