Ep. 1 - The Path of Radical Love

Meditation practice doesn't just help us find more calm, openness, and perspective. It can also bring us face-to-face with fear, anger, shame, and the parts of ourselves we would rather not see. Learning to meet both the light and the shadow is essential for deepening our practice, especially for anyone who hopes to become a meditation teacher. Join renowned Buddhist teachers, David Nicktern, and Andrew Hollachack for a free online talk on Wednesday, September 16th at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Together, they'll explore why transformation requires more than focusing only on the light. How avoiding our shadow can keep us stuck and what becomes possible when we learn to meet our darkness with awareness. You'll also learn about Dharma Moon's 100-hour mindfulness meditation teacher training and have a chance to meet the teaching team. Ask questions and find out whether the program is right for you. Visit DharmaMoon.com/light to learn more and reserve your spot for the free event on Wednesday, September 16th. Welcome to the Sufi Heart Podcast with Omid Safi featuring teachings and stories from the wisdom of the Islamic tradition. Omid invites you to a meditation on the transformative power of love and recalling the necessity of healing our own hearts through healing the world. If you'd like to support Omid's podcast, please visit BeHearNowNetwork.com/omid. Hello, my name is Omid Safi. It is a real joy to have you with us and I'm delighted to get to share these teachings of love and indeed radical love with you in this space. The teachings that we're going to be talking about primarily come from the Sufi tradition. That tradition that is at the heart of the Islamic path and is probably best known through poets like Rumi and we oftentimes end up treating Rumi like a one-off as this giant who stands by himself and I am going to try to remind us that there's this beautiful and wide tradition that produces a Rumi and that this tradition goes back centuries before him and it extends all the way to our own time today. It is important to keep in mind that for these seekers, these beautiful, earnest, luminous souls, love is not just an emotion. Love is not a sentiment, it's not a feeling. For them and for us, love is nothing less than the very unleashing of God onto this realm. God too suffers from a radical love and are very being the cause of creation, the origin, a radical condition, it's a case of love that there was a love which was too great to be contained inside God, unexpressed somehow. It is this love that has brought us here, it is this love that sustains us here and indeed our friends speak of this love as a cosmic current, as this enormous ocean of light that is flowing through everyone and everything and if we could but get over our notion of ourself as a bounded and finite limit itself and discover just how grand and luminous we truly are, then we could re-merge back into this cosmic current of love and return back to God who is at once our origin and our destination. So we're going to be speaking a lot about this love tradition and we're going to be sharing a lot of the beautiful stories and poems and teachings of these wonderful sages. Some of these go back to the very origin of the Sufi tradition. They might go back to stories from the Quran and how they read some of these verses. They might go back to examples from the life of the prophet to the very early luminous beings that we may call Sufis, they may take us back to stories about Rumi and they might even bring us into our own day and age because surely the path of love is not an artifact, it is not something that we have to find in a museum, it is a reality that is all around us, we ourselves are like a fish that is swimming inside this love. If we exist, it is because we are bathed in this ocean of love and perhaps every now and then if we lift up our head and we ask where is the love, why can't I find the love that I'm searching for, it's precisely because we are so immersed in this love that it's invisible to us. We can be pretty sure that whatever language that fish speak, that they don't have a word for ocean because they are in it and the only way that they would know what it's like to have a sense of an ocean is if they were somehow taken out of it. So let us begin with a story and this story comes to us from approximately 800 years ago. It is a story that one of these magnificent mystical sages named Fariddin Atar shares with us. Atar was really important for Rumi, we are told that Rumi met Atar when Rumi was a young child and Atar was already an elderly sage. And as the cool people today might say, game recognizes game, genius recognizes genius and an elderly Atar already saw in this young boy Rumi the sign of who he was to become. In the etiquette, the manners of that day and age, the 13th century personate world, Rumi as a young boy was walking behind his father and his father who was a great mystic in his own right was coming forward to greet Atar. And Atar looked at the father and he looked at the son and he knew that the son Rumi was to be someday a far greater saint than his father would ever be. And he muttered under his own breath to himself, "Look, it's not every day that you get to see an ocean walking behind a lake." And Rumi of course is that ocean. So Atar who gives us so many of these wonderful stories of the sages and the luminous beings that shape the stories that we hear again and again in the Sufi tradition, he talks about a saint who one night has a vision of God in his dream. The dream is of a very momentous occasion, it is a dream of the day of judgement, the day to come when all the souls who have ever been are gathered up before God, before Allah. And in this gathering, God begins by addressing this beautiful and momentous collection of souls. He first tells them who here wishes to have the totality of all the worldly desires and pleasures. Well, that sounds pretty good. All the pleasures and all the desires. So nine out of ten of the people who gathered there raised their hands and they say, "Yep, we sure would like to have the sum total of all the pleasures." And the voice of God comes to them and says, "It is granted on to you." So they get real happy and they leave. Then there's a few of them about a tenth of the people who are left and this time God comes to them and says, "Who here wishes to be spared hellfire?" Well, being spared suffering. that sounds pretty good too. And of the ones who are left, about 90% of them raise their hands. And they say, "Yep, we would love to be spared suffering and torment and pain." And God says to them, "It is granted unto you and they leave." And then of this even smaller group of people who are there, God says, "Who here wishes to have a taste of my heaven but not just any heaven, a heaven that no sight has ever seen and no word has ever described." Well, 90% of those who are left, they raise their hands and they say, "This sounds really good, the highest rank of heaven." Yes, we would love to have that. And this time, God says to them, "It is granted unto you and they leave as well." So then there's just a handful of people. And of course, these are the ones that we've been waiting for. And this time, the voice of God comes thundering at them saying, "I offered you all the earthly pleasures you chose it not. I gave you freedom from suffering and pain and hellfire and you chose it not. I gave you a chance to enter my loftiest of paradise and you chose it not. What are you here for?" And this very small group of people lower their head in humility. And they say, "The one who asks knows better than we do." We did not come for worldly pleasure. We did not come to be free from hellfire and we did not come for paradise. We came for you. And then the voice of God comes to them one last time, but this time through complete tenderness, complete gentleness, and says, "In that case, I am yours." I am yours. These radical lovers that we are going to be spending time with on this podcast, these are people who are after God's own heart. These are people who have an interest in the spiritual path beyond simply pleasure, beyond worldly desire, beyond being spared hellfire or if you prefer different language, suffering. And they're not even in it just to be "safed" to get into heaven. These are the ones who desire to see the face of God. And we are told that all of us are going to see the face of God someday, but the radical lovers want to see the face of God here and now. Here and now in this world, in this realm, they are the ones who want to experience this radical love, which is nothing other than the very being of God. So we are speaking about a love that comes out of sacred traditions and spiritual traditions, but it goes deeper in some ways. It takes us to the core, to the root, to that radical part of ourselves. And for them, this experience of love is something sacred, is something transformative. It's something that changes us. Once we have love, we're no longer the same being that we were before. There's a wonderful short line of poetry that's attributed to Rumi. Every now and then I may recite the original of these poems, but mostly I'll be giving you the English translations. So the line says, someone asks Rumi towards the end of his life. Tell me about this journey that you've been on. Tell us about your spiritual seeking and your path. And Rumi says, well, all of this could be summed up in three little phrases. I used to be raw. Then I was cooked. Now I'm on fire. It's a cooking metaphor. And one of the things that so beautiful about these radical lovers is that they take their stories and their images from the examples that are already around us. We don't need to go to a mountaintop in order to find God. We are already in the ocean of love. We are already bathed in light. So think of cooking if you're an omnivore, a kabab, if you are a vegetarian friend, think of roasting, a delicious cauliflower, perhaps. And when you begin, he says, I used to be raw and all of us start the journey by being raw. So here's one of the beautiful paradoxes of the path. We're trying to become what we already are. We are already luminous. We are already golden. We are already one with the all. But we don't live that way. We don't recognize this. So in some ways, we have to go on this journey. We have to go and seek what it is that we're trying to become. We have to become cooked as it were. And love is of course like a fire. Any of us who've experienced this kind of love, burning love, radical love, we know something of this fire. And Rumi says, I used to be raw and then I was cooked. I was cooked in this fire of love. So again, whether it's a piece of meat, a cabab, or a cauliflower, or a vegetable that you put on a grill and have it be roasted, nicely, maybe something like even, I don't know, a pineapple. Pineapple is good by itself raw, but if you put it on a grill, how delicious it can taste that way. And we all have to become cooked. If you eat something, some meat in particular, that is raw, oh, you might just get a stomach ache. And how often it is that we take somebody into our heart and they cause us not a stomach ache, but a heartache. And it's because that person is not cooked. They're still raw. Their ego is still fully present. They're not soft. They're not moist. They're not tender. They are sharp. And their ego brushes against our tender heart. And let's be honest, our sharp edges brush against other peoples and other friends hearts. And we injure one another. How lovely would it be to take somebody into your heart who's already cooked, somebody who seasoned, somebody who's gone on the journey, and they've come to know both the dark side of their own heart and the love and the light that they're capable of. It's a beautiful thing, beautiful thing, to either take somebody into your heart when they've gone through that process of self-discovery, that process of becoming, as Rumi calls it, that journey of being cooked. And then as we ourselves cook in this fire of love to have somebody welcome us into their heart, that's a beautiful thing as well. But Rumi doesn't end the poem there. He says, "The whole of my life is summed up in these three words. I used to be raw. Then I was cooked. Now I'm on fire. Now I'm on fire." Now that's an unexpected metaphor that we get. After all, if we're talking about a piece of meat, once it's on fire, it might get charred. It might get burnt. You may not want to eat it if it's on fire. So why does he say that? Because when something is on fire, then whatever else comes near it has a chance to be cooked. You no longer in the oven, you yourself are the oven, you yourself are the fire. And every once in a while, we all have met people like this in our lives. Maybe that's the reason that some of you are listening, because you want to be closer to stories and teachings that are on fire. And they will help you and help me and help us move from being raw to being cooked. And Rumi himself certainly seems to have been someone like this, a soul who was on fire. And there's lovely, loveliness that comes when we get a chance to be around somebody who's on fire, somebody who can help us go through this process, this journey of self-discovery, of growth, of being filled with the light that is already inside of us. Now, sometimes when we start talking about being the fish that's already in the ocean of the unleashing of love that is God's own being, I know what some of us think, which is I've never experienced this. I've been looking for love. I've been looking for this kind of radical love, but it has eluded me so far. Or maybe even more painfully, I had it once, and it didn't work out. There was someone that I loved, and they passed away, or they moved to another country, or another part of the country, or they didn't want to be with me. And there is great pain, there's great suffering that comes when we feel like we had a taste of this love, and somehow it has left us, and we feel cut off, we feel alone. Well, here, these radical lovers have a wonderful lesson for us. They always remind us that we are not doomed to live, loveless, existences. They say we're actually living inside a very loveful life, a loving life to the abundance, but we make one mistake, which is a tragic mistake. Love is like a rainbow. Love comes in all kinds of shades and colors, and we somehow insist that love has to come in this one very narrow color. We take all of love, the vastness and the greatness of love, and we want to collapse it into a kind of romantic love, and within that a kind of physical romantic love, and maybe even a sexual physical romantic love. And don't get me wrong, if you find somebody who is on fire, and they help you move from being raw to being cooked, and you can journey together, and you also can share the physical and the sexual, well, as our friends say, "Musseltav, ma brook, congratulations, that's lovely, and that's wonderful." But these radical lovers tell us what matters is that we love. Not only to love physically and sexually, or even romantically, what matters is to love, and here is the key. Love is the movement beyond our ego. Love is what propels us beyond ourselves. When we love someone, we move from the idolatry of the ego and of the self, where your three most favorite people on the planet are me, myself, and I, and we orient ourselves towards somebody else. We anticipate that needs and the desires of somebody else, and what a liberation it is to not live in the prison of the ego. How beautiful it is to not bow down at the altar of our own ego self. So you see, this love, when it's directed beyond ourselves, when it's about a kind of connection with one another, a connection that indeed we already are immersed in, our lives are wrapped up around each other. So these radical lovers remind us, love, love a mother, love a father. If you have children, love your children, if you have a partner, love your partner. Love a friend, how beautiful it is the love of a friend, love a neighbor. How many of us live in places that we may not even know the names of someone who lives two doors down from us, love a neighbor, love a stranger, a stranger. When we read the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, and so many of the other religious traditions, we are told to love the stranger. If we were going to put that in today's language, we would say love an immigrant, love a refugee because we ourselves were once immigrants and refugees. And they even go further, don't stop at just humans. You have a kitten, love a cat, they love to be served, love a puppy. Is there a being on earth that loves more purely and more faithfully than a puppy, right? They look at us and they in that instant they become a mirror for the selfless way of loving. These radical lovers keep pushing us. Love a tree, love a brook, love mountains, love rivers. One of them that we are going to be talking about in this podcast from time to time, he was confronted with a person who says, "Teacher, I really would love to love the way that you talk about it, but I don't feel it. I've never felt it. I don't feel the love of God, I don't feel the love of my parents, I don't feel the love of my friends. What should I do?" And they were having this conversation and the first sign of winter was coming. And so the master looks outside and he says, "Do you love snow?" And the guy said, "Yeah, think I do, I love snow." He said, "Go outside, run around in the snow, right? When the first snowfall comes, if you happen to live in a place where it snows, how joyful children are when they're dancing in this snow. Sometimes it's because they know they're not going to school the next day. But there is this natural effervescence of joy. And in that moment, they are connected with this descent of beauty and grace and mercy and the divine that is all around them and soon is going to be covering everything." So these radical lovers ask us, "Can you love snow?" What a beautiful lesson this is to know that love, that precious connection that we all seek. and so many of us thirst for, that we are standing in a river that is up to our ankles, up to our knees, up to our waist, up to our chest. We might be in the ocean and we are dying of thirst with parched lips. The radical lovers tell us to look around, look around because there is love all around. The path of radical love took some really bold stances in its origin. So here we're talking about developments that happened about a thousand years ago in the parts of the world that today we would call Iran and Iraq. Up to that point in time the mystics of this tradition used to make a clear-cut division and they used to speak about how there is the love of humanity and there's the love of God. And they often said these are two different levels, these are two different tiers. For them what really mattered was that we would be able to love God. And loving humanity was the hardship that we had to go through to learn something about love. They talked about this as metaphorical love. Majozi, Eska Majozi. A love that is like a metaphor and they said there is a real love but that real love is only for God. Because human beings can't love you perfectly and beautifully. So we had to busy ourselves with the love of humans until we got a sense of what love is like. And once we had learned the alphabet of love then we had to move to reading the great sonnet of divine love. And they called that Hakiki Eska Hakiki real love. We had to find the real love which is only for God. And that notion never entirely disappeared from a lot of the Sufi path. In particular because the Sufi is always new that we as human beings are so easily distracted by forms. And in particular beautiful forms you know you see how often do we see someone maybe we can even look back on our own life. And we find that we have sometimes developed an attraction, a desire, a yearning, maybe even a lust that mingles with love towards someone which was not really an attraction for their soul. It was not based on the light that shines in them. It was an obsession with how beautiful they are. How much we admire their body, their hair, their eyes, their skin, their lips. And the Sufi's, these mystics always remind us don't just fall in love with the form. Because all of us eventually will age. That beautiful, supple, healthy skin will eventually get wrinkles. Those wonderful dark locks. Or if you prefer that lovely flowing blonde hair may fall out or it may turn gray. And the body which looks so healthy may become a little bit more well-rounded or chubby or fragile as we age. So if all we have ever loved about one another is a notion of our physical form. They're encouraging us to go deeper into each other. Find that which is divine inside. Find that light and that spirit. So there was this distinction that many mystics made between metaphorical love and real love. The love of humans and the love of that which is divine inside us. But the radical lovers had something else to say. The radical lovers have a bold starting point. And their conversation began with something that would have been so much at home in a great Bob Marley song. This is an insight that so many mystics of different traditions have realized and have connected to. They knew that there is ultimately one love. And the radical lovers tell us don't talk to me about human love and divine love. There is one love. And the minute that we merge with this one love, with this one river into this one ocean, this one love which is nothing other than the outpouring of God, the same one love will carry us back home into God. What they're really saying here is something quite bold. If you claim to love God, we have to also love God's creation. There's no room on this path for someone who claims to be religious or claims to be spiritual, but is not kind and loving towards God's children. The measure of what it means to be a spiritual and a realized human being is to actually be able to love and serve humanity. So the way that we are with one another is actually the measure of how luminous we are. Every spiritual path has its insights. Some paths develop a little bit more in the direction of living harmoniously with nature, the way that the Taoist path and the Native American path do. Some paths go very deeply into meditation and a notion of paying close attention to one's breathing, one's consciousness, and we see that for example in the Buddhist tradition. There's elements of both of those that we find in the radical love tradition. And I would say that above all else, what distinguishes the path a radical love is this bold and fierce and yet gentle path that talks about how do we as human beings live with one another? How do we connect to one another? How do we treat one another? How do we speak with one another? How do we touch one another? How do we listen to one another? There is a way that this radical love path calls us to pursue the life of the Spirit through our bodies. Our bodies are not a distraction. They are not something to be cast off. They actually become our partners on the spiritual path. What a beautiful thing to be able to look at one's body, not as an obstacle, not as something to be cast aside, not as a problem, but as your partner in your spiritual growth. So for this conversation, what I would like to do is to leave you with one of the very simple practices. of the path a radical love. In this practice, we begin by becoming mindful. And I wish that the English language had a word that was not about the mind and being mindful, but instead I wish we had a word that said to become heartful. So let's make up that word. Let us become heartful towards our bodies. And let us pay attention to the different faculties that we have that connect us to one another. And let us begin with that part of our body that so frequently connects us to one another, our tongue, words, language. There's a wonderful story from one of these great mystics who has a lot of students. And he sends his students on a scavenger hunt. And he says, "Go out there and find me the most sour and bitter thing that you can find." Some of them come back with pickles and one of them comes back with lemons and one of them comes back with limes. And one of them sticks out his tongue. And they all laugh. And he says, "Well, the teacher says he is right. The human tongue can be more sour, more bitter than anything that the rest of you have brought." And then he sends them out for the second day. And he says, "Today, I want you to find for me the sweetest thing that you can find." And the students go again. And this time, some of them come back with honey. Some of them come back with bucklova. Some of them come back with sugar, with all kinds of drinks and sweets and pastries. And the same student shows up not holding anything. And when it's his turn, again, a second time, he sticks out his tongue. And they laugh again. And the teacher nods in that beautiful wise, knowing way. And he says, again, this one is right. There is nothing sweeter than the human tongue. We know when we are waiting for those sweet words that we can utter to one another, how transformative it can be, how it can touch our hearts, how it can move us. And the teacher finally says, this one, the one who just took out his tongue, he is the one who will be your teacher after me. These lovers of the radical love path, the seekers after God's own heart, begin their practice by becoming mindful and heartful about our body. They become mindful about our tongue. Let us watch what it is that our tongues deliver to one another. Let us watch the words that we speak with one another. We then move to our glances. Can we learn to look at one another through the glance of kindness, the glance of compassion, the glance of tenderness? Can we look at one another the way that God looks at us? And then we move to our ears. Can we listen to each other the way that we deserve to be heard? There is a beautiful saying that when the Prophet Muhammad would speak with someone, he didn't just turn his head to look at them, he turned his whole body so that his shoulders were squarely lined up with the person, and he gave them his undivided attention. Can we be together like this? And in this DNA, where there is so much conversation and some of it so overdue about the Me Too movement and sexual harassment, can we think about the way that we touch one another? When we touch one another, if we touch one another? Can we practice radical love so that it becomes not a method of possessing and of clinging to each other? But so that every touch is a wanted touch, is an invited touch, and it's a touch that comforts. And we could go through the rest of our bodies, including our sexual organs, and to think about how do we purify the way that we connect with our partners? So that is about comfort and tenderness and togetherness. Can we purify our breathing so that the air that we breathe is one that is welcomed and we feel ourselves connected to all that is around us? So maybe that's a good place to stop for today's conversation. We have so much more to discuss, and I think the next time that we have a conversation, I would love to share with you a little bit about how the radical love path is also a path of justice. The radical love path is not one that removes us from the world. It is one that helps us recognize the way that our lives are already interwoven and interconnected. And my last gift for you today is this recognition from these radical lovers who say, "I cannot be who I need to be until you become everything that you ought to be. I cannot be who I ought to be until you become everything that you ought to be." So until we speak together again on this podcast of radical love on the be here now, network, I thank you and I trust you to God's safekeeping.