Children
Pupil: My daughter is one of my biggest props. There is no way I can think of being nonattached to her, but when I am not in my ego I realise I should be a better mother.
Abdullah: The trouble is that you are not using the real emotions in this situation. Certainly you have been attached to your daughter, and it is correct for a mother to be attached, but one day you will have to learn to become nonattached to her. Most people mistakenly think this means ceasing to love, but in fact you then love in a better way, without desire. In a mother's ordinary love for her child there is often a sense of possession, but with nonattachment the love is on a much higher scale. At the beginning, when trying to change your attitude, you can only use your intellect. The intellect will tell you it is stupid to be so identified with your daughter, you will see it is unfair to use her as a prop, and gradually many other aspects of the situation will be clear to you.
Pupil: But I am not adult enough to do this properly.
Abdullah: At least you are trying. Use the intellect by saying to yourself 'Instead of treating her as my equal I am going to treat her as my daughter.' This may be very difficult. Because you are divorced from your husband, you want her as a companion, but making her a companion deprives her of a mother, and if you can see this it will be a big shock. Everything has to have its proper season and place. By instinct your daughter would want to fall into the role of daughter.
Pupil: I have tried to play the mother role in a surface way but I can see there is not much underneath.
Abdullah: You have to keep trying. If you keep telling yourself a good aim and returning to that aim, then you achieve the aim, because you get help from elsewhere. At the beginning role-playing may be quite artificial, but in time, with practice, it will become real.
Pupil: This situation seems hard on the child.
Abdullah: A child is resilient and understands within its own framework many things which parents may think are beyond its understanding. The child could not give an intellectual explanation, but would understand through vibration, without any comprehension at all in the ordinary brain.
Pupil: How could a woman begin to be nonattached to her children?
Abdullah: Nonattachment is extremely difficult and nonidentification is beyond most people. We have indicated that you should have the aim to be nonattached, but it takes many years of struggle to achieve. At the beginning you have to learn to serve in ordinary relationships between children, husband and wife, to do what you think is good for others, not what will make them think you are nice. You try to love your children objectively, for their spiritual qualities, what they are inside themselves, and not for their outer manifestations. You have to be in such a state that you are seeing them as God, not as little Johnny. This is a very big thing to be able to do, but you can experience it to a degree, have tastes of it. If you are nonattached, you love in a much better way – this sounds crazy, but if you experience it you will know the truth of it. When you are objective to a child, he is no longer your possession, because you and he are also God.
If you are going to be objective, you cannot be partisan. You cannot say this is my son or my daughter – that is
ridiculous. You may bring them into this life and look after them, but they are not yours. No child belongs to us.
Everything belongs to God.
Solar system
Pupil: You have stated that the Sun is God. In what way do you see God?
Abdullah: Abdullah believes His Endlessness or Allah or the Supreme God by any other name is the
cosmic God, the creator of the whole of existence. This great Being or Vibration manifested and came down from the original
Stillness through countless millions of galaxies. When you look up at the heavens you see thousands of millions of stars,
and each of those may be a galaxy of a million million stars. The vastness is incomprehensible, and an understanding of His
Endlessness is far beyond any man. We can have some small conception of God as our galaxy, which itself revolves around the
centre of the cosmos and whose suns revolve around the positive Sun Antares or Ahura Mazda. Coming down to our own Earth,
the forces which regulate existence are the forces of the Sun, and Abdullah teaches that the Sun is God within our solar
system. The Sun is His Endlessness just as you and Abdullah are His Endlessness – everything is a reflection of
everything else – but God as His Endlessness is without form, whereas God in the solar system in which we live is
personalised. Within limitations we can realise that without the Sun we would have no existence on this planet. It must be
understood that it is not the shiny ball we think of as God, but the spirit and forces behind this.
Pupil: I find it difficult to relate to the Sun, to realise, for instance, that God does love me.
Abdullah: You have to slowly build up in yourself a concept of God and the remembrance of him. You
can say your mantras, pray, and have a little humility, but the best way for a person to gain some idea of God is to go out
on a clear night and look at the stars. If you are patient and quiet enough, you will certainly have engendered in you a
concept of the marvellousness and magnificence of His Endlessness, or our galaxy. During the day we can feel how miserable
and small we are in relation to our own Sun.
Neil [Abdullah as a younger man] was brought up as a Christian but had, like so many people, thrown out the baby with the bath water in rejecting the outer part of Christianity. At the time he became a soldier he was an agnostic, but then he spent several years in the desert, lying out night after night under the stars, and slowly he started to get some feeling and understanding of the magnificence of Allah, of God, and he learned some humility. If you have humility in relation to the solar system and realise that you are just a very small part of it, you must eventually gain a concept of God. Each person must understand for himself, in his own way, the forces behind the Sun.
Thought
Pupil: Even in this Work we must use other men's flowers. Is there much room left to progress by having new ideas?
Abdullah: We are giving you new ideas all the time. There are dozens of things we talk about here that
you will not find in books. We use a certain basis of other men's flowers and expand it further. We are using a great deal of
the Gurdjieff system and the Sufi teaching, and as these discussions have gone on we have tried to cover many different angles,
to give you leads, to take new departures. However, there is nothing new under the Sun. No matter what we might talk about, it
has been before.
What we are constantly trying to do here is get people to think for themselves. We give out data on all kinds of things, but we want each person to confirm it and make it his own. The axiom we give you for working on yourself is to make your body obedient, your name strong, then passive, and eventually to destroy your ego. If a person comes head-on at this and really sees how his body runs him, he learns something about making his body obedient – he has taken it a step further, it becomes a reality to him. Though there is nothing original under the Sun, each person has to make it original to himself. What is remarkable about this Work is that every person has to experience it himself. You may have plenty of thoughts, but if they are merely words they will not be any good to you. If you put your thoughts into operation, you will get something out of them.
Unity
Pupil: Is the brotherhood we try to achieve an aspect of unity?
Abdullah: We can talk about unity as Sufis and, more especially, as Gnostics, which is what we in
this group are. We believe in the unity of all religious experience, and in brotherhood, which obviously has unity in it.
We believe in unity in the endeavour of human beings on a planetary scale. Unity is at the very core of what we are
teaching.
Pupil: Is it the ego that stops us from recognising the unity between us and the rest of the Earth?
Abdullah: That is correct. Only when a person loses his ego completely does he understand this unity
for sure. Other people may know it to a limited degree, but the egoless person knows and understands it completely in a
certain way. Hindus teach that this Earth we are living on, and the whole solar system, is maya – illusion – but
we do not teach you that. We tell you the illusion you have is that you think you are your body. That is on a spiritual
scale. On a physical scale, obviously you are your body and a part of the Earth, so it is not illusion. It is all God, but
God on the level of the Earth, the Mother God, whereas the Sun is the Father God or active God. These are just words to give
you an idea of what it is about.
In regard to our being on this planet, we have to get away from the idea that we are unique and realise that we are just a
part of the Earth, what Gurdjieff calls organic life on Earth and Abdullah prefers to think of as a cell of the Earth. In our
bodies, we think of ourselves as whatever our name is, but actually we are all the Earth. You have seen photos taken at a
distance from the Earth and moon, where this planet appears as a big ball. If you look closely you may see some of the great
seas, but you cannot see any kings or queens – just the Earth. You must try to grasp this. We are all conditioned to
think of ourselves as our own lifetimes, and that is our big illusion. We do not see the unity of the whole thing.
Vibration
Pupil: In what manner could we hope to understand that everything is vibration?
Abdullah: It is difficult to say how a person would understand it. From reading books on science you can find out that a chair, for instance, is made up of molecules vibrating at a certain rate. Getting a sense of scale would give you an idea of vibration as the basic principle. Each person has to realise this concept for himself.
As far as we can gather, the first thing would have been silence, a void, and out of this the three forces would have come. One of these forces would have been vibration. The Christian gospels say 'In the beginning was the Word.' The Word represents vibration.
Pupil: Do you mean the other two things were something apart from vibration?
Abdullah: In a sense everything could be part of vibration, but there must have been three forces coming from that original Silence or Void. There may have been something like motion. We know we are living in a spiral galaxy.
Pupil: Does the space between particles constitute some sort of vibration?
Abdullah: No, that would be one of the three forces.
* * *
Abdullah: The word vibration will have different connotations for different people, but in this chapter we have been trying to demonstrate that vibration is the one constant thing in our world as we know it.
The idea of God being vibration comes from the Gnostic teachings. Christians can gain the idea from John's Gospel, which is a Gnostic gospel. Conceiving vibration as being the major aspect of God in our solar system is just an exercise in trying to understand what God is to us individually.
In dealing with these concepts you should look beyond the words and gather as much to yourself as possible, from as much of yourself as possible.
