Body

Pupil: I have never been able to figure out where the body finishes and the ego starts.

Abdullah: The body exists, it is real enough in the third dimension, but you yourself give the existence to the ego by thinking that the body is you. The ego does not really exist at all, it is completely imaginary.

Pupil: Is it true that all our negativity comes from the body?

Abdullah: Negativity is everywhere. It is a constant force. But it feeds through the body. We saw this last month during the election, when the politicians were working on everybody's greed, fear and selfishness – people experience these things through their bodies. They may believe they are thinking about it, but this is still on the level of the body.

Pupil: If we identify with the body then the negativity is just part and parcel of the dimension the body exists in?

Abdullah: That is right. We are in the third dimension because the body of the Earth is in the third dimension and we see everything from this angle because our senses are also part of the third dimension. The great masses of humanity live in a negative way. This does not mean they are 'bad' – they just live in the negative vibration, because of their bodies. But there is also a positive force and a neutralising force and we can go against our negativities and generate an energy which will allow us to live in a more positive way in the third dimension. We can choose to work with the positive force.

Desires

Pupil: You obviously have a great deal of desirelessness. Is it a peaceful feeling?

Abdullah: There is an absence of all the noise, worries and troubles. The Lord Buddha spoke about the state of desirelessness and it is possible to gain it in our lifetime. But what we do is gain it for a minute or two then lose it again. It must be that way. The body goes on having desires, but inside yourself there is something which is free. The Buddha's body would have had desires even when he was living on the planet as a man No. 6. He would have had the desire to urinate and to take in food to keep the body going, but he would have had nonattachment to his body, so a part of him would have been desireless and that is the part he would have lived in. Desirelessness is a spiritual state. But you can separate from the body while you are still in it.

Pupil: Can we actually create desirelessness by some form of remembrance, for instance the repetition of God's name?

Abdullah: Repeating God's name over and over is struggling against desires – you are trying to block them out. After struggling like this for many years, fewer desires will come in. To be able to live with desires you have to be psychologically always on guard.

Remember that you can work in three dimensions. The body is in the third dimension, thoughts are in the fourth and the spirit is in the fifth. You can live without desire if you live in the spirit. If you live in thoughts, in the fourth dimension, you can deal with desires. In the third dimension you would always have desires, for warmth, food and all the cravings that come from the body.

The Lord Buddha said the way out of the rounds of lives and deaths was to overcome your desires; we tell you the way to do this is to make your body obedient. That is not the end of it, because desires do not come only from the body, but if you make the body obedient you will certainly quieten down your desires.

Imagination

Pupil: I find it hard to get any real conception of the ego as being the imaginary idea of myself. The nearest I get to it is to see myself reacting in a situation and think 'This is the way I go into fear' and so on.

Abdullah: The imaginary idea you have of yourself is as your body – you think you are your body. When you say 'I want this' or 'Bill did that' you are talking about your bodies. When you look at other people you see their bodies, which you think are them. You identify with the body. This identification or idea of yourself is the ego. The real you is something inside, something quite different. Otherwise we would have to agree with atheists or materialists who say that when you are dead that is the end, it is all over. We believe there is something else, that you may call soul or whatever you want, and that this is the real you.

When you are trying to understand this, sometimes you fall into the trap of believing you are thought. Thoughts are apart from the body, in another dimension, and can live for a long time – Plato's thoughts are still alive, although his body has died. You can set some store by thoughts, but thoughts are not you, and after a certain time they too disappear. Of all the untold millions of thoughts that have been in the world, most have gone. Most have gone west! In your life you will have had thousands of thoughts and a lot of these will still be floating around somewhere, although thousands are trapped in your own computer system. In time, all will go. So, although imagining that you are thought is one step further than imagining you are body, it still is not the real you. Mind is only a part of body and thought is the product of mind.

Pupil: When people have what they think is a spiritual experience – being surrounded by golden light or something – is this usually imagination?

Abdullah: Each case would have to be assessed on its merits. Some experiences would be spiritual, many are nothing but imagination.

Pupil: Sometimes when I have felt I have done the sensing exercise properly, as the Sun was rising, I have had a feeling of rapport with the Sun in my head. How can I know this is not imagination?

Abdullah: If you have been looking at the Sun rising and then close your eyes, you can still see the Sun – it would not be imagination but a physical thing that was happening to you. When the Sun is operating through you as a force it does this through the solar plexus, not your head, and radiates throughout your whole body, going out all ways at once. This is a remarkable feeling and you would certainly know it was not imagination. Abdullah is aware as a Sufi that in another way the Sun does appear in your head, as light, but this is a quite different situation.

Negative attitudes

Pupil: Negative attitudes cover such a vast area. How would you begin to work on them?

Abdullah: First of all you have to be aware of your own negative attitudes, see each one as it arises, and then find out where it comes from. You cannot work on it until you understand it. Many of our negative attitudes arise from the actions of other people. You have to see all angles, try to become objective to the situation, see the other person's point of view. Maybe you will decide their action was wrong; maybe you will find you have been labouring under a misapprehension. Irrespective of rights and wrongs, if your attitude is negative you are inner considering, and you will see that this is hopeless. So you have to change your attitude.

Pupil: Do you mean replace it with a positive one?

Abdullah: Yes, what you try to do is exactly that, but you can only do it by being objective to yourself. You know that our aim at these meetings is to wake you up, so you can get some idea of being objective. If you are fast asleep you will never see your negative attitudes. Hazrat Inayat Khan said the higher you climbed up the mountain the more you could see.

Pupil: I can see that something is watching the negative attitude or emotion, and that it has to be changed, but what do you actually do?

Abdullah: It is no good just stopping a negative attitude. You must put something back in its place, otherwise the negativity will crop up in another way. If you just go against something like anger, telling yourself you are not going to get angry, eventually you will stop it, but maybe it will turn to resentment or hatred. You must make sure you put something back in its place – a positive emotion, or prayer, which means you are replacing it with God.

A weakness with many people when they start working on themselves, whether through this system, Zen, or something else, is that they simply suppress their negativity, and that is really fatal. We advocate that you use a mantra. As soon as you catch a negative thought, say 'In the Ever-present Here and in the Eternal Now, I (your name) am not angry' or whatever the negativity is. In this way you stop it and replace it with God. You work on different levels. First you must recognise the negativity and struggle against it, and finally you say 'It's over to you, Allah'. If you do not have this faith, then you just have to hope that you will get it.

Abdullah: Negative attitudes result in negative emotions of some kind, most of which are based on fear. Fear is like an octopus with tentacles going in all directions. Negative attitudes can come from essence, environment, the name part, body or ego and if we approach life negatively we will by the law of vibration attract negativity to ourselves. People who in industry are accident-prone or in ordinary life go continuously from one sickness to another are what Abdullah calls 'body people', that is, their main preoccupation is with their bodies.

All of us suffer to some degree from negative emotions and it is only by changing our inner attitudes that we will overcome them. As with most of our troubles it is first necessary to use the intellect to reconcile, followed by autosuggestion and prayer. If we remember what Gurdjieff said about choosing between dying like men or perishing like dogs, we will be able to give ourselves enough shocks to struggle against our negative attitudes.