Introduction

This book consists of a series of diary entries made between August and November 2020.

South Africa was gradually coming out of lockdown as a result of COVID. Everything was strange and new.

I was invited to the home of a Sufi shaykh to work on a new website and some books he was busy writing. I kept a diary of as many of the events of the first two weeks as I could. I had no intention of sharing what I experienced: it was simply in my heart to record as accurately the nature of my experiences given how particular and surprising many of them were.

These entries have lain quietly to one side for the last four years. My heart now compels me to put them in a more open place. I have re-read them with fondness and a soft smile for the naïveté they often display. Creating this site is, in a way, part of my practice of compassion applied in and across time. I am such an idiot, but I keep faith that there is in everything a special fondness for God's idiots.

The Book of Guidance is a long-abandoned project of the shaykh's, with which I intended to help. I have placed these diary entries on this domain because it occurs to me that there is a great deal of guidance in them, both in the form of what not to do, as well as intimated in some of the direct quotes still held secure in the text.

I invite you to read them with lightness and affection, both for yourself, and for everyone around you who is struggling to understand what life is all about and how they can live it well. We are all doing our best.

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There are three remarks I wish to make, looking back on the time held in these entries.

First, I changed all the names. It feels like the correct way to approach making these entries more open.

Second, SFH will continually call out to you, highlighting how there is no need for teachers, gurus, or shaykhs. Yet, the text is really all about one such teacher, guru, shaykh. How to untangle this performative contradiction? I don't intend to. Like Rumi's chickpeas, I will let you cook in it, as I have been cooking in it. Transmission - somewhat irrespective of tradition or culture - has always occurred between teacher and student. It has been a critical structure for passing on what can't be passed on. Permission, accountability, conduct, respect, and shared understanding have depended upon the teacher-student structure for a long time. That said, I sense that something important about this archetypal structure is changing. Thich Nhat Hanh says the next Buddha is the Sangha. SFH says that the teacher-student, shaykh-murid structure is no longer as useful. A framework for understanding what this looks like in shared reality can be found here. An attempt to understand the inner implications can be found here.

Third, a word about what I mean when I say "transparent", because it took me a long time to remember. A part of it is the traditional meaning of being open and honest without secrets, but it goes much deeper than this. The moments I recorded a feeling of being transparent were not just about feeling that everything was an open book, but also that there was simple, uninterrupted flow. It is beyond light and darkness: it is about a state of being in which even light passes through without reflection. Years later, I would find names for it in other traditions; names like tadvanam. It would be sparked on different visits to the farm by studying Arabic words like naslakhu: how day is peeled from night as a thin veneer covering a much larger, "dark" reality would be (where "dark" means something more like "dark energy" or "dark matter" rather than just "ignorance"). If you reflect on the dream described in one of the later entries and the way balance is represented, perhaps you can get a sense for what I mean when I talk about being transparent.

May these words guide you as I have been guided.