Until You Are Like This

An individual at this point, as a child, is born, according to the Muslims, in what is called the fiṭrah nature, which is submission. The very first state of the child, before the nafs begins to develop — and the nafs is explained below — the very first state of the human being, is submission. There was a famous teacher from Morocco. One of his students asked him: how do we come to God? How do we arrive at God? He went upstairs, and he came down with a newborn. And he said: until you are like this, you do not arrive at God. Until you are like this, you do not arrive at God. The idea is: until you are helpless before God. Until you recognise what your human attributes are in relation to the divine attributes. Because we are God-like.

The human being is God-like. There is Shakespeare's idea of the paragon of animals: how like a god, this human being — this form, the symmetry, the will, the volition, the power, the sense of independence, the ability to transform, the creative capacity within the human being. The human being is God-like. But this is delusional, because he is only God-like in relation to creation. When the human being relates himself to the Creator, he becomes the most pathetic of creatures. He becomes the most helpless of creatures, the most incapacitated. We cannot survive for a few minutes without air.

There was once a Buddhist monk, a master, whose student came to him and said that he wanted to achieve enlightenment. He said: the first thing you have to do is learn how to breathe. The student said he knew how to do that; he had been breathing all his life. He said: no, no — you have to learn how to be conscious of your breath. The student asked why he should learn how to be conscious of his breath. So the master had some of his students take him to a river next to the monastery and hold him under, and then bring him up. And he said: now do you know why? In other words, we forget how quickly we can lose our breath — how quickly we can become helpless — because we feel this sense of independence. And until we start becoming aware of our weaknesses, our inherited weaknesses — the most subtle is breath itself. Because we are one breath away from death. Literally one breath away from death.