Conditioning

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Conditioning

One piece of the puzzle on the path of Sufism is learning how to separate yourself from your conditioning. In other words, what is the authentic, real you, as opposed to your culture, the ideas your family embedded in you, the biases you learned from your schools, friends, and relationships?

There is you, and then there is all the other stuff. Where do your opinions come from? What are your values and are they real or just the echo of others’? There is a source to everything you think you know.

The process of getting closer to Allah, is directly through the minefield accrued from your life and experiences. You begin this process by accepting that you really don’t know who you are. You are NOT your culture. You are NOT just your experiences. You are much more and a lot less.

So you need to divorce yourself from all these influences first so that you can have an objective perspective to clearly see what these influences are.

You probably have ideas about what love is, what friends are supposed to be, what honor and truth are. All these ideas were formed somewhere. As a Sufi, you start to learn that everything you know is upside down and backwards. What is complicated becomes simple, what is simple becomes very complex. Things and people are not what they appear to be. You learn over and over again not to judge others.

Examine your concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. Where do they come from? Whose ideas are they? You may think they are yours, but on further examination you will discover they were fed to you along with many other ideas. All these ideas and philosophies need to be tested. The only way to find out if something is true is to test it. Be wary; be skeptical; don’t accept other people’s ideas or philosophies just because they sound good. Don’t toss viewpoints away because you don’t like them. 

Part of this examination process is to see if you are reacting. To react means there is an emotional element attached to the thought or idea. Perhaps you have had unpleasant experiences associated with the concept. This negative energy may then influence your future feelings about the concept, but it is not clean – it is a reaction from a previous engagement. You are then unable to see clearly if the concept is true or false because you are unable to empirically test the truth of it because you feel it is wrong or bad. This is nafs in a subtle form, because you are basing your thinking process on a previous experience but it may or may not be accurate. You are clouded by emotion. You are reacting, not thinking.

Observe the people, the news, the weather, the politics around you so you can make intelligent and wise choices.

This is what I mean about staying objective and not letting your reactions interfere with your intelligence. Think, deduce, read, examine, talk with experts about what concerns you, and then make your own decisions, based on all the facts. And even facts will change, because this world is not locked down to any kind of permanence. Everything will change and die. Nothing remains as it is. The only constant is change in this world, so learning how to let go is pr

Salaam Alaykum, murids, seekers, curious and interested listeners,

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