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The right and the left are both ways of error, and the straight path is the middle way. -
Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him)
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Balance
One of the most sought after, yet elusive, qualities in life is
balance. We are besieged with a plethora of problems and
issues which are demanding our attention: finances, family,
career, education, meaning, desires, spirituality, friends,
politics, health, fears, love, pollution, identity, crime, purpose,
death and so on.
How do we budget our time and set our priorities to do
justice to these issues? Furthermore, even if we could find
the time and energy to delve into these areas with something
more than superficial commitment, what should we do? What
exactly does doing justice to these issues entail?
How we view death often has a huge influence on how we go
about living life. Our attitudes toward death affect our
system of values, goals and choices.
Who we believe ourselves to be, has ramifications for
education, family, career, politics, crime and love. Are we
animals? If so, what kind of animal are we?
Are we rational beings? If so, what does it mean to be
rational?
Do we have a soul? If so, what, if anything, follows from this
with respect to the question of identity?
What does being healthy mean? One can be physically fit
and, yet, be emotionally crippled. One can be emotionally and
psychologically well-adjusted to a given set of societal norms
and, nonetheless, turn a blind eye to injustice, abuse,
homelessness, poverty, hunger and corruption.
Some might say the ability to shut out the world and stay
focused on only the things one can control is the key to
emotional and psychological stability in a complex world.
Yet, how many times do we discover, much to our chagrin,
that the world we have shut out has the capacity to radically
affect what we can and cannot control in our own lives?
No one is an island because it is in the nature of the world to
refuse to leave us alone. Even if we do not go seeking the
world, nonetheless, the world will come looking for us.
We may be convinced we are, in some sense of the word,
spiritual beings. We may even be very much involved in
spiritual activities of one sort or another.
We may prioritize our lives as a function of spiritual values,
orientation and the like. Yet, in our heart of hearts, in the
stillness of the night, we may wonder about: why we still have
doubts and why we feel so empty and estranged from
everything - especially God.
We are constantly borrowing from Paul to pay Peter and,
then, borrowing from Mary to pay Paul, and so on. More
specifically, we devote time to our career by borrowing, if not
stealing, time from our families. We borrow money in order
to buy things in order to try to make up for what we have
borrowed from our families. We steal time and energy away
from the pressing social issues of the day in order to work to
pay back the money we have borrowed to give to our
families.
We borrow time from spiritual pursuits to devote toward
satisfying various sorts of physical, emotional and
psychological desires we have. We go to weekly religious
services as a kind of down payment on our intention to do
more spiritually in the future.
We borrow time from a whole set of activities in order to
have the opportunity for an education to prepare for a career
and, possibly, to learn the meaning of life. When our
education is completed, we borrow some more time and
energy in order to go fishing, or whatever, and reflect on why
we always seem to be running behind on our payments to life.
Juggling is not taught in the vast majority of public schools,
secondary schools, universities and colleges of the world.
There are no post-doctoral programs in the art of juggling.
If you want to be a juggler, then join the circus or go to
clown school. However, many of us feel very much like
clowns because our lives appear, in so many ways, to be
circus-like. Our lives are filled with: animal acts; high wire
feats performed without a net; death-defying stunts;
fast-foods; showmanship; a lot of moving from place to place,
and, finally, a fairly substantial mess to clean up before we
fold up our tents and silently steal away into the night.
We have a sense in which, as card-carrying circus
performers we ought to know how to juggle the different
parts of our lives. Unfortunately, most of us are unable to do
so because no one has taught us the necessary skills.
The Sufi masters are very accomplished jugglers. They have
dedicated the better part of their lives to learning the
techniques, discipline, concentration and aesthetics necessary
to be artful practitioners with respect to meeting the
extraordinary challenge of keeping all the components of life
in harmonious movement.
In order to be a proficient juggler in the mystical sense, one
needs to learn when and how to grab hold of a component of
life. Furthermore, in order to ply one's craft competently, one
also needs to know when and how to let go of the various
aspects of one's life. One also needs to know where to place
these features as one releases them.
In addition, one needs to know how to simultaneously focus
on what is at hand, as well as to be aware of what is going on
around one. To be capable of juggling excellence, one must
be prepared to improvise, on the spur of the moment, as
unforeseen contingencies threaten the harmonious movement
of the different components of one's life.
To be a Sufi juggler, one must learn to trust one's inherent
capacity to juggle. However, before one can learn to trust
oneself in this regard, one must learn how to trust the
individual who is helping one to develop juggling skills.
Without trust of this latter sort, one will never find one's way
to realizing one's inherent capacity for juggling. Without
trust in one's teacher one will never come to understand, with
any clarity or intensity, that learning how to juggle is a
fundamental part of the calling and purpose of human
existence.
To be a Sufi juggler, one has to have a deep, sincere and
abiding desire to commit oneself to all that becoming a
juggler presupposes. One must be prepared to make
sacrifices and to accept the rigors of the training program.
One must be ready to patiently deal with, and persevere
through, the frustrations of protracted periods of juggling
incompetence, before one experiences the joy and
exhilaration of being, if God wishes, a successful participant
in such an art form.
Ultimately, to be a Sufi juggler, one must understand that one
is not the juggler but the jugglee. One is the object being
juggled. One's life, in all its myriad aspects, is brought into
harmonious movement by the Supreme Juggler. As such,
learning to be a Sufi juggler involves giving oneself over to
that process and not interfering with it, and, thereby,
permitting the forces of balance and harmony to flow
through one in an unimpeded fashion.
To be a Sufi juggler, one must abandon one's desire to be a
juggler. To be a Sufi juggler, one must be content with being
a witness to, and servant of, the acts of the one and only true
juggler in existence.
To attain this station of understanding, may seem to be a
rather dubious, if not trivial, achievement. Nevertheless,
those individuals who have been permitted to bring this
process to resolution, are deeply satisfied with the result and
prefer it to all other possibilities. They indicate that all
lasting and non-illusory meaning, purpose, identity,
significance, direction, value, and balance are derived from,
and through, such an understanding.
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