Mindfulness is a practice which originated from the Buddhist concept of Sati, and it has been developed as a meditation technique in both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. Mindfulness has been popularised in the West for the last several decades as a way to overcome the stress and the pressures of modern life and to enhance one's attention and concentration in dealing with daily tasks. It has also been adopted now by many health practitioners, including the National Health Service in the UK, which actively promotes mindfulness as a practice that is beneficial to our mental health.
What is mindfulness? Imagine that you are seeing a friend that you have known for a long time. You usually get together for a cup of coffee and share your life challenges and events and seek each other's advice. You have been doing this for a long time and you have always had positive feedback and a pleasant outcome after seeing your friend. However, on this particular occasion, your friend acts very differently, for no apparent reason. Instead of listening sympathetically to your story, he takes a completely negative approach towards you. He harshly rebukes you for your actions and calls you 'very stupid.' Your immediate reaction is to feel hurt and become angry. There are two ways you can now deal with this situation. One way is to let your hurt and anger overwhelm you and get swept away by negative feelings and emotions. You will then become defensive, perhaps raise your voice, and accuse your friend of total ignorance of the situation. Your anger has taken over and you have no control of the situation. The other approach is to acknowledge the negative emotions that arise in you as a result of your friend's harsh words, but not cling onto them. As hard as it is, you try not to take his rebukes personally. You detach yourself from the emotions, you take a deep breath, and you focus your attention on the present situation and your friend. Since you care deeply about your friend, you engage in a calm dialogue with your friend to understand his reasons for saying such harsh words. You show genuine empathy and understanding in the face of your friend's harsh words. The second approach is acting in accordance with the principle of mindfulness.
A simple characterisation of mindfulness would be paying attention to the contents of one's consciousness without identifying them as belonging to oneself, clinging on to them, or giving any value to them. You simply notice the content of your consciousness as an impartial observer. The consequence of such awareness is to begin to live in the present moment. Most people live unhappy lives because they pay no attention to the present moment; instead, they focus on the future or the past, which is futile. The core insight of mindfulness is to point out that reality is always now, the present moment, and the way to focus on the present moment is to become aware of your thoughts and feelings at any given point in time.
Being mindful does not mean to think about your experiences, but rather to experience what you experience in any given moment more clearly. It is to be aware of the content of your awareness. If you are angry, you take the step of being aware of your anger without identifying with it or following it down the path to reaction. Once you pay attention to the emotion itself in a dispassionate manner, the emotion soon disappears and will be replaced by another emotion or thought. You simply observe one thought, emotion, or sensation being replaced by another. It is a shift in our awareness. We go from performing various tasks in life on automatic pilot, caught in an eddy of our emotions with no awareness of what is happening, to standing back and observing our thoughts, emotions, feelings and body sensations without attaching any value or story to them. Mindfulness also requires that we observe the quality of our experience at every moment whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, eventually letting go of the perception that there is an 'I' or ego who is 'observing' such experiences.
Mindfulness is a skill which can be perfected by years of practice, and there are meditation techniques that are designed to enhance this skill in a practitioner. Here is one. Find a quiet place and sit either crossed legged or in a chair. Shut your eyes and breathe normally. Pay attention to each inhale and exhale of your breath. Be aware of the sensation of each breath and stay focused on your breath. When thoughts arise in your consciousness, observe each thought without identifying with it, and without being carried away by it. As thoughts or emotions appear and disappear, continue to be focused on your breath. This sounds easy, but most people report that they are distracted by their thoughts immediately and find themselves thinking with their eyes shut.
This way of characterising mindfulness is of course neutral as to its ultimate objective. You can say the main aim of mindfulness in a secular sense is overcoming stress or achieving mental health. Defined this way, it is completely neutral vis-à-vis our moral or spiritual objectives. To be mindful in the sense explained above, does not presuppose that we take a moral stance or adopt a spiritual goal. A politician can practice mindfulness with the aim of promoting himself to be elected as a member of a parliament or as an effective way to overcome the stress associated with dealing with the opposition. A salesperson can practice mindfulness to enhance a marketing strategy and increase her profits. Mindfulness is useful to a surgeon while performing a very complex operation on a patient to remain focused and present. A corporation can actively promote and teach mindfulness with the sole purpose of increasing the productivity of its employees, as people can work better if they are taught how to deal with stress.
It is important to realize that the practice of mindfulness was taught by the Buddha to his followers to overcome greed, delusion and egotistical desires in order to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment is to experience the illusory nature of the self and thereby achieve liberation from the self. Ultimately, it is to experience a limitless awareness not as a separate entity but as one with the whole cosmos. This may correspond to the same concepts in Sufism which are Annihilation of Self (Fana) and Subsistence in God (Baqa). One first dies to oneself in order to come to 'life' in God. Once the subsistence takes place, one's awareness becomes all-encompassing and limitless. It is important to remind ourselves that such notions as 'being one with the cosmos' or 'subsistence in God' are purely experiential both in Buddhism and Sufism and cannot be further analysed or understood by rational discourse.
There is no doubt that the practice of mindfulness can help us to be more attentive to our emotions and thoughts and help us let go of them in our pursuit of peace of mind. But without having a spiritual objective and the right intention from the beginning, the practice of mindfulness remains merely a skill. Like driving, it can be used to transport one to another place or used to smuggle goods for profit. Again, what is important in the practice of mindfulness is our initial intention and objective in embarking on this practice. Is it for the purpose of overcoming greed, egotistical desires and self-delusion, or is it for the purpose of eliminating stress? Or is it to achieve more self-control so we can use our time more effectively to achieve worldly gains?
Whether our objective for practicing mindfulness is to reduce stress in our lives or to be a better human being by cultivating compassion and kindness in ourselves, the approach taken is a mental approach based on paying attention and focusing on the content of consciousness at any given moment. This makes it very accessible to everyone and quite comprehensible to a Western audience who are accustomed to approaching spirituality in a rational or conceptual way. It makes it possible to rationalize one's approach to spirituality or 'understand' things at a certain level before embarking on such a path.
What can we say about the place of mindfulness in Sufism? If you look up the definition of Sufism, you will see that it ranges from 'mystical dimension of Islam,' to 'ecstatic experience of divine through whirling and chanting' and further still to 'a mystical path with its aim to be one with the Reality with the aid of love and loving-kindness.' In my experience, most people in the West are attracted to Sufism by reading books about Sufism, and especially finding the love poetry very elevating and inspiring. But the situation is different in the Middle East, the birthplace of Sufism.
To be sure, in Sufism, the practice of remembering God's name (zekr) is very much similar to the practice of meditative mindfulness discussed above. Here, the Sufi remembers God's name through breathing with the aim of leaving the ego behind and purifying him/herself through contemplation of the divine attributes. However, as has been pointed out by many Sufis, at first the Sufi practice of meditation is an exercise in duality. There are still two separate entities in the act of remembrance: the rememberer and the remembered. The aim of Sufism, on the other hand, is to reach the state of Oneness.
How then is the state of Oneness possible? Like mindful meditation in Buddhism, the Sufi practice of zekr (remembrance of God) is for the most part a gradual liberation from the self. The more one performs and gives oneself over to the zekr, the more one cultivates in oneself the divine attributes and at the same time diminishes one's ego (nafs). Ultimately one's ego disappears completely in God. The analogy which is used to describe this process is the drop and the ocean. The drop is transported in many different stages from a cloud, a stream, and a river to ultimately reach the ocean. Once the drop is unified with the ocean, it becomes the ocean and there is no trace of its being a drop.
The question that could be asked at this point is whether there is a way or path other than the practice of meditative mindfulness that can lead us to the experience of Oneness and the realization of the illusory nature of the self. There are non-dualistic approaches both in Buddhism and Sufism which bypass the practice of mindfulness to bring on awareness of Oneness and the illusory nature of the self at any given moment. In certain schools of Buddhism, such as Zen, there is the practice of non-duality in which a sudden realization of the illusory nature of ego becomes manifest. Teachings in Zen Buddhism are most commonly communicated directly from master to pupil.
There is, in fact, a similar direct approach in Sufism which is not solely based on the Sufi tradition of meditation or zekr, but which is based on direct experience of the divine through love of one's spiritual guide. Although Sufism is usually defined as purification and liberation of the self through divine love, the Sufis concluded that since God transcends the world and even our imagination, it is impossible to love something which is completely incomprehensible. Love requires something tangible, something we can form an image of and direct our attention to. Hence, the development of love towards one's spiritual guide serves as a ladder to reach the divine.
However, the love of one's spiritual guide is just the starting point for the seeker in Sufism. As he or she learns to love through the love of the spiritual guide, the seeker gradually learns, with the guide's help, to direct such love to everybody and everything, as all are a manifestation of the divine. It is of course the task of the spiritual guide to remove him/herself as the ultimate object of love and introduce the seeker to the domain of divine love.
My experience while growing up in Iran in a Sufi environment was that people who came to Sufism were not attracted to Sufism through books or reading about Sufism. To be sure most Persian poetry has a Sufi connotation and Iranians, or at least the majority of them, know a few lines of Hafez or Rumi and recite these lines sometimes without a true understanding of its Sufi meaning. Sufi poetry is part of Persian culture but knowing the poetry does not for the most part cause or motivate people to seek the truths expounded by such lines.
There are, of course, others like me who were exposed to Sufism because of a family connection, but, by and large, people become attracted to Sufism because they see someone who claims to be a Sufi or a Sufi master. What attracts most people to Sufism in the East is the need to express love and devotion to another person in a religious setting. First hand exposure to that kind of love and devotion is the key point in the spread of Sufism in the East. The paradigm example of this approach to Sufism, is the profound spiritual transformation experienced by Rumi (13th century Sufi and poet) upon his encounter with Shams-e Tabrizi. At the time of the encounter with Shams, Rumi was a renowned theologian and spiritual guide to many, but his meeting with Shams had such a profound effect on him that he gave up everything for the love of Shams. As he recounts in one of his poems:
I was dead, I became alive, I was weeping but I am laughing now, The fortune of love arrived, and I became everlasting fortune.
He told me that you are not crazy, you are not worthy of this abode, I went away and became crazy, all tied up in chains for him.
He said you are the candle and the qiblah of this assembly I am not a candle, I am not a qiblah, I became scattered smoke for him.
He said you are the master and the guide of so many people, I am not a master, I am not a guide, I only listen to your command.
Perhaps this is the main cultural difference between the East and the West. In the West, spirituality and religion are largely practiced in special places such as churches and synagogues, or through retreats and seminars. Society is by and large secular, by design. You do not encounter religion when you shop at your local supermarket. In the East, at least in the Middle East where I grew up, one encounters religious discourse and spiritual ideas at every corner and it is part of the fabric of the society. It is also common for people to seek spiritual guides in a variety of different places and devote themselves to them once they find the right person. This perhaps explains why the idea of love and devotion to a spiritual guide is more readily accepted in the Middle East than in the West.
Growing up in Iran, I mostly saw love and devotion towards my father (Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Order 1953–2008) as a spiritual guide. If asked about the reasons for embarking on the Sufi path, people's replies were numerous and diverse. But what kept disciples going was mainly the love and devotion they felt towards my father.
Although love and devotion can provide sufficient nourishment for people who come to Sufism by being attracted to a spiritual guide, this by no means implies that such people have a better 'understanding' of Sufism than the people who pursue Sufism methodically by way of reading books, joining a Sufi group and participating in group meditation. With a change in their circumstances, such love can change almost immediately to indifference and sometimes anger. Embarking on a spiritual path based on devotion and love for another human being has its own dangers and pitfalls. The danger for the spiritual aspirant is that he or she may have unrealistic or worldly expectations from the spiritual guide. And once these expectations are not fulfilled, he or she is disillusioned and the love may turn into animosity and rejection.
The risk for the spiritual guide is the possibility of succumbing to charlatanism and creating a cult of individual worship if they do not recognise that people's love towards them reflects the need for a transcendent experience in this world. It could be argued that any love and devotion tainted by worldly desires and attachments is not true spiritual love and so these people were not on the Sufi path from the beginning. Perhaps what is required is an unconditional and reciprocal love between both the spiritual seeker and the spiritual guide in Sufism. What is meant by unconditional love is a love which is not tainted by personal ambitions or material gain. Such love and devotion by itself is sufficient to achieve the main objective of mindfulness effortlessly. That is, to live in the present moment and experience Oneness, even perhaps for just a very short time.
There is a story in Rumi's Mathnawi which is an illustration of liberation from self by way of love of another.
A lover knocked at the door of the beloved one day,
His beloved asked "Who is at the door?"
He replied, "It is me." "Go away", the beloved scolded the lover,
"My place is not the abode of raw seekers.
The raw seeker can only become ripe by the fire of separation,
The lover should be cooked in the fire of love to be liberated from duality."
The lover went away for a year and
The poor wretched soul burned in the fire of love.
When he returned, he knocked at the beloved's door again with fear.
He was careful not to utter any crude or discourteous word.
The beloved asked again who was at the door.
"You are at the door, the usurper of hearts", the lover responded.
"Since you are me, come inside,
There is no room for two 'I's in this house."
In Sufism there can be an immediate and sudden realization of Oneness through love. But as everyone knows, love —or more importantly unconditional love—is not a state that one can manufacture in oneself by practice. It comes to us suddenly out of nowhere and at times when we are not even looking for it or expecting it. So, until love arrives, the practice of meditative mindfulness can be a sure way to cultivate divine qualities and to ultimately shatter the illusion of the self to become selfless.
Mindfulness is a practice which originated from the Buddhist concept of Sati, and it has been developed as a meditation technique in both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. Mindfulness has been popularised in the West for the last several decades as a way to overcome the stress and the pressures of modern life and to enhance one's attention and concentration in dealing with daily tasks. It has also been adopted now by many health practitioners, including the National Health Service in the UK, which actively promotes mindfulness as a practice that is beneficial to our mental health.
What is mindfulness? Imagine that you are seeing a friend that you have known for a long time. You usually get together for a cup of coffee and share your life challenges and events and seek each other's advice. You have been doing this for a long time and you have always had positive feedback and a pleasant outcome after seeing your friend. However, on this particular occasion, your friend acts very differently, for no apparent reason. Instead of listening sympathetically to your story, he takes a completely negative approach towards you. He harshly rebukes you for your actions and calls you 'very stupid.' Your immediate reaction is to feel hurt and become angry. There are two ways you can now deal with this situation. One way is to let your hurt and anger overwhelm you and get swept away by negative feelings and emotions. You will then become defensive, perhaps raise your voice, and accuse your friend of total ignorance of the situation. Your anger has taken over and you have no control of the situation. The other approach is to acknowledge the negative emotions that arise in you as a result of your friend's harsh words, but not cling onto them. As hard as it is, you try not to take his rebukes personally. You detach yourself from the emotions, you take a deep breath, and you focus your attention on the present situation and your friend. Since you care deeply about your friend, you engage in a calm dialogue with your friend to understand his reasons for saying such harsh words. You show genuine empathy and understanding in the face of your friend's harsh words. The second approach is acting in accordance with the principle of mindfulness.
A simple characterisation of mindfulness would be paying attention to the contents of one's consciousness without identifying them as belonging to oneself, clinging on to them, or giving any value to them. You simply notice the content of your consciousness as an impartial observer. The consequence of such awareness is to begin to live in the present moment. Most people live unhappy lives because they pay no attention to the present moment; instead, they focus on the future or the past, which is futile. The core insight of mindfulness is to point out that reality is always now, the present moment, and the way to focus on the present moment is to become aware of your thoughts and feelings at any given point in time.
Being mindful does not mean to think about your experiences, but rather to experience what you experience in any given moment more clearly. It is to be aware of the content of your awareness. If you are angry, you take the step of being aware of your anger without identifying with it or following it down the path to reaction. Once you pay attention to the emotion itself in a dispassionate manner, the emotion soon disappears and will be replaced by another emotion or thought. You simply observe one thought, emotion, or sensation being replaced by another. It is a shift in our awareness. We go from performing various tasks in life on automatic pilot, caught in an eddy of our emotions with no awareness of what is happening, to standing back and observing our thoughts, emotions, feelings and body sensations without attaching any value or story to them. Mindfulness also requires that we observe the quality of our experience at every moment whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, eventually letting go of the perception that there is an 'I' or ego who is 'observing' such experiences.
Mindfulness is a skill which can be perfected by years of practice, and there are meditation techniques that are designed to enhance this skill in a practitioner. Here is one. Find a quiet place and sit either crossed legged or in a chair. Shut your eyes and breathe normally. Pay attention to each inhale and exhale of your breath. Be aware of the sensation of each breath and stay focused on your breath. When thoughts arise in your consciousness, observe each thought without identifying with it, and without being carried away by it. As thoughts or emotions appear and disappear, continue to be focused on your breath. This sounds easy, but most people report that they are distracted by their thoughts immediately and find themselves thinking with their eyes shut.
This way of characterising mindfulness is of course neutral as to its ultimate objective. You can say the main aim of mindfulness in a secular sense is overcoming stress or achieving mental health. Defined this way, it is completely neutral vis-à-vis our moral or spiritual objectives. To be mindful in the sense explained above, does not presuppose that we take a moral stance or adopt a spiritual goal. A politician can practice mindfulness with the aim of promoting himself to be elected as a member of a parliament or as an effective way to overcome the stress associated with dealing with the opposition. A salesperson can practice mindfulness to enhance a marketing strategy and increase her profits. Mindfulness is useful to a surgeon while performing a very complex operation on a patient to remain focused and present. A corporation can actively promote and teach mindfulness with the sole purpose of increasing the productivity of its employees, as people can work better if they are taught how to deal with stress.
It is important to realize that the practice of mindfulness was taught by the Buddha to his followers to overcome greed, delusion and egotistical desires in order to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment is to experience the illusory nature of the self and thereby achieve liberation from the self. Ultimately, it is to experience a limitless awareness not as a separate entity but as one with the whole cosmos. This may correspond to the same concepts in Sufism which are Annihilation of Self (Fana) and Subsistence in God (Baqa). One first dies to oneself in order to come to 'life' in God. Once the subsistence takes place, one's awareness becomes all-encompassing and limitless. It is important to remind ourselves that such notions as 'being one with the cosmos' or 'subsistence in God' are purely experiential both in Buddhism and Sufism and cannot be further analysed or understood by rational discourse.
There is no doubt that the practice of mindfulness can help us to be more attentive to our emotions and thoughts and help us let go of them in our pursuit of peace of mind. But without having a spiritual objective and the right intention from the beginning, the practice of mindfulness remains merely a skill. Like driving, it can be used to transport one to another place or used to smuggle goods for profit. Again, what is important in the practice of mindfulness is our initial intention and objective in embarking on this practice. Is it for the purpose of overcoming greed, egotistical desires and self-delusion, or is it for the purpose of eliminating stress? Or is it to achieve more self-control so we can use our time more effectively to achieve worldly gains?
Whether our objective for practicing mindfulness is to reduce stress in our lives or to be a better human being by cultivating compassion and kindness in ourselves, the approach taken is a mental approach based on paying attention and focusing on the content of consciousness at any given moment. This makes it very accessible to everyone and quite comprehensible to a Western audience who are accustomed to approaching spirituality in a rational or conceptual way. It makes it possible to rationalize one's approach to spirituality or 'understand' things at a certain level before embarking on such a path.
What can we say about the place of mindfulness in Sufism? If you look up the definition of Sufism, you will see that it ranges from 'mystical dimension of Islam,' to 'ecstatic experience of divine through whirling and chanting' and further still to 'a mystical path with its aim to be one with the Reality with the aid of love and loving-kindness.' In my experience, most people in the West are attracted to Sufism by reading books about Sufism, and especially finding the love poetry very elevating and inspiring. But the situation is different in the Middle East, the birthplace of Sufism.
To be sure, in Sufism, the practice of remembering God's name (zekr) is very much similar to the practice of meditative mindfulness discussed above. Here, the Sufi remembers God's name through breathing with the aim of leaving the ego behind and purifying him/herself through contemplation of the divine attributes. However, as has been pointed out by many Sufis, at first the Sufi practice of meditation is an exercise in duality. There are still two separate entities in the act of remembrance: the rememberer and the remembered. The aim of Sufism, on the other hand, is to reach the state of Oneness.
How then is the state of Oneness possible? Like mindful meditation in Buddhism, the Sufi practice of zekr (remembrance of God) is for the most part a gradual liberation from the self. The more one performs and gives oneself over to the zekr, the more one cultivates in oneself the divine attributes and at the same time diminishes one's ego (nafs). Ultimately one's ego disappears completely in God. The analogy which is used to describe this process is the drop and the ocean. The drop is transported in many different stages from a cloud, a stream, and a river to ultimately reach the ocean. Once the drop is unified with the ocean, it becomes the ocean and there is no trace of its being a drop.
The question that could be asked at this point is whether there is a way or path other than the practice of meditative mindfulness that can lead us to the experience of Oneness and the realization of the illusory nature of the self. There are non-dualistic approaches both in Buddhism and Sufism which bypass the practice of mindfulness to bring on awareness of Oneness and the illusory nature of the self at any given moment. In certain schools of Buddhism, such as Zen, there is the practice of non-duality in which a sudden realization of the illusory nature of ego becomes manifest. Teachings in Zen Buddhism are most commonly communicated directly from master to pupil.
There is, in fact, a similar direct approach in Sufism which is not solely based on the Sufi tradition of meditation or zekr, but which is based on direct experience of the divine through love of one's spiritual guide. Although Sufism is usually defined as purification and liberation of the self through divine love, the Sufis concluded that since God transcends the world and even our imagination, it is impossible to love something which is completely incomprehensible. Love requires something tangible, something we can form an image of and direct our attention to. Hence, the development of love towards one's spiritual guide serves as a ladder to reach the divine.
However, the love of one's spiritual guide is just the starting point for the seeker in Sufism. As he or she learns to love through the love of the spiritual guide, the seeker gradually learns, with the guide's help, to direct such love to everybody and everything, as all are a manifestation of the divine. It is of course the task of the spiritual guide to remove him/herself as the ultimate object of love and introduce the seeker to the domain of divine love.
My experience while growing up in Iran in a Sufi environment was that people who came to Sufism were not attracted to Sufism through books or reading about Sufism. To be sure most Persian poetry has a Sufi connotation and Iranians, or at least the majority of them, know a few lines of Hafez or Rumi and recite these lines sometimes without a true understanding of its Sufi meaning. Sufi poetry is part of Persian culture but knowing the poetry does not for the most part cause or motivate people to seek the truths expounded by such lines.
There are, of course, others like me who were exposed to Sufism because of a family connection, but, by and large, people become attracted to Sufism because they see someone who claims to be a Sufi or a Sufi master. What attracts most people to Sufism in the East is the need to express love and devotion to another person in a religious setting. First hand exposure to that kind of love and devotion is the key point in the spread of Sufism in the East. The paradigm example of this approach to Sufism, is the profound spiritual transformation experienced by Rumi (13th century Sufi and poet) upon his encounter with Shams-e Tabrizi. At the time of the encounter with Shams, Rumi was a renowned theologian and spiritual guide to many, but his meeting with Shams had such a profound effect on him that he gave up everything for the love of Shams. As he recounts in one of his poems:
I was dead, I became alive, I was weeping but I am laughing now, The fortune of love arrived, and I became everlasting fortune.
He told me that you are not crazy, you are not worthy of this abode, I went away and became crazy, all tied up in chains for him.
He said you are the candle and the qiblah of this assembly I am not a candle, I am not a qiblah, I became scattered smoke for him.
He said you are the master and the guide of so many people, I am not a master, I am not a guide, I only listen to your command.
Perhaps this is the main cultural difference between the East and the West. In the West, spirituality and religion are largely practiced in special places such as churches and synagogues, or through retreats and seminars. Society is by and large secular, by design. You do not encounter religion when you shop at your local supermarket. In the East, at least in the Middle East where I grew up, one encounters religious discourse and spiritual ideas at every corner and it is part of the fabric of the society. It is also common for people to seek spiritual guides in a variety of different places and devote themselves to them once they find the right person. This perhaps explains why the idea of love and devotion to a spiritual guide is more readily accepted in the Middle East than in the West.
Growing up in Iran, I mostly saw love and devotion towards my father (Dr Javad Nurbakhsh, Master of the Nimatullahi Order 1953–2008) as a spiritual guide. If asked about the reasons for embarking on the Sufi path, people's replies were numerous and diverse. But what kept disciples going was mainly the love and devotion they felt towards my father.
Although love and devotion can provide sufficient nourishment for people who come to Sufism by being attracted to a spiritual guide, this by no means implies that such people have a better 'understanding' of Sufism than the people who pursue Sufism methodically by way of reading books, joining a Sufi group and participating in group meditation. With a change in their circumstances, such love can change almost immediately to indifference and sometimes anger. Embarking on a spiritual path based on devotion and love for another human being has its own dangers and pitfalls. The danger for the spiritual aspirant is that he or she may have unrealistic or worldly expectations from the spiritual guide. And once these expectations are not fulfilled, he or she is disillusioned and the love may turn into animosity and rejection.
The risk for the spiritual guide is the possibility of succumbing to charlatanism and creating a cult of individual worship if they do not recognise that people's love towards them reflects the need for a transcendent experience in this world. It could be argued that any love and devotion tainted by worldly desires and attachments is not true spiritual love and so these people were not on the Sufi path from the beginning. Perhaps what is required is an unconditional and reciprocal love between both the spiritual seeker and the spiritual guide in Sufism. What is meant by unconditional love is a love which is not tainted by personal ambitions or material gain. Such love and devotion by itself is sufficient to achieve the main objective of mindfulness effortlessly. That is, to live in the present moment and experience Oneness, even perhaps for just a very short time.
There is a story in Rumi's Mathnawi which is an illustration of liberation from self by way of love of another.
A lover knocked at the door of the beloved one day,
His beloved asked "Who is at the door?"
He replied, "It is me." "Go away", the beloved scolded the lover,
"My place is not the abode of raw seekers.
The raw seeker can only become ripe by the fire of separation,
The lover should be cooked in the fire of love to be liberated from duality."
The lover went away for a year and
The poor wretched soul burned in the fire of love.
When he returned, he knocked at the beloved's door again with fear.
He was careful not to utter any crude or discourteous word.
The beloved asked again who was at the door.
"You are at the door, the usurper of hearts", the lover responded.
"Since you are me, come inside,
There is no room for two 'I's in this house."
In Sufism there can be an immediate and sudden realization of Oneness through love. But as everyone knows, love —or more importantly unconditional love—is not a state that one can manufacture in oneself by practice. It comes to us suddenly out of nowhere and at times when we are not even looking for it or expecting it. So, until love arrives, the practice of meditative mindfulness can be a sure way to cultivate divine qualities and to ultimately shatter the illusion of the self to become selfless.
