Wudu and Weeping

Muslims! When you perform your wudu,
What is that you think you do?
With what care you perform ritual ablutions,
Five times daily for your habitual intrusions
Into this world of creative spontaneity,
Hating Nature, loathing kuffar, and serving your own vanity!
Salafists, Wahabbis! wash your faces, forearms, feet –
While worms fill your hearts on which they feed!

I've relished wudu, learned the script, revelled in prayer ...
Then, absorbed in dhikr I reread those suras, became aware
Of what you're doing, have always been doing, will go on doing:
Not joy you sow but stark despair, and all of your wudu-ing
Will never cleanse a single hair; you love jihad but know no God!
You love to conquer, just not yourselves; claims of peace deception, fraud.

Taqiyya your gospel, and mighty hospitable, as it suits you, as it suits you –
Supremacist and underdog unified in Umma, addressing others, Christian, Jew,
Or East or West: your plans are laid, appeased and blessed by States who've screwed
Their peoples for less, dhimmitude without conscience courage or character to confront
An ideology of such massive proportion, with an own ideology which would grant
Islam all that it wants and hankers after – how the imams do sheikh with laughter,
At the suicide of nations – full of patience, speeding their haste for dominion – gullible kuffar!

And so I weep, and go on weeping, for all your victims, my head bowed –
My weeping is my wudu, my tears are my ablution now.

You Missed All This

The local finches and doves and swallows
sang and warbeled and chirped for you,
dragonflies buzzed and a June breeze
whispered your inner name – but
you missed all this riding your bike past it all,
your headphones neatly hugging your ears,
playing nature music ...
The whole Earth is covered with your shoe leather
because you won't meet Her, and
you're missing all this!

Your MP-3 played bhajan or dhikr or hymns or reggae
through those earplugs of yours,
while the Beloved announced Herself
in the subtlest of tone unobserved –
and being hooked on technology, I'm afraid
you missed all this.

You've attended concerts and kirtans,
but having not taken home with you
the Sound going on all the time within you
and making it your own – Friend:
you missed all this.

Friend! be like Hassan that old one of Nablus,
who heard Ya Hu in the rustling grasses,
reading a dervish in every reed;
or, be like that young Chisti fella for whom
a Boulder foothill actually leapt once in praise
and the Flatirons there faced sunrise, showing
the call to prayer - or for whom, sitting
on that most commercially-zero island Kéa,
each lapping Greek wavelet before him
rose shouting out yes, yes yes, yes, yes, yes …

Try not to miss all this!

"Which Mantra, which Dhikr?"

 The best mantra to use, or the best dhikr, is whichever keeps you – and you exclusively, no one else – in closest, most initmate concentration on God, in this moment exclusively – and not what worked yesterday or what you think tomorrow will look like. Suppose you have knowledge and confidence in (A) through (M) so to speak, and they are all good, there is joy, there is release, there is love and fulfillment, there is focus, all that – and the balm for existential panic or fear or loneliness or grief or arrogance or anger – great, but you are only usng one at this particular precious moment. If you go with (A) don't think, maybe I should be doing (B)...this keeps it all in the superficial and complicated. Give us this day our daily mantra/dhikr, and lead us not into the temptation of leaving the present for some moment which isn't there, and where no need will be served, and the need of this moment will not be addressed..

In the process of life lived in the development of concentrations through mantra or dhikr and sacred inner work, siddhis may come to the practitioner, there could be power issues; but these will be likewise overcome for the Siddha, the Bhakta, the Jnani, when one returns again and ever again without fail to the repetition of the mantras or of dhikr -- of the Name, from which and from whom these siddhis came in the first place – so devotedly practicing further and ever further for the purpose of liberation of all sentient Beings, of realization of the Self, one is spared the pitfall of identifying with the phenomena or with being the doer of something.

Walking The Walk

(feeling Sheikh Hassan of Nablus)

Friends, I'll tell you –
there are days and there are moments
when I don't know who I am.
When on the intake and the outake
of one breath after another,
I hear distant cymbals and a drum –
and the vast space within me,
mad and sovereign, intones a heady chorus
of God is Alive, He is Everywhere Now.

Friends, let me confess –
there are days and there are moments
without a nickle in my pocket.
When one leg walks and the other leg walks,
and the left says allah-hayy, da'im-hu,
and the other leg likewise,
with a stride and a knowledge
of the truth and the reality of this,
with this mad love toward you and you and you
sharpening my glance:
and this heart – this heart abreast
with every heart which comes to mind,
beats with a power half my age.
There is fear toward no one, nor cold in winter,
only sovereign, only sovereign love and joy,
moving and beating with every step, peace
with every thought, with every breath -
there is no religion in it, only faith.

Friends, coursing through my arms and
into my hands and my fingertips
is this dhikr, this hadhrat, this focused adoration!
Neither do I own it nor am I entranced,
it is as natural as holding this cat purring
or driving to my patients or getting the groceries.
It's the balm addressed in my dream in the open field
that night nearly four decades hence, the balm
for suffering humankind.

It holds the atoms together and blesses,
it commands and it radiates the desire
for your well-being and anyone else's.
Friends!  Walking the Walk of the Beloved,
you pick up only the Beloved's scent.

YouTube Clips

Sam-on-youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcOQY-n-EWs Highlights, Shabbos-Kiddush

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43W4_Vi9LU Dhikr àla Sufi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=428lJH-ihts The Muslim World
http://youtu.be/8jk4ZB2SfPY REMEMBERING:  (Sufi) Murshid Hassan of Nablus - A Tribute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo0LaUAR7QA&feature=youtu.be Singing Joe Miller:  A Tribute

Loving, Serving, Remembering

Love, serve, remember:

Love everyone, serve everyone, remember God.

There is only one way one actually can love everyone, serve everyone – that is to remember God, there is absolutely no other possibility. Otherwise one is “trying to“ and that is either helper-syndrome which is based on a need of one's own, or social concern which is admirable but greatly limited and frustrating – because in both there is only ego. It is in remembering God that the inner movement comes, and from which the grace may come to indeed love everyone, serve or feed or nourish everyone.

One isn't at all distanced from the human side of giving, of being available, attentive, or generous – one's humanity and warmth is not forgotten but enhanced, empowered and rendered conscious. Remembering God is not like "remembering to believe in," this would be to remain trapped in the external, like remembering "someone else". One can only remember what one has experienced, where one has been. That's why we're instructed to remember. God is your Origin and your Source, That's where you came from, so buy it or not, That's where you return to and Remember, because That never “left or abandoned“ you (for where?), because That Alone exists and not your ego. And That, therefore, is Who actually loves, Who actually serves and nourishes – and Who actually Remembers, in you and as you when you are in the act of Remembrance. The practice and the mastery and the conscious absorption in Remembrance is 24/7 on every breath. That is serving everyone, that is nourishing the planet and all those around one. Any outward "form" of service or generosity will come from this and will make its mark in the world.

The surest way of becoming acquainted with all this is through love, in falling in love. When one meets, directly in-person or indirectly, a Being who thoroughly embodies this, one will be smitten with love for that Being – who is both mirror and enabler – who is worthy of all love and reverence. Through such a one will one grasp Remembrance of God.

Repetition of mantra is not for building up points in a merit system for oneself, that's all external religion, tailored to ego. Like dhikr-allah among the Islamic-expressive dervishes, or it's silent form, fikr – the former coming from the Arabic “to remember“ and the latter "to think" or hold in thought – one is keeping in the Eternal Moment of Remembrance through the repetition, whatever the mantra - let's take om sri ram jai ram jai jai ram. (Was Rama really God or someone merged in God, is God Ram and we say Rama when referring to this guy who lived and had this adventure in the Ramayana and was there a Hanuman?) Lovely work, inspiring, multi-layered as always – but if one wants to get super-involved in all that, one can go spend 20 years with pundits in the Himalayas. Or one can practice, here and now, immersing oneself in this love-bond with the Beloved. Om is now and every-other-now. Sri isn't just some holy application, it means all forms, male or female, are of the Divine Mother. Ram is God and God is Love. Jai is victory. So: God always wins. With God is victory. God is Most Great. Allahu-akbar.

Where is this divinity? Don't look around, it's in the mantra or dhikr itself, God is there in every syllable, they are atomic and loaded. Repeat them consciously. What is their power? They will awaken in one the Memory of Origin, the faculty of Remembrance. So one can go on Remembering, ever more consciously until the only one left Remembering is God/Allah/Ram HimSelf, as the ego becomes more and more absorbed in this love and less and less in itself.

One does what one does, but dropping the ego from the doing every time the identity with it asserts itself, one stays in the Remembrance, on the breath or intoned, and remains concentrated and relaxed. As Krishna also instructs in the Bhagavad Gita.

Two big things lost through all this are pity and self-pity, which are almost the same thing. Also envy, jealousy, resentments and grudges.  Expectations and judgment will be tamed, disappointments overcome or less important. Drama and trouble will be survived and gotten through intact. One will take oneself far less seriously and remain one-pointed in love, on God. One will be present and available for others in a way never imagined, instead of breaking one's neck trying to "be there" for "others" - as the illusion of "others" is not being nourished here, through the repetition of Remembrance: that there is no "other," only the One Self - which is awakened in the atmosphere around the very one absorbed in the practice of Remembrance.

Now that is love, that is serving, that is remembering.

"Balm of the Arab Masses"

I had a dream of which I very rarely tell, and at the same time have referred to in one or two poems ("Cornerstone of Your Faith," for example).  The dream's importance in my life turns on the time and place and circumstances in which it came, but also as a task (or so I 'd understood it) for me to fulfill in my life, and to this day I am wondering whether and how, and whether in the literal or universal sense, but there it is:

Summer of 1976, I'm 21 and leave Boulder for the one and only "Sufi Camp" I would ever attend, and it was at Neve Shalom, a piece of land smack at the midpoint of the boondocks on the Latrun road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Across from us was a Benedictine monastery which produced wine - of course.  Neve Shalom was already an established plot of land used for the purpose of Peace Alternatives, of bringing groups of youth together, Muslims and Jews, Christians, Israeli and Palestinian...here was where the four week long camp was to be held and was held; preceded by a three week long work camp to set the camp up; I was in it for the full 7 weeks, and it was all and altogether an experience that's remained with me for life. 

Three individuals were to have been the main feature, not the only but the main, here:  Banefsha Gest, one of the earlier pupils of Samuel Lewis in San Fran, Murshid Hassan who she first introduced to us in the first place, in Boulder, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter who taught in Penn., a wonderful and dynamic man.  The Camp's intention was to bring Jews and Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Israelis to work together, worship and celebrate together and to eat together - and together we performed the Dances of Universal Peace given by Murshid Sam Lewis with all the Hebrew and Arabic and Christian phrases, etc., to finally sow these seeds on Israeli soil, where Sam Lewis never set foot (he'd been practically everwhere else).  This did happen.

As as it so happened, Reb Zalman was certainly there and we in-joyed each other's presence very much.  Banefsha was most certainly there, it was sort of "her" camp - there was much to appreciate about her, but she had this ego.  And that was the rub, why Sheikh Hassan was not physically at the camp, she'd had a falling out with him, and that was its own story.  Where was he while I was there?  He was with us at our house in Boulder, staying there on his 2nd of 3 visits (I got to catch him on the 1st and then later the 3rd) - so in a typically comically "Sufi" madcap way, it was all perfect.  He was where he should be and I was where I should be.  And after his first visit with us in Boulder I carried plenty of what he'd put out there in me.

A quick background, so as to put the dream in still better perspective.  Since the age of 19, now going on just over 2 yrs., I had gone around washing, literally washing, and massaging feet (with almond oil and intuitive reflexol.), as my inner discipline/ love-task to connect as directly as I could with the beginning of the Last Supper in John.  I washed the feet of street transients in Boulder, of students, of guys and women, of the hot and beautiful and the far from hot and not very beautiful, in fact as much and as willingly even-mindedly, the very shabby and dirty, and of my compadres in the house (our khanka / at times ashram), and of every guest who came to us - and that meant as well some pretty prominent ones, including among others, Pir Vilayat.  I had my wash cloth and plastic basin, my hand towel and oil - for a long period I was even seen going around in a Moroccan woven jalabea, sometimes barefoot myself, sometimes with sandals or shoes.   This was all okay in Boulder back then.   And I did this at Neve Shalom where I also brought this concentration to a close.  Pir Vilayat had told me after doing his feet, I should go on to full-body and work on that, which I already had but now expanded more to it.

Among the various Zikrs / Dhikr-Allah (ceremonial Remembrance of God through repetition) evening sessions (often called Hadhrat, or Presence) we did with Murshid Hassan in Boulder, there was one very soft and mild one, or a version of it, where we stood clenched together in a line or a wide circle swaying left, chest, right, chest, left... intoning like a breeze:  Ya...Huu...Ya...Huu.   (By the way, the original "Jews" addressed God with Remembrance of "ya hu," hence Yehudim, its form YaHuwa may appear familiar: Yahuvah, Jehova...)

So I'm on my flight to Israel via Tel Aviv.  I'm starting to compose my Christ-poem which you have already read, "A Prophet's Reward," making myself very receptive, primarily through the text of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas which was unearthed at Nag Hammadi some 30 yrs. earlier, and through the Shiva Sutras of which there were some 107 or so listed at the end of Paul Reps' Zen Flesh Zen Bones, and I found myself picking one and concentrating on that, it was focused on the outgoing breath and holding that point between the exhale and the inhale.  And "dying".  I believe through these two practices, the Thomas Gospel and the Shiva Sutra, I received all the impressions I needed for this poem which was also centered on the washing of the feet.  On the evening I finished this poem, that August in '76, in a big tent at Neve Shalom, Ramadan had just begun.  It was about 1 a.m. and I went into the open field and zipped myself up in my sleeping bag and was out.  I woke up around maybe 8 a.m. with tears streaming from my eyes after having the following dream - which I'd tried to crawl back into but that didn't work:



In the dream I was in  a hole in the ground - in later reflection clearly a well, but there was no water in it, we were standing dry.  We were three:  myself, Reb Zalman and Banefsha.  Murshid Hassan who was not with us there but was thoroughly present and dominant in spirit - or literally, on and in the breath - in that we performed the "Ya Hu" dhikr between us three, hands and arms clenched, swaying in that dry well.  While there was no actual water in which we stood, the entire atmosphere in it and surrounding us and reflected in the dhikr was full of the water element.  And added to this we were weeping together.  Why?  Well one, we were so deeply moved.

And two:  what is most sacred to desert dwellers?  Water.  And where was this well?  In the middle of the fucking desert.  While we were in this condition, there surrounded us inside the well a voiceless voice, that is, no one spoke and yet the voice-impression surrounded us and permeated the place even as the element water had - you could say, it spoke in our hearts and addressed us there.  It said, and I remember this, it referred to our dhikr in there and the condition it brought us to:  "This is the balm of the Arab masses."  - 'of' or 'for' are the same here, the 'balm for the masses' was meant and I also strained to grasp later whether 'Arab' or 'poor' was said, and remained certain with my first impression, that by 'Arab' was meant 'poor' - and not in any positive or any coddling sense.  I did also understand - or misunderstand, but I maintained for a long time - that this was more universally meant, not just 'the Arabs' - today, I see that differently, as I also always maintain:  the real enemies of Islam are the Muslims themselves.  But the dream:  it was really clear to me afterward, that this was the voice of Prophet Muhammad, and the 'well' was his own heart.  Period.

And our instruction, to take this out there, struck me while still in the dream as being like - or being literally, in dream-symbol - carrying a pan full to the brim of water on our heads over the desert to the thirsting masses without spilling a single drop - some undertaking, that.  And this made us weep further.  And with that I woke up, still weeping.  And with, oy, such a headache!

And my Christ-poem was finished and would be read aloud that morning by Banefsha to all present, and my dream was intact even if I wasn't - don't ask me whom I then told this to, I don't even know any more, I was no longer in touch with anyone there interestingly enough.  Except one correspondence to Zalman in 1980, where I hand-typed some 100 letters to Jews and Christians and their respective organizations and congregations, of my intention to some day and somehow make it to Germany as an American Jew and, yes, in the spirit and reality of Christ (some Jew, eh?), on my own recognizance and following my own inspiration (with encouragement form my Teacher but in no connection with any group or sect) to connect specifically with the population of the post-war born generation, mine and the one just prior - of younger Germans who MUST largely be normal feeling human beings like myself (yes, they were) and therefore, if I as a Jew was still so affected by the Shoa, I figured - and I was right as rain here - how thorough and yet ignored, unrecognized by everyone else must their burden be as children and grandchildren of the perpetrators and members and accomplices and those compliant, of the Nazi generation!  I had to meet them and let them meet me, to listen and share with each other, to find each other, to let them know that here was at least one American and Jew who wanted to meet them and hear them out and join with them - and to expose myself to exactly what not one single Jew or American I ever met even once ever considered or considered possible, ever mentioned or even wanted to look into.  Where was our compassion!  If I were the child or grandchild of Nazis, I figured, I'd want to shoot myself.  We needed to meet and we needed to embrace.

As fate would have it, I wound up in the Army in '86 and without my asking and without asking me first, they sent me here to Berlin - really, the Army was the horse I rode in on.  So I joyfully got here, joyfully stayed, stayed longer, remained.  And my hunches were all true and produced 23 yrs. of relationships.  So fine, I'm in Berlin, now what do I do with all these Arabs and world's third largest Turkish population in one city?  The trend is not, nor ever was, toward Sufi thought, Sufi tolerance, Sufi dhikr and universality - rather toward nationalism, mythological Islamic supremacy, playing the victim while milking the generous social system here for all its worth, producing more kids while barring them from normal schooling, i.e., from participation in important and normal activities if not keeping them home altogether, maintaining a parallel society which no politician has the balls (or ovaries) anymore to challenge with any teeth, and of course keeping a tight hold on family holdings in Turkey and shuttling between the two - keeping the wheels greased so that they can get what they want out of Germany without holding a whit less onto the Anatolian illiterate, superstitious and controlling village-mentality.

 I advised a dear American friend who wishes to travel to Pakistan to bridge understanding between Christians and Muslims, that what she is bringing with her there is not popular, certainly not now - and is this an understatement!   On the other hand, when Murshid Sam Lewis (also known, in fact specifically there in Pakistan, as Sufi Ahmed Murad Chisti) was over there and in India in the '50s and the '60s, as well as Egypt, Japan... meeting Sufis and dervishes and roshis and masters and saints and swamis of a whole range of caliber and standing and attainment and energy, he was constantly running into them, as American as you could get and yet recognized everywhere he went as one who'd "got it"  - and initiated into and brought further along by several orders and schools - his life demonstrated that when you are there in the breath and conscious of what you are doing there, magical things do happen, which "don't get written up in the papers, as not-news" as he often loved to point out.  This all fed into his eventual breakthroughs in San Fran.

He passed away in Jan. '71 at the age of 75, after tripping in Dec. of the top step of the flight of stairs in their house in San Fran and suffering the expected concussion and any other such injuries as a fall like that can bring on.  That was the entire story as I always had it - there was never anything else to it.  Yet at the beginning of this year, I received word which was from pretty unquestionable sources, and supposedly corroborated when my source asked further (by certain former pupils of Sam's from that time), and that this was already well known among at least some in the Sufi Order - but news to me and very disturbing at that:  he was supposedly or evidently pushed down, at that dawn hour, by a Muslim fundamentalist (what one was doing in THAT house and moreover at THAT hour, beats the hell out of me).

He did not have "friends" among the Muslim Association of San Fran, although he was due to meet with them in the near future. He never had anything to do with them, he just did what he did (and cnfirmed to him by Sufi Barkat Ali in Pakistan) and was better at it than they ever would be: he brought hundreds to chanting "Allah" - and the Muslims blocked any dialogue he may have offered.  Once they approached him in regard to the Dances of Universal Peace which he'd received in inspiration directly from the spheres and the instruction to manifest this directly from real Sufis, the "Muslim Bruddas" approached him there around '67, and said, "We don't appreciate what you're doing," they meant using the sacred Arabic phrases in Dance, praising God and producing actual joy - they didn't like that.  He replied, without losing a beat, "Oh I'm sure you don't - but the only matter of importance here is, whether Allah appreciates it."  He said they took off in a huff without another word, and that he knew then that their arrogance would net them a smashing loss of face in the '67 war with Israel, he saw that coming.

I went on to advise my American friend to always stick with what she knows and come from experience, to stay open to inspiration but trust Allah and no Muslims.  S/He's got your back, I cautioned, they'll try to put a knife in it.  And last of all, I offered her this as a Great Concentration:

"On the in-breath:  TOWARD THE ONE, on the out-breath:  TOWARD THE ONE.  Let it sink deep, take it in, anchor it, let it guide you and energize your work and cover your ass."