October was a busy month. And the start of November. I was so busy being in the moment I didn't have time to process or analyze. Just had to be! Or was I becoming? Particle or wave? Cue emoticon for wink.
My father was visiting Pakistan after a gap of two and a half years. This much maligned but blessed country has long provided an orbital pull on him. In his early days of awakening to his higher purpose he dedicated much time and wealth to working with people in this land. He even went far down the path of trying to move his whole family here, buying land and starting to build, but that plan never came to fruition and South Africa claimed him instead.
And here is where we leave off the father part and start the teacher bit. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri has been my teacher and guide since my late teens. It was one of those things I knew at the age of 18 beyond conscious thought: he would be my teacher, like it or lump it. And even though I had cause to reconsider this state of affairs many years later, I chose, once again, his light, his flavour, the offering of his portal to higher wisdom sciences that would help me 'become' who I am in essence.
In the early days of his spiritual awakening, he would regularly go 'wali-hunting', that is, travelling throughout the Muslim world to meet and commune with beings of light, living or deceased. In Pakistan that meant he travelled through Sindh and Punjab visiting the shrines, taking the light detector of his heart to observe and feel the traces of luminescence left in their wake. He also connected deeply with a few living beings, the more prominent among them being: Shaykh Ikram Chishti, a hakim and shaykh in Hyderabad, Sufi Barkat Ali with his Qur'an 'hospital' near Faisalabad, and a humble soul known as Samandari Baba who lived on the very edge of Karachi, in a hut made of marine flotsam and jetsam which barely stayed above sea level.
Several of his students, myself included, have been the beneficiaries of these exposures. Over the years, many have come from abroad to experience something of the legacy of these awliya, and a few of them have been fortunate enough to accompany Shaykh Fadhlalla on these trips. These are my favourite types of adventures, for with such a highly calibrated tuning fork in our midst, miracles often happen. Not that we are looking for miracles per se; Shaykh Fadhlalla often emphasizes that mere breath is a miracle - so what more sign could one want? And indeed the very word miracle in Arabic, mu'jizah, derives from a verb which means to be weak and feeble, as if to imply that one's trust and faith being weak, one seeks the supernatural in order to be restored to the essentially deeper state of knowingness that all is from the One, sustained by the One, and returning to the One.
What I mean is that we get to be in the midst of serendipitous confluences of hearts and events, where aha! moments abound, epiphanies wash away our virtual cataracts, and sheer humility in the previously unappreciated paradoxes of human experience floods our veins. In his company we are shown how to witness perfection. We tend to give better attention, to notice, to hear, to listen carefully, because we are accompanying a being who has truly aligned all the feathers of his self with the light beacon of his soul. And that's a delicious slipstream to fly in.
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My father was visiting Pakistan after a gap of two and a half years. This much maligned but blessed country has long provided an orbital pull on him. In his early days of awakening to his higher purpose he dedicated much time and wealth to working with people in this land. He even went far down the path of trying to move his whole family here, buying land and starting to build, but that plan never came to fruition and South Africa claimed him instead.
And here is where we leave off the father part and start the teacher bit. Shaykh Fadhlalla Haeri has been my teacher and guide since my late teens. It was one of those things I knew at the age of 18 beyond conscious thought: he would be my teacher, like it or lump it. And even though I had cause to reconsider this state of affairs many years later, I chose, once again, his light, his flavour, the offering of his portal to higher wisdom sciences that would help me 'become' who I am in essence.
In the early days of his spiritual awakening, he would regularly go 'wali-hunting', that is, travelling throughout the Muslim world to meet and commune with beings of light, living or deceased. In Pakistan that meant he travelled through Sindh and Punjab visiting the shrines, taking the light detector of his heart to observe and feel the traces of luminescence left in their wake. He also connected deeply with a few living beings, the more prominent among them being: Shaykh Ikram Chishti, a hakim and shaykh in Hyderabad, Sufi Barkat Ali with his Qur'an 'hospital' near Faisalabad, and a humble soul known as Samandari Baba who lived on the very edge of Karachi, in a hut made of marine flotsam and jetsam which barely stayed above sea level.
Several of his students, myself included, have been the beneficiaries of these exposures. Over the years, many have come from abroad to experience something of the legacy of these awliya, and a few of them have been fortunate enough to accompany Shaykh Fadhlalla on these trips. These are my favourite types of adventures, for with such a highly calibrated tuning fork in our midst, miracles often happen. Not that we are looking for miracles per se; Shaykh Fadhlalla often emphasizes that mere breath is a miracle - so what more sign could one want? And indeed the very word miracle in Arabic, mu'jizah, derives from a verb which means to be weak and feeble, as if to imply that one's trust and faith being weak, one seeks the supernatural in order to be restored to the essentially deeper state of knowingness that all is from the One, sustained by the One, and returning to the One.
What I mean is that we get to be in the midst of serendipitous confluences of hearts and events, where aha! moments abound, epiphanies wash away our virtual cataracts, and sheer humility in the previously unappreciated paradoxes of human experience floods our veins. In his company we are shown how to witness perfection. We tend to give better attention, to notice, to hear, to listen carefully, because we are accompanying a being who has truly aligned all the feathers of his self with the light beacon of his soul. And that's a delicious slipstream to fly in.
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always such a delight reading your posts
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