Yol I
Consider the depth of consciousness, and of the interplay of the mind/heart with the material world. From the moment of birth, we are influenced in every way imaginable. Through every sensation and by every emotion, we come form an understanding of our environment. We are given a name, and identify by that moniker and the personality it develops through courses of relationships as experienced through culture. Culture becomes an essential component of necessary knowledge of our identity, as we begin to understand our place within the societal frame of our environment. Our relationships/experience become the basis of our biases as well as our prejudices, and become definitive as we develop an sense of what is ethical and virtuous. As this takes place we consume media, to such an extent that a particular film series or musical genre makes such an impression upon us that it becomes integral to our sense of identity. We are schooled rigorously from the most formative years of childhood until our most impressionable. Once we reach adulthood, it is possible that the entirety of how we and our environment understand “who we are” has been defined by the phenomena of the material world and its psychological affects. This is sadly perhaps an inevitable component of human life in a society, and its results in the secular societies of the modern era of global civilization have been catastrophic.
The wayfarer, through the guidance and compassion of God is one who not merely becomes aware of this process but in turn realizes something is tremendously wrong with its effect on the human being. This process of environmental conditioning delivers an individual to a place of where life’s objectives become the blind pursuit of material comfort and complacency. This is opposed by the fitrah, that natural connection between creation and its creator. For the wayfarer, the fitrah calls out from underneath the layers of environmental conditioning and by the guidance of God they’re made to hear. A profound discontentment overcomes the wayfarer, matched by the despair of longing. This melancholy may last for days, weeks, months, and even years. It the moment in the life of the wayfarer where they feel the most distant from God. The wayfarer looks, but He is not seen, and so he cries out but He is not heard. The mind/heart becomes consumed with doubt and confusion, which gives way to anger and desperation. This is the place of tension where the wayfarer is caught between their environmental conditioning and the de-conditioning of sayr al suluk, or the path/the spiritual life. This is the beckoning of God to the locus of becoming, where fear of death and passion for life is extinguished, their places taken by clarity of holy service.
The wayfarer gives the entirety of their being to God, in the effort of understanding the conditions that facilitate the patterns of sin and redemption by purifying the mind/heart of the temptations of sin and seeking refuge in the redemptive acts. This goes significantly further than the obligatory worship of conventional religious life, which for those content with the obligatory acts of faith and the avoidance of that which God decreed forbidden, there is permission to engage with the world with the assurance of blessings through forbearance and piety. For the conventional religious life there is no demand upon the believer beyond this, and paradise awaits those who have prepared for it in this life and His trials and mercy for those who do not. The life of the wayfarer is the pursuit of fanna, of annihilation in God. It is where all but the living body is extinguished in His name. The mind/heart are purified of all ambition and desire, of all conditioning, and liberated in servitude to God. It is where every thought and act if worship, where every breath is prayer.
