You have 0 items in your cart
Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim
I have often heard and I’m sure we have all often heard people speak about disease as dis-ease. There’s a connection between these two words – dis-ease. It is a significant connection. It is like illness or feeling ill. It is not without reason that ill feeling is a very similar concept to feeling ill. Ill feeling makes you ill. Ill feeling makes you feel ill. Why is that? This first thing – we have to own our feeling. We have to understand that ill feeling doesn’t just come out of the ether. We produce feeling. And how do we produce feeling? It is because we are thinking. Feeling is the body’s reaction to thought. The body is similar to an animal. It can’t really distinguish between illusion and fact. If you show an animal a projection of something the animal will think it is a real thing. So in a sense your body works like that also. Your body gets played a movie of horror by your mind. Your body feels horror and all the chemistry that’s associated with a feeling of horror get produced. And this chemistry is not healthy chemistry.
Ill feeling makes you ill.
So we keep on running little subtexts of disquiet, little programmes that are thought patterns that are running on an ongoing basis which are concerned with security, concerned with significance, worrying about what people think of us, worrying about the future. And these little bits of subtext that run on an ongoing basis tell the body we are under threat. Now, if you frighten your body often enough you strain it, you make it prepared for a fight that doesn’t happen. So eventually this donkey which is our body gives up and it gets ill.
So your feeling which is produced by your internal dialogue that is concerned with insecurity and concerned with significance, that feeling eventually makes you feel ill. It makes you sick. Now this is not to say that every illness that people face they have in a sense deliberately produced themselves, because that isn’t true. Illness is from Allah. But simultaneously we do create the conditions for it. If I plant a crop and I do all the work associated with the crop it is by Allah that the crop is there. I do not make the crop. But at the same time the crop wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t sow the seeds and till the soil. So, the crop of illness definitely gets sowed. The natural laws that produce the illness, these are Allah’s laws, but we have to understand that we create the propensity for this.
Our condition is an outcome of things we do and how we think.
We have to own our state. We have to accept that our condition is an outcome of things we do and how we think. And, we have to stop blaming life and the world for our condition. If you continuously run a commentary of disapproval on the world around you, that gall, that bile and bitterness of disapproval – if you think about the mouth of a person who is disapproving, it is a bitter mouth. It is a mouth that has just tasted something bitter. So your being becomes bilious. Your being becomes bitter. Your being is impregnated with bitterness. So, not only does it sit in your mouth, it starts to sit in your cells and then your cells become bitter, nauseous, nauseating. So not only are you bilious and nauseous, you are also nauseating. So when people find you deeply unpalatable and repulsive, nauseating, understand that you are producing this condition and that reaction you are getting from the world eventually will be borne in your body. You will be a nauseated person because you are a nauseating person.
Very often we set-up the conditions that produce our dis-ease or disease.
The taste that we ascribe to the world is the taste that we acquire. So if you ascribe to the world sweetness then you acquire sweetness and you are therefore sweet to the taste. If you ascribe to the world bitterness then you acquire bitterness and you are bitter to the taste. Eventually your body carries the message. Your cells carry the message. It is sad if you create a taste environment, a chemical environment in your body which is so repulsive that your body itself wants to leave. Very often this is the case. Very often we set-up the conditions that produce our dis-ease or disease.
May Allah Grant us success on the Path.
May He Grant us nearness to Him.
May He Grant us annihilation in Him.
May He Grant us death before we die.
This discourse was given by Shaykh Ebrahim after a dhikr session on 7th August, 2009.
