Tasawwuf: Metaphysics - Murshid Sam's Living Stream

Tasawwuf: Metaphysics—Gatha with Commentary Series I
TASAWWUF: In this lies the foundation of education, of every kind of education, from the first effort
to bring child and teacher together to the highest echelons of instruction and investigation. The
western educationalists have often taken this for granted and trouble has arisen.
In India they say the parents are the first teachers. By that means a certain relationship is set up.
Then this relationship is transferred to teachers and gurus, but the foundation has been laid, and
mostly this is based on trust. In the West it was based on authoritarianism even where authoritarianism
has been derided.
GATHA: The third belief is the belief that reason helps one to believe.
TASAWWUF: This has given us both scientific knowledge and the scientific outlook. Many say science
is against religion. It is not that science is against religion. It is that in science reason is called in
to support one’s beliefs. This sort of reason can also be brought in other matters. And even where it is
not, one need not go contrary to reason—a subject to be taken up in a later study.
GATHA: The fourth belief is conviction of which one is as sure as if one were an eyewitness.
TASAWWUF: And very often this belief comes because one has been an eyewitness. But there is
also involved here Kashf, or Insight, by which one knows, whether he can explain it or not, and in
the end this always proves to be true. Indeed, without Intuition few scientific discoveries would be
made and the difference between the way scientists tell their stories and others tell the stories of the
scientists is often very great. For to be a scientist, one is not a trained skeptic: a trained skeptic would
hardly be able to add to knowledge. One has to have the open consciousness.
GATHA: The four kinds of belief are held by souls of different grades of evolution in life and different
temperaments. There is a knowledge which one can perceive with the senses, and there is a
knowledge which one can perceive with the mind alone; and a knowledge which can be realized by
the soul.
TASAWWUF: We find this especially as a theme in Mahayana Buddhism, that there have been
schools which varied on the importance they put on the sense-life or also the unimportance they
put on it. And it is difficult to say whether any one school is necessarily right or wrong. And later
schools saw the different points of view and gave scope for all.
GATHA: And it is for this reason that when a person wishes to touch a thing which can only be perceived,
and when a person wishes to feel a thing which can only be realized spiritually, he naturally
becomes an unbeliever.
TASAWWUF: Or else he becomes a blind believer, which we call being credulous, to believe without
any foundation. Both are states of ego. And when it comes to profound knowledge, it is not always
possible for everybody to think clearly and thoroughly. So at some point trust comes in and even
those who regard themselves as thorough unbelievers or skeptics, at some point in their lives, on
certain subjects they operate almost entirely on trust and do not consider it.
GATHA: In point of fact one person’s belief cannot be another person’s belief; every belief is peculiar
to the person who holds it. Even if two persons held one belief, there would still be the difference of
the point of view, even though it be as small as the difference between two roses.
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