6 September 2020

I find it difficult to write about the last few days at the farm. I’ve put it off until arriving home to try and gather the courage to write it out as truly as I can.

We had another meeting with SFH to review the site again this morning. I asked him specifically about the “Pointers to Practice” section, and he gave us two recordings on practice and - more specifically - “stillness”. To sit in the stream of those recordings, eyes closed with him as he went into his state and spoke from the heart, was more than words can hold. The intensity of such moments exceeds any description, any expectation, any concept.

We didn’t talk too much more about the website after these recordings. Yuval came, and related the story of how SFH and he had met 25 years ago when SFH had just arrived in South Africa. He spoke a little about Keys and some of SFH’s work that he particularly enjoys. It was a welcome break from the intensity we had just experienced, but there is also a bereftness to leaving that zone and existing again within space and time. They go together: the relief and the agony; the knowing and the doubt; the light and its shadow.

I felt utterly drained afterwards. We had brunch with the family - I sat with Mary and Mama Zee and Grace. There was - in particular - a loaf of polenta bread to die for. We went back to Andalus after some further conversations with Grace and SFH, of which I wasn’t really a part. The only thing that stood out was Yuval going to fetch a copy of Keys and reading a few ayat. Grace remarked, “Oh love, you were on such illuminated fire then, when you were writing those tafsir!” To which he responded simply, “Yes. It was a nice barbecue.”

Paul and I went back to Andalus and I just lay on the grass in the sun and surrendered myself to that little patch. There’s something wonderful in feeling supported by each blade and asking permission of all the little yellow flowers, placing your legs and feet carefully so as not to crush any of them. Of course, there is gotu kola growing all around, which somehow adds to the ambience of serenity.

David came around a little later with some questions about my experience of SFH, so he could “check himself”. All I told him is what Aldous Huxley says in The Perennial Philosophy: the language gives it all away. To be “checked” means to be stopped. The whole story is really about stopping yourself. Can you, no matter what is happening, stop dead right now? Can you do so joyfully? Can you die, over and over and over: knowing that the intensity of the moment - this eternal moment where I am writing and you are reading and which is not separate, ever - arises from the very simple fact of constant creation and destruction? Birth and death are like the pedals on a bicycle which moves on forever.

“So, why does the teacher speak at all?” David asked.
“Because he has no choice,” Paul responded.
“Because it is worship,” I said.

Worship at its most intense and potent is always sacrificial. It’s Abraham in the fire, refusing to ask Gabriel for mercy, and then again refusing to ask his Lord through Gabriel, because “It is enough for me that my Lord knows where I am.”

It is enough.

To speak is to enter time - because language is always already within time - and so this is the ultimate sacrifice for a being who knows that time does not exist. Who knows that we carry a light which is timeless and boundless, and yet which shines truly in response, as a reflection of its own self-disclosure. And so he reflects, his hands empty, his heart overflowing, his words the fire in which he burns, content that his Lord knows where he is.

Just this is enough.