Juma Khutba with Shaykha Fariha - December 11, 2020 - a podcast by Nur Ashki Jerrahi Community

Reading from Perfect Humanity / beyond concepts, dogma, and heresy / may we contemplate every moment anew

O aspirants to the new human reality, keep your critical spirit alert, your discernment and perceptiveness so clear that nothing and no one can cloud your unitary vision. Struggle arduously in full battle against malignant spirits, which would block the road of the new humanity. Satan, the joker, impostor, parasite, and cynical assassin, is empty of true substance and can only snarl and scream with his deceptive conceptuality, his habitual obsession, his cancerous inanity. His illness is contagious, his evil infectious. But be absolutely certain, O lovers of Truth, that authentic spiritual combat against the adversary of humanity, against the demon in all his corrosive forms, is always victorious, thanks to the intervention of realized beings, who are the force of the new humanity.

The secret meaning of this novel of chivalry that is our own life is freedom from self, dethronement of ego. As Saint John of the Cross explains about his own spiritual emblem, which he calls the colorless bird, “Do not take initiative in anything.” This principle of total renunciation extends even to mystic knowledge. Sings Saint John, the solitary bird of omniconscious unity, “Only know God, without knowing how.” To feel excessive attachment to the forms of society, including religious forms, is to convert them into an obstacle or a veil between the aspirant and perfect humanity.

At the peak of his ascent of Mount Carmel, Saint John proclaims, “To here, there is no road.” The scholar Luce Lopez Baralt explains in her admirable study of Islamic roots in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, “The saint carries out a circular and nonexistent journey from God to God.” This is the Sufi journey within God and beyond God through mystical annihilation, through the ecstasy that obliterates. The only heresy within the new humanity is to attach oneself to anyone or anything that is not God. As Saint John affirms, “One single thing is necessary, which is to know how truly to negate and annihilate oneself.” There is no question here of nihilism. On the contrary, as Shaykh Muzaffer of Istanbul confirms several centuries following Saint John, “It is an absolute certainty that those who are annihilated in Allah will exist forever.”

Excerpt from Atom from the Sun of Knowledge
by Lex Hixon / Shaykh Nur al-Jerrahi

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