The keys of the spiritual path, by Karim Ben Driss
In the Sufi tradition, sincerity and humility are held to be the master keys of the spiritual journey, indispensable before the first steps as much as all along the way. Sufi teaching is rich in tales and anecdotes that school the disciples in the worth of these qualities.
Sincerity in love
In far-off times that only the storytellers remember, there lived a king around whom crowds pressed every day, drawn by a wisdom equalled only by his goodness. This king had a servant whose purity of heart and faithfulness never ceased to amaze him. The man bore his lord a love and a trust that made everyone who laid claim to sincerity tremble with humility.
One blazing hot afternoon, the king had an orange brought to him to cool himself. Before even taking a bite, he gave half of it to his devoted servant who, thanking him with a radiant smile, set about savouring a segment at once. Watching him relish it, eyes closed, face delighted, the king asked him: ‘So it is good?’ ‘Succulent, my king!’ the other answered. The king then took a piece, which he spat out straight away: ‘But it is terribly bitter! How can you find good something so detestable to the taste?’ ‘My king,’ the servant answered him, ‘how could I find bitter something given me by my beloved lord? Everything that comes from him can only be excellent.’ At these words the eyes of the king, and of many around them, filled with tears, their hearts seized by this testimony of a sincerity raised to the highest degrees.
At the start of the journey, the sincerity of the aspiration to the sacred quickens the awakening of the heart and disposes it to receive the spiritual food it longs for. Along the way, it opens the gates of spiritual experiences that make love for God grow and sustain the delicate work of ‘polishing the heart’. At last, freed from its ‘illusory self’ and from the egotistic tendencies (pride, love of riches, the cult of self-image, the thirst for power) that keep it from the Source, the wayfarer reaches the highest degrees of sincere love, where all dissolves in the contemplation of the Beloved.
Humility in order to know
One day a great theologian set out in search of a Sufi master. After crossing many lands he at last found a master who had made his dwelling in a cave at the top of a mountain. The mountain climbed, the theologian reached the cave. He was about to greet the master when the latter called to him from afar: ‘Go and perform your ablutions!’ ‘Well now,’ the theologian thought, ‘I was sure I had already done my ablutions!’ And he went back down to the stream below to perform his ritual ablutions with care. The exercise done, he climbed up again and heard the same voice say once more: ‘Go and perform your ablutions!’ Troubled, the theologian went back down and did his ablutions again, more scrupulously still. ‘This time I’m certain I have forgotten nothing,’ he told himself. For the third time the master called out to him: ‘Go and perform your ablutions!’ Utterly disconcerted, the theologian made for the stream again. As he was about to redo his ablutions, he finally perceived what his future master expected of him: before laying claim to anything, he had to rid himself of his supposed knowledge and all his certainties, so many veils. What he had to do first, then, were his ‘inner ablutions’. It is in this way that the disciple, become fully receptive, can benefit from his master’s teaching1.
The pretension to knowledge, especially when it is bookish, is a veil over inner knowledge. A head that is ‘well filled’, even ‘well made’, can have only a vague idea of true spiritual knowledge: book learning does not reach the inward dimension proper to the mystical experience of unveiling, and so cannot transform a person’s conduct. Whoever sincerely aspires to spiritual knowledge must renounce the illusion of approaching it through the intellect. He must humbly enter upon an inward undertaking in which his aim is no longer even to understand, but to live closeness to God. ‘At the beginning, one must give up claiming to understand everything from exoteric knowledge. The thing is rather to meditate and to work until the opening happens. But the goal itself is not that opening. The goal is to have no expectation left but that of being near, in conformity with the Truth, in complete selflessness.’2
Humility is an essential condition of the initiatic journey towards the unveiling of the divine lights. It is one of the fundamental aspects of the science of conduct, central in Islam and in the Sufi traditions. That science of conduct is held to be the highest degree of Sufism and, at the same time, the unavoidable way of access to spiritual knowledge. ‘True knowledge is obtained only when it is truly asked for with humility. The way of going towards it is like that of someone who wants to drink the water of a stream: that person will have to bend right down to the stream to drink. Water is always found in the lowest place of a spot, and we must be like water.’2
Sincerity and humility are the precious allies of the spiritual traveller in the transmutation of the soul: as the grip of the ego disappears, the divine realities are revealed to him, until his heart, irradiated with light, is extinguished in the experience of unification, as the moon fades at the rising of the sun.
* Karim Ben Driss is a sociologist, director of the Montreal Sufi Institute, and author of Le renouveau du soufisme au Maroc (Archè / AlBouraq).