Junayd & Qushayri

“Sudden gleams of light
when they appear, apparitions,
revealing a secret
telling of union.”
–Junayd

Junyad is speaking of Sufi states, which are temporary but which are tastes of fuller, more continuous states and sometimes of stable stations. Reflecting on my last post I feel the inviews – for they are not insights or epiphanies so much as views of an inner-ness residing in a non-ordinary realm — are transitory. They are gifts that appear inside a state. They are also a portrait of the inner state. Yet what is tying them together is the underlying rida – contentment. This has become a station for me. Not that I don;t experience discomfort or anxiety from time to time, but a fundamental plane in myself has smoothed into contentment. This is a station. Nearly 30 years of work to arrive here.

I used to understand contentment as a lassitude. It was laced with being lazy. Fat & happy. Perhaps this was because it was transitory. A state. A taste. This is not the rida I know now. In his essay on Maqam (Station) Qushayri’s (d. 465/1074) asserts: “Whoever has not attained contentedness is not ready for the station of trust-in-God; whoever has not attained trust-in-God is not ready for the station of surrender.” He is clear in his hierarchy. (In part because he was writing in a period of high Sufism in which many people understood the context of his discussion. He needed only to refine and reflect on accepted concepts.) I initially felt that his statement did not match my experience, and in Sufism, one’s experience is the font of understanding. But as I look more deeply, I see that these three particulars have fallen into place for me and I agree with him.

In my students, I note that surrender is difficult because they do not trust. And they don’t trust because they have no contentment. I also see that I constantly push them to surrender to their movement, to stop directing their bodies from the head down. This is the cultivation of surrender.  I navigate them towards a place I know will take years to reach, but to train people is at times to do things out of sequence. To push for something in order for another thing to be jogged into place. I want them to know rida and tawaakul.

Living as we do now in an era of superficial fragmented information, spiritual development is full of non-methodical necessities. This long path often requires devising flexible strategies to outwit the delusions of self. Yet the path is the same now as in Qushari’s time. He lived in the 11th century yet his essays ring clean and bright amidst modern cacophony.