#17 Internal and External Belief Systems

Wise men often explain situations through allegories, stories that when told depict a certain situation and then bring your own awareness of certain things to a different level. Sometimes you don’t get it. Sometimes you hear the allegory and you really don’t have any idea what they are talking about. And then the teacher will explain the allegory and then you can get more insight into the situation.

Our life is like that. It is one story situation, scenario, set of facts after the other. And there are lots of different ways to deal with it. There’s what appears on the surface, there’s what’s under the surface, there’s what’s much deeper under the surface, and then there’s the message about reality that exists within the scenario, and either distance from reality or a closeness to reality in the situation.

Ibn ‘Arabī said that the world is a translator for Allah. The world is a translator for God. The point being that the things that we see and the things that we interact with are learning lessons from us indicating to us what it is we have to do in order to become closer to reality. For instance, a simple one, if Allah wants you to learn patience, He may give you a situation that requires patience. Now, if you’re sitting with yourself and you’re in the midst of frustration and anger, do you think it’s going to naturally come to you, ah ha, this is the situation that needs patience and it’s my time to learn patience? Or is this one of the allegories that we didn’t get?

The point is that we have to learn to become diagnosticians of ourselves and of each of our situations. There are ten trillion, one hundred million, ten thousand, hypnotic illusions that attach us to them, and that we follow around or choose not to follow around. However, if we consider everything that goes on as normative and capable of becoming involved with, we’re not looking below the surface of what we see. Somehow, we have to start looking at the deeper level of things in order to figure out what is actually going on. And until we do that we are never going to know what happens with the depths because we are swimming on the surface of illusion, and being very interactive with it. And that interaction consumes all of our thought, all of our time, and all of our energy. So if we are constantly in process with illusion trying to resolve illusion, and trying to resolve what it throws at us, what can be the end result?