Rafiq's Blog - Posts Tagged "mysticism"

The following excerpt is from my new book, Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my confrontation with the spiritual and cognitive dissonance of our times.

This excerpt describes a moment in the tenth chapter, at the middle of the book, when a spiritual quest begun years earlier comes to a beautiful turning point through a chance meeting with a man straight out of a Taoist tale. If I hadn’t gone with the flow, I might have missed what this flawed wayfarer was going to reveal to me about myself.

Part of my spiritual quest included exploring mysticism with the “wild Sufis” of northern India. In the tenth chapter, I find my way back to the teachings and practices of the Sufis when a young woman on the Baja Peninsula gives me a book of poetry by the Sufi master Hafiz.

Here, toward the chapter’s end, I am living in a camperized 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon – the “whale” of the book’s title – when those teachings find their sudden expression in me. And I am both surprised and humbled.

Excerpt

By New Year’s Eve everyone in our group had moved on. Some north, most south. I had editing work to finish so I stayed. When the propane tank for my fridge and stove ran dry, I used bags of ice to cool my food and a Coleman burner to cook it. The nearest filling station was a hundred kilometres away.

Then one day a Mexican family came to the beach in a beat-up Volkswagen bus. Its windshield was cracked all the way across, it had no hubcaps or taillight covers, the sun visors were gone, and its signal lights didn’t work. But it ran fine. The father said that they were headed north to Guerrero Negro, but first he had to stop at a junk lot off the highway. I’d driven past it. A graveyard of Volkswagens, boats, and motorbikes.

I went along. I wanted to see if I could add a valve to my propane line so that I could bypass the tank in the van and use a portable one. Something that I could fill in town. We pulled into the yard and were met by a squat, tattooed, mean-looking German. The father asked about the parts he needed. He wanted them cheap. “I’m no American,” he said. “Look at me. Look at my kids.” His three shirtless boys were watching us through the side window of the bus.

The German held one eye open with his grease-blackened fingers. “Do you see anyone in here who cares?” he shouted. Then he went around the yard and gathered up all the stuff. He even took a windshield out of a gutted blue and white bus. And he let the whole lot go for five hundred pesos. Less than fifty bucks. The guy had a heart after all. He said that he would help me with the propane valve, change my oil, and rotate my tires. I just had to come back next week.

When I saw the German again, he came with me to Mulegé to get an oil filter and the parts for the propane refit. I needed him to speak Spanish at the hardware store. As payment for installing the valve, he asked me to buy him dinner. He was starving. As he devoured his southern-fried steak with mashed potatoes in a pool of gravy, he told me his story.

He was an ex-con doing time on the Baja to avoid a life sentence back home. He didn’t say for what, only that he’d had his first run-in with the law when he was sixteen and working as a doorman at a brothel in Hamburg. One night at closing time a man who didn’t want to leave threw him against a wall. The German lunged at the towering brute and clamped onto the guy’s crotch with his teeth until blood was running down his face. When the guy buckled in two he clobbered him in the head without having to reach up.

That was the day he learned how to fight the big ones. The first thing he did whenever he got put in the joint was take on the biggest guy he saw. He would hammer him in the balls, wait for him to come down, and then beat him with the frightened fury of a small man. He said that people always left him alone after that. I wondered what I was doing with this guy.

We went back to the junk lot and he worked on the propane line until after sundown. He was bruised up because his chopper had fallen over on him without anyone around to lift it off. He was lying on his back in the gravel grunting in pain. He had to work by flashlight but he got the bypass line put in. I had propane again.

I came back a few days later so that he could rotate the tires. He was cranking off the lug nuts on one of the wheels when I saw that his arm was scarred. The tattoos were melted together. “What happened there?” I asked.

“Barbecued,” he said. A drunk in a pick-up truck had pulled into the road and cut him off while he was on his chopper. He was left knocked out in the ditch with his arm under the hot exhaust pipe while the drunk sped off to find “witnesses” that he could pay to lie for him. A nurse at the hospital said that she could see the driver was liquored up but the German told her to forget it. He saved the drunk from jail so that the guy could pay for the damages to the bike.

But the German needed parts. So he asked his friends in California to deliver some stolen goods to the drunk at his house back in the United States. All the guy needed to do was mail them south. But he never did.

“Now the motherfucker’s dead,” the German said. His eyes grew wide. “It’s not for nothing I’m an ex-biker. I phoned up there and told them to kill the son of a bitch.” He rolled over in the dirt to adjust the jack. “Was it the right thing?” he asked. “I think yes.”

I was talking to a murderer. He was confessing to me. Asking for absolution. “You should’ve let him live,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“So he could’ve seen what a prick he was,” I said.

“If he didn’t know it already, he was never going to,” he said.

I watched the German sweating there on his back in the gravel and ground-up seashells of what was once an ocean floor. Like he was lying at the bottom of the world. And all I felt was forgiveness. Love.

I recalled what an American man had said to me in Nizamuddin. How the important thing was to choose one path and follow it to the end. At the time, I’d scoffed. That would be like reading only one philosopher. I’d forgotten what the Hindu thinker had said about all religions being a finger pointing at the same thing. The unifying, indwelling quality of God. I felt like I’d followed the path of Sufism to its end. Love for all in All. And I’d found my heart again.

Below are two excerpts from my book Days of Shock, Days of Wonder: The 9/11 Age, the Ways of the Mystics, and One Man’s Escape from Babylon in the Belly of a Whale, a memoir about my spiritual travels and activist journey.

As a traveller, I have discovered that when we step out of the routines of our lives, three significant things happen.

One, we become an outlaw, sleeping where we shouldn’t and trampling on the bylaws put in place for the sedentary. Two, we become fearless in the face of the many obstacles that arise between ourselves and the basic necessities of life. And three, we become aware of something almost mystical guiding the course of our journeys.

As the following passages illustrate, suggestions of this third phenomenon are most often seen in the “coincidences” that accumulate as we travel.

At the beginning of the first excerpt, I have just arrived in New Delhi with the intention of meeting a Sufi or Hindu guru. I wanted to experience a mystical religion up close. And being a filmmaker, I’d brought along my video camera, hoping to make a documentary.

But what were the odds of finding such a person? Like a Taoist, I prefer not to make plans. I just let the current push me along. So I decided not to look for this mystic or to tell anyone why I was in India. I would simply show up in New Delhi, get a room at an ashram, and wait to see what happened.

Excerpt 1

On Monday I had jetlag. I was in bed at three-thirty in the afternoon. Parrots were squawking outside my window and keeping me awake. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears. The pillow slip was spotted with the blood of those I’d managed to kill. The curtain at the balcony billowed into the room. Finally a breeze. An inner dialogue started:

“Get up.”

“I’m tired.”

“Get up or you won’t sleep tonight.”

“I’ll get up for dinner.”

“Get up now.”

“And do what?”

“Get up and walk out of this room.”

“And go where?”

“Get up!”

I got up and left my room. I walked to the staircase and went down to the next floor. A door to one of the rooms swung open. It was the German musician I’d met in the dining room. He spent half the year in Europe giving concerts and half in New Delhi with his tambura teacher. He was allowed to live at the ashram because his study of sacred music counted as a spiritual quest. He asked me if I wanted to go to a concert.

“When are you leaving?”

“Now,” he said. He just had to check about a taxi.

For forty-five minutes we careened through the din, heat, and smog of New Delhi at rush hour. Finally we stopped at the arched gateway of a centuries-old Muslim neighbourhood called Nizamuddin. In its maze of streets we found our way to the shrine of Inayat Khan. The saint who’d brought Sufism to the West. Pilgrims from Europe and America were there to mark his death. That was why there was a concert.

My German friend concluded upon sight that the American guy running the show was a spiritual fraud. I was amused by the various pieces of Indian garb the pilgrims were wearing. Scarves and chunky necklaces. Ornate rings on fingers and toes. Wise beards on young faces. But the vibe was mostly good. There was some love in the place. I made friends with an American who’d been in India for weeks. Peter. He was on the verge of sporting a wise beard himself.

Excerpt 2

The next three days I went back to Nizamuddin and walked its narrow streets. I filmed the food vendors sweating over open grills. The families who lived in the recycling yard and sorted the waste. The women who washed their clothes at the neighbourhood water pipe. Muslim tombs and gravestones rose up out of the pavement in the alleyways. Traces of Islam’s hold in northern India since the twelfth century. Children followed me wherever I went. I turned the camera’s viewfinder around so that they could see themselves. They grinned and mugged as they jostled with each other for a spot in front of my lens.

Each night I went to the shrine of Inayat Khan for food and music. On Friday Peter said that the next day he was going to visit a Sufi babah in Nizamuddin. He asked me if I wanted to come. We were in the street outside the shrine and about to leave for the night.

“Meet me here,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Eight-thirty.”

“Right here,” I said. “No matter what.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be here.”

“I want to meet this babah,” I said.

It was the end of the rainy season. On Saturday a storm was lashing the city. When I got to the shrine the doors were locked. There was no one around. I waited ten minutes. Then Peter came out of the downpour. We ran to the end of the street. There it was. The babah’s khanqah. Like an ashram but curbside. Just an enclosed room with a cement pallet out front. It was next to the water pipe where I’d been filming. But I hadn’t seen it.

Inside were at least twenty men crammed shoulder to shoulder. They were sitting cross-legged on thin carpets. Their brown faces bobbed. Their bodies swayed. Lilting sounds rose from their throats. They were chanting the many names of Allah. A practice called zikr. We each found a space on the floor and squeezed in. The babah lit a chillum. Hash smoke billowed into the air above our heads. He placed a hand on his heart and gave the chillum to Peter, who smoked and passed it along. It got to me. Using it was tricky. The clay pipe got hot. You had to keep it straight up and down without burning your fingers. But the babah was patient. He smiled and held it for me.

I closed my eyes and fell in with the chanting. Everything began to spin. Even the cells beneath my scalp were whirling round my head. But at my centre all was still. My consciousness had merged with a vaster consciousness. A small room had opened into a larger one. As if there was no end to the well of mind. Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” The house of God was mind itself. And I was there. The babah handed me a drum. All I knew was the four-beat rhythm of Indigenous ceremony. I banged away. He smiled. Straight rows of small white teeth sparkled in his dark face.

By the time we left the khanqah, I’d missed the ashram’s eleven o’clock curfew. There’d be no one at the gate to let me in. I decided to go to Peter’s hotel on the other side of Nizamuddin. It was still raining and water was rushing through the streets like a river. We got soaked to the knees. But the hotel wouldn’t let me stay. Not even in his room. Everyone had to sign in with a passport and mine was at the ashram.

I only had one option. I went back out into the downpour and retraced my steps until I was at the khanqah again. The front of the pallet was deserted. Torn plastic tarps hung overhead, twisting in the wind. In the roofed area outside the door two men were asleep against the farthest wall. Wrapped in blankets. I was wet to the bone. I had no choice but to knock. After a moment I heard a chain rattling through the handles on the other side. The door opened a foot. A Sufi with frizzy hair looked out at me. On his head was a plastic takeout container made to look like a woven basket. It was green. He’d had it on his head all night instead of a Muslim skullcap.

He smiled. “Come, come,” he said. I stepped into the room. Rows of sleeping men covered the floor. Three of them shifted closer together to give me a spot. The babah handed me a blanket from a trunk. It was new and still sealed in plastic. One of the men began chaining the door shut. I’d heard of bandits disguising themselves as Sufis and duping foreigners into spending the night. While the visitors slept the impostors slit their throats and fled with their cash and cellphones. The guy who was chaining up the door saw me watching him. He frowned and pointed outside. “Bad man coming,” he said. But I wasn’t worried. This was a den of devotees, not a den of thieves.

In the morning I went back to the ashram. It was Sunday again. Seven days since I’d arrived. My time was up and I had to go. I got my backpack and returned to the khanqah. I started living with Babah Mubarak Ali Shah and his bacha. His spiritual children. Mostly orphaned boys and homeless men. After a week in India I’d met the follower of a mystical religion. What I’d wanted to find had found me.