Sufism, Vol. 1 Sufis: The People Of The Path Chapter 2: In Hiding, Question 1

The first question:

Question 1

HAS SUFISM ARISEN AS A REBEL AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ISLAM? OR IS IT PRE-ISLAM?

It is both. Anything that is alive is both. It is very ancient and it is very new -- together, simultaneously.

Sufism is pre-Islam and yet it is a unique new phenomenon too. It is the essential core of Islam and yet it is a rebellion against the establishment of Islam too. That's how it is always. Zen is also both -- it is the essential core of Buddhism and a rebellion against the establishment.

It has to be understood. Whenever a man like Buddha or Mohammed happens, the essential flowers. But sooner or later the human mind will make an establishment out of it. That too is natural because man needs something to cling to. And man needs something pseudo because the real transforms him. The real is dangerous. He needs something which only looks real but is not real. He needs a toy to play with. That's what the Church is, the establishment is; it gives the appearance of doing the real thing. So you can enjoy doing it and you can enjoy the ego trip and yet you remain the same. It does not penetrate you, transmute you, at all. Nothing is at stake.

If a man really goes into prayer he will die. He will never come back the same again. He will come back, but as a totally different person. The one who has gone into prayer will never come back. Something new, something that has never existed before, something that is discontinuous with the past, will arise. You will be lost and then only will you find the real you. Real prayer is dangerous; it is a death and a resurrection.

So man is very tricky -- he creates a false prayer. He makes a ritual out of prayer, he pretends to pray. He only goes through the gesture, through the empty gesture -- his heart is not in it. He goes to the mosque, to the temple, to the church; he prays. And he knows that he is deceiving, he knows that he is not in it. Yet it gives him a certain respectability. People think of him as being a religious man. That gives him a certain credibility. It is a formal gesture, it makes his social life smooth, it creates a kind of lubricant -- but it doesn't change him.

So whenever a Mohammed or a Buddha happens, the real is brought into the world. But the real drives you mad, the real starts killing you. only very rare people, courageous people, can have that date with the real. What about the cowards? They would also like to enjoy... at least the idea that they have seen God, dt Icajt the iled Lhdt they have also been into prayer, at least the idea that they are also religious. What about these cowards? And they exist in great numbers. The majority of humanity consists of cowards. These cowards sooner or later create a false religion. Christ is real religion, Christianity is false religion. Mohammed is real, Mohammedanism is false. When this false religion, this established religion, becomes too much, again and again there will come people -- courageous people -- who will assert and who will say that this is all wrong. So these people will look rebellious. In fact, they are asserting the very spirit. The spirit of Mohammed is asserted by Mansoor; the spirit of Mohammed is asserted by Omar Khayyam; the spirit of Mohammed is asserted hv a thousand and one Sufi mystics again and again.

But now you can see what the problem is. Whenever somebody asserts the same spirit he is bringing the essential religion back, but he will go against the establishment, against the false religion. And the false religion has great power -- the mass madness is behind it. The mass neurosis supports it. It can kill, it can destroy. It cannot create but it can destroy a Jesus, a Socrates, a Mansoor. That is very easy for it.

These people are like flowers, very fragile, and the mass neurosis is like a rock. If you throw a rock at a flower nothing is going to happen to the rock, only the flower will be destroyed. The higher is always destroyed whenever there is a clash with the lower, remember it. If there is a clash between poetry and prose, poetry will be destroyed, not prose. If there is a clash between God and the world, God will disappear, not the world. If there is a clash between lust and love, love will be poisoned, not lust.

When the unknown descends, when the superior comes into this world, it comes like a flower.

Yes, it is very rebellious. It is rebellious because it is essential. The essential is always rebellious. Mohammed was a rebellious man -- his whole life he was haunted by enemies. Many times he was just on the brink of being killed. He had to fight his whole life -- a mystic had to become a warrior, a mystic had to waste his whole life in being a warrior. He had to carry a sword. And you can see the contradiction, the paradox -- on his sword he had written the words: peace, love. Love had to carry a sword because of mad people. Peace had to carry a sword because of neurosis.

Mohammed had to wage war continuously; he was fighting and fighting. His whole life was wasted in fight. He could have brought more flowers from the unknown, he could have brought more of God into this world, but there was no opportunity.

And once Mohammed has become established, sooner or later the enemy wins again... the enemy who was fighting against Mohammed will become the priest. Watch it! The priests were fighting against Mohammed -- the priest of the old establishment. Mohammed brings the essential religion back again, the eternal. Then the priest who was with the older establishment fights with him. If Mohammed wins, then the priest changes party. The priest is always with those who are victorious; the coward is always with those who are victorious. The priest changes party. He says, 'I am converted by you.' He moves into the camp of Mohammed.

But he has his old tricks, he has his old mind. He starts playing the same game. Maybe while Mohammed is alive he will not be able to do it, but once Mohammed is gone it will be very easy for him to have the same kind of establishment in the name of Mohammed. Then again whenever another Sufi mystic brings God back, he will be a friend of Mohammed and an enemy of Mohammedans. That's why there is this paradox.

It is both; religion is always both. Look at me. Whatsoever I am saying to you is the essential religion. It is the religion of Buddha, Christ, Moses, Mohammed, and yet all the priests are against me, all the priests. They may not agree on anything else but they agree on one thing -- on being against me they all agree. The Mohammedan priest agrees with the Hindu. They will not agree on anything else, but about me being wrong they both agree. The Christian agrees with the Jaina. They have nothing similar, not a single iota of doctrine which is similar, but on one thing they will agree: if they have to condemn me they will all be together. Whatsoever I am saying to you is the essential core of all their religions, but they are against it. They pretend to be for it, they pretend to be the protectors -- they are the enemies. The establishment is the enemy of religion. But it happens in the natural course of things because man is stupid. The establishment is bound to happen again and again. And again and again somebody has to assert and rebel.

There is a beautiful parable in Dostoyevsky's BROTHERS' KARAMAZOV.

Jesus comes back to the world after eighteen hundred years to see how things are going now. He is very hopeful. He thinks, 'Now almost half the earth is Christian, now I am going to be welcomed and received. The first time I was there on the earth people were against me because there were no Christians, there was nobody to receive me. There were Jews, and they killed me.' Now he comes with great hope. He descends into Bethlehem on a Sunday morning. Naturally he chooses Sunday -- Christians will be free and they will be coming out of the church and he will meet them just in front of the church.

People are coming out and he is waiting with great hope. Then people come around him and they start laughing, they start ridiculing him. They say, 'You are pretending perfectly well. You look just like Jesus.'

And he says, 'I am Jesus!'

And they laugh and they say, 'Jesus is only one. This is sacrilege to call yourself Jesus. You look like him, but how can you be him? It will be better if you escape from here before the priest comes out. If he catches hold of you, you will be in trouble.'

But Jesus says, 'He is my priest. If you cannot recognise me, it's okay -- you are lay people. But he is my priest, continuously reading my scriptures, thinking, meditating on whatsoever I have said before, continuously talking about me. At least he will recognise me. You wait!'

And they laugh and they say, 'You are wrong. You just escape from here, otherwise you will get into trouble.'

Then comes the priest, and the people who have not even bowed down to Jesus touch the feet of the priest and give him a passage very reverently, very respectfully. And the priest comes in and looks at this young man and says, 'You get down! You come follow me, you come into the church. Have you gone mad? What are you up to?'

And Jesus says. 'Can't you recognise me?'

Then the priest takes him into the church, puts him into a dark cell, locks the cell and disappears. In the middle of the night he comes back. The whole day Jesus thinks, 'What is going to happen? Am I going to be crucified again by my own people, by Christians? This is too much!' He cannot believe it.

In the middle of the night the priest comes with a small lamp in his hand. He falls at the feet of Jesus and says, 'I recognised you. But please, you are not needed at all. You have done your work and we are doing your work perfectly well. You are a great disturber. If you come again you will disturb the whole thing. It has been hard work for us. For eighteen centuries we have struggled, and somehow we have tried to manage things perfectly well. Half of humanity is converted and half is on the way. You just wait. You need not come! Master, you are not needed, we servants are enough. You just send messages from there.'

Jesus says, 'I'm happy that you at least recognised me.'

The priest says, 'Yes, I can recognise you when we are alone but in front of the masses I cannot recognise you. And if you insist on creating trouble then I am sorry but I will have to crucify you the same way that the Jews did with you -- because a priest has to look to the establishment. I am part of an establishment -- Jewish or Christian does not matter. I have to save the Church. If there is any conflict between you and the Church, then I am for the Church -- I serve the Church. It is perfectly good. You live in heaven, you enjoy there and we are enjoying here. Things are perfectly good. There is no need of your second coming, the first was enough.'

The essential religion will always go against the established religion. Sufis are the very heart, but the heart is bound to be against the mind, the intellect. The priest lives in the head; the man of prayer lives in the heart. They are two polarities, their languages are different. Their languages are so different that the priest cannot understand the language of the heart at all. He can spin theories; he has great expertise as far as doctrines are concerned. He has a very legal mind and is very knowledgeable. But as far as the heart is concerned there is a wasteland in his heart; nothing grows, nothing flowers, nothing flows.

The head cannot understand the heart. The heart can understand the head because the heart is deeper than the head. The man of the heart can understand the man of the head and can feel compassion for him, but the man of the head cannot understand the man of the heart. The lower cannot understand the higher; the higher can understand the lower. The man who is sitting in the valley cannot understand the man who is sitting on the top of the hill. But the man who is sitting on the top of the hill can understand the man who is living in the valley.

So people of the heart are very compassionate. They understand. They understand why the priest is against them; they understand why the majority of humanity is not able to fall in rapport with them.

Let me tell you an anecdote.

A man was walking along and he saw a snail lost in a crevice in a wall, and for no particular reason he said to it, 'Hello. snail.'

And oddly enough the snail could speak and the snail could hear and it said, 'Hello,' and it moved its eyes around as best it could on their stalks to try to see what it was that was confronting him.

So the man said, 'Can you hear me?'

And the snail said, 'Yes, of course. Who and what are you anyway?'

And the man said, 'Well, I am a man.'

And the snail said, 'Whatever is that?'

So the man said, 'Well, we are something like you. For instance, you have got eyes on stalks and we have got stalks on the other end.'

And the snail said, 'The other end?'

And the man said, 'Yes, just a minute. It's for putting our feet on, you see -- and these feet....'

And the snail said, 'Whatever are these feet for?'

And the man said, 'The feet are for moving along very rapidly on.'

And the snail said, 'Really, you amaze me. Is there anything else peculiar about you?'

And the man said, 'Well, you know how you have got your house on your back?'

And the snail said, 'Yes, yes.'

And the man said, 'Well, we don't do that, you see. We have lots and lots of houses and we go in and out of them almost at will. '

The snail said, You really are a most astonishing creature. Is there anything else strange about you?'

And the man said, 'Well, now, we are man, and a man can take a thing like a leaf -- you know a leaf?'

And the snail said, 'Yes, yes, I know a leaf.'

And the man said, 'Well he can make marks on this leaf and hand the leaf to another man who could give the leaf to a third man who could tell from the marks on the leaf what the first man was thinking. '

'Ah,' said the snail, 'you are one of them, hm?'

And the man said, 'What do you mean?'

'You are a liar!' said the snail. 'The trouble with you liars is you tell one lie and then you tell a bigger one, and then finally you over-reach yourselves.'

There are different languages at different planes. The Sufi speaks the language of the heart, and the priest speaks the language of the head. The priest speaks the language of knowledge and the Sufi speaks the language of love. They don't meet, they don't communicate. Communication is impossible. the priest is blind, he has never seen the light, he only believes in it. The Sufi has seen the light; it is not a belief any more. He knows it.

Try to understand this paradox. The people who think they know, don't know; the knowledgeable people don't know because they can't see. And the people who love and don't talk about knowledge at all, know, because they can see. Love opens the eye of the heart. And when you have seen, you will be constantly in rebellion. When you have seen, then no belief can satisfy you. Then your very vision will become destructive to all kinds of beliefs. When you have seen, then you cannot concede to and you cannot agree with stupid ideas about light. A blind man can have only stupid ideas about light. He cannot have the right idea. How can he have the right idea? He has no eyes. Whatsoever he knows about light is going to be wrong. He has not even seen darkness -- what to say about light? A blind man cannot see even darkness.

Never have the idea that blind people live in darkness. No, they cannot. Even to see darkness one needs eyes. To see anything one needs eyes. And there is no way to explain to a blind man what light is. You cannot even use darkness, you cannot say 'light is against darkness'. He does not even know what darkness is. There is no way to make it clear to a blind man. The only way is to help him to see, the only way is to help him to open his eyes. Or, if he needs some treatment for his eyes, then apply the treatment. Be a physician to his eyes. It is pointless going on giving him explanations, philosophical doctrines, scriptures. They will simply muddle him more, confuse him more.

The Sufi is rebellious because the Sufi has seen it. And naturally he will always find it difficult to explain it to people. That's why Sufis don't believe in explanations. If you go to a Sufi he starts giving you methods, not doctrines. That's why they are called the people of the path. They give you a method. They say, heart, opens your being, you will know. ' They will not give you a single doctrine, a single principle -- they have none. They have only methodology. It is very scientific. They give you the taste. It is hard, arduous work.

If you come to me and ask 'What is truth?' I can say something -- within minutes the work is done. I have told you, you have known, and it is finished. I have neither told you nor have you understood anything, but the idea has arisen in you that now you know. And now you will carry this idea. If you are really interested I will have to give you a device, not a doctrine; I will have to give you a meditation, not a principle; I will have to initiate you into your inner lab; I will have to take you slowly, slowly into the deeper waters of your being. By and by you will start feeling, seeing -- you will become more sensitive, more alert, more aware, and things will start penetrating your thick layer of unconsciousness. A few rays will start entering into your 'dark night of the soul'. And then you will know.

The work of the Sufi takes years. Sufis don't preach. They teach, certainly, but they don't preach. And when they teach, they teach methods, not principles. To follow a method one needs to be really in search -- because sometimes it takes twelve years, sometimes twenty years, sometimes your whole life. And sometimes many lives are needed. The people who are in search of instant enlightenment cannot have a contact with a Sufi. That's why Sufis go on hiding themselves. They don't declare them selves, they remain invisible. They are available only to those who really search, who really seek. It is very difficult to find a Sufi Master, and he may be living just in your neighbourhood. He may be doing such an ordinary thing you cannot believe it. He may be a weaver or he may be a shoemaker or he may be running a hotel, or any kind of work. You cannot even suspect that a Sufi Master lives just at the corner. And you may come across him every day and you will not have any idea who this man is -- unless you are a seeker. If you are a seeker then by and by you will be led to him. In fact, if you are a seeker he will start choosing you. He will be watching you. He will not allow you to watch him; he will be watching you, he will be seeing. And if he feels that here is a seeker, then by and by he will make it possible for you to see him. He can become visible if he wants to.

There is a famous story.

It happened that a well known Sufi was asked, 'What is invisibility?'

And he said, 'I shall answer that when an opportunity for a demonstration occurs.'

They believe in demonstrations and they believe in opportunities. They will not say a single word if the opportunity has not occurred, if the right situation is not there. You can ask the Master a question and he will say, 'Wait, when the right opportunity occurs then I will show you' -- because he does not believe in saying, he believes in showing.

He said, 'I shall answer that when an opportunity for a demonstration occurs.'

Some time later, the man and the one who had asked him the question were stopped by a band of soldiers. And the soldiers said, 'We have orders to take all dervishes into custody -- for the king of this country says that they will not obey his commands and that they say things which are not welcome to the tranquillity of the thought of the populace.'

And the Sufi said, 'And so you should, for you must do your duty.'

'But are you not Sufis?' said the soldiers.

'Test us,' said the Sufi.

The officer took out a Sufi book....

-- a book that is tremendously respected by the Sufis. It is called THE BOOK OF THE BOOKS. It has only a few sentences written in it, otherwise it is empty.

'What is this?' the Sufi Master said.

-- as if he had not even recognised the book. The soldiers had brought the book which will be a sign of a Sufi -- the moment the Sufi sees THE BOOK OF THE BOOKS he will bow down. It is a great treasure.

The Sufi Master said, 'What is this?'

-- as if he did not recognise the book.

The Sufi looked at the title page. 'It is something which I will burn in front of you,' said the Master, 'since you have not already done so.' He set light to the book and the soldiers rode away satisfied.

The Sufi's companion asked, 'What was the purpose of that action?'

'To make us invisible,' said the sufi. 'For to the man of the world, visibility means that you look like something or someone he expects you to resemble. If you look different your true nature becomes invisible to him.'

The Sufi Master is saying, 'I have become invisible to these soldiers because they could not believe that a Sufi could burn THE BOOK. They have a certain expectation -- that the Sufis revere THE BOOK. The moment I burned THE BOOK we were no longer Sufis. I had become invisible to him. '

And that's how Sufis become invisible to people. You can't expect the things that they do. Gurdjieff learned his methods of invisibility from Sufi Masters. Gurdjieff was a Sufi Master in penetrated the Western consciousness. He remained invisible to the masses, and he had such techniques to become invisible that in just a single second he could become visible and in a single second he could become invisible. Sometimes it used to happen that two persons would come to see him. If he wanted to become visible to one and remain invisible to the other, he would become visible to one and remain invisible to the other. And both were talking to him together. He had become so practised that he could show one kind of emotion from one side of his face and another kind of emotion from the other side of his face.

For example, if he did not want to become visible to you he would look so cruel, so murderous, that you could not believe that a Sufi Master or any kind of Master could be so murderous. And if he wanted to remain visible to you he would look so compassionate, so loving. And he could do it together, simultaneously, to two people. And one would go away with the complete idea that 'here was the Master', and the other would go away with the idea -- 'Never again am I going to see this man. This man seems to be a murderer, and it is dangerous to be with this man.'

Sufis live a very, very hidden life, for a certain reason -- because they only want to live the essential religion. If you want to become visible you have to do many things. For example, I am here, but to Poona people I am invisible. I have made myself completely invisible, even to the people who live just in the neighbourhood here. I am invisible to them. They cannot see. It is impossible for them to see. I am visible only to those who are seeking. Those who are seeking can come from thousands of miles, and those who are not seeking can live just by the side and will remain there and will be convinced that I am a wrong man.

It is good that it is so, because it helps me to work only on those people who need work. Energies are not wasted.

Sufis are not interested in the mass. No Master has ever been interested in the mass. Masters are only interested in individuals, and only in those individuals who are really in search, in authentic search. It is simple to avoid the unnecessary people and it is simple to attract the necessary people who need help... with just a few things. People are so insensitive -- with just a small thing you can become invisible because they don't look deep, they only look on the surface.

The second question is exactly what I have been talking to you about:

Sufism

VOL. 1, SUFIS: THE PEOPLE OF THE PATH

Chapter-2

In Hiding