All praise to the Doer and Witness Who is the Gate to hell and bliss By Whom we come to act and see By Who’s intent we come to be By His command we rise and fall His gift is terror and to enthral We begin and end by His decree He surrounds us...

By way of metaphor, one can describe the centre of the human experience as the being in the chest. And one can distinguish between fundamentally two different modalities, two modalities that you can experience the subject as, the subject being the self or the one that's experiencing. In Tasawwuf we refer to one modality as...

Our current and normal way of looking at things is to see things upside down. Where we in our consciousness see blessing we are probably seeing curse. Where we see curse there is blessing. And in no other context is this true as particularly in the pursuit of wealth - and in wealth itself.

Everything has a courtesy to it and you can define the courtesy as the rules that are concerned with the quality of what you are doing rather than the outcome of what you are trying to achieve. So it’s the rule whereby you give attention to the process rather than the outcome, what you are...

One can’t have a sense but end up recognizing that you are pickled, quite literally pickled, in blessing. The interesting thing, of course, is that most of us don’t experience it like that. Most of us don’t experience a sense of security, a sense of fulfilment as our basic condition.

A wayfarer on the Path raised a very relevant question: ‘How can someone overcome the love of this world?’

Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, meditates and writes on "the gentle power" of gratefulness.

Why do Muslims have an issue with pleasure? Why is it that being Muslim is so punitive that you can't do things which other people enjoy doing, and which you enjoy doing, that you get pleasure out of? Why is it what we are so restricted and accept and take on this restriction?

Our base condition, our root condition, our normative condition, is ecstasy. That’s what we've been designed to experience. An ecstasy of such a profound character and nature, that to experience it even for a moment, is to fulfill a life. It is to have achieved the purpose of a life.

The first virtue which is the parent of all virtues is gratitude. Why this should be the case becomes apparent when you consider the opposite. The first vice, which is the parent of all vices is ingratitude and resentment. If I am convinced that the world has done me in, and that what I have...