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In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching QUOTES

In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching QUOTES

21 " A drop that knows itself, knows the Ocean. (p. 80) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching

22 " All life is one and everything that lives is holy. Holiness is Reality. (p. 80) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching

23 " Worship is taking time from the momentum of our lives to stop and stand before the Face of God for a few minutes. The prostrations in the ritual prayer that are the regular practice of the Islamic tradition, and which Sufis also do, include four to eight cycles of standing, bowing, and prostrating. At most, the ritual prayer takes between five and ten minutes. It‘s a deep and mindful encounter with the Infinite Face of God, not performing a ritual with rote recitations. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said, „If your ritual prayer is not done with presence, it‘s not worship.“ Presence is absolutely essential to the ritual prayer. The whole normative practice of Islam, its basic practices and rituals, are a spiritual training system when properly understood […] One of our friends, a great Sufi teacher, recently said, „Everything is in the prostration.“ When our foreheads touch the ground we enter into that Divine Oblivion. It is oblivion, in the sense that we are so present with the Divine that everything else just disappears. We‘re completely there in the consciousness of the Divine, forehead to the ground, for that moment. It‘s a kind of bliss. (p. 103) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching

24 " Remembrance in its most elementary, tangible form is to chant the names of God. Remembrance is everything. Our destination as spiritually developing human beings is to live our lives in such a way that we are completely within that continual remembrance. That is the world and universe we live in. It surrounds and informs us. It illuminates our perception and softens our hearts. It should also bring us joy and happiness. That is our reality, because looking at life through the distorting eyes of the ego is, at best, a secondhand reality. The word for „remembrance“ in Arabic literally means „to mention,“ yet we translate it as „remembrance.“ When you mention someone, in a way, you‘re remembering the one you are calling to mind. We are remembering our Origin, remembering that we come from God and to God we will return. People sometimes talk about how children have an open channel to the Divine because they just came from God relatively recently. Remembering our Origin is a fundamental truth that we need to call to mind. This is expressed in the hadith „Whoever belongs to God, God will belong to him or her.“ In that sense, if remembrance is deep enough, complete enough, it is the Divine remembering in you. In the state of belonging to God, what you want is not different than what the Divine wants. And „God“ wants what you want; there is then no separate „you“ wanting. There is no duality or personal will pulling in the opposite direction. Rumi calls that being under „the compulsion of love.“(p. 6) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching

25 " There's a transformative power that exists in the nature of Reality. There is something that can almost miraculously transform human beings. We need that. (p. 3) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching

26 " To invite God into a conversation is to open the door of mystery and possibility. It is not about an exchange between two people, with the thought of „I‘ll do this for you, maybe someday you‘ll do it for me.“ It has nothing to do with expectation. It‘s not a quid pro quo. It‘s something entirely of a different order and unpredictable. (p. 3) "

― Kabir Helminski , In the House of Remembering: The Living Tradition of Sufi Teaching