#18 Seeing Reality

Recently, very recently I was dealing with a client who has been a client of mine for over thirty-five years. And he’s one of the brightest men I have ever met. However, he’s eighty-four years old and his memory isn’t what it used to be. Here’s a man who is used to being always right and never making mistakes. And being incredibly methodical in the way he went over things, over and over and over and over to make sure he was right. And when he came to me and told me something was so and so I could pretty well rely on it, because I knew of the way that he approached things. Recently he’s had a situation where his memory is faulty, his logic is faulty, but his stubbornness as to being right hasn’t altered one bit. And it’s a very interesting thing to watch because you see this deterioration of faculties and the inability to come to appropriate conclusions. But you also see the absolute insistence that the conclusions are correct.

Really interesting because that’s what all of us do, no matter what stage of life we are in. And no matter what the situation is unless we have somehow changed into someone or something that understands the foibles of this worldly existence. As long as we give that kind of credence to that which is visible and we believe that it’s a non-shifting, non-eroding thing we can’t fully understand reality, because that which we look at changes and goes through different forms and loses its sameness over time. In other words it can’t remain as it is in the future, something happens to it, something erodes it, it somehow begins to dissipate.

Now, in Sufism, we talk about the haqq, the haqīqat, the level of reality. The level where things are not changing, the level where things remain and are real, as opposed to illusory, as opposed to losing their form, as opposed to altering, as opposed to dissipating.

To change our focus from the temporal to the eternal is the point of this path and as long as we keep our focus on the worldly, what happened to my client is going to happen to each of us. We are going to keep insisting that things are a certain way when everybody around us sees that they are not, in a real scenario actually involving the temporal. We are going to lose touch. When you see people who’ve lost touch and you realize that that’s the path we’re slowly traveling to, you begin to also realize simultaneously the relevance and irrelevance of being in touch with certain things. So the question is, what is it that we want to be in touch with and what is going to sustain us as the world leaves us and as our ability to manipulate the world leaves us, what is it that can stay with us then?