Self-Realisation
It is very easy to lose sight of the fact that your teacher is continuously working on your spiritual side, particularly when you’re so wrapping into knowing your inner self. Your part is to deal with the psychological and emotional side, whilst the teacher works on the spiritual side.
Obviously you can consult the teacher on these issues and you will receive as much assistance as possible, but you need to use your free will to deal with these issues when they arise. Self-realisation cannot be given to you - you have to work for it. Why? Because that is your own private experience with the Beloved.
You cannot receive self-realisation from anyone, and anyone who professes that you can be given the experience is a charlatan. A teacher is an assistant and a coach who simply uses his experience to assist you.
In Sufism, the teacher’s job is the hardest thing to do because you can see what some students are falling into, but you have to keep silent because you cannot override their freedom to experience that. You have to go along with it unless there are catastrophic things happening, in which case one has to speak out. Generally, all experience is part of the student’s growth. Negative and positive should be approached equally on those terms.
Things may be painful but that is usually because the person wants to control and they are perhaps going against the higher Will. The Beloved’s energy is very pure and simple, only humans like to complicate things. The creation law is very simple. Everything is moving and dynamic, all is submitted and moving in the same direction apart from humans who have been given the free will. Hence, because of that, we cause many headaches for ourselves. Even marriage is made complicated by us.
It is the influence of the negative energy and our reasoning that makes things so complicated. We apply that reasoning because we want to survive in society and we use it for other things. But you cannot apply reasoning to spirituality, it simply doesn’t work and you have to abandon that approach to move forward in the Path. In some Paths, even book reading is forbidden in the beginning because you are diluting yourself and deceiving yourself. Knowledge only comes on the basis of experience, not from reading information from external sources.
Hopefully that assists to clear up some of the delusion we have about spirituality. The Path is a hard work, nobody ever said it was easy but the contentment that comes from that far exceeds any worldly happiness or sorrow.
Ya Hu.
