Choice
Pupil: Is it important to realise this is a planet of choice?
Abdullah: You must know this is a planet of choice, this is a very important factor. You must use your three brains to exercise choice. The three brains cannot do this very well until they start to learn and have knowledge and wisdom. You have to develop the wisdom in yourself before you can exercise the choice. If you put an infant in the position where he could have a gaily coloured marble or a rough-looking stone which happened to be an uncut diamond, he would most likely take the gaily coloured marble. He would not have any discernment.
Pupil: So few people are doing [this work] yet so many have the choice.
Abdullah: The Christian Bible tells you that ‘many are called, but few are chosen’ … Many people touch these teachings we are talking about, but they do not choose to struggle. In this sense it is the deep part of ourself that does the choosing. You see, someone may come in one night to a group such as we have here and go away saying it is a lot of nonsense; others may come for a while and then decide ‘it is too hard for me’. What you have to bear in mind is that they have all had the opportunity to come to it. ... Everything is vibration and what we are giving out here is a vibration of a fairly fine quality. It goes out, but through ignorance people do not know it is here; if they did have this homing device in them they would home in on it. The people who are attracted here are exercising choice inside themselves that they know nothing of, as there is no liaison between the ordinary and deep parts of themselves.
Conviction
Pupil: We all seem to have biases due to our upbringing and conditioning and these seem to be convictions …
Abdullah: These are your fixed attitudes and the only way to overcome them is by bringing in the Work as a third force. If you were acting as a Buddhist you would have to bring in Buddhism, or as a Christian, the Christian religion as a third force. You would have to bring in one of these moral religions then take the whole thing a step further. … In arriving at conviction a person must be able to relate to the Work in a sincere way, because if you do not relate to the Work in a proper way you might go off on an ego trip, this is the problem.
Our first mistake is that we tend to think our body is us, then we work on ourselves as we are doing here so we begin to think there is sense in the idea that we have three brains, which is our name part. Next we become convinced that our name part is us, and later move to the idea that the spirit is. These ideas are the vehicle of what you are inside. When a person has this, it means the Work or God is working as a third force and helps them arrive at these different decisions. … When you get further on in this work you reach the conclusion that the intellect can only take you so far and must drop away. Reaching a spiritual conviction is what we are talking about here.
Humility
To become humble, the best way is to look at the stars and do this regularly; whenever there is a clear dark night, go and look at the stars for half an hour. Just look at them and drink the wonder in, and then slowly this sense of awe will begin to come in. As with most of these positive emotions, humility comes to you. You make the proposal and say to yourself 'I am going to try and be humble,' but when it comes to you it is a gift of grace from God. To become truly humble is an aspect of love.
Listening
Pupil: When you are listening to natural sounds, sometimes if you are not thinking of anything in particular this seems to calm you down. Is this a sort of silence?
Abdullah: You mean listening to the noise of birds and so on outside? Yes, if you are able to be quiet enough to listen to those sounds, of course you are being silent. The idea of being silent is to shut up all the associative thinking going on in your head. When you have silence, you can maintain the silence and be talking. This is a way of remembering God constantly, and another way to do it is to be able to sit and listen, and give attention to outside. If you are in a forest or on the seashore listening to the waves and not having any thoughts going through your mind, that is silence. At that moment you are quite close to God, for God is the silence. This is where he is. He is the silence. Very few people are taught to listen … most people cannot stand their own company, they bring noise into themselves in the form of inner talking when circumstances outside are relatively quiet.
There is another form of listening which is very subtle, and that is from the heart.
Need
The real need is to perfect yourself. That is the only way you can serve God, to learn to perfect yourself. We can talk and think about it intellectually, but when it does come to you it comes as a spiritual force, then you come back to learning to serve without seeking reward. You change your whole outlook on life. Whereas at first you might do these disciplines because you think you should, or to curry favour, then suddenly the idea comes to you that you want to do this as you want to serve. This makes a complete change in what you are doing. If a person keeps plugging away, irrespective of how well they do this, even if they cannot do their exercises but they keep plugging away by being able to think about these ideas, then in the end they will get help. This is what we mean about faith, for as we go along we learn faith. In the end faith always comes; but in the beginning we do not see it as we are wrapped up in our worries and egos, until suddenly faith smacks you and you get a very important need. As you go along, greater needs come. We are really preparing ourselves to die, consequently you are also preparing yourself to live in the right way. What we do when we dedicate ourselves more and more to God and people other than ourselves, is attract Grace. We cannot do it ourselves, we can only do our best. When Allah is ready, the grace comes.
