THE VOICE WITHIN

A Sufi master was visited by a perplexed seeker-after-truth, who said to him: “I have only one question to ask. Why is it that, wherever I go, I always seemed to get different pieces of advice from Sufis?”

The master answered: “Come with me for a walk through this town, and we shall see what we can discover about this mystery.”

They went into the marketplace, and the Sufi asked a greengrocer: “Tell me, what time of prayer is it?”

The greengrocer said: “The time for morning prayer.”

They continued their walk. After some time the Sufi asked a tailor: “What prayer-time is it?”

The tailor answered: “It is the time of midday prayer.”

After spending more time in conversation and companionship with the seeker, the Sufi approached another man, this time a bookbinder. He asked him: “What time of prayer is it?”

The bookbinder replied: “It is now the time of afternoon prayer.”

The Sufi master turned to his companion and said: “Do you want to continue the experiment, or are you now satisfied that virtually the same question can elicit almost totally different answers, all of them corresponding to the current truth?”

Sufism is simply about seeing things as they truly are – a realization that is available to all.

Venerable Salih of Qazwin taught truth seekers: “Knock and the door will open for you.”

When the Sufi saint Rabi’a al-Basri heard this, she admonished him, “What are you talking about Salih? The door has never been shut!”  

And the great Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi said, “I knocked and the door opened, but I found I’d been knocking from the inside.”

—the harbinger