Fresh Rain

This is It
by Ihsan Chris Covey

Soon after we married, Masami and I decided to take responsibility for managing our savings and investments, in the name of securing our financial freedom. 

Entering the stock market without any prior training seemed a scary, risky move, and in the course of our learning we made mistakes, followed bad advice, and suffered some staggering losses. But by sticking it out through disappointments and setbacks, we gradually increased our skill, developed discernment and confidence, and recognized that the freedom we sought comes as a total package, with all of the ups and downs. The “market” itself is a dynamic composite of psychological and emotional responses to uncertainty and change in the human realm—and by staying with its bouncing-falling rhythms, we also internalized an old adage: “Trade the market you have, not the one you want.”

To me, it’s not a leap of the imagination to find parallels between this “outer world” learning and the mystical wisdom of the Sufis, who have perennially said something like: “Live in the world as it is, not as you imagine or wish it to be.” 

For centuries, Sufis have pointed to a radical simplicity at the heart of spiritual realization—a truth echoed in the Arabic declaration, “la ilaha illa ’llah.” Beyond its familiar translation, “there is no god but God,” this phrase can also be rendered into a more luminous assertion: “There is nothing but This.” Here, the whole universe with all its complexity is recognized as the unmediated presence of Divine Reality—beyond names, forms, expectations, and veils. In This, freedom is not a distant goal, but the very ground of existence, waiting to be discovered.

Many Sufis have gone a step further to suggest that even the name Allah—mystically rendered as al-Lah, “The Nothing”—can be approached as a no-thing-ness, empty of conceptual limitation yet overflowing with potential and presence. In this view, Divine Reality is not a distant entity but the very source of pure Being, unfolding as the immediacy of our experience.

Ibn Arabi’s words from the late 12th century still hold true, “[This] is now as [This] was”—the constant churn and transformation of the world is none other than the ongoing self-disclosure of the One Being. To let go into “There is nothing but This” is to recognize that all seeking, longing, and striving dissolve in this presence—there is nowhere else to go, nothing else to become. 

Rumi points us to the “This” that always is, the ungraspable heart of all moments—before the mind fragments reality, before judgments and hopes cloud the present:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

Hazrat Inayat Khan also reminds us: “Life is what it is, you cannot change it; but you can always change yourself.” While reason is based on a limited conception of things, the soul is unlimited. Freedom and peace are only possible when we surrender to the limitless potential of This. And the taste of freedom is like the moment our breath is taken away in awe, when we stop resisting, simply move with what comes, and receive. It is the grace of “just This”—nothing to hold onto, nowhere to escape, no past or future to deny or become.

Freedom is revealed not in the improvement of “what is,” but in a courageous, loving acceptance of it—of This in its totality—however difficult it may be at times.

It’s natural to want something else when things don’t go the way we would prefer, but doing this only takes us away from what is here now. The essence of freedom is not liberation from the conditions of our lives. Rather, it is the liberation IN and AS the very play of these conditions, when our striving for a different world than This is unnecessary. Live in the world as it is. This is the true taste of Freedom. 

To remember this birthright, we return again and again to the heart—where the secret is always the same, whether in the outer world of geopolitical turmoil, the gyrating financial markets, the mundane tasks of daily living, or our own innermost being: la ilaha illa ’llah.

This is It.