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Sufism on Awakening & Self Realization - Zahir Khan (Non-Duality)

Zahir Khan shares his Sufi journey, blending Qadriya Sufism with non-dual traditions, exploring awakening and self-realization.

Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.

Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.

Key Takeaways

  • Spiritual awakening often begins unexpectedly and organically, without prior knowledge or preparation.
  • The student-teacher relationship in Sufism is based on deep trust and surrender rather than structured teaching.
  • Sufism incorporates diverse practices and draws from multiple tariqas, enriching the spiritual experience.
  • Exploring multiple spiritual traditions can deepen understanding and foster inclusivity.
  • True realization involves embracing ordinariness and trusting the unfolding process.

What the video covers

  • Zahir Khan introduces himself as a contemporary mystic trained in the Qadriya school of Sufism with exposure to Advaita and Buddhist non-dual traditions.
  • His spiritual journey began unexpectedly through an interest in Qawwali music, leading him to meet his Sufi teacher and become a murid.
  • He describes the traditional Sufi student-teacher relationship as one of complete surrender and trust, often without structured teaching.
  • Zahir studied various Sufi tariqas, including Qadri, Suhrawardi, Bundy, Abu Layla, and Chishti, incorporating diverse practices like whirling, zikr, and prayer.
  • He emphasizes learning through presence and observation rather than formal instruction, highlighting the organic nature of his spiritual education.
  • Zahir also explored other religious traditions such as Sikhism and Hinduism, reflecting an inclusive approach to spirituality.
  • He shares personal anecdotes about his initial confusion, the significance of his teacher’s guidance, and the gradual unfolding of his awakening.
  • The talk touches on the differences between non-duality and devotional paths, and the importance of trust and openness on the spiritual path.
  • Zahir reflects on the role of dreams, miracles in ordinary life, and the importance of cross-cultural spiritual exchange.
  • He concludes with insights on humility, the uniqueness of each spiritual journey, and the value of patience and trust.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Introduction to Zahir Khan and Sufi Background
  2. 08:25Initial Spiritual Experience and Becoming a Murid
  3. 16:12Sufi Practices and Tariqas Explored
  4. 23:53Learning Through Presence and Trust
  5. 39:01Exploration of Other Traditions and Personal Reflections
  6. 47:01Non-duality and Spiritual Methodologies
  7. 59:01Dreams, Miracles, and Ordinariness in Spirituality
  8. 67:43Cross-Cultural Spiritual Exchange and Final Insights

Answers

Questions about this video

How did Zahir Khan begin his journey in Sufism?

Zahir Khan's journey began through his love for Qawwali music, which led him to meet his Sufi teacher and become a murid, starting his spiritual path.

What is the role of the teacher in the Sufi tradition according to Zahir Khan?

In Sufism, the teacher-student relationship involves complete surrender, where the teacher guides the student like a 'dead body' in their hands, emphasizing trust and presence over formal teaching.

How does Zahir Khan integrate other spiritual traditions in his practice?

Zahir Khan explores various traditions such as Advaita, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Hinduism, embracing an inclusive and organic approach to spirituality beyond just Sufism.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:02
Speaker A
Hi everyone, this is Zahir Khan. He's a contemporary mystic in the tradition of Sufism. He has spent eight years studying with a master of the Qadriya school of Sufism and then further studying and meeting teachers from non-dual Advaita and Buddhist traditions.
00:21
Speaker A
Hi and welcome, Zahir. Hello, how are you? Are you well? I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm good, I'm good. We finally got here because I think we've been like doing the dance, but we're here now and
00:35
Speaker A
you know, obviously, let's see what happens this evening and what comes out in the talk and whatnot. So yeah, I'm really happy to be here and, um, very grateful for the opportunity to obviously speak, so thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy we finally
00:49
Speaker A
figured this out and I'm really, I apologize for how long it took because I do this on the side. Um, things are slow on my end. I can't, it's, I work on these things only on weekends. [Music] Um, so
01:07
Speaker A
I think you have a really interesting background in Sufism and you're also, you also have exposure to all these different traditions. Yeah, I was thinking maybe first we could start with Sufism teachings and then we could move on to talking about your own
01:24
Speaker A
awakening and your own, I'll kind of mix the two together because I think that's probably going to be the best way to answer it. Um, I, um, had absolutely no inkling on spirituality or anything like that, let alone Sufism or anything like that. My
01:42
Speaker A
journey literally started because I enjoyed something called Qawwali music, which is this devotional form of music which is really, um, popular in the subcontinent, and I was told that a certain Qawwali artist was going to be coming to a town near London
01:57
Speaker A
and if I wanted to go along, and I snapped up the opportunity. Um, it was there that I met my teacher who was going to become my teacher for the next eight years, and I had no idea about Sufism. I had no idea there were
02:09
Speaker A
different schools. I had no idea about lineages or methodology or anything. I literally just walked into a world that I had absolutely no idea about because I'd left home at 18, gone to university, and I was completely disconnected with
02:23
Speaker A
um, my community, my traditions, and what have you. And, um, I was there for about two days and on a Monday morning somebody asked me if I wanted to become a murid, which is a term which means become a student,
02:35
Speaker A
and I thought, well yeah, why not? Because literally all of the weekend people have been telling me about the whole need for a guide and how a guide can take you to this place of realization, although none of
02:46
Speaker A
this actually meant anything for me. I was literally just caught up in the whole, you know, um, weekend and they'd been whirling as well. I was to find this out later that one of the methodologies that the, the school used was whirling,
02:59
Speaker A
and, um, so Monday morning I became a murid. I was instructed in certain zikrs, which are certain, um, mantras that you would pray. I was given a book which was, um, Arif, which is the lineage of where
03:12
Speaker A
the, the school started and where it went, and just given a lot of basic techniques. Um, and there was one student, he read out what needed to happen and that was like you've taken on a teacher. I, I did
03:23
Speaker A
something, I, I did something called a bay'ah, which is basically a pledge of allegiance, and that was basically me entering into a formal contract with my teacher. So let's say I take you as my spiritual guide now within the Sufi tradition. What they
03:35
Speaker A
say is traditional Sufism says that the murid, the student, is like a dead body in the hands of a teacher. The teacher can do whatever he wishes. Um, so I've entered into this contract unaware of what I'm doing. Um,
03:47
Speaker A
and then literally started learning certain zikrs, certain, um, verses of the Quran that I had to pray every day. I'll admit I wasn't the best of students. Um, there were people who were a lot better. I did this for about seven, eight years
04:01
Speaker A
or so in which I had a teacher who never spoke to me. He literally spoke to me for about 10 minutes or so and about three minutes of those was just reiterating what somebody had read to me out of a book that I'm your
04:12
Speaker A
teacher now and I'm responsible for you and this is, this is, you know, you will listen to everything I've got to say. It was now that I look back on it a complete blessing because rather than having everything talked to me about
04:25
Speaker A
so-and-so Sufi came down the Silk Road and came to India and he did this or so, so if he did this or this is what this zikr means or this is what this means and everything, I literally was just picking this up or
04:36
Speaker A
organically by just literally observing and just doing whatever the teacher needed to do. I recently went back to the school that I was a member of, um, just to kind of consult on a little issue and I literally walked and said we are
04:49
Speaker A
taught in a way where we don't realize we're being taught. So it wasn't structured teaching. It was a very old methodology whereby just being in the company of the teacher, doing what the teacher is asking you to do, talking to
05:00
Speaker A
the senior students in the school, um, literally was my education. What was really interesting was that after meeting my teacher, he'd come from Pakistan for about two weeks or so and after meeting him I remember going back home and, um, I'm originally from a
05:15
Speaker A
town called Coventry in the United Kingdom and I just went to the local library and over about four or five days I read about 11 books on Sufism, um, from people like Sheikh Nazim who is Anders Bundy, Sufi Idris Shah who everybody knows and
05:28
Speaker A
just whatever I could get my hands on. So I learned about the classical Sufi, something you know, the characters like Ibn Arabi and Rumi, Imam Suharjan, how they had undertaken their journeys and then I started learning about the school. So
05:43
Speaker A
the schools are known as Tariqas and there were like five main schools and the school that I was involved was almost in a sense like a merger of all these different schools. So I was technically being instructed in
05:53
Speaker A
Qadri method, Suhrawardi, Bundy, Abu Layla, and Chishti, and that basically meant a lot of different methods were brought in. So our school used music, so we used Qawwali, we also used whirling, we call it the rocks, and everything, so that was a method as
06:06
Speaker A
well. We also used certain breathing techniques as well and we were also told that we should also pray five times a day as well and also keep up our duties as Muslims as well and that was very much the influence of
06:19
Speaker A
the Naqshbandi school. So it was an amalgam of ideas and what was really interesting rather than being told this, oh this is what we're going to do and this is what we're going to do and this is what this
06:29
Speaker A
is, you literally just trusted but without realizing you were trusting. You just were in the company of the teacher. Now I was terrified and also completely ignored my teacher because he was just this larger than life character and what was really
06:44
Speaker A
interesting is when we first met he said a couple of things which I really didn't understand. One of them was that one day you'll teach and, you know, I've literally just walked in through the door and there was another guy with me and he
06:57
Speaker A
started crying and he, you know, started banging in front of the teacher and, you know, like kissing his hand and I'm like I have no idea what's going on here. And one of the other things he also said you
07:05
Speaker A
guys sit with these other approaches and then we'll show you where we go. So naturally what happened was then over the next couple of years I started looking at other traditions as well and sitting with pundits from, you know, the
07:16
Speaker A
local mandir, sitting with people from the Sikh tradition, Muslim tradition, anything I could literally find. But again it was something that was happening organically and if I go back into my story, my father was quite liberal so for the first six
07:30
Speaker A
years of my life I didn't realize I was a Muslim. I actually thought I was a Sikh because my auntie, he was a Sikh. I, I saw as my mother. I even have a Sikh name as well. I was given the name Bergen,
07:40
Speaker A
which is quite a traditional Punjabi name. So I was brought up in an atmosphere where, you know, there was an old Hindu.
07:49
Speaker A
atmosphere where i i didn't see the differences between religion it's just when i got a bit older and i started seeing that hold on certain people don't like certain people and they're certain pointers so i started it was always one to me it
08:02
Speaker A
didn't you know there wasn't a separate thing so falling into a school like this was completely natural what then happened was i i went to pakistan and there's a festival called an horse which is it's a festival in which we
08:15
Speaker A
celebrate the the reuniting of a saint and it's it's known as the wedding night and it's the the lover is reuniting with that beloved and one of the things we do is we play music you know we play
08:25
Speaker A
quality we do drugs you know there's longer as well which is basically the serving of a meal to you know whoever is and whoever's there and there was a couple of hundred people there and i had been quite shy
08:36
Speaker A
up until that point but on that night i just whirled and whirled and world and world and there was a point where i completely lost complete consciousness and stuff and everything i literally just woke up i didn't know where i was
08:46
Speaker A
and that's when i really experienced the whole the whirling in in a practical sense like what it meant and how it was done and then after that what happened was i i just just didn't feel the need to be there
08:58
Speaker A
anymore um so i i left there were rumors in the school saying that you know i've been given something i've been given something called fakie which is basically you know i'd become a dervish in the truest sense but i was unable to
09:10
Speaker A
cope with it i just felt at peace and didn't feel the need to be there around that time i i'd had a conversation with tony parsons about god about a year or so and i wanted to go to
09:20
Speaker A
one of his talks i was i was also looking all these different self-help methods and i was doing something called the sedona method and i was on a forum and they put on this website it's called the open secret and i thought myself
09:30
Speaker A
okay this looks interesting so i start reading this website and i'm really resonating with this but i don't know whether i'm resonating i just felt oh what's going on here so i rang tony pass and said look i'd like to come to one of
09:40
Speaker A
your talks and he goes well whether you're here or not you're here and i just remember thinking okay i just put the phone down um a year later i end up in glasgow and um i just remembered him one day and
09:52
Speaker A
i you know i had one of these page mobile phones i topped it up and i rang him up and the first thing he said is if you think this is gonna improve your life it's not and um my reaction wasn't the best
10:02
Speaker A
because i was hoping that by this time i'd heard about this thing called self-realization i was hoping that self-realization was going to improve my life and somehow i was going to have this really blissed out existence and um
10:12
Speaker A
that led to the first awakening i then went down to london spoke at one of the open secret meetings just like for about five or ten seconds just said whether you're here or not you're you know i don't know you're you're done or
10:22
Speaker A
whatever um about a year and then the awakening disappeared so i was like damn i've lost my enlightenment this is not good i then ended up speaking to another teacher called roger linden who comes out the whole tony parsons thing
10:35
Speaker A
um what was then interesting was you know a couple of months later i'm again talking to tony i've forgotten all about him one day i decided to ring him and there was just this complete sense of self there
10:45
Speaker A
and i'm just we're literally talking over a phone and i was just like okay and he goes well look if you want to come down this weekend to the meeting i was like yeah why not this then lasted for two months and this
10:54
Speaker A
this awakening and i was like wow you know i'm enlightened again it disappeared again and i thought i'm getting really careless now this thing keeps coming and going by this time seeking could just become a full-time preoccupation i theoretically and experientially knew
11:08
Speaker A
this but i just couldn't seem to grasp this thing and i remember then phoning tony again but his wife claire picked up and she said before you even ask the question you know what the answer is and i was like yeah i really didn't want to
11:20
Speaker A
hear that i put the phone down a couple of days then before everything came to an end i was sitting in i heard of a man who'd gone to the holy city of medina and he'd shaved his beard off and
11:30
Speaker A
straight was like that man knows so i rang this guy up and said well can i come and see he was like yeah cool when do you want to come and see me as a young lad and i said look i'll come and
11:38
Speaker A
see you at 10 o'clock so him and his entire sanger are literally waiting for me at 10 o'clock in the morning and i'm walking through the door at 10 o'clock at night and um literally he was like asking me whatever
11:49
Speaker A
you want and i was like i'm just watching this reality which is probably the best way to put it a couple of days later i was just sitting on the sofa and i realized that everybody was saying the same thing
11:58
Speaker A
there was a phrase that i'd heard everybody say from tony to roger to my teacher to this young teacher as well and then there was just this sense of whirling that was occurring in me and then just i just stopped
12:11
Speaker A
so i was just sitting on a sofa i stopped my friends turned up and they bought some food and they were like look would you like some food i was like guys i'm done and then three months later i started
12:19
Speaker A
speaking i was very very non-jew about it all it was everything was just happening it was all very just it's just this there is no weather and all of this stuff and then over the years what happened was the sufi something started
12:29
Speaker A
creeping and people started asking me about sufism so now what's happening is i'm uh despite my best attempts to not talk about this stuff and to generally try and sell sabotage all of this i now find myself talking from almost
12:42
Speaker A
like a combination of sufism and nonduality because to me it's actually one of the same um but what's happening now is that there's terms coming in as well and now as i look at the history of sufism as well we
12:52
Speaker A
look at the history of advaita they have come together at points and literally sat and discussed and realized they're saying the same thing so it's about really just highlighting that we're all saying the same thing and it doesn't matter if i say
13:08
Speaker A
you know i'm going to go through the makama fernando shape which is annihilation in into the teacher or i say awakening we're actually pointing the same thing so it's um it's creating an interesting conversation because this is not a
13:20
Speaker A
strictly non-dual conversation and it's not a strictly sufi combination sorry conversation as well but bits keep coming in and somehow it makes sense so yeah that's that's what i'm doing at the moment and you're seeking ways how long did it last was did it
13:37
Speaker A
take you years to come to i i started the age of 23. um that that was i wasn't serious i wasn't serious at all i think it really kicked into gear when i i went up to scotland but then it was literally
13:56
Speaker A
it was literally over in about a year and a half two years because i literally just caught fire i just needed to know this thing and it just became a preoccupation like i i you know i was i was working i was
14:07
Speaker A
literally walking in and out of jobs because i just couldn't hold anything down because this had literally taken over my life so when i literally got serious about it it was literally about a year or two or so
14:20
Speaker A
possibly even three but what i found was it's just time just seemed to just disappear in that that time i was i was literally just bumping into every mystic dervish non-duality people buddhist and everything but rather than sitting there and kind of like saying
14:35
Speaker A
okay give me a book to read and everything it was just being in the presence of these people and just literally um being able to just be there was kind of showing me something else and i think that's what's it and it's affected my
14:46
Speaker A
communication because for many many years i really wanted to come down to london and go to these great meetings that i've heard about and i wanted to sit with these teachers and i want to do these retreats but i wasn't able to do
14:56
Speaker A
so which in retrospect was the best thing for me because it meant that i didn't get caught in any one particular uh particular approach you know what i'll talk about love and i love it but at the same time i'll say it's just this
15:08
Speaker A
as well but it all depends on what's happening in the moment and it literally also depends upon the person in front of you you'll get you'll get the conversation if you want and if you don't then you won't i'll just literally just say
15:19
Speaker A
whatever you need to say so yeah it's crazy yeah and what are like the main is there really much of a difference i'd say sufism is a bit more expansive because it also you know with non-duality my understanding of it this
15:42
Speaker A
is just this all one and the funny thing is it's like i kind of almost find like yeah okay that's kind of what with sufism i mean that there's the the approaching sufism which would encapsulate nonduality which is this oneness of being and it
15:58
Speaker A
was popularized by suffocating um a lot of sufis weren't happy with that so they came out with a counter approach which is what there's water which are then there's water show which is this witnessing and i find that even with
16:12
Speaker A
non-duality you know if you go back to advaita there's debate as well and debate is very devotional and a methodology about getting somewhere whereas um nonduality's a lot more it's just this it's more of a direct path so
16:23
Speaker A
within sufism yes you have that direct path of you know what double jolt um but then what you find is some of the sober schools will go for water which is witnessing and that's where you see methodology taking a teacher taking
16:35
Speaker A
the journey and things like that i think the reason that happens is because if you look at sufism it kind of has its roots in islam and these are the abrahamic faiths and the abrahamic fates have always had this whole idea there's
16:47
Speaker A
this benevolent god and we're traveling back so i think what's happened with sufism it's taken that into account but then when sufism came into the indian you know indian subcontinent it was confronted by things like adventure and debater and then vada
17:02
Speaker A
which was this oneness of being became quite popular as well so it's literally what i'm finding in sufism is they're both in there whereas with advaita there's a sister philosophy of devata which is kind of quite devotional so
17:14
Speaker A
it's kind of all in there but what i'm finding is that the methods expansive which with one person it may be just look it's just this you've got to stop so somebody turns up and says look i've been with my teacher 20 years and i've
17:26
Speaker A
done this and i've done this and i've done this the best thing to do is just say to no mate it's just this it's a complete waste of time what you've done for other people who are going on about
17:34
Speaker A
oh it's just this it's just this it's just this and they've been going on for the last 10 years then what you do is you take them off that and you bring them on to the methodology side of
17:42
Speaker A
things in order to take that pressure off them because i think sometimes with non-duality there's a pressure there as well you've got to wake up right now and it's it's it's a one-dimensional approach and i'm not saying that as a
17:54
Speaker A
criticism because i found a lot of benefit from it i think the older approach is like if we were to go into advaita or debate or into sufism they offer other avenues as well so had i sat with my teacher who was from pakistan
18:07
Speaker A
and didn't understand my language because i couldn't speak my language properly we probably wouldn't have got very far if it had been like a satsang or as we call it a sorbet but he was able to get the same results
18:20
Speaker A
by making me do things like clean floors and things like that but i think for that to work you you've got to look at the person as a whole so for example i remember um there was a certain sufferings with
18:31
Speaker A
and he came up to me he gave me some money and i was like okay thanks and um got a couple of hours later i was clearing her garden and i was clearing the garden with this one guy i really
18:40
Speaker A
didn't like and there was this there was this piece of timber and we both had to work together so i learned about teamwork i learned about working with someone like they want to but what was really interesting at the end of all he
18:51
Speaker A
left there a couple hours later it's good in your own money isn't it and i was like yeah because i hadn't been working i'd literally become so spiritual that i didn't want to do normal things what i'm finding now
19:03
Speaker A
my journeys i seem to be going into normality but what i'm finding going into normality is a lot of these ideas that we discuss and we think are very deep are actually just common sense to people who just live their lives so that's
19:17
Speaker A
changed my approach as well i lied to that as well i mean going back to the the poet iqbal that i was talking about you know he did a series of lectures in which he said if you look a
19:25
Speaker A
lot of sufi schools are very very static now they're following regimentedly what their teacher did and what their teacher did or what their teacher did and in that sense they're completely out of touch with what's happening and what i
19:36
Speaker A
found is sufism like advaita has you know has has changed you know for example you have the united school and with the united schools you you know some sufis will say you have to be a muslim to be a sufi
19:48
Speaker A
with the united school which is a branch of the chishti school which is um i think it's headed by someone called khan now at the moment they're of the opinion that sufism is universal and it's open to everybody regardless of
19:58
Speaker A
what your faith is and i kind of feel that you know sufism advaita and in its current form even non-duality will just keep mutating and keep changing if it goes static that's when you've got the beginning of a religion going on when we
20:11
Speaker A
start taking terms and turning the terms into god and we start saying wonder this is the right way anyway then we're on our way to today's point of because tomorrow's religion and stuff and and i think that's where we have to
20:22
Speaker A
destroy that that's why with with sufism i there's two forms of sufism there's a one that people understand and there's one that is nameless and formless you know there's a very famous sufi one stated a reality with no name is now a name with
20:35
Speaker A
no reality and if we go to the reality based then there is no such thing as sufism there is no such thing as non-duality but when we are in that place of nothingness that's when yes you're a non-jewish and you're a
20:48
Speaker A
sufi and you're a yogi and you're a buddhist as well so these these are just terms so technically everybody you've interviewed up until this point has been a sufi but they've also been a yogi and they've also been a buddhist because they've let
21:00
Speaker A
go of terms by by ceasing you become but by by letting go you become so yeah that's that's what i've started kind of deeply with sufism about because to me there isn't really much that can be said about it yes we can tell the stories i
21:16
Speaker A
can tell them allah sudden story now but that again is another teaching as well because one of the things they do in sufism is they use storytelling and you know that was evidenced by books like the thousand one nights which
21:28
Speaker A
is just his huge story but it's actually a teaching tell this poetry is also used as well which is why room in a state of ecstasy composed the muslim and again these are just ways of pointing back movement again you know you have yoga
21:42
Speaker A
you know there's whirling and it's literally a methodology sometimes we need to move people physically sometimes we need to move people emotionally and poetry is absolutely wonderful for doing that sometimes you need to tell a story because then what happens is the
21:55
Speaker A
mind is looking for answers there so you start telling on the story you know i i am it's kind of crazy i created a character at one of my talks i started talking about a man called bob and i kind of said bob was a friend of
22:07
Speaker A
mine he was a fisherman and what was really funny was i was like oh here he goes he's telling a story it's something that sufis do and bob became an entire character he became a fisherman me and bob were friends and
22:19
Speaker A
everything and then i started confessing that bob was actually you know um you know fighting the sea monster and everything and what was really interesting is by the end of the summer there was one lady that talks you just went thank you i
22:31
Speaker A
just realized that monsters don't exist because that was her trauma but unbeknown to me just telling the story was enough to you know kind of bring it down and that's that's something that you've seen come down so example someone like milton
22:44
Speaker A
erickson who was a very famous hypnotist he used storytelling as well because it does just jam the mind with stories and at the same time what you do is whatever you need to do you need to do because
22:54
Speaker A
technically you're working with a person energetically you know one of my most profound moments was cleaning the floor in pakistan and i started off hating it i then just had to get on with it and by the end of
23:06
Speaker A
it i there was just someone cleaning the floor and then i looked up and my teacher was looking at me and i was like damn he's done me again but that led to me spending an entire night whirling and
23:17
Speaker A
really connecting with myself so it was for me it was the physical side of things because when i started working that sense of self just started expanding outwards and i just wanted to let go there wasn't anybody trying to
23:28
Speaker A
hold on then and i just wanted this just to be gone like i didn't want to be stuck in this body i just wanted this expanse and i remember just coming back and there was just there wasn't this separation as such but
23:40
Speaker A
i didn't have those terms then so i didn't know about consciousness and awareness and separation i i still don't know what they mean i was experiencing so it was a reality with no name now yes i can talk about the fact that you know
23:53
Speaker A
if the other b wrote that poem and you know the religious clerics of the day he called him a heretic and then he used the quran to justify his position and stuff but these are only if they're needed and stuff because sometimes what
24:05
Speaker A
can happen is we can any of these things i'm talking about we can get addicted to so i knew a man who so got addicted to whirling that he would just well all the time but by then it was it was completely
24:15
Speaker A
naturally inefficient for him because the whirling had become his crutch or people who will go to to see and they'll just sit there they'll tell stories all night but you need to go past that story now this is why there's a beautiful
24:28
Speaker A
incident and as i tell this story i'm actually contradicting myself with rumi's teacher who they said he was sitting in a gathering and a man started telling stories and using all this poetry to which you know sean said you know why
24:40
Speaker A
do you talk of the condition of your heart with the words of others which is what rumi said when he said drone legend so the whole thing is to say what are you seeing now what's your legend what are you saying what's your
24:50
Speaker A
poetry what's your love so that's where you find your own way of communicating you find what works for you because i remember when i did my first talk and i was mortified because i wanted to sound like a non-jew
25:02
Speaker A
teacher i was like and roomie started coming out and i started talking about poetry and i spoke too fast and then i think i swore a few people as well and i was like oh god what am i doing
25:12
Speaker A
but over time i realized it was me you know the end of this is the realization of you as you actually are and that's where you become your expression so yeah i can be non-jew but then at the same time now recently
25:24
Speaker A
people want to hear about sufism but it's like well what do you want to hear about sufism and then you know you know there's a question about dreams that you know you sent to me you know well that's not something that would be
25:36
Speaker A
welcome in the whole non-dual community and yet with the whole thing about dreams i remember sitting with my teacher and he said that the grandshaykh of our school was a man called sufficient but he was this towering influence
25:48
Speaker A
on sufism in the indian subcontinent and um he had a crisis of faith had a complete crisis of faith prayed to god in the state of desperation which doesn't make sense because guess what it's just this and he said look you know
25:59
Speaker A
if i don't meet my teacher tomorrow i'm going to leave the faith i'm leaving everything i'm going to become a heretic i'm going to become a disbeliever and he goes to bed he has his dream of a man on
26:08
Speaker A
a bicycle and the man on the bicycle comes up to him and gives him an apple right so he gets up in the morning it's coming it's just a dream um he gets up in the morning and you
26:18
Speaker A
know he goes for a walk and also lo and behold there's that man so the man comes up to him and just like smiles him and then he goes oh yeah you need this as well and he pulls out the
26:26
Speaker A
apple that's how he recognized his teacher so what i've found is everything has its place once upon a time it was very black and white it's just this and and it's just this now i realize yes there's there's so
26:39
Speaker A
many different ways that this reality is communicating to us and it is literally there is this whole other beloved thing going on and yes okay it is just all one but we're here you know the sufi say granted the world is an illusion but we
26:52
Speaker A
still have to live in it and we see that in nonduality teachers as well they know it's an illusion but they're doing very good work and it's literally about how do we live here and that's where certain things that we were taught that
27:04
Speaker A
the school that i was with it was it wasn't just about the spiritual side it was also about giving people the necessary skill sets to live their lives as well and i was watching an interview with i think swami
27:15
Speaker A
sadwa priyananda and he said the same thing as well in traditional advaita there's other things as well that we look at like the character of the individual as well and i think this is why when sufism invader met it we've seen that it's
27:26
Speaker A
actually one approach because it's not just a spiritual experience it's also building the character as well it's also building the individual it's also really being able to handle any problem because most people coming through the door do not want to wake up
27:39
Speaker A
most people have another issue but enlightenment has become such a huge thing that you know when we are close i just want to be i just want to be free i just want to enlighten and it may just mean
27:49
Speaker A
something else and what i found with traditional teachers is because they've had this methodology that they've been using for thousands of thousands and thousands of years and it works they can identify what the problem is straight away and i saw that in my early
28:04
Speaker A
years you know a man came to see my teacher it was literally you know he had he'd had a row with his wife and you know she'd left angrily um and he wanted her back and what was really really interesting is like i
28:17
Speaker A
remember my teacher just making him come and see him so many times and then he goes look the reality is all the the bank accounts are in her name and that's what he wants and he goes but he'll come
28:28
Speaker A
tomorrow he'll tell us that and he came in the next day and he just in this state of desperation because look i want it back because all the money is in their name and i was like ah so what you
28:36
Speaker A
find is some of the older methods will get to the actual heart of the matter you know you turned up babaji you know translation i just want to sit with you i want to see your presence so what you'll find is the older
28:48
Speaker A
teachers the older ways and and that's when you're going to advance from sushis and stuff they're a bit more wily they kind of know and and to a certain extent within nonduality as well and i think what will happen is
28:59
Speaker A
non-duality kind of matures it will start bringing other things in as well at the moment there's a direct path there's only this but what i've found is as you go further on you start looking at it from different angles it's like
29:09
Speaker A
you know you have a diamond you're not going to look at it from one angle and what you do is you'll find that you'll get different aspects of it but then when you open your eyes you'll see it's a complete hold the sufis tell a
29:21
Speaker A
story of men who were taken into a room and there was an elephant but they were blindfolded and each person touched a different part of the elephant and then they left the room and they described what they were all these different
29:30
Speaker A
pointers are literally that elephant in the room that we're touching different you know like parcels and oh yeah but look here's a trunk or here's a tail and and these traditional approaches are literally about taking the blindfold off
29:42
Speaker A
and saying oh can you not see that that's in its entirety and that's where i think this kind of combination thing is is happening with me but there seems to be a movement towards talking about sufism but in a
29:54
Speaker A
demystified way because unfortunately the image is very romanticized it's all very thousand and one nights it's all very you know beards and whirling and it's all very roomy and stuff and if we go by that logic sufism hasn't changed since thousands of years
30:10
Speaker A
ago but it's a living reality adapts you know a sufi in india will be dressed in one way and sufi and london will be dressed a different way you know i remember when i first met my teacher i
30:18
Speaker A
was like he had long hair and he had a beard and i was like wow this gives kid's been excused to grow long hair it's obviously gone south now um and i said look can i grow my hair and can i
30:26
Speaker A
have a beard he goes no don't be silly you'll never get married if you have a beard and it was weird i was just like thanks for that mate i know because you're meant to be giving me spiritual
30:35
Speaker A
instruction about how to become this holy person and he's like i don't grow a bed you'll never get married and the reality is yeah he was he was right so what's speaking at that point and who's speaking of what you know where's it
30:47
Speaker A
coming from and and that's when it gets interesting they're the questions we need to but that's when we go into this reality with no name that's when it gets really exciting so yeah yeah it's interesting you mentioned about um
31:03
Speaker A
understanding the real life you know problems because i i heard someone from other teachers speak about that to diagnosing the right problem instead of giving like an ultimate solution to everyone the ultimate solution is it is just this
31:21
Speaker A
or no no it's but that's that one size doesn't fit all and i think you know even within the whole duality community as well you know people know that that it isn't a case of one size fits all and what you find is you know stop
31:37
Speaker A
it will come from meeting and they will listen and they'll go home and that's great some people will start talking to you and what you'll then find is you get to the heart of the issue and always look why what why are you here you know
31:48
Speaker A
why are you here because everybody let's be honest you're not going to walk this room if you don't want anything it's literally just get to the part of the master or what you want and you know everybody goes you know i just want to
31:59
Speaker A
be free and i want to be awakened and then your conversations what happens is why they're really here happens because they themselves aren't satisfied with the ultimate answers that go out you know remember the ultimate answers are being thrown out because guess what
32:13
Speaker A
there's a couple hundred people in the room you are responsible for these people you can't go into specifics however you know if you're getting in front of someone and literally like this then yes you can dig into why that person's actually there
32:27
Speaker A
and yeah 99 percent of time most people don't want to wake up it's it's another issue altogether right i remember talking to a young man years ago who um who quoted ramana maharishi to me i mean it was amazing this guy knew everything
32:40
Speaker A
about ramana maharishi two hours into the conversation i was like yeah but what do you want like why are you talking to me and it just came out they went to the relationship who's lonely he wanted a girlfriend and i said so
32:51
Speaker A
what are you doing to actually find a girlfriend you know so basically what you find is sometimes people turn up but talks and they're going to tell you that they really really want to be enlightened um but then what happens when you talk to
33:04
Speaker A
them you find out that's a different issue altogether um and one such instance i remember having a skype call with this guy um you shall remain nameless and you just quoted ramana maharishi to me and this went on like for about two
33:17
Speaker A
hours or so with me kind of replying to everything yeah but what do you want but what do you want but what do you want and um in the end it just came out that he was lonely he wanted a girlfriend and
33:27
Speaker A
that's that's all he was literally you know he literally that was the the issue so then i asked him look what are you doing to get yourself a girlfriend i mean are you going to the gym are you working out are
33:38
Speaker A
you going to the mall because he was in in america i think he was in dallas somewhere and he was like no i'm just sitting here reading these books and the silly thing is sometimes what you can find is it's like we use our spiritual
33:48
Speaker A
seeking to bypass and to not really look at the issues that really matter and it's not just something that happens in non-duality i saw it so many times within sufism as well and in different schools as well that
34:00
Speaker A
we hear about this thing called enlightenment and we feel it's a cure for everything so rather than kind of drilling down on what our issues are we then take on this journey that you know we we want to be we want to be free i
34:12
Speaker A
mean i remember meeting a sufi from the national monday school and it was evident speaking to him that he had mental health issues however he'd walked into the gathering and the teacher said you know i can turn you
34:23
Speaker A
into so-and-so and he just gone for it and the only benefit he was getting from from being with that school was that his his behavior was such that had he not been wearing the uniform that school he would have got himself in trouble but
34:37
Speaker A
in terms of was he really in need of some sort of spiritual awakening i think he was written more in need for you know for counseling or you know like mental health kind of i don't know psychotherapy or something like that but
34:50
Speaker A
the thing is with this whole thing about enlightenment it's such a it's such a catch-all that it just puts everybody into this position where they're oh yeah i've got to wake up and then everybody forms ludicrous ideas and
35:01
Speaker A
that was one of the things i see i didn't hear about this term called enlightenment or self-realization until i literally left the school prior to that it was like you had this teacher and you know the way it works is you know
35:17
Speaker A
your teacher was everything to you so you know the old man who was teaching me you know it was i wrote a book called reflections and i called him the fake who was real and um it was because what i found is the
35:28
Speaker A
further i've gone down the path the more a lot of what he said to me now makes sense and yet there was a time when i was just like this guy's a charlatan um but the thing you find with with with
35:37
Speaker A
things like a beethoven supreme and indian subcontinent it's a very deeper deeper version and what you found now as it's traveled to the west is it's a bit more simplified you know whereas if you look at students in india and pakistan they will
35:51
Speaker A
be treated a different way to how western students are treated so for example you know i remember um first time i saw my teacher um i'd walked into a room and um the koalas were there and they started playing one the men started kind
36:05
Speaker A
of like literally physically jerking like he just started having this kind of spasm and i remember the teacher just picking up a piece of food and throwing it at him and hitting him in the face with it and i remember just going
36:15
Speaker A
what the hell um but i remember him then turning around and he said don't worry i'm never gonna hit you and i thought it's an odd statement to make but i found even the methodology changes as well but that's something
36:29
Speaker A
that i can speak about because i i you know i'm cross-cultural you know my parents are from there so i understand the mentality so you will even see that the methodology varies so i mean a good example of that
36:39
Speaker A
was like if you see something like j krishnamurti j krishnamurti in the west was um a speaker and it was all very contemporary and what have you and yet in india he was seen as a holy man people would kiss his hands and they
36:50
Speaker A
want them they want him to heal him because they believe there's a healer so the teaching has to kind of change as in where you are you know i remember going to a place called multan in pakistan it's known as the city of sufis it has
37:02
Speaker A
got over about 140 50 shrines and prior to myself going i remember talking to sweetie because you know when you get there grow a beard and wander around and have a stick and all of this stuff and everything and i got there and
37:13
Speaker A
everybody had a bid and everybody had a stick and everybody was going to shrines and i found out what made me stick out was just me being me like talking in english and you know going down to the local
37:23
Speaker A
restaurant and everything but what i found is that yes wherever you move you will adapt into into that environment so yeah in in the indian subcontinent it's a different way you know the google system works very well there because of
37:36
Speaker A
the mentality of the people we will do save our we will do you know we will do hidmut and everything you know we don't have that situation here in the west because you know there's this whole example i don't know
37:46
Speaker A
i'll just go into the whole debate of charging and you know here teachers charge and what have you in india we don't do that and the whole reason for that is because there is that whole system of kidnapping
37:55
Speaker A
the teacher going there taking care of the teacher going and cleaning the house and what have you and that's something that doesn't happen in the west so some of the ideas i've been transported over are completely right but i've
38:07
Speaker A
misunderstood slightly as to why you know we're doing it like this here and doing it like that because any kind of a teaching it's like i now know sufis who are now doing organized events whereas once upon a time the early sufi came
38:18
Speaker A
over the 60s and 70s sitting in a living room somewhere talking to somebody but now it's adapting you know even like interviews and what have you you know i i know for a fact that a lot of teachers
38:28
Speaker A
outside we would probably not want to do anything like this it doesn't make sense for them it's all really about just being hidden and working quite in their communities as well which is why going back to something you said at the
38:38
Speaker A
beginning it's very hard to price one of these sufis out of his little hole and so i said come on talk to me about it talk to you about it because most are so consumed in this reality that they don't really have time so
38:49
Speaker A
example if you were to meet there's there's different classes of sufis and for example if you to me a major business a sufi that's so consumed this divine love that they can't teach and they're just ecstatic all the time
39:01
Speaker A
and then you'll have something like this you can't teach and then they'll have a fakie and that traditionally goes back to someone who has you know makes his makes his like sustenance by you know like begging and teaching and what have you so there's
39:13
Speaker A
and and no doubt the same thing's happening in the debate as well because as we're in different stages we're getting teaching the difference so for example at this one time this is completely right i i recently like i
39:22
Speaker A
said i went back to the markers which is like the headquarters of the school and i literally was like well my teacher has now been bailed is my bet which is my my pledge of allegiance is it is it still
39:32
Speaker A
valid and they were like of course even though your teachers value are still with us and i literally said look this is what i'm now doing and you know presenting them with a copy the book and everything and
39:42
Speaker A
literally the teachers are smiling as go with the flow he just might go with the flow it's hilarious and all punjabi manga go with the flow and um but at the same time you said look if you want to teach tradition
39:51
Speaker A
you'll have to come back here and then you'll have to get permission and you will have to do it this way and you know you know just basically have a weekly zipper session um read out the shoujo and everything
40:02
Speaker A
but that's when you know i can imagine the kind of people i've been talking to so you do adapt you adapt to the people in front of you like i don't make claims of being a sufi you know people say oh yeah you're a sufi
40:16
Speaker A
because you spent this time on everything but what i find is now that's naturally what's coming out now that's what i've got to talk about so it's about getting people to ask me questions about what is this thing called sushism
40:27
Speaker A
and yes we can do the surface level stuff of look what schools were there who were the personalities so for example you know who's head of the goddard school and everything but this is stuff you can pick up out of a book
40:37
Speaker A
the real conversations come to get to the point where we're talking about the reality with no name because then what we find is we're having a conversation there's no advaita non-duality or sufism there that's what i'm finding the
40:49
Speaker A
teachers who've been doing this for absolutely incredibly years years and years and years whether it's here only in subconscious i've come to that it's all actually one it's it's it's just one reality and it's masquerading as many different fonts as
41:01
Speaker A
possible which is beautiful absolutely beautiful love that so yes i i would love to get your perspective what sufism would have to say on this topic especially about this question of realizing versus being mainly because a lot of tradition seems
41:21
Speaker A
to disagree on this like for example modern non-duality just focuses on self-realization and they don't talk about like being that realization or living that um embodying or living that from that space of openness uh they dismiss it as just
41:41
Speaker A
like stories and anyone on the idea of evolution of consciousness some traditions like hinduism they talk about you can self-realization is just the beginning and you can yeah like it's like never ending like how much you can open up
42:00
Speaker A
and uh uh how your consciousness can keep on evolving and opening itself so there there are like mixed opinions on that uh and a lot of like uh disagreements uh i would love to get your take on i i think with this is it's
42:18
Speaker A
um obviously there's there's so many different stages like for example when when you have final fantasy the word for annihilation uh with for now there's there's subcategories which is phenomena which is annihilating to god then ultimately ends in something called
42:39
Speaker A
which is permanence with god and that's the only way you're going to be able to function here what that basically means is being that realization but also being in the body as well and everything and what i found is i would agree with
42:51
Speaker A
the hindu tradition there that yes self-realization is just the beginning um you know i for years was looking for this thing and i thought yes the minute i've realized that's it it's the end if anything that's the beginning it deepens
43:03
Speaker A
as well you go into subtleties um the only constant i've found is that it's always constantly changing so it's constantly evolving i'm you know i'm constantly deep into what this reality is i'm not separate from this reality but i can also say i am separate
43:19
Speaker A
from this reality as well you find there's a freedom and what you then find is you're not shackled by language anymore and really the best way to know this is is to experience it is literally two experiences this this is this is
43:33
Speaker A
speaking from an experience you know i i you know i had a friend of mine once and um we were sitting in this gathering and he literally dissected the different stages of sufi and yes we are here and this is what we see in these colors
43:47
Speaker A
and everything and this is what the life which is our version of the chakra system will be like and everything and it was incredible absolutely incredible i've met so many people i'd have there's a debate going on you know
43:57
Speaker A
like okay you know you know is that person stuck there or whatever and i remember just falling asleep and the next day somebody said well he understood what was going on because he just fell asleep no i was actually just
44:07
Speaker A
tired um i think what happens is after a while you just you just drop the debate and what you do is you just you just you know you just swim through the ocean and you have the experiences that you need
44:18
Speaker A
to have but yes i think what happens is a journey well not even think the journey really starts when we stop and that's when we start going from i i tend to say we go from seeking into seeing and that seeing is expansive it
44:30
Speaker A
will const it doesn't switch off you know one of the things i'm not finding is i'm literally saying to people that this is a reality i'm speaking about this is not theoretical and i think one of the things that
44:41
Speaker A
people when they follow the non-jews thing is they learn a language and the same thing with sufism said oh you know i'm going to go through an aftershave and stuff and we get caught in a language not realizing that the language
44:52
Speaker A
is pointing at a reality this is real this is what you know this is how we all function it's and i think i could go for the rest of my life saying this for most people i believe it they'll just
45:03
Speaker A
control this theoretical and because they think it's theoretical the sense of impossibility develops as well so when we hear the stories of that great sufi who went down the silk road and then he worked in a state of ecstasy or amir
45:15
Speaker A
composing those nine lines of poetry or we hear about ramana maharishi sitting under a tree we've sort of sitting at the mount you know at the bottom of we create a sense a sense of impossibility and it's about
45:27
Speaker A
demystifying that saying no guys it's not like that you know i tell my story look i wasn't born you know in india somewhere you know when i was born no sheikh came through the door and said to my parents your son
45:39
Speaker A
will be a teacher or anything i was born in a maternity ward in the home in my hometown of coventry to a working class family nobody turned up and everything i led a pretty ordinary life i was then with a
45:51
Speaker A
sufi shape for eight years and completely got it wrong you know i couldn't even do the simplest of things and yet somehow with possibly being a bit honest with myself and kind of because the biggest shift for me was
46:04
Speaker A
when one day i went i want what he has why was i hanging around this teacher why was i sitting around this teacher if i didn't want to know what he what he knew and i think it's whether we can be
46:15
Speaker A
honest with ourselves and you see that you see within sufism as well you see within the movies you know the the amount of murids i met who said oh no we are just here to be of service and we
46:24
Speaker A
are just the dirt under the teacher's feet you're lying please you're lying you want to know what he knows that's why in the room and i think when we get to that point we have to be uncomfortable when we get engaged into
46:35
Speaker A
debates we're literally kind of holding ourselves back i say look stop debating let go let go go forward see what you see but yeah within the within the whole sweet future as a deep there's always there's always always a deep thing i i wouldn't go so
46:49
Speaker A
far and say there's levels and some teachers are deeper in this realization there's levels i don't think that but what you will find is i will automatically if i see what i would turn the elder on the path
46:59
Speaker A
i will literally step away and let them talk so you know a really beautiful example of that is when i went back to the old school um it was a day before i was releasing my first book and
47:11
Speaker A
i was sitting with this old sufi and he took a shine to me he's like look i'm going to give you a left hand i was like no that's cool i'll get my cell phone and whatever happened whatever's going
47:20
Speaker A
to leave the building come back in so about four or five times i've tried to leave the building gone back and he goes look i'm taking you home so we're sat outside my house at half past one in the
47:28
Speaker A
morning and i'm discussing the situation and his understanding and his advice on the situation blew my brain away because it was so subtle it was so beautiful he'd gone deeper into this thing so here's me planning death and destruction and he's
47:46
Speaker A
like no you have to love these people and i just thought there's nothing i can do there's nothing i can say and i'm not saying that yes because he was on some other level but yes realization is is the end but it's also
47:58
Speaker A
the beginning but then that beginning deepens and it deepens it's the end of that illusory story and the whole idea that i exist and all of that stuff but then it's a brand new story and we're seeing that it's like literally open
48:10
Speaker A
your eyes and you go wow all of this is around me and i witnessed that with him because there was a deepening you know here was a man who wasn't teaching in any sense you know he runs a successful cab firm
48:22
Speaker A
um and literally has a desk and and what happens is all manner of people turn up and he makes him a cup of tea and he talks to them and he's helped so many people it's incredible so sometimes it's
48:31
Speaker A
not even about communicating via this so i see that in a lot of the traditions that i've met teachers who would because who would not consider themselves teachers were just just going about doing their work and and that's
48:43
Speaker A
beautiful and i think that happens because they realize there's a constant change there's a constant deepening i'm not who i am now and i won't be this guy in about 10-15 minutes if i try to say no realization is the end then
48:56
Speaker A
i'm static i'm in separation the the story has moved on and i think that comes from an insecurity and the thing is in all traditions it's all it's always about constantly swimming it's also it's always about constantly going through
49:09
Speaker A
the ocean it's always constantly about trying to get you know nearer and nearer to your beloved and removing those veils that anything that stands in the way between your beloved because it's a it's a love story within the sufi tradition we see
49:21
Speaker A
as a love story you know i think there was a very famous sufi i've forgotten his name but he said it's literally like almost three stages first there's an architect and there's a mashup there is a lover and there's a
49:31
Speaker A
beloved and then there's just a mashup there is just a beloved but there is some semblance of somebody you can say there is just you and then there is no asha then there is no mashup because there is no one to witness this
49:41
Speaker A
anymore it's just reality there is no sense of anything and i think that's what non-duality touches on and people have woken up to that but those who are working outside will no doubt stop debating about this thing and just
49:54
Speaker A
keep deepening you get subtle i i had i had the complete honor of meeting a teacher called russell williams who was 96 years old when i met him and he'd been sitting in a living room in manchester for about 50 years talking
50:05
Speaker A
about this reality i walked into this talk um i don't remember hearing the word beingness or consciousness or anything it was just a man having a conversation i have never met anything so deep in my life just literally and i think when we
50:19
Speaker A
can come at this from the ordinary then it becomes very very powerful when when we just allow the energy in that presence to speak that's when it becomes powerful when we are still trying to debate things i think one of the reasons i i kind of
50:34
Speaker A
moved away from the non-duality thing was i just could not be bothered and i'm not saying it's not bad i just could not be bothered with the debates that go on about but you use the word eye and it's
50:44
Speaker A
like it's a beautiful day the sun is out we're in love i don't really care about that so you find it just simplifies walking down the street becomes one of the most profound things in the world i don't
50:54
Speaker A
really want to debate them as to whether separation is going to stop at a certain point it was going deeper i just i just carry on doing what i do and i think that just allows this opening in this
51:06
Speaker A
expansion to carry on we carry on seeing that consciousness has no limits i i literally say it's a gift that keeps on giving and if we had seven lifetimes and we had seven lifetimes more we wouldn't get to the bottom of it so why would i
51:18
Speaker A
then limit it and say oh no but once i'm at the pinnacle of non jewel understanding or the pinnacle of socially understanding that that's it it's not it then because you've allowed yourself to stop and become started this
51:30
Speaker A
is constantly changing it's constantly moving we see it we see it in life people grow up they go old they die their replacement thing life is about change it's about movement yes we've kind of complicated and said it's a journey now and put time into it
51:44
Speaker A
and what have you but no there's just this it's it's change is the only constant and yet yeah it's great it's great you just ultimately you just fail you just go yeah just going to silence so yeah thank you thanks for yeah thank you for
51:59
Speaker A
explaining that yeah i i feel like um if if if that is like and that can be verified only from a subjective experience i think if there are states of um consciousness and if it gets more and more subtle as
52:18
Speaker A
you deepen um there's one cons of um modern non-duality is like there is room for misinterpreting that message as uh the end like as like thinking that the end um stopping at the end it's always been it's it's always been the end it's it's
52:40
Speaker A
always been the end i think what happens is you know i remember when i first came across honduras it was amazing i genuinely thought god was speaking to me through a through a pc because i was resonating and i didn't
52:53
Speaker A
know what i didn't even know what resonating meant and i remember oh absolutely i brought my friends to death it's just this nothing is happening so what are you saying bro what's going on nothing but after a while you start asking well
53:06
Speaker A
what is nothing when we say it's just this what is this and that's when we deepen our exploration some people are okay with that but i i think i think why it's happened there and i don't think it's anything amazing that's
53:18
Speaker A
happening is because of the experiences that i grew up in you know i i grew up in a muslim household so i was sick for the first six years of my life and had a hindu couple who would feed me
53:28
Speaker A
and to me i didn't see a difference in faith or castes or anything and then um you know i just ended up on this journey where to me it's it's just different explanations of one reality but i also realize how
53:42
Speaker A
people can get caught up in a certain explanation it's like yes okay people ask me to talk about this whole sushi something do i think it's any more better or any more valid than anything else no i don't
53:52
Speaker A
you know i still feel that yes nonjarti has a lot to offer i also feel that every single pointer has a limitation and there is no such thing as a perfect pointer we are ultimately have to let that go
54:03
Speaker A
the the question is whether people will let go because we now have so much resources about this now you know there's interviews there's podcasts there's some songs there's methods you know i've gone to you've got a cat as
54:16
Speaker A
well how cool is that i've got a cat as well but you know he's like he's away there you go there's a true teacher there um so yeah yeah what's your cat called stop this project archie i've got a garfield garfield's
54:31
Speaker A
like he's he's in that case and stuff but he um he's taught me a lot but yeah um yeah i think it's it's always going to be from the experience it's it's got to be from the experience but
54:42
Speaker A
um but then the question is and i love the non-dream question who's the experience happening to and that's when it gets really interesting because that is designed to just stop but then when we stop that's when we actually start because we do go from
54:55
Speaker A
seeking something to seeing something and that's that's when it becomes really interesting i was wondering it was like this kind of shadow and there's a cat wandering around the screen and speaking about consciousness on zahir yes um i would love to get
55:10
Speaker A
sufism uh what sufism has to say about dream state consciousness because it seems like some sufis talk about how dreams can be significant in an individual's progress um there there's a really good book called sushis and was written by a guy
55:26
Speaker A
called sheik lala harry and i remember he was dreams play a pretty a pretty big part you know the amount of people i mean in in our tradition i remember like people used to say that the devil can
55:39
Speaker A
come to you in any form but he can't come to you in the form of i believe it was the prophet and also in the form of your teacher so if your teacher appears in your dream you will have messages and
55:49
Speaker A
stuff um i myself have had experience and it's kind of really interesting because i'm never really when you send me that question i thought wow this is kind of really cool um because it's it's kind of getting me to
56:01
Speaker A
talk about something that i thought i was never going to talk about but yeah i've i've had dreams where i've been kind of pointed to yes you're on the right path i still do i don't dream a lot
56:12
Speaker A
but sometimes they're just there to kind of say to me look you're on the right path you go in the right way um there is also a method that we use as well to to kind of like see whether the dream is
56:23
Speaker A
true or false and we always say that literally muslims pray five prayers a day and one is like for your prayer the fudge prayers done around some sunrise and they say if you have a dream around that time it's more likely to be authentic as
56:35
Speaker A
well so and then there's entire books on dream interpretation as well what happens if you see a spider what happens if you see a snake and all this stuff and this is a body of knowledge and stuff that's just been accumulated over
56:45
Speaker A
years and years and years you see that in the indian tradition as well what's happened is we because we just want to wake up we're not realizing that dreams can be used to show us whether we're going the right
56:56
Speaker A
way or not i mean one of my most significant dreams i did you know i wrote a book in india i talk about there's a point where i went through a state where i was laughing and crying simultaneously and
57:09
Speaker A
i've turned up at home and i just looked at the mess and i remember turning around to my mom and said look take me to see this imam and i literally had this poor fellow on his coast for about two days
57:18
Speaker A
and i literally i walked and i kind of went the table is me and i'm the table and the guy just was like okay i've got a live one here so he pulled out a copy of the quran and we started talking
57:28
Speaker A
about dreams everything always but i'd had this dream where i felt the presence or the prophet people upon him and it's kind of really interesting because i've never said that an interview and i remember saying that to him
57:38
Speaker A
through tears and i remember he just literally turned around tomorrow because now he's going to be okay because my mother was like you're having a nervous breakdown but when he heard that he was like no you're fine um you know i also
57:48
Speaker A
remember once like just having this real aching sensation around my heart area and um i didn't know what it was i was just like what's going on and i remember just walking out the mosque in the guide there's all your hearts opening
57:58
Speaker A
and i was like okay and these were things i was very close to but now what i found is what you find is when you deepening this you start looking at all of this other stuff as well um
58:10
Speaker A
with the with the sufi something the way it came across with me is just to me it's just a practical reality um and hence yeah anything goes in it really i don't kind of you know we we could discuss whether the
58:24
Speaker A
oneness of being was right or witnessing was right but the worst is whatever fits in that appropriate moment and stuff and everything you know it's kind of i remember grappling with free will and destiny for years and then one one day i
58:35
Speaker A
just realized i kind of understood where free will started where destiny's not you know finished but it was only because i was experiencing it and i think that's why it is when we're at a theoretical stage we can see
58:45
Speaker A
where it all clangs and stuff or we start experiencing it but then we realize that that experience can't be spoken and that's why we're then pointing and stuff so yeah and that's an interesting point you brought up being able to tell the
58:59
Speaker A
difference between if a dream is true or false yeah how do you tell that difference but i was the same the simplest way i was talking was like dreams at a certain time of day would be true and so it would be false
59:11
Speaker A
and stuff and everything and then certain character because what it was is i i came through a very traditional suki school which was very rooted in the islamic tradition like i said there's now schools that say look you don't need
59:20
Speaker A
to be rooted in islamic tradition that's that's a debate that's happening in the sufi world at the moment anyway um but in that it was literally sort of yes so yeah because i came through that it was literally you know i was told that
59:34
Speaker A
the devil can't appear in a certain form and this and this and this so i use those rules as a kind of benchmark and stuff and everything and then what i found was there were books written on this as well about this is what happens
59:44
Speaker A
if you see this stream and that and everything and around a certain time and within the islamic world there's all these different events as well there's amount of fasting of the contemplation things like that and you'll find or will
59:55
Speaker A
provide you answers as to to what's happening the key is not to get stuck in that as well because i remember there was a young lady used to come to my talks and she over relied on her on her
60:05
Speaker A
dreams so sometimes so we pick up this stuff very lightly and don't try to get involved in it so i remember when she turned a question look i had this dream and i was like look just just put it down so
60:17
Speaker A
it's about sometimes picking because sometimes example if we're going to coincidences and synchronicities as well you know i remember going to see this sufi shake once and um i went yeah but all the signs are pointing this and then yeah but
60:28
Speaker A
sometimes the science can be wrong as well so it's about picking this stuff but never getting attached to it because if you get overly attached to your dream what you'll find is and this happened to a friend of mine his uh his grandmother
60:40
Speaker A
started having his dreams and they completely took him to another place into a really really dark place in the end she was very paranoid about everything somebody spilled some milk outside you know her flat and she was convinced there was magic being done on
60:51
Speaker A
her so we have to be like i what i would say sober about this stuff as well because if we go too deeply into something and i think this happens in everything so example if we go too deeply into
61:01
Speaker A
non-duality or sufism we we kind of open ourselves up to that point where we could literally start misinterpreting things you know there's a very beautiful um you know saying by a famous goofy who said kill a hundred ecstatic southeast
61:17
Speaker A
to save the one sober one um although it's a bit of a kind of crazy one it's like sometimes we can go too deep into our spirituality if we take a sober approach where we go that tool is then that resource is there
61:29
Speaker A
so when i have a dream i've got the the tools and the resources to interpret it but not turn it into god then i'm gonna be okay because i can then get the same information from asynchronously from coincidence as well
61:40
Speaker A
but at the same time i can also get that same you know information from cleaning the floor or you know i i remember there was this beautiful moment when i was in pakistan and i was told to go to the
61:50
Speaker A
mosque to pray and the village of the teacher had a mander a gurdwara and a mustard so literally it had you know hindu temple the sea temple and the muslim temple i'm saying literally all around this river and i thought wow once
62:04
Speaker A
upon a time we literally lived together and again that was really significant in my journey so everything's given us scientists whether we will just stop and and look that's why i think we go from see seeking is just it's like that we just need to wake
62:17
Speaker A
up and we're missing everything that it's like i've got a compliment even about two years it's um bruce lee into the dragon when he goes you know don't concentrate on the finger you miss all the heavenly glory the heavenly glory is
62:29
Speaker A
when we when we we're at that point where we just stop and then we stop we start seeing so in that sense we're all in realization there is no such thing as somebody who's not in realization everybody's realized
62:40
Speaker A
and we're all realized to varying degrees and that's what creates the conversations because like i say to people my my my perspective will always be that you're perfect and you'll tell me something's missing and that's what causes the conversation ultimately
62:55
Speaker A
you know the seeker's always proven wrong because it's illusory it's not real yeah i think that's a really good advice zahir because sometimes um we have a tendency to lock ourselves into a paradigm if if that started working because it's you have few dreams
63:13
Speaker A
that come true but there may also be some that don't come true so but we have this tendency to focus only on like latching on to something oh i've got i've got psychics around me like it's going out fashion at
63:25
Speaker A
the moment i just attract psychics on what's going on and i can like i can see how how almost enticing it is to actually get involved in that discussion but the thing is is when we start over relying
63:38
Speaker A
on it and what i found with with going down that path now is life gives us so many tools to play with walking down the street seeing that you know seeing that coincidence or synchronicity having that dream talking to that person you know um
63:53
Speaker A
the amount of times i've been walking down the street i'll get into a random conversation i mean i've i've literally i was in devon for most of the pandemic and i've returned to manchester and since i've got here i cannot walk down
64:03
Speaker A
the street now without getting into a conversation with somebody or another you know i was having lunch god a couple of weeks ago and literally this guy almost climbed over the table to try and talk to me and i was like what is going
64:14
Speaker A
on and he was literally you look really familiar to me and i've coined this term families sometimes you know somebody walks into a talking kind of there's something about you that i seem to know and you know there's a
64:26
Speaker A
story so there's there's all these things we can play with but what we've got to do is just drop our ideas about this when we drop our ideas we realize it was always there and that's when we can
64:35
Speaker A
start that's when real self-inquiry happens that's when the world exploration happens you know that's when you know we're recognizing recognizing ourselves as this consciousness this ocean whatever you want you know whatever you want to call it and it just becomes expansive but that's
64:51
Speaker A
when i've found that there's humility as well because you realize how little you know so you know sitting with this ugly sufi in his car and he's opening up so much more for me by showing a level of compassion i'd never seen you
65:07
Speaker A
know i was like wow this is incredible i'm like i'm planning death and destruction this guy's telling me oh no you've got to love them but you know that person's hurt me i want to hurt them back and he was like no no and i was like wow
65:20
Speaker A
and and it is it's you know you find wisdom comes in all different guises i mean i i i had the complete pleasure of meeting the local satish kumar um in dartington god about two three months ago and this guy
65:33
Speaker A
literally has done all these peace walks and um he left home at the age of nine and became a jain monk and now has written all these books on you know like ahimsa and pacifism and everything and it was interesting because he was
65:46
Speaker A
walking up and went that's come on and i don't know how i knew that and then when he came up and i was in the car and i said look i know you you're somewhat famous and there's my
65:55
Speaker A
name and i literally just jumped out the car and i was like sir it is a complete honor to meet you and we were literally talking about quality and haven't been to the hall and you know as he was walking away you know
66:08
Speaker A
i i i literally have this real urge to want to just touch his feet and that's with blessings and stuff and he's you know he wouldn't say yes on this realized master but there was all wisdom there was this greatness around him and
66:19
Speaker A
i didn't go up to him but he just gave me this amazing smile we got a photo taken together it was a real honor but again he was talking and i thought wow because he's just trouble sometimes a
66:28
Speaker A
lot of what we're talking about is just pure common sense about people who've been down to pass and live their lives so the answer is to live your life that's the grand answer you know go live your life and you will find that most of
66:39
Speaker A
this will just naturally fall into place that's why sometimes i can meet someone who's who's elderly and god they'll tell me stuff that that i'm supposed to you know be telling everybody else and to me that's just somebody on the path a bit further down
66:51
Speaker A
the road and you respect that because you just don't know what you're going to pick up it's beautiful it's absolutely beautiful and as you pointed out like some of these subtle information doesn't have to come through like some
67:04
Speaker A
fancy visions or um some fancy um psychic dreams um it can be like something actual as like just a simple intuition or a feeling yes yes oh god yeah um i think what it is is i jokingly say that
67:20
Speaker A
spirituality is harry potter for grown-ups and you know we want we want you know i remember when i was at my first school and people say ah you know i had a dream last night and the teacher was in it and
67:30
Speaker A
he flew through the air and all of this stuff and i remember talk to one and he does you know such was my love for the teacher that i could say to the rain rain it would start raining and then i
67:40
Speaker A
would say i would look at like some metals they turned to gold it would turn to gold and that's the real glamour stuff you know i mean i don't think it was really happening i think it was all
67:48
Speaker A
a thing about his imagination and it doesn't always have to be like that but i think one of jesus spirituality is so mystical you know it's like people look at me and you know i remember i i talked to this
67:58
Speaker A
festival called mindful man and on the first year i wore some alchemies and i wore this white silver archimedes and i remember just walking into the courtyard and i was just in this beautiful traditional whites or archimedes and i remember this woman and
68:11
Speaker A
oh my god it's like a vision it was like an angel that was just wearing white but i think that's what we have to demystify these things because those great openings are probably not as powerful or subtle as just that little
68:22
Speaker A
understandable just a little knowing yeah this makes sense i don't know who it's making sense to but it's making sense and this is what i found if you just allow yourself to be open to that follower and that's where you
68:35
Speaker A
you're just literally reconnecting with yourself you're just literally diving into your emotional wisdom you know we all know this there is nobody out there who doesn't know this there's there's i mean even this is not a teaching it's a reminder
68:47
Speaker A
just the word teacher is used to i suppose get a certain reaction but we're just constantly reminding each other i think ramadan said it beautifully we're just walking each other and you know what i found is on that
68:58
Speaker A
walk home i've met all these characters and you know i've come and become richer it's like even right now i'm learning i'm literally learning i'm thinking wow how cool is this you know i started my day at three o'clock in the morning it
69:11
Speaker A
was like i don't know how i'm gonna handle this and now i'm just like wow how cool is this this is wonderful the conversation's going and yeah you know it's it's wonderful it's beautiful you know yeah something like swedish about it
69:24
Speaker A
we're all in the tub and getting drunk and talking about our beloved and dancing or whirling you know if you want to get all seafish about it but yeah it's just that's beautiful yeah i i completely agree like sometimes
69:35
Speaker A
simple and subtle can be way more powerful yes versus like sometimes in fact having all these like flashy light visions there's a tendency to get addicted to it and if it doesn't come true then like making up stories to like why it come true
69:51
Speaker A
chasing it's it's state chasing most people are state chasing as like as i call it and stay chasing is we just want those big expansive opens openings so in that sense we become spiritual junkies we then don't want to wake up we just
70:03
Speaker A
want those moments we want to be sitting in that you know we want to be sitting in that method we want to be whirling and yet what we don't understand is maybe there might be a bigger opening while sitting at your desk at work
70:15
Speaker A
there might be a better understanding yeah there's a there's a prophetic saying with the prophet said live as if you're going to die tomorrow but work as if you're going to live a thousand years so really and then it was
70:25
Speaker A
further added with work his work his worship and yet what you'll find is so many people will say no i just want to be sitting there in the comfort of the great masters and i want to wake up and
70:33
Speaker A
i want to do this and i want to fly through the air it's like you're just trying to be harry potter just watch the film it might be better you know but the subtleties are so much much more powerful i i feel the
70:45
Speaker A
ordinariness is really where the miracle is happening and i think that's where you start dropping things you know you also you don't want to talk about that person who did that and you flew through the air you know i mean i i
70:59
Speaker A
heard so many stories like that at the beginning and sometimes people need to hear that you know i i remember one guy joining a teacher because he was more popular than the other teacher and one guy joining the teacher because guess
71:10
Speaker A
what his teacher done more miracles and other teachers and that's okay for when we're starting but then as we travel further we realize that okay we can put this stuff down that's the entry level stuff i feel that's the stuff that gets you really
71:23
Speaker A
excited oh my god do you mean what are you trying to tell me who's flying through the air last night oh my god i want to be like that as well i want to learn how to do that
71:30
Speaker A
after a while it's just enough to just walk down the street that's enough that as a matter of fact that's more than enough next thing i wanted to ask you about was the importance of fasting uh during ramadan um yeah
71:47
Speaker A
i didn't i'll just find a muslim now when you'll do the best meeting is that really a portal for an awakening you you you can i mean i it's really interesting you should say this um my my experience with fasting i would be
72:04
Speaker A
completely honest if there's muslims listening to this i'm probably gonna be damned to hell by the end of this was um when i was a kid growing up i would just fast and i just feel hungry to me
72:14
Speaker A
i was just hungry but i was okay because my mum was gonna cook really really nice food at the end of the day so you know it became about just having a real nice speech at the end day as i got
72:23
Speaker A
older i saw other people do the same thing so i used to live with the guy we still call him sufi and one night he goes look you know i'm going to open my fast and i'm going to this place and i
72:34
Speaker A
got there and the table was permanent food and everything and i realized that was going against the spirit of fasting so what happens is obviously i stopped seeking and everything and one year i decided you know i'm actually fast i'm
72:48
Speaker A
actually going to fast so i'm gonna see what it is and i found it a really deeply spiritual experience because you know yes the explanations are we get to we we get to like kind of feel how people who haven't got any food feel and
73:00
Speaker A
all that stuff no it was just a really beautiful way of going inwards for me and i'd had a similar experience when i was doing yoga once i was i was doing yoga at this class and um it was one of these hot yoga classes
73:10
Speaker A
and i'm dying and i'm like i need to get out of here i remember the woman saying can you just move just slightly and as i move slightly it just went completely into now with fasting what i found is it
73:19
Speaker A
just eradicated thinking i was just literally just present and you know what i decided to do that month was i decided to pray as well and then i started seeing the methodology behind prayer as well because i realized that
73:31
Speaker A
it wasn't just a physical exercise because you know i remember once again some yoga teacher was looking at like prayer and you know of the salah as we call it and he was like look you activate your chakras as you're praying
73:43
Speaker A
but what i found is all of these are methods to wake up but the problem is we don't know how to use them because what i found is i just found myself very common in now and towards the end i i think you know there
73:53
Speaker A
were 30 days and i completed 27. um i was just really sad that it was leaving because in that one month all of a sudden what i found was my body cleaned out everything there's also the physical aspects you detox and
74:06
Speaker A
what have you because you're literally dry fasting but what i found was it really slowed me down it really brought me into now but it was again something that had to be experienced i don't think i was i was finding a real joy in it but i
74:19
Speaker A
wasn't doing it for any religious purpose like oh yeah we've got to do this because but what i found is i was then experienced religion from a place of i want to do this as opposed to i have to do this if you look at most
74:29
Speaker A
religions people are having to do this and that creates a misunderstanding you know i've got to pray five times a day or i've got to go to the monday and everything but when we go from having to to wanting to that's
74:40
Speaker A
that beginning of love that's when when we go to the mandarin we go to the mustard we really understand what the founders of these fates were trying to to do because i feel that most of these fates were literally exactly like what
74:53
Speaker A
we're seeing with nonjarting now people trying to figure out what it was all about the reality of it what then happened is the methodology got misunderstood example ruby really they say that world rumi they say world around us tree in a state of ecstasy and
75:08
Speaker A
when he would go through the the marketplace the muslim view was actually written by a man called hosmadin shalabi and what rumi would do is he would compose in a state of ecstasy and jalabi would write it down and they go that
75:21
Speaker A
search was his love that jalabi was a blacksmith and every time his hammer hit the iron room he would whirl in ecstasy like he would just work like so we're looking at sound here now so now we can even use
75:32
Speaker A
sound to wake up and um what happened was then people took it and they turned into a ceremony and now if you look at it you know the guy takes his cloak off power so the sheik and then they they were true
75:43
Speaker A
whirling pulls you apart it leaves no sense of you true fasting does the same thing as well but unfortunately most people misunderstand it they see as 30 days in which they're going to give their charity their zakat and everything and they're going to
75:55
Speaker A
you know they're going to pray in the mosque for 30 days after those 30 days of them they're gone and then to me that's there's no there's no understanding it's whether these methodologies whatever you know even even praying a certain mantra if it's
76:09
Speaker A
done properly will wake you up but the problem is most of the people teaching this stuff now they don't know themselves so if we look at most of the imams and the pundits and the priests they're reading out the book so how in gazing
76:20
Speaker A
they're gonna guide us to the mountaintop when they've never been themselves and i think that's what that's why i think fasting is really misunderstood and and yeah i think 99.99 muslims are doing it wrong which is unfortunate and quite a controversial
76:33
Speaker A
thing to say but it's true it's a way to actually wake up as is praying as as is giving charity as is being a good person you know all of these are methods to wake up you know even inquiry you know there was a very
76:49
Speaker A
famous sufi kabul who said hundreds of hundreds of years ago which was like i don't know who i am so we've always been asking that question who am i and what's happened is over time life has given us methodology
77:02
Speaker A
so you know when i was just in that place of peace i was just constantly deepening myself just meeting myself because then there wasn't the there wasn't the noise that was associated with all this ultimately it comes into that silence the noise
77:15
Speaker A
disappears the explanation the need to know disappears and that's when we find ourselves home or always yeah yeah i feel like it it it's different for different people you have to pick what really of course yeah yeah no i i agree um
77:33
Speaker A
i've seen people who look like the holiest people i'll ever be in my life and then you get into a conversation they haven't got a clue you know i i unfortunately remember talk to this young man just burst into tears and he
77:45
Speaker A
looked your quintessential holy man and it was because and he and i just said why are you crying because you're asking me really basic questions and i can't answer them so sometimes rather than occupy ourselves with the mountaintop or
77:57
Speaker A
occupy ourselves with this great goal of realization why don't we just start with the basics what do you want why are you here who are you really basic questions but do any of us really take time to answer the question
78:09
Speaker A
why and this is what you'll find most teachers will do if you think about it they say the most important things to you within the first 30 seconds who are you and what do you want have we ever taken time to actually
78:21
Speaker A
answer those but it's it's subtle it's it's you know it's it's very subtle i remember my teacher turned around to me he asked me punjabi type which basically means i've never loved and me being me i was like yeah there
78:33
Speaker A
was this girl at uni once i really and he was like idiot but that started something and then he turned around he goes you know the arrow has left the bow it cannot return and this was all classical sushis and being
78:43
Speaker A
thrown at somebody who had no idea and i remember just wanting to get out of the room you know the first person i met you just said you know tonight we are going to get you drunk you know a muslim guy
78:53
Speaker A
talking to me about getting drunk he gets you know i just don't know basically we're going to get you you know drinking and i'm like i don't understand but then i started understanding this is a language just as terminology but
79:05
Speaker A
ultimately then i had to let that go as well because if i was to do that then i would just be parodying someone i would just literally be you know copying someone it's not it's about you your authenticity
79:16
Speaker A
you know who are you not who is that guy we know who that guy is who was you that's the thing that's really exciting when you talk about this stuff is to meet someone it's the most beautiful thing about this is when somebody speaks
79:30
Speaker A
to you and it doesn't matter what they're speaking but you will hear that intimacy and oh god it's wonderful because then you don't have to listen to that conversation there's no two in that conversation but that's that's when it gets really
79:42
Speaker A
interesting because that person will just speak openly and when they speak openly you know one of my most beautiful moments was when a man came to talk four hours we went forward and backwards it was great and in the end he just went it's my living
79:53
Speaker A
situation and there was such a degree of authenticity and reality with it's my living situation and i don't remember what he said for the next 10 minutes and he probably just remember he said but his life completely changed because he met
80:06
Speaker A
himself you know going back to what we were saying earlier about we have to identify why people are sitting in the rooms does he come to meetings now but life keeps bumping into us you know we keep popping into each other why
80:17
Speaker A
because he was honest with himself honestly i think is that the key but honestly with yourself being really honest why are you sitting in these rooms why do you want to sit with that teacher what is it you actually want
80:30
Speaker A
you know and if you could be honest enough to answer that well that's the end of all for you that's simple i had just couple more things for you i know it's too late for you over there no no we can listen i'm enjoying this so
80:45
Speaker A
much we'll talk all night if you want you know i mean the phone's getting charged everything's all good you know so yeah finally back to your time that's why i know i'm just really enjoying this i'm really it's it's interesting because
80:56
Speaker A
you've got me to talk about things that i don't normally tend to talk about so i'm really grateful to you because i i just love this it's great i i wanted to do this like cross culture yeah verifying kind of a thing like for
81:09
Speaker A
example in hinduism um there are stories of some of these gurus where uh like this next question is about like conscious death like i and i would love to get some perspective on it oh god yeah okay it's more um inspired from some of the
81:28
Speaker A
stories of some of these gurus how they okay consciously choose the day of their death like this is the day i'm going to decide to consciously i'll do everything i want to do in this life and i'll consciously decide to leave
81:42
Speaker A
after so many years on this and there are stories about gurus being able to leave their body consciously without having to be like because usually death is a is like a surprise for most of us like it's like a
81:56
Speaker A
bit of an inconvenience to the day yeah to um that that hinduism seems to point about like there is a way to consciously i'm so glad you've asked this question because i i know what i'm going to say
82:16
Speaker A
so yeah perfect um i wanted to soupy some perspective as well as you know they're going to die i i it's not just the ghouls we all know we're gonna die um and i'll i'll give you like an understanding of that um
82:30
Speaker A
what we believe is that 40 days before you're going to die and i don't know why the number 40 is in there but it's significant in some way say it shape or form you know you're gonna go and what happens is you know you're
82:40
Speaker A
gonna go but you can't actually say i'm gonna go so what you then start doing is and i'm gonna expand on that um you start literally meeting people and you start saying your goodbyes you know you will you will start getting your affairs
82:53
Speaker A
in order and everything because you know you're gonna go you know that this is it you're you know you're on your way um and literally what you do is you start getting the affairs in order but it starts from literally the moment
83:05
Speaker A
you're born so you know i i remember my father passed away many many years ago and um he i've got a step brother in pakistan and he went to see him and my father went to see him about a couple
83:17
Speaker A
years before his death and everything and as he was leaving he burst into tears he never cried he'd never cried you know like in front of his son and he just burst into tears and stuff and what happens afterwards when we discussed it
83:27
Speaker A
we realized he was saying his goodbyes and then what happens he was diagnosed with cancer or just out the blue was like oh you know dad's got cancer he's gonna die and literally afterwards when i looked at it
83:39
Speaker A
it was like he already knew he was gonna go and he started getting his affairs in order but that doesn't really answer the question totally so we all have that ability that when we're about to go we have this knowing it's just sometimes
83:51
Speaker A
not verbalized with the whole guru thing i think and and again this is this is kind of backing up a lot what i'm saying is in these places the traditions have gone so deeply that these abilities are there
84:08
Speaker A
to know these abilities are also there to be able to do as well so for example if you look at bikram bikram yoga the teacher of bikram yoga was a guy called bismuth who induced a heart attack because it was like the easiest way to
84:22
Speaker A
go and i believe and um and i'm going to say this but i'm not 100 but i believe even rumi literally chose when he was going to go and it was like literally okay and i've heard about this of of teachers just
84:38
Speaker A
kind of stopping and then just disappearing and kind of going like that saying i'm done um how much of it is under conscious control is is debatable i i don't think it's under our control at all um because if you are a guru then there's
84:53
Speaker A
no sense of you in that traditional sense of an individual who can make a decision i think it appears like they know but i think again that and that's me contradicting my position again which is really really cool i
85:07
Speaker A
think there's this knowing but the knowns with everybody but i think that we're going to go but we don't get to choose we we don't get to choose it sometimes appears like we're getting to choose but it's and if it appears
85:19
Speaker A
as to you know if it appears that we're getting to choose i would say what reality is sitting there like what is actually sitting there because there's there's um there was a a series of sayings from the prophet and one of them
85:32
Speaker A
was that when a sermon becomes mine i become the eyes that he sees with the ears that he is in the mouth that he speaks with and i think when we have those situ situations where it appears that the guru knew he was
85:44
Speaker A
going i would ask what reality is sitting there because i would say that if we look at the guru as an individual as a separate staff no no if we look at it as consciousness you know in this
85:55
Speaker A
form then yes it does it does know but as consciousness yeah we all know and stuff and everything and i think sometimes also the death of the teacher serves as a as a lesson as well because i remember the
86:07
Speaker A
story in um the sufi tradition and i've never really ever kind of really gone into it but it was like literally uh a man asked this teacher about picabillo this state of permanence with god and before you can answer it the teacher
86:20
Speaker A
died and what happened was he said um when i die my funeral prayer whoever turns up let him pray and a man walked in in in a cloak and prayed and this student went up to this man and
86:33
Speaker A
said like you know was going to say thank you and as he turned around it was literally his teacher took the clerk off and said and this is so that takes us into realm of can death be cheated as well and everything because
86:45
Speaker A
it's literally all that's been dropped away as a physical form i feel so really death is just it's i i don't feel there's any life where there's any death anymore i just think there's just this reality this i suppose
86:56
Speaker A
we'll call it life i suppose no there's just this reality and i think these ideas of death happen but i think sometimes it's an example that teacher has to kind of their last example is to say look i knew that i was going to die
87:07
Speaker A
in this day because that serves as a lesson somewhere but then we're getting into into realities i think that have existed for thousands of thousands of years that i think hasn't deepened because like i said i'm not going to be this guy at the
87:19
Speaker A
end of the interview maybe 20 30 40 years from now i'm going to be that guy doing something like that but i think it's just you know for from a non-dual perspective consciousness it's it's showing itself as and how it is but when we look at it
87:31
Speaker A
from a fuller perspective when we start bringing witnessing their being and all these different methodologies yeah i believe it can exist but it serves a purpose because i don't think any guru would ever do anything from a place of
87:42
Speaker A
inefficiency it served a purpose he probably said something said that and god kept his honor and made sure he went on that day and it appeared like he knew but what knew what i actually knew and and that's the question and what was the
87:56
Speaker A
reality that was speaking there you know going back to the when the servant calls mine because i think when we're in this state of realization there's no personal self there's no personal so i don't think i'm you know there's no personal self here
88:11
Speaker A
and it's just speaking so i could say something it's like sometimes you know i was told in the day that i had a dream and i don't talk about my dreams and apparently and said that there's gonna be a group of you and
88:22
Speaker A
you're just gonna be causing so much hassle that i'll just leave and other people turn up and i was like really i would say that so i think sometimes what's speaking there you know sometimes that guru could be sitting
88:33
Speaker A
there but something else speaking saying i'm gonna die in this day and it's gonna happen like this it's gonna happen like this and then guess what life shows it but it leaves a lesson behind so yeah it's who's speaking at that
88:43
Speaker A
point because i think yeah we can know this but not here like as this individual because then we're getting into the realms of enlightenment can be claimed it's something again that's that's separation i don't believe in that you know i'd
88:54
Speaker A
love to say that yeah i know this stuff i don't i don't i don't know anything i i really don't know no doubt you've heard everybody else here yeah you know um unpleasant this whole thing about dying before you die so yeah
89:07
Speaker A
it's all interesting so yes yeah i i resonate with what you are saying and yeah and maybe sometimes it's the purpose is to like uh show a possibility um yes yes yeah well i'll i'll give you another possibility um there was um
89:27
Speaker A
basically the head of the national school of sufis was called and he was very a very sober-suited very into praying to the zika and all this stuff and they go a man came to a school and it was a dervish and the dervish
89:41
Speaker A
walked in and he flew through the air did all of these things turned into gold did all these manual miracles and everything and then just left there's a lesson so what happens the students and he was obviously serving this purpose as
89:52
Speaker A
well so he's left and also the students you know they gathered around the teacher and said look we've been following you faithfully for years and you've never done any miracles and we're wondering if you even know what you do
90:01
Speaker A
because he just did all of this and you've never done this so he got up and he literally did everything that that man did everything that i dervish did he did and then he dissected it and everything he's and he showed how it
90:12
Speaker A
could be done he said this is how you can do it this way you can do this and then he went back to his prayer matters but i'm concerned with something bigger than this and within the sweet tradition they
90:21
Speaker A
say that miracles are like the menses of the sufi it's just something so sometimes when we see teachers who are predicting their death smart stuff it's really just the entry level stuff the deeper stuff is really just a gain in
90:33
Speaker A
the subtleties like he said you know this is great and it's a miracle it appears like a miracle but there's something greater than this and that's when he went back to his prayers and i think there's an example there but really if
90:45
Speaker A
we want to take the example that teacher predicted let's go past that miraculous event and go into the softball games and that's where we'll find the world teaching it's um again there's another story it's it's amazing you're getting stories out all
90:56
Speaker A
night here of two you know students who go to see their teacher and you know they both get there and you know the teacher was how was your journey in the first year was a certain past i was attacked by a dragon but you
91:08
Speaker A
know with the amulet of truth i evaded the dragon and then i was attacked by this and this and this and this and this and this but finally i am here in front of you my chef and stuff and he's like okay
91:18
Speaker A
excellent and then he asked the second student how was your journey it's not very peaceful it's very calm i got here and the greater wisdom is in that calm because again sometimes that drama stuff is the harry potter stuff it's the stuff that
91:30
Speaker A
we need to hear because it kind of you know i've seen that sufi shrines you know you'll get templates it doesn't basically translation oh the teacher did this and this and this and that's for that's for those people who are
91:41
Speaker A
interested in that but there's those people who start inquiring you know and as they inquire they go into the actual reality you know some people need miracles to believe and some people just need subtleties and i think sometimes
91:52
Speaker A
people need those miracles they need to hear those harry potter stories and they they serve a purpose but after a while once that's all done you start inquiring into the real societies and that's where i i feel your
92:03
Speaker A
your deepening you know you're really going into it that's that's when it gets real funny and i and i think that's what's amazing about what's happening with this whole nonduality movement and what's happening in the west that you know i think we've got most of the
92:18
Speaker A
things that we need so we don't need to hear these stories sometimes it's a villagers you know i remember my father passed away his final wish was to go to pakistan and prior to going to that i remember
92:28
Speaker A
reading the book on reading palms and um i remember one night just you know reading at someone's palm she was good looking i wanted to hold her hand that was the real reason behind it and by the time i got to pakistan again half the
92:41
Speaker A
village was convinced i was a spiritual teacher in the hospital i was a charlatan so it doesn't really matter but you know people like oh my god he said this and it happened but yeah sometimes people need to hear
92:50
Speaker A
that and sometimes people just need to see an assignment and it all depends on whatever happens in the moment you know you say yeah yeah there is not much of um like there is a lot of talk on self-realization and
93:03
Speaker A
non-quality but not much has been talked about how a lot of these uh subtle realities unfold or open up um it doesn't yeah and hopefully we'll see more of that in new york i think that will happen this nigerian matures
93:18
Speaker A
because if you look at nonduality you can't motivate that bait is a fully complete traditional stuff it's called debate it's got you know like i said when i watched that interview between i think it was rupert's firing and swami
93:28
Speaker A
server and then you talked about like after enlightenment sometimes you have to still do that work you have to get rid of all these issues and stuff but it was saying you know like you know we use the time to be it and
93:38
Speaker A
it's kind of like almost construction i remember the school that i was with it was very regimentalized you know the teacher walked in you stood up and that to a western mind just like no that's just sounds almost cultish and
93:49
Speaker A
stuff but i've found and and this is the thing what i think most people understand is you can be sitting with some of these teachers and the lesson will click 20 years later so i remember once we there was an opening of a restaurant and
94:03
Speaker A
the teacher was invited and we went there and they put a sofa down and he sat down and as he sat down he placed both of his palms on the sofa and i then got what 20 plus years later
94:13
Speaker A
to go to bosnia and i've done this talk and i got invited to a house and i thought right i'm really glad i was sitting with him because i i i noticed that when the teacher went to the house
94:21
Speaker A
he behaved a certain way so i was like okay now i understand why i see this and i've walked in and there's this big sofa and i said okay and everybody just kind of like sat on all these different
94:30
Speaker A
chairs and also what i did is i just placed my palms on the sofa and i was like oh god that's why i saw that and i don't i can't logically explain that so the simple act of him just me seeing him
94:43
Speaker A
just placing his palms on a sofa had some significance 20 years later so i think what happens is you know some of these i always say to people the talks you know like this interview starts when this interview
94:55
Speaker A
finishes you know and these talks start when these talks finish and stuff and and i think what happens is that's where we take what we've been given and we digest and we become aware of things i think what will happen is non-driving
95:07
Speaker A
matures and you know and i'm not saying anything that the teachers aren't who they are they are what will happen is the listeners will start seeing the subtleties it's like you know i remember when i first heard tony parsons
95:18
Speaker A
incredible sitting on a chair is happening i've heard that said by everybody else nothing but when tony says it it's it's it's something else there there's something and you know yes he's a nonduality teacher but it i would say don't listen to the words go
95:36
Speaker A
be you know prior to the words and you'll see an ocean and that's what will teach you that there's an ocean there and that's you know i've been very fortunate to meet great you know great teachers i remember seeing one who i for
95:47
Speaker A
years didn't even think existed i kept hearing his name and i literally said to brother look i i've not come from your words because i could just see behind it it's like if you ever get a chance to watch
95:57
Speaker A
krishnamurti's final talk it's incredible because as he's talking i remember meeting people who followed jay krishnamurti and i was like how could you not understand what he said he's breaking down this reality so simply it's unreal but when you look at
96:13
Speaker A
his face you just see the timelessness in it and you see the energy behind it and that's what we're really here for you know that and that that's present that's present i have experienced that too and i i've
96:25
Speaker A
seen the opposite end of that as well where teachers are saying the right thing but you're not you don't feel anything they're not they're they're not your person then i i mean that there's again here's another story um
96:40
Speaker A
they go a man went to a teacher and said look i've got this problem and um he couldn't do anything he went to another teacher went to another teacher went to another teacher and in the end he got to this one guy and he said look
96:51
Speaker A
i got this teachers to call this problem and it was sorted instantly and he said i don't understand and he goes it wasn't meant to be them and i think what and that goes with this whole idea of resonance sometimes we resonate with
97:03
Speaker A
certain teachers and with others we don't we're completely you know it's you know we're completely off it's like you know i i know what tony parsons is going to say at the next talk on the next talk on
97:16
Speaker A
the next talk of the next door but there's a resonance there and yet i can hear others like oh no hold on this guy just sounds like he's cloning tony or something but i think what happens is as
97:25
Speaker A
we go through like we just we just resonate with certain people and stuff and certain people just don't it doesn't mean that they're not right for you you know it doesn't mean that they're not right it's just they're not right for
97:35
Speaker A
you it's like you will only ever you know that does not saying your vibe attracts your tribe you will only ever meet people like you and that's what i found it's like you know i've got this group and it's
97:46
Speaker A
grown but it's actually me it's actually me and they've all got similar personalities and so you're only ever going to meet people like you are you know like we're talking and i'm really enjoying this and i guarantee if we were to sit down and say okay
98:00
Speaker A
super telling me tell me your story because your time store you'd find the parallels and then you kind of know yeah i remember sitting in the suitcase and he said okay let's just go through your story and i was like okay and we'd literally
98:12
Speaker A
have the same experiences of course i was gonna resonate with it but then what you'll find is sometimes you'll you know that teacher that you don't resonate with is probably just a signpost to the other teacher i had a friend of mine who
98:23
Speaker A
went to see ramashvar saka and he's sitting there in bombay and somebody goes oh yes this guy called tony parsons you guys should you should you should go and see and he's like great i'm in bombay and the guy i need
98:33
Speaker A
to see he's in london he gets off right he throw tony parsons walks past him and he's like in a state of shock he's like he just walked past me at the airport but that's how it works but that's when
98:44
Speaker A
you know like i said let's go back and look at that we realize that's reality that you know you know the guy but i'm i'm sure tiny wouldn't claim that he knew he was going past anything however if he needed to very similar to the
98:58
Speaker A
ghoul saying i'm going to tell you i'm going to die in this day you know there was there was a famous sufi who stated that as well as he was killed he said you know when a certain khalif comes
99:06
Speaker A
into the city my reality will be known and what he did was just before you know he was going to die he made this speech and he said what you worship is under my feet and people were like
99:15
Speaker A
he's saying god's under my feet we're gonna kill him and he literally told everybody my secret will come out when this person comes into this city and when that person came to the city all those years later they said oh he
99:26
Speaker A
mentioned you and he said well take me to the spot where he died so he they took him there and he said dick he just had this id his dick and they found gold they found a mound of gold so what he was saying was
99:38
Speaker A
what you worship gold is under my feet but that's because i think a lot of these teachers are sitting in a in in reality when we're sitting in separation we're not seeing this reality and yet we're not separate from it you know but we're
99:51
Speaker A
even a seeker is a perfect expression of this reality and is playing the role now if there was no secret why would these people be speaking and if there was these people speaking that would need to be so that duality is needed just to
100:02
Speaker A
keep our play going you know granting the world is an illusion but we still have to live in it so yeah just use a duality for what it is one giant huge mirror we're just literally staring into each
100:12
Speaker A
other and it's and it's great and then as we realize that then there's no one staring into anything it's just this there's no need for a mirror anymore so duality serves its purpose until he doesn't service purpose that's wonderfully described
100:29
Speaker A
is there a teaching or a lesson from sufism that left a really strong impression on you that you'd like to share today um really good question really good question um i think i think the thing that really really got me is like um i i left the
100:49
Speaker A
school in a in in a massive controversy you know there was allegations made about this this and this and this um and i took a position and i think the most significant thing i learned there is that never take a position because the
101:04
Speaker A
further you go and it's something i'll say to people as well is that sometimes we can make these statements so once upon a time i was making these really strong statements it's just this what i what i think
101:16
Speaker A
i'm having a really hard time verbalizing so i think what i took away is that you just don't know you you just don't know so always reserve judgment because once upon a time i had this teacher and he was
101:28
Speaker A
absolutely everything and then he was a fake and then he was a charlatan and then he was the fate that was real and now i don't know what his reality is and i kind of i i wrote a book on poetry
101:39
Speaker A
and one of the poems is about him and i and i i think one of the final verses was that it wasn't that i needed to know you know you it was just that it was enough that i saw you it was just that it was enough
101:49
Speaker A
that i saw you and i think what what i what i took away from it was that you just never know and you just have to be open and and it's it's like the more i've gone through life the more i've realized how
102:01
Speaker A
little i actually know i don't even know why this is all happening but i'm i'm really grateful that this is all happening but yeah i i think not even just from sufis from non-duality as well i just took away this whole idea i don't
102:12
Speaker A
know and and that to me was quite possibly one of the most significant lessons that i could have ever ever ever taken away from this stuff that none of us will never know there's never going to be that pinnacle we're never going to
102:23
Speaker A
have that total understanding but that's what's so wonderful about it because then we can have that joy of discovery that aha moment like those those moments that you know it's like you know i i've come to a friend's house you know
102:37
Speaker A
i was like guys i'm going to be coming around and everything i've got this interview and everything i'm taking over blah blah blah and then we've had our ups and downs and everything i didn't know any of this wasn't going to happen
102:46
Speaker A
but i'm really grateful i didn't know how do i come on to simply said oh yes by the way swimming this is going to happen that's what happened that was going to happen how boring would life be if we knew
102:55
Speaker A
everything so yeah the fact that i don't know everything is what i took away and that i i will constantly be learning and constantly be deepening until the moment i take my last breath is is to me wonderful you know rather
103:08
Speaker A
than sitting there at the the pinnacle of non-jewels if you understand i don't even know what that is anymore i i really have no idea but i'm so glad i had no idea and i think that's what i've taken away from it and
103:22
Speaker A
and i think that's what keeps me safe i realize that the safest place for me is in the arms of my beloved now not with my mind or with me trying to plot and plan if i try to live with this
103:34
Speaker A
idea of separation of an individual doing something then i'm in a very frightened place because i'm not going to know so it's literally let go and let god for me now and you know or if you want to be not jordan let go in that
103:48
Speaker A
consciousness do what it needs to do and and just take away this idea that yeah i i know something so yeah um i kind of realized throughout this i don't know anything which is absolutely crazy because i find
104:00
Speaker A
this hilarious i talk about this thing called self-realization and i have no idea about it but i meet some incredible people and i learn from those people i just want very beautiful souls and that's beautiful as well because
104:11
Speaker A
that always keeps me on a i really don't know anything look at these i i always kind of joke they say one day i'm gonna grow up and really talk about this i look at these other teachers and i think
104:19
Speaker A
wow they're amazing like they're absolutely amazing they're like oh mate but you're amazing oh no no no me when i grow up i'm gonna be like you you're incredible but no doubt they're doing the same thing as well
104:29
Speaker A
because that not knowing bills in this humility that you don't have to do it just naturally arises i haven't got a clue i haven't got a clue i'm lost i'm hoping one day i'll grow up and i know what i'm doing
104:42
Speaker A
but i don't know what i'm doing and that's that's absolutely wonderful that's that's what i took away that i i don't know anymore and i've never known which is brilliant it's like being comfortable with the unknown yeah yeah um
104:56
Speaker A
i went through a phase a couple of months ago where i started recording lots of videos about not knowing and then i i write a newsletter and i recently said from this not knowing the knowing emerges so sometimes we're not
105:09
Speaker A
meant to know and then sometimes we are meant to know and we live our lives between this knowing and not knowing as well and it's and it's perfect it's absolutely perfect and what i'm finding now in in my work is something's a bit
105:20
Speaker A
different and i want to talk with like the amount of stories i've told it's it's it's incredible i mean you're an amazing interview because not many people get stuff like this out of me because to me what's the point why does anybody want
105:32
Speaker A
to talk about you know i don't know anything about this stuff but i'm i'm getting this opportunity to talk about but the knowing is kind of now getting me in front of the right people i walk down the street i'm
105:42
Speaker A
terrified i'm i'm going to be abstinence so terrified because for years like most most people who this happens to if you then start going down that route of talking to people you're going to do your best to sell sabotage i heard this
105:56
Speaker A
wonderful story about papaji and they go he was with this english gentleman who's called romano and they want to found india on this bike and years years later this this man called ramana went to see papua gina that they yeah they had the end of their
106:09
Speaker A
time together and papaji's in a room a couple of hundred people there and he's an old man and papaji looked only goes i got too old to run and the reality is most people don't really want this is not something that
106:21
Speaker A
somebody wants to do it's not a career you know you don't wake up and go i'm going to be a teacher it's a calling and it is terrifying but then what happens is you find your voice so what i'm
106:31
Speaker A
finding is recently i'm starting to explore ideas i want to talk about this stuff you know once upon a time if you get paid in my life you would have just got very short thrift and we'll see you
106:39
Speaker A
later i found the way i'm talking is changing the way that just everything is just changing it's something that's happening organically but i'm realizing that yeah i just need to let it just do what it needs to do so yeah there's this
106:52
Speaker A
there's this kind of wanting to discuss this stuff now but not from a personal viewpoint and to try and get these ideas across and to try and get them all across as clearly as possible because i feel that really all these approaches are
107:05
Speaker A
what but somewhere along the line someone's tagged me into this you're going to talk about the sufi stuff and somewhere along the line i was very lucky i got to sit with these old men who told me these stories
107:14
Speaker A
and somewhere along the line i also got to sit with people from different traditions who told me their stories and somewhere along the line i got to eat all this different kind of food and i realized that everybody was saying the
107:23
Speaker A
same thing so to me there isn't really a differential um i think when the differential comes in it's an insecurity my way is better than your way is really just saying i'm really insecure and i have no confidence
107:33
Speaker A
in what i'm saying so i've got i'm trying to convince myself but i'm going to appear to be convincing you because like in manchester sometimes you'll see the street preachers and they're there they're telling you that you can only get through the lord you
107:44
Speaker A
know to the lord through jesus or there's a guy over there going it's only krishna and most of times insecurity now i say let's meet in the middle let's exchange our stories and i think that's the most beautiful thing that
107:55
Speaker A
ever happened on the subcontinent when these people from you know these traditions came together and they sat there and there was real inquiry and i think that's why a lot of people believe that india is almost like this hotbed of
108:08
Speaker A
spirituality because so many people came together and it was it was just this beautiful beautiful time and i think we were all the richer prayer if i sit in my place and say well no my way is better than yours and use it to your
108:20
Speaker A
place where we're always going to be you know we're just we're doing a massive disservice from ourselves this to me is incredible they're just coming together whether we speak or silently but it's just energy it's just this energy just doing
108:34
Speaker A
whatever it needs to do and it's it's absolutely perfect and yeah it's just now for some strategies i want to tell about you know tell a few stories use the words you know use the words love and beloved because to me it is it
108:48
Speaker A
is like falling in love i think even most you know even with non-duality it's a love story we are fallen in love whether we want to call it consciousness of god or whatever we have been consumed there is no trace
108:59
Speaker A
of us why would somebody like tony pastor's other age be running around the country because it's not our choice it's not our will you know like you're talking about time there is no time when when it's time for
109:09
Speaker A
this i'll i'll give you all the time in the world you know i will talk to you all day long jeremy because we're talking about something so beautiful and something so profound and and someone could take anything away
109:21
Speaker A
from from from from this then that's great and if not then that's wonderful as well and i think that's that's where it gets really interesting and beautiful this is my last question for today about especially because you have um
109:46
Speaker A
you have experience doing this you know in different cultures so you uh yeah so that's why it would be really helpful to get your insight on this do you like do you what is a difference in um how some of these topics are
110:05
Speaker A
received uh like um [Music] in west versus uh in east or in pakistan well i'm really glad you uh it's it's not a one i think you've answered this already and that was like one-size-fits-all tour there is no
110:20
Speaker A
um would i talk like this if i was sitting in a gathering of of people from pakistan um would i then say what i would say in a gathering of pakistanis or indians in in say bosnia where i went no i wouldn't
110:38
Speaker A
what you find is that in in trusting it will just come up the way it is so um to give an example i i went to bosnia and um somehow i ended up in the serbian end of bosnia which was which was absolutely
110:51
Speaker A
wonderful it was such an education and i remember i was in munich i was standing at the state um i was standing waiting for for the connection to to connecting flight sorry to zagreb and um i literally looked like the italians
111:06
Speaker A
walking past they worked a certain way the germans were walking past they walked a certain way and i looked at the croatians i thought oh i know exactly what i'm going to talk about and literally just by seeing that posture
111:16
Speaker A
but i i didn't talk about sufism there because i know the history of the region and i i knew that it was a bit of a crazy topic and everything and and literally all i did was i walked in and i just one look at
111:28
Speaker A
everybody and i thought if you get engaged in stories you're dead by the end of the week they will energetically eat you i spent the rest of the week calling everybody boris like i just laughed and i joked and i was
111:40
Speaker A
like boris what is going on here like literally i'm talking like this and at the end of the week they were like who is this bodhisattva look he's a character in this film called snatch and he played there's a guy called boris the
111:50
Speaker A
blade in it and they were like we would like to watch this and i was like cool okay and i'm i'm like literally mimicking the axle and stuff and it turns out that the actor playing boris was actually a
112:00
Speaker A
really famous croatian actor and what was really interesting was rather than going about sufism or non-duality all i knew was i was in a place where there had been this huge conflict and people had killed each other and there was this suppression of
112:14
Speaker A
emotions now if you want to get dental work done in europe go to bosnia it's cheap as hell and the reason there's so many dentists is because there's a natural tension in the jaw you you see it with people it's like
112:26
Speaker A
they literally won't allow their emotions out and the center i was speaking and the woman wanted to start screaming so you would go in there and you would pay to scream and i said look with the trauma that's happened in this
112:36
Speaker A
country if you allow the people to scream openly you're gonna absolutely kill yourself you know you're not about to handle the breakdowns that happen and what i found was by using the combination of humor and just literally being friendly with
112:51
Speaker A
people and in bosnia they have this great tradition where they like to chat all day long and they want to eat and oh god you know these people feed you some amazing food so i literally just did that you know there
113:02
Speaker A
was some structured talks but most of my talks were literally happening outside the talks like i remember starting one friday morning at about eight nine o'clock in the morning then at 10 11 o'clock at night i was still talking and i was literally
113:14
Speaker A
sorting out situations but the way the energy was it was like literally help these people release these emotions but very slowly and and and surely then categorize it to a talk i didn't the isle of man and um
113:30
Speaker A
so i got there i wore a sawayakumi's again my second thought was i was going to do a talk on traditional sushi so i walked into one look at the room and spent two hours telling jokes like literally just told jokes um
113:41
Speaker A
midway through it the police turned up because somebody was double parked and i was like yo who would call the feds to my talk so i'm talking really well and then also i just went like yo who would do this you know i
113:51
Speaker A
mean like what's going on here and what happened this woman took a flight from the island and came to my next talk in manchester look thank you that talk was absolutely profound and i've been telling jokes and she goes it was
114:01
Speaker A
literally like you were talking to me i then found out that the island man has the highest suicide rate in europe and so what you find is that you literally just adapt any teacher from any traditional it's not just
114:12
Speaker A
you know their advaitan or buddhist whatever will just literally just adapt and that's what i found but i noticed that also certain topics don't need to be talked about if i'm in pakistan or india i'm not going to be sitting at
114:24
Speaker A
darbar or nashville and saying guys let's talk about consciousness they don't know what it means they want to hear that quality they want to hear that budget they want to they they want to world they want to dance and stuff you know and you go oh
114:37
Speaker A
guys no no no we need to sit down in a in in satsang they're like too busy doing that and yet the the other side is you come to the west and people actually want to ask you questions
114:47
Speaker A
they want to know about this and this and this and everything and but so yeah one size doesn't fit all and you literally adapt the thing about the good thing about being cross-cultural as i was born in the uk but i have this
114:58
Speaker A
eastern tradition and i find that there's a lot of positives in our cultures but there's a lot of negatives as well and yes in the west there's a lot of negatives and a lot of positive and i've found that i've been able to
115:08
Speaker A
just pick up the best of both worlds and somehow that's adapted you know i i went to multan which was a city of sufis went to all these amazing amazing shrines my highlight of that trip was there was like a samosa cart that i used
115:23
Speaker A
to go to and on the final night um i just remember i was going and there was these kids that they were working they couldn't afford an education and i took a 500 rupino and um i bought my little samosa plate
115:36
Speaker A
or walked off and it was dark so literally i literally walked into shadows and i literally just said to the guy here this is for you just i'm gonna go open it when i go and i managed to
115:46
Speaker A
turn around and i saw this smile on this kid's face when he opened up with this like you know this note it was a 500 rupee no you don't give those kind of and to me that was the highlight of my trip not
115:57
Speaker A
i'd gone to this shrine and i'd felt this energy although that was all amazing it was just seeing a smile on that child's face don't know what happened to him i don't know all i know that i was
116:07
Speaker A
there for a month and this kid and me just we had just this like relationship you know you get my food for me and all of this stuff and then i remember once it was like you know these these two kids came up to me you
116:18
Speaker A
know i understand eight-year-old kids and then my uncle do you want to play with us and i was like playing badminton in this park again those were the moments that really mattered but at the same time when probably shrines felt the
116:28
Speaker A
energy and everything but yeah just the look on that child's face was just absolutely brilliant but yeah that was that was different that's how maybe he'll remember it maybe he won't i don't know maybe life will cross our
116:40
Speaker A
paths but it's a different type of way because again i was still in that energy i even did a talk there it was hilarious i i literally could not talk in the time the energy was so strongly talked about
116:49
Speaker A
they're all in it and i went to a village and started speaking but again it was like there was a young girl there who wanted to leave everything behind for the sake of truth she wanted to go to a shrine
116:59
Speaker A
and she wanted to sit at the shrine so literally the talk was based upon that like you know is it practical that you're gonna go and sit at a shrine what was really interesting is i got invited to dinner and um there's this young man
117:11
Speaker A
and he just he was talking a certain way and i was like there's something really odd that's often i said look can i ask you a question he was like yeah i was like do you know of an indian teacher called
117:19
Speaker A
osho i'm in the middle of nowhere and he goes osha was amazing he'd read so many books about so many videos of ocean that his verbal speech patterns has changed so then i mean we'll start the city of
117:31
Speaker A
sufis but i'm talking about osha so it adapts wherever you are you know some some people want you to talk to them really profoundly and you're not meant to you meant to tell them a joke because that could really you know
117:43
Speaker A
a lot of people want to hear that sometimes it's about sitting there being playing or being a bit of a fool talking about the cat that keeps jumping on the screen and stuff everything just little things like that they're the things that
117:52
Speaker A
matter because that's where sometimes wisdom is found but then sometimes there's points where you open up the book and say what did rumi mean when he said this but again it's the moment and stuff and everything what i'm finding is this the
118:03
Speaker A
cross-cultural thing is really helping and it's kind of creating something and i'm just enjoying that you know that process that's going on so i i don't know we've kind of gone everywhere but somehow you know i also said there's
118:17
Speaker A
a beginning middle end of no idea and stuff but yeah sort of fun sort of fun yeah i can completely relate to what you're saying about the cross-cultural thing and in itself is like a non-dual experience because you're
118:30
Speaker A
merging these polarities yes oh god yeah i think people like ourselves who are caught up in two worlds need to bring that into as well i i for years have not wanted to speak about sufism and what i'm finding
118:44
Speaker A
as people say well why don't you talk a bit about the suicide thing as well i'm like okay are you sure because i remember once i was doing the talk and i was um we were discussing about the job me and this muslim guy and
118:54
Speaker A
i remember turning around that's look i'm really sorry we just need to discuss this with this guy and everyone was like no no we want to hear as well so i think the thing is this is you're right in
119:02
Speaker A
that long journal understandable these polarities come together it all becomes one and sometimes you have to kind of show something else to to show something here kind of use that tradition there you know it's you know you could wake up here and hear
119:16
Speaker A
the story about some teacher or something it's it's it's it's incredible i mean india's got so many stories it's it's god we could be here all night talking about this stuff but yeah i think it's time to kind of bring that kind of stuff
119:29
Speaker A
out and that can really help to kind of show people that it's not just a set of phrases or words and it's not just about an awakening or realization that there's something a bit more that there's development of
119:40
Speaker A
character there's about becoming a you know a good member of your community as well you know i i remember seeing this online he would never claim to be anything and he used to just go around he used to
119:49
Speaker A
collect charity for everybody and it was only when he passed away that i realized what this guy was so yeah sorry you're gonna say ironically i um i don't know if you have noticed this in pakistan but in india
120:02
Speaker A
there's not much of an interest in advaira or things like that we have we have we have a new what what it basically is is um we there there's a really good guy called dr shashi tarou if you ever get a chance
120:18
Speaker A
to listen to this guy it's incredible um and he talks about when obviously you know the raj was there and after the british empire took over india i think what happened was um without sounding too controversial we gave up a lot
120:31
Speaker A
and now the the modern indian and the modern pakistani and even the modern bangladeshis is is in a rush to materialize um and we've lost a lot of traditions and stuff it's like you know in the uk you make your money and you
120:46
Speaker A
move from the city into a nice little village and a place in the country and stuff we're going the other way india now has the biggest you know middle class in the world and i think what's happened is
120:57
Speaker A
that there's a really good book called yoga school drop out about this woman he goes i think what it is the spirituality still exists there it's just gone deeper it's gone subtler we now don't need to get up in the
121:08
Speaker A
morning and do our asanas and the asanas have moved into ourselves even if you look at yoga there's raja yoga which is the science and the mind and stuff i think it's still there i think what's happened is we've kind of
121:20
Speaker A
lost touch with it because we're now trying to materialize you you're right most people don't you know i remember my my last trip to pakistan and yeah i was with these young guys and all they wanted to do was party it was great
121:32
Speaker A
you know i remember kind of i i was literally you know i i had these like things i wanted to do one of the things i definitely didn't think i was going to be doing was going clubbing in
121:42
Speaker A
pakistan and i was taken clubbing by a guy who was meant to be really religious and i was like tell me about pakistan because you're on the dating scenes like this and this and this and this and i was like whoa because i think
121:54
Speaker A
what happened with our parents is they left villages and they gave us a very romanticized image of what indian pakistan was you know we were village people and we would sing these songs and then we'd have all these traditions and
122:05
Speaker A
and indian pakistan moved on and i think most of them it's it's all about industrialization now but i think what will happen is sooner or later when we get to that pinnacle you know the the prophet stated that one day the sun will
122:15
Speaker A
rise in the west and i think we're seeing that now we're seeing the emergence of spirituality in the west and i think over the next couple hundred years i think spirituality will really take root here because everybody's got everything here
122:27
Speaker A
and they found it's not enough we're we're taking that journey and one day one what would happen is we'll realize it wasn't enough and then we'll want to go back hospital traditions but the chances are then we'll probably be
122:37
Speaker A
coming to the west to talk to the teachers here because it's taking root here now you know london's a hotbed of non-duality teachers you know you don't they're they're cropping up everywhere you know i remember when i first went to the
122:50
Speaker A
attorney pastor's meeting it was middle england the spirituality you know i'd never seen anything like this before in my life middle class people talking about there is no such thing as this and i'm like what the hell is going on here
123:01
Speaker A
because my spirituality you go to the mustard you know or you go to the gurudwara because the number is really good and everything and you know you hear it from it but that suits us because of our personality the
123:11
Speaker A
way we are you know like i said you know if i was doing a non-duality meeting i took an apple and i threw it and hit someone in the face i'm getting done on an assault charge and yet the mentality was different when
123:23
Speaker A
that was done i remember being shocked because i'm western educated and you know this is just wrong but that guy could just immediately seize his behavior so again it it's just it depends on the situation now i've i've
123:35
Speaker A
never hit anybody so far um but i don't think i will because i don't think that's that's me but i can fully see why he did that but i can also see if i see through a western viewpoint
123:46
Speaker A
then no that's cultists and that's abusive and everything but we don't take into account the personality behind it because i know that the india and pakistani i'm just saying it's some continuity it works a lot simpler we've got very stubborn personalities
124:00
Speaker A
because we were brought up with this stuff think about it we grew up on a diet of polish you know we have lotta mongeshka singing to us you know we had bollywood and everything we're so deeply steeped in this spiritual tradition that
124:18
Speaker A
nobody can you know show us anything or teach us anything this is what i find when i find people on the indian subcontinent come to my talks all they're looking to do is see whether this guy is a fraud whether he's a fate
124:29
Speaker A
whether he's a dodgy teacher and uh what the angle is because how can you teach these people because they already know and that's where we have to drop that and and i think that's what i love about the non-duality scene and what's
124:42
Speaker A
happening here it's something fresh it's something that's growing it's making mistakes it hasn't got the depth it doesn't have the schools you know it doesn't have thousands of students you don't get gatherings where thousands of people turn up and you know babaji is
124:56
Speaker A
sitting on the stage or anything like that it's in its infancy it's it's it's finding its way and i think that's beautiful i i think that's really beautiful but i think one day it will go back to some of these traditions and
125:06
Speaker A
kind of go and grow into his depth and i think that's i'm seeing that with people who are now really looking at ramana maharishi now and can't say who was she so i think we will sometimes have we sometimes have
125:19
Speaker A
to go back to the source and i think that's happening and that's that's a nice thing as well so yeah it's all it's all good it's all up i think this was such an informative conversation as i think it's just being
125:36
Speaker A
no this was really good like i i it's almost it's kind of like an honor to learn so much about sufism because uh it is hard to find someone like you online who speaks about this um like both like non
125:50
Speaker A
duality and yeah yeah yeah i i kind of came up in a really odd way you know i i think a lot of my friends are still like bro when are you gonna just stop doing this nonsense and you're gonna join us
126:00
Speaker A
and you know you're gonna try and tell everybody your ways better than everybody like guys i don't think that's gonna happen it's just i think it's just an unusual set of circumstances but it seems to it seems to work you know i'm not
126:13
Speaker A
everybody's cup of tea but you know it seems to work and thank you so much for being generous with your time i i i deeply appreciate that no no i i'm really honestly thank you for thank you for
126:27
Speaker A
for this opportunity you know all joking aside i i i i'd love to offer the conversation because i i think we've kind of touched on the the cultural side of things which is i think something that we could really
126:39
Speaker A
kind of go into because i think that would really help people see why it works a certain way um but no um no thank you honestly you know from the bottom of my heart and you know it's not
126:51
Speaker A
about the time i've just really really enjoyed this i've just really enjoyed how this has happened and i just hope that i've answered the questions adequately and if there's any more questions then yeah just just ask them or whatever and
127:05
Speaker A
and i i do feel like the cultural maturity is kind of linked with non-duality because um like there are so many like especially for some of us who have lived in many uh uh yeah in really different cultures yeah we
127:21
Speaker A
understand the struggle of merging all these like really poor views we're kind of sitting at the crossroads you know i'm i'm a mix of everything you know i i know that you know i can go i can go to india for
127:37
Speaker A
a couple of months but then i know i'm going to miss the mod cons of western society but then i i think i think what's happening now is those of us who are cross-cultural are finding our own identity you know india
127:50
Speaker A
is now a spiritual home to us i don't think many of us will ever really go back and then at the same time with what happens with culture and racism and everything and things like that as well we're kind of
128:01
Speaker A
we're accepted in certain places in certain places we're not really accepted and even happens in our communities as well it was you know so you know our generation of indians and pakistanis look at the new generation coming and
128:13
Speaker A
going oh no you know like there's this derogatory term or they're freshies and things like that so there's all there's all these separations and dualities and stuff but i think if you can see that you can see that there's a lot
128:26
Speaker A
to offer and i think we're building our own identity where we're kind of taking the best of both worlds but at the same time because when you're cross-cultural you can actually look at the other side as well and so i say look this is and i
128:39
Speaker A
and i think that's where i think the thing that i've enjoyed about the conversation that the most is just really talking about how these approaches when they came together found parallels they never found that they never went my way is better than your
128:52
Speaker A
ways and i think being cross-cultural that gives us that opportunity to to kind of find parallels instead as opposed to yeah but you know we're indians we're so much better than you westerners or you're western and you know you're decadent and we're where
129:06
Speaker A
indians are very spiritual you know i remember somebody saying can you come to india it's a spiritual guru of the world and i just went that's arabic because i think ev everywhere's this capital of this and i think
129:18
Speaker A
our traditions are everywhere right you know there are i think what's happened is because there's been this industrialization in the west a lot of the western spiritual traditions have been lost and i refuse to believe that there wasn't deep
129:29
Speaker A
spiritual traditions and i think over time as that maturity you know it gets deeper we will see the emergence of western spirituality as well and it probably won't be nonduality as people reconnect with their culture i think what's happening in the indian
129:41
Speaker A
pakistanis somehow we've managed to keep that culture and it's whether in industrialization we you know we lose those traditions you know i you know i've i've been in situations i've been completely closed-minded about stuff and then completely had my mind completely blown wide open
129:58
Speaker A
by by something by some old lady telling me a story or you know i've got a headache and somebody goes yeah come on i'll pray over you and i'll blow on you and your headache will go when you're like no
130:08
Speaker A
i'll just have a paracetamol and also it just goes so i think it's whether we can kind of reconnect with that and i and i think the more we can have these conversations the more we can demystify i think
130:18
Speaker A
what's happened with things like sufis and vedanta is the people who are now the custodians of these traditions don't really understand them and in that sense they mystified them and they're just a reality with no name and it's something that's really affects
130:31
Speaker A
every aspect of our reality from getting up in the morning to go to sleep to being a sleeper as well but sometimes when we don't understand everything we want to make it complex and the true understanding is is
130:41
Speaker A
simplifying it so to me sushism is just simple and when i say it's simple even the name sufism disappears as well it it doesn't have a place in it and to me then it's just a reality and that's real sushi
130:55
Speaker A
and i think true non-duality when we really talk about non-duality there is really no nonduality there that the name ceases and that's what we're really in that place but that's where we realize we're all saying the same thing we're all in that
131:06
Speaker A
one singularity and and that's that's when we we're everything you've been interviewing yogis and buddhists and sufis on every single interview you know and it's just sometimes we just need to sort of say oh yeah and again these are just calling cards
131:23
Speaker A
they're just ways of attracting attention you know just to get a point across but ultimately we have to drop all this we become what we cease to become yeah it's it can be a very liberating experience in itself because
131:39
Speaker A
at the beginning it may be confusing like do i belong here or do i belong but now it's like i belong neither and everywhere yeah yeah it's it's expansive i mean i'd rather have that problem i'd rather be
131:53
Speaker A
everywhere nowhere in nowhere and everywhere right i think if if anything what i love about this is just wow what a place to be to be in that center that inquiry and to be even talking about this stuff i think it's great i'd
132:06
Speaker A
rather be here than in some closed-minded guess what my view is better than your view my religion is better than your religion we've seen what that's done and i think it's now it's it is about breaking down that duality
132:19
Speaker A
you know and we will find our ways you know for some people you have to tell them joke for somebody else you have to you know i god i did a talk recently and i started singing i don't sing
132:29
Speaker A
and i was singing a dean martin song to somebody and everybody's like he's singing dean martin yeah welcome to my world um was the name of the song from enough and yet there's been talks i've just sat there silently and not said a
132:40
Speaker A
word you know um the first teacher i was with you know he didn't he didn't even bother speaking to me because what was he going to speak to you know what a complication to speak to me just ignored me best thing ever you
132:53
Speaker A
know even i always say our parents are our first teachers and i think our parents will be and every teacher after that just literally reinforces what you know what what our parents talked to you know i had a very formal relationship with my
133:05
Speaker A
father and i realized god it had to be it had to be because the moment you're born you're preparing yourself for yourself you know it's great it's wonderful thank you so much this was this was fun and if people want to find out or contact
133:24
Speaker A
you falling into the mystery.com yes that is the website yeah um pretty much everything is from there um yeah everything's from there the social media the youtube channel pretty much everything and 18 um and that's where you can contact me
133:40
Speaker A
as well so and and i'm sure it'll probably be in the description anyway at the bottom so yeah just in case we forget but um no thank you thank you it was absolutely absolutely wonderful being able to to just kind of talk
133:53
Speaker A
openly about all this stuff it's it's always good to be able to share and you know just and the duality and everything
Topics:SufismZahir KhanQadriyaNon-dualityAdvaitaSpiritual awakeningSelf-realizationQawwaliSufi tariqasMysticism

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How to pump out high quality Roblox games FAST — Transcript
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How to Improve Your Roblox Game Stats FAST — Transcript
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How I Make High Quality Roblox Thumbnails with AI — Transcript
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New SSA Case Law Scares People — Transcript
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Funniest Stand Up Comedy You’ll See Today! | Live at th… — Transcript
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Like My Coffee | Game Changer [Full Episode] — Transcript
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The Drinking Game | Game Changer [Full Episode] — Transcript
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Smosh clips to laugh at for 50 minutes straight — Transcript
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The best interview advice you never got (get into Googl… — Transcript
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Why Jesus Had to Go To HELL the 3 Days after his Death? — Transcript
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