The second stage of the repentance is known as “repentance
of the repentance” (Tobeh-al-Tobeh). When you start feeling
that love, the Majesty of Beloved in your heart, you start repenting
for the fact that you’ve only just began to experience that
love; you wish that you’d always been experiencing that rather
than doing anything else. You find yourself repenting from neglecting
the Beloved and His love and hence that becomes a repentance of the
repentance. Though you’ve repented already, you continue repenting.
The Beloved
loves those who are
constantly repentant and loves
those who purify themselves.
- Surah 2:222
But that forgetfulness is part of us as human beings.
If you remembered Him all the time and you didn’t have the forgetfulness,
you couldn’t appreciate what remembering Him means. A simple
analogy is that if you were healthy all the time, you couldn’t
appreciate what health is; you’ve got to be sick occasionally
to appreciate what health is. Forgetfulness gives you an opportunity
to appreciate what loving the Beloved is; to feel that repentance,
to feel nearness to Him and that feeling builds momentum.
Later, there comes a stage that you will have developed
to the point of having to abandon your conscious. You will have worked
so much to develop your consciousness, to become aware of yourself,
to know your shadows, to know your good points, bad points and to
detach without judgement – and now you have to abandon that.
We see manifestations of Beloved’s love all around
us, but unfortunately we’re too preoccupied to notice. The beauty
of the flower represents His lovingness, His beauty and tenderness.
Trees and many other things are all manifestations. We expect a manifestation
to be in accordance with our understanding and that’s why we
stay and don’t go beyond that. By understanding our self, we
expand that horizon. And then by abandoning our self, that’s
the time we start seeing reality as it really is, rather than the
‘reality’ that has been presented to us as ‘reality’.
These days, the majority of people believe what they read in newspapers
– that is how the naffs (ego) and our intellect take us on a
ride, not giving us any time to detach from all that.
