The Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship
Online Library
God is Enough
A chapter from the newly published book, Enough for a Million Years.
God's power is the truth of God. This truth cannot be
destroyed by anything. This power is God's beauty. It is His qualities, His
justice, and His peacefulness. It is the love and compassion He bestows without
ego, without the 'I'. Selflessly, He gives His grace to all, keeping nothing for
Himself. This is the power which is bestowed upon all creation as tolerance,
patience, peacefulness, and compassion. It has no anger. It is that which
provides all nourishment and sustenance to each of the creations in keeping with
its specific needs and wants.
Our duty, our sole duty, is to take the divine power of God, the three thousand divine qualities, within ourselves. We must train ourselves, to do this. If you can train a tiger and sharpen its intellect, you may be able to teach it not to attack and kill other lives. If you can train it to eat nothing other than the food it is given, then it will no longer leap on other creatures and kill them. Similarly, if we begin to imbibe only God's qualities, we will not cause harm to any of His creations. But first we must learn these qualities and bring them into ourselves before we can teach them to others.
God has no form. He has no shadow. There is nothing comparable to Him. He has neither wife nor child. He is neither darkness nor light. He is not like the sun, or the moon, or the stars. God is one power, a power that is able to control and subdue all the other powers. This power is intimately mixed within all things, from the single atom to all the universes. It casts no shadow, needs no aid, owns nothing. It is the one who is alone, the Original One. It is a point, a power, which has neither beginning nor end. There is no language for it, nor does it have a religion. It has no race or color, no black or white. It is a power, a point existing within every creation.
God has no mouth or tongue to speak, yet through our mouth that power is speaking. It has no eyes, yet it is observing through our eyes. It has no ears, yet it replies to the sounds our ears hear. It has no nose, but it senses fragrance through our sense of smell. This power has no hands, but it uses our hands as an agency for giving and receiving. It has no feet or legs, but it walks throughout all the universes. Such is this power.
The mind is incapable of seeing this power. The mind, which is the essence of the elements (earth, fire, water, air and ether), takes a demonic form. It takes an illusory form, the form of spirits and vapors, the form of desire. Mind and desire cannot see God or pray to Him, for that treasure transcends mind and desire. Only wisdom can understand that treasure. To see it and realize it, we have to first understand ourselves. If we acquire His qualities within ourselves, they will create a different form within us, a form of His beauty. Then we will realize God. Although God can never be seen, His beauty can be seen in His qualities, and the light radiating from those qualities is His power. That is God.
We must try to develop that form within us. If we can be as nothing, then it will be His qualities that perform all actions. If we develop those qualities within, that form will come and there will be no more 'I'. The power that will come from that inner form is God. Whoever has become nothing and taken on those qualities and that beauty and that form will be the prince of God, the son - the heir to the kingdom of God. Our duty is to develop those qualities within so that we can teach wisdom through them.
There are seven states of wisdom, or consciousness: feeling, awareness, intellect, assessment, wisdom, divine analytical wisdom, and divine luminous wisdom. It is with these seven states of consciousness that one must see God. God cannot be seen through science or intellectual learning, nor can He be seen through religion, sects, or languages, nor through the prayers that come from the mind or from our desires.
Only God can see God. If only God can see God, then what is God? God is His
qualities. Those divine qualities are what are called 'God'. When the form of
His qualities develops within a person, then God is there. God is
within.
- M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen
September 11, 1973