Readings from Pir Elias
Reading 1
Sufi Tao
Once, a young seeker asked an old Sufi woman,
“Mother, tell me, what is the way of the Sufi?
What way do you follow?”
She replied:
The way we follow does not lead.
It is like a wind that has no origin
and that seeks no destination.
It flows everywhere without moving,
never straying from this moment.
The way we follow is holy and alive
but to call it a way is to make it a thought,
suitable for the mind but not the heart.
The love-wind we follow teaches without instruction.
It reveals a path without pointing.
Accepting what arises, it holds on to nothing,
holding on to nothing it embraces all things.
Following the way, one is gentle
and does not defend or claim to know.
Not knowing,
one goes the way in wonder.
The way has no abode yet it is home.
In the evening friends gather and sing.
At dawn they go their own way without leaving.
Having no abode they are free.
Free, they are unafraid of rejection and death.
Unafraid, they give comfort to the comfortless.
If someone asks them who they are,
they say, a friend.
The way we follow does not separate or declare,
nor does it draw attention to itself.
Loving, it has no need to possess.
Intimate, its secret remains secret.
Though it is most holy, it is not special.
It belongs to all beings and is never withheld.
No one and nothing is outside of the way,
but few know it.
To know the way is to be the way.
Kind, the way is naturally kind.
Curious, it laughs with amazement.
If you do not know the way, be kind.
If you do not know the way, be curious.
Then like a leaf warmed in the sun,
in autumn you will turn gold, then brittle,
then earth, and never stop living.
Reading 2
Human Being
How marvelous this creature, the human being! What a wonder and privilege it is to be one!
I know it doesn’t always seem that way — we humans can be vicious and cruel, short-sighted, selfish, and petty — so to say that we’re marvelous can sound absurd. But perhaps in this strange, nervous, pandemic time when we’ve had to pull back from close contact and have become so wary of each other, perhaps it would do us good to remember, for a moment, the miracle at the heart of what a human being is.
This miracle is a constant theme in Sufi teachings and poetry. Ibn ‘Arabi, the great 13th Century Sufi mystic and metaphysician, described the human being as a barzakh, an “isthmus.” Human-being is an isthmus between the seeming polarities of matter and spirit, body and soul, the dense and the subtle. Like the Isthmus of Panama where the vast continents of North and South America meet, the isthmus that is human beingness is “the Towering Station” amongst all barzakhs. Ibn ‘Arabi:
The barzakh is between-between,
a station between this and that,
not one of them, but the totality of the two.
It has the towering exaltation,
the lofty splendor,
and the deep-rooted station.
This is what Rumi calls “the majesty that lives in the deep center of everyone.” I suspect it is a majesty that lives in the deep center of everything, in the tree and the mountain, the rabbit and the hawk, but in the barzakh of human being it can be known, and once known it becomes a source of wisdom and loving kindness. Rumi:
You are a joining point of sky and ground,
soul as witness, green compassion.
The binary name human being itself reveals the miraculous barzakh we are. Human is a word derived from humus, earth — the human is an earthling. Our extraordinarily complex and wondrous bodies are born of the earth — skin, bone, blood, and brain — a living system of matter and energy. The second part of our name, being, points to the ineffable quality of the creature we are: call it spirit, or presence, or awareness. Our nature of being awareness cannot be objectified in the way our earthling bodies can. Together, the two words suggest the barzakh we are: human-being — “a station between this and that, not one of them, but the totality of the two.”
It’s fairly easy to sense this in the moment: first you can know yourself as body, manifested as the sensuous organism of matter that you are, and you can know yourself as a locus of awareness, an ineffable presence, clear and ungraspable. You are human, being. An isthmus “between” matter and spirit, it is in this “Towering Station” that the seeming duality of matter and spirit can be recognized as not-two. As Rumi invites us:
Come out here where the roses have opened.
Let soul and world meet.
This is the miracle of human-beingness. In the place of meeting, in what Rumi calls “the spirit-form we are,” a wondrous alchemy becomes possible. Our spirit-being enlightens our earthling-nature, and our earthling-nature gives clear spirit a field of sensate beauty and impermanence in which to love and play, become attached, suffer, and with any luck, recognize “the towering exaltation” within which it arises.
One of the most profound and beautiful expressions of this earth-spirit-human-being miracle can be found in the concluding passage of Rilke’s Ninth Elegy. Here, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation, Rilke is praising to the angels the “Things” of the earth, and reveals how they become “invisible” in us, in our love and amazement and gratitude:
…And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.
They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,
within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . . . . Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
Reading 3
The Practice of Living Presence
A Zen master once said to his students:
"In order to have warm human relations, we must pay attention to what is. In other words, we must touch the source of existence. Only then can we take a deep breath; only then can we feel relief. Under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence."
What does it mean to be rooted in the source of existence? What is this source and how can we know it?
In my experience, being rooted in the source of existence does not involve the thought-mind or require concentration. What is required is more like an intuitive openness, perhaps comparable to our peripheral vision or our experience of spatial dimensions. It’s a subtle capacity we have, to be able to open ourselves intuitively like this. For me it has a kinesthetic feel to it, as if the back of my head has disappeared, or the space inside my chest has no boundary.
So to benefit from what the Zen master said — under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence — we will need to allow our intuitive capacity to spread its wings, and not just try to understand conceptually what he’s saying.
The source of existence is immanently present, and it is alive.
Everything we see and feel, including the intimate and ever-changing feelings of our body and the thoughts we think, is inseparable from the source of existence. It is not that there is a source over here making existence over there, or that a source in the past made existence happen now. Existence and its source are immediate; they are happening all at once, and that happening is alive. I’m not referring to carbon-based life here, but to the immanence and impulse and creative becoming-ness that we experience moment to moment as the dynamic of reality.
Existence as we know it is continually changing and moving. It is alive with itself. Quarks appear out of nowhere, light blossoms from stars, our eyes move across the page, cars on the street roll by — everything is flowing forth magically, becoming what has never been before.
To the extent that we can appreciate this aliveness we root ourselves in the source of existence. Again, this is not an intellectual appreciation but an intuitive openness to how everything we perceive shares this blessed aliveness in this moment.
Simultaneous with aliveness and its ever-changing nature, is a numinous, ineffable stillness I call presence (it also has many other names.) Presence is the silent host of all that appears. It is what allows aliveness to flow forth. One way to intuit what I mean by presence is through the analogy of space. Space allows things to show up. If there were no space there would be no possibility for chair, table, or our bodies to appear as they do. Presence is like that, but is even more mysterious since it’s not dimensional in the way we imagine space to be, and yet it is everywhere.
Presence is silence itself, perfectly clear, open, and contentless. It may be difficult for us to understand how these apparent opposites — aliveness and stillness, sound and silence, co-arise as the source of existence, but they do. It’s like what happens when we listen. Our listening is silent, and that silence allows us to hear sounds. In the same way, our most intimate awareness is silent, pure, and clear, and that silent clarity allows existence to appear.
How marvelous, the presence of everything that we perceive, that is alive and changing, is simultaneously still, silent, and unchanging! Inayat Khan speaks of this primordial silence: “…our eyes cannot see it and our ears cannot hear it and our mind cannot perceive it because it is beyond mind, thought, and comprehension.” In this same passage he describes beautifully how we awaken to the silent quality at the source of existence:
"This all-pervading, unbroken, inseparable, unlimited, ever-present, omnipotent silence unites with our silence like the meeting of flames."
The Great Silent Presence and our own silent presence meet, and though they were never separate, experiencing their meeting is what roots us in the source of existence.
The Zen master (Katagiri Roshi) begins his instruction with the words, “Under all circumstances” — Under all circumstances, we must be rooted in the source of existence. That’s a tall order. Again and again circumstances find us oblivious to the source of existence, caught up in odd assumptions about what is real and what matters. We need help here. We need to discover ways that we can easily remind ourselves of the living presence that is the source of existence.
To that end, below is an outline of a simple practice that might be helpful. In this version I use breathing as the sensory focal point; you can experiment with other sensations once you get comfortable with the practice. Then you can do it while walking down the street, or eating a meal, or in the midst of a conversation. Having done something like this practice for a few years, I‘ve found that over time it’s become less step-by-step as in this outline, and more fluid and creative. Whereas the practice here takes several minutes, eventually you may find it happens in a few seconds and becomes the kind of effortless kinesthetic movement I mentioned earlier. Good luck!
The Practice of Living Presence
1. Sit quietly. Come to rest; body and mind relaxed and alert.
2. Bring your attention to your breath. Breathe naturally.
3. With your attention on the living, changing nature of your breath, simultaneously open your awareness to the presence in which your breath rises and falls.
4. Effortlessly allow your awareness of presence to open to the boundless presence in which your surroundings appear, and in which your body and its sensations, thoughts, and feelings appear.
5. Notice that everything that appears moves, everything that arises comes and goes, while presence doesn’t. Recognizing movement in stillness, sound in silence, living presence: this is the key point.
Reading 4
Faith-Mind
The title of the Hsin Hsin Ming, the enigmatic 6th Century text from the Chan tradition, is typically translated as: Verses on Absolute Trust; Engraving Trust in the Heart; Verses on the Faith-Mind, along with other variations. The meaning of “trust” or “faith” here is not intended as belief in a religious conception of some kind — belief or faith in God, Allah, Buddha, or any religious narrative — it is a faith so intimate that there is no intervention of a storyline or icon upon which to have faith. Similarly, the word “mind” in the title refers not to our rational mind but to awareness itself, the immediate heart-presence of our nature.
The text of the Hsin Hsin Ming takes this even further when it says: Faith and mind are not two. Not-two is faith-mind.
Faith-mind. What is it? How can we realize it? In a way, our faith-mind is already present in us right now and there’s nothing we need to do to make it happen. We have faith that the breath we are breathing this moment will occur by itself and will provide us with the oxygen we need to live. We have faith that we can understand these words. If we reach for a cup of tea, we have faith that our hand will find the teacup handle without difficulty.
The fundamental nature of faith-mind doesn’t imply that outer forms of religious faith are false. In our not-so-easy immersion into human being-ness, religious faith can be a profound support as we seek to release our fears, self-preoccupation, and sense of separation. But finally, awakening from the dream of separation, the particulars of religious narratives vanish. All naming ceases. It must. Face to face with God, there is no God, no me, no you.
This is how I understand faith-mind. It’s immediate and inherent in the moment. As many of you who are reading this know well, opening to the nature of faith-mind happens spontaneously as we learn to relax the sense of being a “me” — the one who likes this and doesn’t like that, the one who has opinions, the one who wants to be a better person, the one who wants to be respected, seen, or who wants to matter. In fact, faith-mind is exactly what allows us to relax from this identification and simply be present in the present moment, without attachment to memories, thoughts, hopes or fears — just here. We realize that our presence happens all by itself, and we can have faith in that. This is faith-mind. Absolute trust.
From this space of simple, unadorned presence, we know we’re safe. Indeed, there’s no “me” to be safe or unsafe. We simply are faith-mind.
I realize this kind of talk can sound a bit other-worldly, abstract, and disconnected from our daily concerns, but that’s not the nature of faith-mind. Think of the faith-mind of Han-Shan, the crazy-wisdom mountain poet who lived at about the same time that the Hsin Hsin Ming was written. In his poems he tells how he simply lets heaven and earth go about their changes, he lets the sounds of nature purify his ears, he doesn’t worry or fear. He’s at ease with following his karma through, finished with a tangled, hung-up mind, writing his poems, laughing with his old monk friend Shih-te, taking whatever comes. His faith-mind is natural and uncomplicated. He knows he’s safe.
What does that mean – safe?
It means that he knows, all the way through his faith-mind, that this spacious awake presence we are is not something that comes and goes. It’s the very nature of reality, and we are inseparable from it. Old Han Shan was no different from us. Like him, we too can wander at ease, effortless and fearless in the assurance of faith-mind. The universe’s spontaneity is ours. Like him, we are connected to everything, whole. The body of the universe is our body.
We can wander in this life with the faith-mind of a Han Shan, a Buddha, a Jesus, a free woman, a free man. We can love and care for this beautiful world and all its beings with compassion and tenderness, with a happy, carefree heart. Faith-mind is ours — not-two!
I know that when I carry on like this, there’s often a little “but” that sails into peoples’ minds: But I’m NOT safe, not really – so many terrible things could happen – my children could get hurt or die, my house could burn down, I could lose everything that I love!
Yes, that’s true. Anything can happen and we know it. A terminal diagnosis could come tomorrow. Pain, sickness, and death are just a roll of the dice away.
So how can we speak of being safe, of living in faith-mind without fear? Is it really possible? Is there some magic to protect us? No, there’s no magic, there’s nothing to protect us from loss. As we know all too well: everyone we love, everything we value, everything we have ever been given — our bodies, our parents and children, our friends, comforts, good works, this beautiful natural world — all of it will one day be taken from us.
That’s how it is here. There’s a sadness that comes with this life that we can’t avoid, nor should we try. It’s the cello sound of that which we love, passing. If we resist knowing that sadness, we diminish our lives. When we don’t resist it, when our faith-mind allows the cello’s melody into our souls, our lives win a measure of fineness and depth, a nobility even — the quiet nobility of being mortal.
But of course, this tender sadness that comes with living and loving is not the whole story. In the end, thankfulness transcends grief. The great honor of being human and to have been given all these chances to love is evidence of something wholly good that’s inherent in this moment and in the nature of reality, and our faith-mind knows it.
Reading 5
The Place Where Nothing and Everything Meet
If you walk into a forest and put your ear against a tree, you will hear a silence in there that is like your own. It is a silence that has no end. Empty silence is the background to everything we perceive, in the same way that space is the background to everything we perceive. Most people don’t like listening to that silence because it makes them feel alone, and they equate aloneness with loneliness. But the silent aloneness inside us — and inside all being — is not lonely.
The Zen master, Katagiri Roshi, once said, “When you see the bottom of your life, you see emptiness right there. You are standing by yourself, completely left alone in emptiness. That is a very deep sense of aloneness.”
Accepting emptiness like this, accepting our perfect aloneness, is not isolating; it is an essential part of our awakening. As Katagiri puts it, accepting emptiness allows us “to stand up in a new way.” When we stand up like that, with recognition of the ground of emptiness everywhere, we enter the reality of what he calls togetherness and creativity.
By accepting our perfect aloneness we embrace our perfect togetherness. Our aloneness extends to others because we see that everyone shares this same empty nature. “A bodhisattva,” Katagiri concludes, “constantly becomes alive from emptiness, and that life helps others.”
Sufis have a different way to describe all this, but it amounts to the same thing. “Essence is emptiness,” Rumi tells us. “Emptiness brings peace to your loving.” And this:
Dear soul, if you were not friends
with the vast nothing inside,
why would you always be casting your net
into it, and waiting so patiently?
This invisible ocean has given you such abundance…
And this:
…lying in a zero circle, mute…
when we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
we will have become a mighty kindness.
The Sufic equation of dissolving into emptiness and emerging as love is identical with the image of the bodhisattva constantly becoming alive from emptiness. It is the movement of awakening described in Sufi teachings as fana and baqa. Fana is deconstruction of the self-illusion, most often translated as annihilation of the self. “I honor those,” Rumi says, “who empty the self and have only clear being there.”
Baqa is what comes after. As Coleman Barks describes it: “Baqa is the coming back from annihilation with cleansed enthusiasm for particulars. In the state of baqa one reenters the moment fully, doing small quiet work, sewing the robe of absence.” This is Katagiri’s “standing up” in a new way, the way of togetherness and creativity. Or, as Sufis might say, it is the expression of love and of doing the beautiful that naturally flows from emptying oneself into clear being.
In my own life this “move” has become a practice that happens — in shortened form — dozens of times each day. Let’s try it together now. As you follow the practice below, notice the subtle kinesthetic sensations that occur in you. When you do this a number of times, those sensations will begin to elide, and the “practice” will happen almost instantaneously.
As you sit reading this, notice the clarity of your vision. Notice there’s nothing in the way of your seeing these words.
Now notice the clarity of the awareness in which these words appear. That clarity is unobstructed — there’s nothing in the way of the words appearing in your awareness; there’s no color or background, your awareness is perfectly clear.
Bring your attention now to the space between your forehead and the back of your head. Notice that the space inside your head is also perfectly clear. This clarity is emptiness.
Notice the sensations of your breathing. Notice how each inhale arises out of nothing and, at the top of your in-breath, it vanishes into nothing. Your out-breath does the same. Very gently, notice the space surrounding and pervading each breath. Recognize its clear, empty quality.
Now allow your intuitive openness to expand, seeing how this clarity, this empty quality, is not bounded by anything — it is all around and through you, it is everywhere, like space is everywhere.
There is nothing you need to do to “hold” this recognition of the empty quality that pervades you and all the people and phenomena you encounter; it is always present. Relax in, and as, this clear, empty presence.
This is the “intentional” aspect of this practice. What happens next is where the magic is — baqa — “standing up in a new way” — re-entering the moment with “cleansed enthusiasm for particulars.” However this occurs will be unique to you and the moment you are part of.
The place where you stand up is the place where nothing and everything meet. It’s not a place where your intellect will be of much use. We might call it a “heart space,” though it’s a heart space that pervades reality, not just the space inside your chest. In the place where nothing and everything meet, love opens all by itself, amazed and kind and creative.
Only this ancient love
circling the holy black stone of nothing,
where the lover is the love,
the horizon and everything in it.
— Rumi