8 September 2020

We left the farm today after coffee and one more slice of cake with Mary and SFH. It was such a striking mood to find (and leave) him in. He began the discussion by telling us that it was all just generosity - the whole thing. His own life has just been a reflection of gift upon gift upon gift, and so these two weeks of sharing with us is just one more, small expression of that overarching theme, or “arc of consciousness” as he likes to say. In a sense, all the “rise in consciousness” really means is an increasingly broad and deep awareness of the overflowing mercy of this governed universe.

We moved to more comfortable couches after coffee and began a last little bit of work on his biographical data for the website. He wanted to add a sentence or two about the orchards in Karbala from which they got all of their fresh produce, especially his favourite item: pomegranate. He spoke in surprising detail about his love for these fruits. It was sweet and human and local and I could almost sense what it was to walk through those orchards on a tributary of the Euphrates and smell the spring blossoms which are still echoed here in the Lowveld of South Africa because the world is strange and wonderful.

He emphasised - as we went through these very local and personal threads of his life - that this place was somewhere you come to be humble. After taking me on this long journey through the universe, where - in truth - self does not exist; where there is no time and no space; where there just is: we now landed back - via a few pomegranates growing in a Karbala lost in the sands of time - in a place where you can’t deny any of it. We must live and respond as honestly and humbly as we can to the situations that present themselves to our local, limited and particular awareness if we are ever to sense that which is limitless, if we are ever to touch the timeless and learn how to live completely in tune with it; present and therefore with the perfection of this very instant, even if its expression in time seems to pass.

The drive home was surprisingly challenging. It’s not easy to leave the orbit of the farm. However, we made it back to Johannesburg without incident. After salaat, Paul and I sat down to dinner - veggie and bean curry and rotis - and a pot of tea Paul made. It was late and we drank the tea in reflective silence after a long discussion about all that had happened at the farm, our favourite moments with SFH, and some reflections about the nature of true teachers. They always point away from themselves, because they know that it is not them, but Reality through them and that any spotlight cast on the biographical person dims the purity of the light which is not theirs.

As the tea percolated through us, silence returned. I once more became caught in the refraction of lights through the little bit of water left in a glass on the table in front of me. Eventually, it became too bright to bear and my eyes closed of their own accord. I sank and sank and sank, and soared and soared and soared. I felt everything I think I am dissolve, beginning with my back: all of it just floating away in tiny little fragments. In an image I’ve seen often in sajda and meditation before, I stepped out from behind the dark wall and faced the light, not out of arrogance, but simply because that is what it demanded of me, and I was blown to pieces.

This occasion, unlike previous ones, I genuinely felt it - the image itself shattered, and there was no longer a self stepping out; there was no longer light; there was no longer anything to be blown apart.

What is the nature of such an experience? Of course, such a question cannot arise there, hence the sacrifice required to come back here and ask it, even though the knowledge one seeks is implicit already in the way the question is phrased: no nature, therefore natural.

This description can make it seem like I am the one who chooses to “come back here”, that somehow I am magnanimous and noble and compassionate, which is obviously not at all the case. It is really just the flow of Reality which turns our hearts this way and that, without anyone really understanding how or why. All we can hope for is given in the words of Ishmael as he follows his father up the mountain to be sacrificed: “I trust you will find me patient.”

Paul had read the English translation of “The Departure of Illusion” just prior to this, and it was this verse which stood out most for me:

It obtained a secret and a path of balance. Few of the people of perfection have tasted it.
Our Lord, bless the light - every slave who goes to it attains his desire.