Teaching Tools for Mindfulness Training

"Fall 1999 Classroom Talk"

Dreams of a mindful pilgrimage.
Posted by Perk on September 13, 1999 at 00:25:57:

If you are curious about what it’s like to ‘go to the end of the earth’ at the close of the 20th century, please read on and enjoy a story about a traveler that found himself in the right place, at the right time, with the right teaching and the right teacher....

I flew to New York City on June 23, 1999 in the company of an old and dear friend, Frank Milan, having learned about this voyage from him. He's a long-time student of the Sufi tradition, sometimes referred to as the kernel of the Muslim religion, sometimes as preceding the Muslim religion by two thousand years. He learned that a tour was being organized out of San Francisco among many students of Sufism there, and I cajoled him to go along on it with me. I was intrigued because of the company, thirty-five in all (ages 16 to 65) and because of the agenda: a pilgrimage to Sufi sites and Muslim mosques outside the ordinary tourist routes.

We arrived in Casablanca after eight hours on an Air Maroc 747,
during which I'd been punched and kneed and had my hair pulled out in tufts by people passing by in the narrow aisle. Five hours of bus ride later (twenty five hours after leaving Tucson) we fell into various stages of rest in Fes at the Hotel Nouzha. It was air-conditioned, filled with tile mosaics and rugs, and quite beautiful.

We were met there the next morning by a man named Sidi Ahmed Kostas who seemed at first a historian, and later showed himself to be an actual manifestation of the Sufi tradition. In a model that repeated every day, Sidi led us in a series of chants that are commonly used in the Qadiri Sufi Order there. These chants are done out loud and are various names of God or esoteric phrases or words from the Koran.

On this day he spoke to us about Moulay Idriss, the founder of
Sufism in Morocco, and about how to visit the region and the shrines located there. One version was to start with the shrine of Ibn Arabi in the south. The other was to begin at the shrine for Moulay Idriss. He'd founded Fes in the 7th century in a location where “the winds would not influence the spirit of the place.” We'd take this latter route. It is a route that was laid out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, when Sufis were being persecuted everywhere in the region and fled to Morocco. At that time Morocco was the end of the earth and then, as now, the people there held no animosity toward Sufism.

Sidi began talking about the sacred art at that time too: there
is a particular tile mosaic that one sees everywhere, a solid-sun-like center from which radiates outward thousands of tiles in colorful symmetrical patterns. He said that this symbolizes the sun, and for the Sufis, knowledge. And that various points on that sun represent the five daily Muslim prayers and the fifty blessings that accrue from such praying. But it is not the literal sun of an ordinary day.

If you are taken by the day, you'll not remember the Divine,
he'd say. I took ‘taken by the day’ to refer to how I, a stranger to
this culture could quickly become encumbered by thinking and emotional reactions when things didn’t go my cultural way. I would forget that I am literally present here, in contact with my own body and experience and mind and am not all that stuff. I’d just be asleep again,
automotated with the conditioned behaviors from my cultural and familial roots, as are we are all the time.

For the Sufis, the worst enemy is forgetfulness, forgetting the
Divine, he said. And thus he set the stage for our visiting many holy places where Sufis are now buried, and for a great deal of remembering that was to occur. After that commentary, an interesting tour member spoke, a man named Bilal Bruce Hyde. He'd come to study Sufism in Egypt in the early 1970’s, and was now employed as the Muslim Imam (or prayer leader) in San Francisco at San Quentin Prison... Bilal said something like, this chanting we'll do needs to be easy on your body... if you are paralyzed, just pray with your eyeballs! Don't be too puritanical!

That day we began dressing as Muslims in ankle-to-wrist
djellabas. We visited the medina (the old city) within the city of Fes, built in the 800’s, a maze of eight foot wide cobblestone walkways with shops on either side holding every conceivable item. And then the we did practices at the shrine of Moulay Idriss II (the founder's son), resplendent with mosaic tiles on the walls, carved plaster Arabesque floral scenes higher up, topped-off with a cupola that had another form of symmetrical design in the ceiling. This was followed by our presence
at the Qaraouiyyin Mosque where we did one of the daily prayers. Finally  we were taken to a hidden small room on the edge of the Mosque with elaborately carved symmetrical suns where Sufis retreated to write books and meditate. Our hosts had to beg us finally to depart from this room, so filled as it was with the remnants of consciousness practiced there for so many centuries.

One of those hosts was Hassan Samrhouni,  owner of Casablanca Travel and Tours  in Arlington, VA. He later repeated a conversation he’d overheard at the Qaraouiyyin Mosque: two local women saw our party arrive and were delighted to see that half were women. They and the women on our tour then prayed together in the women's portion of the Mosque. Upon leaving one of the women said to the other, "Those are the real Muslims!" It was one of many occasions where the Moroccan women showed spontaneous sisterhood with the women in our group.

I dreamt that night that I'd gone to see a Moroccan physician, a
specialist in healing children. He decided I needed an antibiotic of some kind, and then had to hurry off to his children's clinic....

Sidi spoke the next morning of an Arabic word for traveling that
means to uncover, or trouble. This is a practice given to disciples to go and trouble a little bit, a directive about going out to rely more on Allah, not on your program but His. Here were presented the ethics of visiting the Sufi masters: first, you accommodate to the culture, thus breaking whatever arrogance you may have about your own, which is,
incidentally the purpose of that bar I'd been bumping my head on placed about four feet high in front of all mosque entryways. Second, you have to chant the chants at the shrines, deal with lots of people who'll be there, and try to discern the beauty of those that you meet, even those who may be hidden by impoliteness and such. If you feel judgments or reactivity at the shrine, you can offer that too: “it's all I have to give.” But in any case, perhaps you'd get caught up in the experience.

Shrines are like hospitals, he said, and Sufi people see themselves as doctors or nurses in their dreams.

It's always a bit startling when the lecturer alludes to the dream you had the night before. It was quite an agreement, my dream unbeknownst to him, and his apparent commentary on it. It’s a common citation in Sufi literature that the teacher intuitively makes such pertinent remarks in apparently random lectures to students.

The next day we drove by bus twelve hours across Morocco, lots
of desert and eucalyptus trees planted in very straight rows. We were in the direction of the Saharah Desert now. Oh yes, and 33 million olive trees I later learned. We arrived in OuJda near the Algerian border in preparation for the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed and the gathering of more than four thousand friends of the Friend at the meeting house of Sheikh Hamza, the Grand Sheikh of Morocco. This is not a title of celebrity nor of academic attainment: it is a reference to the level of attunement with the Tradition of this man, and of the responsibility that comes with that.

The scene we men entered in twos and threes was dramatic:
thousands of men from all over West Africa were laying, standing, and kneeling, chanting in concert with a chorus that sat near the Sheikh. A keen eye could discern that our own Sidi and Hassan Samrhouni were also on the stage, but it took the intrepid (in a strong state of alertness) to walk up that far in some covert fashion, over hundreds of bodies, to chant next to the younger men near the stage who were in various states of ecstasy and perspiration, shifting in rhythmic rocking movements to the cadence. I was, of course, there with the twenty-something's, giving it my best American shot....

When the chants would stop and long lectures in Arabic began,
I'd step out (gingerly and awarely ) over two hundred bodies and wander around quite comfortably in that mild full-moon night, passing a few camping lanterns and vendors selling tea and cookies and oranges. I thought if I didn't return from those dark explorations that it would make for good copy back home..... but I did, and the process continued until three in the morning, when we all fell back on the bus.

The women had the best of it, I'd gathered: they (as always)
were in a separate area in the meeting house with all the other women who’d attended, and they'd chanted with them and been accepted with much love and appreciation.

On days that followed there were visits to more shrines in more
cities, to include one which was really chaotic with people and vendors in the streets amidst preparations for a big celebration. There were goats and and cookies and chickens everywhere for sale, and suddenly I realized I'd been jostled, and that I didn't have my passport or money any more. In a sudden horror I turned to friend Frank and said, "I think I've just lost my passport, and my money!!!" Frank responded immediately, "So! Do you want me to buy you a chicken???"

I was nauseous for the rest of the day until I could search my
hotel room. There I found that the thief had hidden my security pouch under a pile of my dirty clothes. I hadn’t lost any of this stuff... The thief was the state of sleep I’d been in when I left the room. I’d been hobbled by my grasping delusionary mind since I’d noted the “loss.”

So I could go on for you about the three calendar weeks of this
troubling, about visiting the ruins of the first century Roman city
Volubilis, about some crazy-in-God people we met, about the living ancestors of one saint who happened to be at his shrine when we arrived, about taxi drivers and all-night hotel car guards who spoke to me in French about Sufism, about Bilal’s leading chants in Mississippi Delta blues-riff cadence, and about more difficult days visiting graveyards in 116 degree heat, with lots of us getting sick on the local food. But I 'd like to just cite a few more things to give you the gist of what accrued.

After this pilgrimage to a dozen shrines and mosques, after
chanting Allah five thousand times (literally) on the bus in one
stretch, after visiting more sacred art and architecture than I've seen in a dozen books on the topic, I began to notice something in myself.

First, I slowed way down in speed. I was thinking and moving and acting quite deliberately, quietly.

Second, I began to have this very noticeable sensation of what
I labeled “interiority” inside my body, the experience of being very hollow, very empty. It was more like emptiness without a container, in fact, but with a definitive organizing source inside that space. The sensations were odd because they felt like really tangible space, experiential space, nothing that I've known before. They persisted for days after I returned from the trip, when all I could do was listen to Sufi chants around my house, no longer tolerant of the fast-paced music by the String Cheese Incident that I'd been playing before I left.

Third, I found myself with a quiet little smile on my face,
often throughout a day.

Fourth, women began noticing me on the street and in restaurants and airports, and spontaneously smiling.

On the last day of the tour, just as the bus was closing its
doors to leave for the airport, a box arrived. In the box were
thirty-five pieces of green cloth that had been covering the Shrine of Mohammed Ben Aissa (Mohammed, Son of Jesus), the shrine we'd visited where Aissa's ancestors had been present and had chanted with us. They'd later taken the covering off the central part of their inner shrine and divided it into thirty five pieces and given it to us to bring back to America....

What the Sufis address most is separation, negativity, Sidi had
said. Here's a story: a man says to his Sheikh, I want to see Allah.
The Sheikh tells him to eat a lot of fish, don't drink water, go to
sleep. He did, and dreamt all night of oceans, water. When told the dream, the Sheikh said when you have the hunger for something, you see it. The chanting makes you hungry for Allah said Sidi, and the Sheikh works to create that hunger in you, and make it deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

We asked Sidi about one of the chants we did frequently,la il
aha illa-llah, meaning, there is no god but God. Every single relative reality, inclusive of everything and not excluding anything, is the manifestation of the ever present incorruptible unchanging ultimate, he said. This means that we can attain enlightenment, in principle, by doing anything properly. One Rabbi said, how to define the Nameless?
It is not a secret: God is All. What does this mean? That God is
reality, is nothing, is everything, is all thought -- there is nothing
outside God -- nothing else but God.

The Sufi path is an endless path, Sidi said. “It is one hour, one day, all filled with one word: Allah. This retreat was a gift from Allah -- this is not a message -- it is a flame...”

Love, Perk

PS : On July 13th I dreamt that I was visiting Morocco with a group of spiritual seekers and that I wanted us to do a kind of group exercise where we represent all the 99 Names of God in a public display. Some people said that this kind of display is blasphemous, but finally that interpretation was over-ruled as being too concrete, thus we proceeded with the exercise and represented all the names of God.

On July 24th, my Sufi teacher in New Mexico emailed me: “I would like to review the practices you are doing. Do you have a copy of the 99 Names of God?”