This Earth contains and remains
This Earth is continuation and cessation
This Earth is mountain and pit
Continue and cease
Retinue and decease
There are words of cess
There are words for cess, process
The process continues
Begin seems to start this circulation
This circle with ends and continuations
But without an end in itself
The process of success is about accessing
A break in the process
To know how excess is healed
How Love is revealed.
It is said on The Way that “Man proposes and God disposes”.
For me as ‘Abd al-Mu’min this is the living reality of my experience. There is a hadith that says that God fits into the heart of the believing servant.
So, as life poses problems for me, there is a constant flow of possible proposals for me to manifest as a consequence of engaging with life.
These arising proposals are at every level and aspect of my being without exception and with a total unconditional regard. These proposals encompass my physical/mental/spiritual presence and are led only by my certainty of union and conscious contact with God as the experiential fact of my life.
This fact of my conscious contact with God is unassailable but is testable from moment to moment in terms of my inner experience and my manifestation of mental activity and physical action. This fact is embodied in Step 11 of a 12 Step Programme.
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
Thankfully God disposes of His presence in my heart and the extreme limits of my awareness are held in a function of peace and relative possibility so as to make my service possible and bearable, not only for me but also for those to whom I am brought into contact.
This post then contextualises the years of writing that is patently embracing of a message of messianic proportions, but without having to join the queues of disintegrated messianic function that presents itself for treatment in the psychiatric offices of the global health care systems on a daily basis.
My exterior function is integrated in that prayer of Muhammad (pbuh), “O God, I seek refuge in You, from You.”
I am open to any rôle that is possible for me to manifest for God in His/Her/Its creation. I do not crave any particular rôle however, even though the reality of my presence connects the highest with the lowest as may be generally understood by Mankind.
There is not much more for me to say about me personally or explicitly that can expose any further the implicit message that my writings have conveyed over these past few years. The reader can take what suits them and leave what does not, without worry that there is anything to be missed that may be somehow needed.
Events in this physical world on Earth are not what they immediately appear to be, especially at this time of juncture between eras. My posts and communications will attempt to convey the strength and hope that is the antidote to my personal experience, the reality of the protection granted to me by my being who I am.
For you to be able to come to believe in your own Higher Power is the only reason for my writing.
Thus although my writing and talking exposes myself to a scrutiny that is utterly unnecessary for my certainty of and service toward One Love in action that is Life Itself, yet as a catalyst it may be utterly necessary for you to have read or heard it, if your belief in yourself is to become reconnected with what you know of yourself.
“Man proposes, God disposes.”
From the book, Sufis Of Andalusia by Muhyiddin ‘Ibn Arabi, “35 Abu Ishaq Al-Qurtubi of Cordova. One of the ‘Believers’ and a companion of Abu Madyan of Bugia.”
(The note by the translator says – I do not know what is meant by the special use of the term ‘believer’ (mu’min) here.)
My name is ‘Abd al-Mu’min, and mu’min is both a term to describe a believer, and also an attribute of Allah as is described by the hadith, Fifteenth Khabar (55) from Divine Sayings The Mishkat al-Anwar of Ibn ‘Arabi, p 64:
“God, ever mighty and majestic is He, will say in addressing the people of Paradise, ‘You are the faithful who rest in security, and I am God the Faithful who bestows security. I have broken open for you a Name from among My Names. There shall be no fear for you, nor shall you be sad. You are My Friends, My Neighbours, My Beloved, My Chosen, My special ones, the people of My Love, and you are in My Abode.'”
Also from the King James version of The New Testament:
“There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.” 1 Corinthians 10:13
As a ‘Believer’, my role is to make this, my service and Union by this Name that has been broken open for me, more clear for you, to bear witness to an illumination of Faith (Al Ikhlas), a bestowal of tranquillity and security, that you might take heart during these times of change. Salaam.
‘Abd al-Mu’min – Spring Solstice 2018.
The above is a Facebook post taken from my page and put here to expand upon after conversations with passengers in my taxi.
It seems that ‘belief’ is held by many people to be inferior to ‘knowledge’. Yet, the irony is that as people grow up supposedly from believing in Father Christmas and The Tooth Fairy, then in the sophistication of this technological age people can be overwhelmed by information, know a lot, then suddenly realise that they don’t believe in much of anything at all.
I was introduced to the beginnings of what it is to be a Sufi thirty eight years ago. I experienced an overwhelming spiritual experience in 1982, from and in which it has taken me until now to believe what actually happened.
Many years ago, I was told by a man who knew Bulent Rauf, the Sufi who was a Consultant to The Chisholme Institute in Scotland, that Bulent had told him that I was protected.
I did not know what was the purpose of that message then, but that is the nature of The Way, to understand only later the meaning of statements or the answers to questions. To not just know the words of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi in the following poem, but to be and to believe them as one’s only being …
“O marvel, a garden amidst the flames –
My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for
gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka’ba and the tables of
the Tora and the book of the Qur’an.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take,
that is my religion and my faith.”
It has taken until now for me to be able to usefully integrate my oft-disintegrated self-knowledge, into a realisation of being able to write the Facebook post above.
For these matters of becoming are carded and developed through oppositional forces, forces often given to one in outer experiences of failure and psychosocial behaviour often deriving from personal defect, as much if not more than experiences of triumph and personal success.
This much is known in stories from scripture about the lives of men like Job, but it is not believed that these principles of a direct preparation by God, by the reality that some say is attributed to Khidr, can still be transmitted into a person and can still be experienced in these modern times.
To reconnect belief to knowledge is easy to say, but not easy to achieve unaided. I have been protected, I am protected as ‘Abd al-Mu’min and only now do I understand what Bulent Rauf saw in 1981, for his help I am truly grateful.
“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Here, belief is expressed as the word charity. For belief illuminates faith, indeed as it says, though you have all faith so that you could move mountains – without a certain something else is present, nothing happens.
Why is belief like charity, that certain something else?
Because they both affirm the primordiacy of doing something without expectation of profit for oneself, the primordiacy of giving rather than getting something to happen.
It is why Christ talked of the need to become like little children. He did not mean to let go of the contemporary expressive science, but that without the open-heart of belief, that openness that most children have and that most adults lose, then knowledge stalls and fails to release its meaning.
the HU man healing 