The Individual Development
by Qutub Sarmouni

Most Western seekers these days are confused more than ever by their hopes for a world-changing mass spiritual awakening.  They like the idea in the book, The Celestine Prophecy, that if a large enough “critical mass” of spiritual hopefuls become collectively aroused emotionally about their spirituality, it will suddenly change the World and bring about a new Golden Age.  Unfortunately, we have to inform you that there will be no sudden mass evolution or “Great Spiritual Awakening”.  Those who think like that are fools in a land of fools.  There is not and cannot be some sort of sudden mass mechanical “evolution” of unconscious humanity.  Evolution is the result only of a very tiny minority of human beings struggling as consciously awakening private individuals or in secret little groups working with fully conscious “Ultra-Terrestrials”, as it were.

 

Many people today are finding out things that for many centuries have been aspects of secret knowledge.  One of the secrets has been the truth of a variety of occult, spiritual and religious lineages, transmissions and traditions of unusual personal development.  Unfortunately, all such things (whatever their relative value in the past for certain people during certain eras) have become anachronistic and mostly inappropriate for, say, modern Europeans.  Almost all the “ways” have become seriously contaminated by the local beliefs and rituals in which they have been historically embedded.  This has become virtually as true for most of our Islamic Dervish Orders as for other occult persuasions.  Yet the Wise among Us are aware of these problems and have taken steps of renewal in the West that other traditions have not wanted to take.  We can do this because we have always worked more with certain principles of the human development rather than with local emotional identifications with religion and culture.  Our Path, for instance, does not try to convert Westerners to Fundamentalist Islam.  Nor will you find Us trying to purvey exotic Eastern culture-thrills to bedazzled Western emotional seekers.  Those who wish to seduce the Westerners through Public Group Zikr-chanting, for instance, are not generally of Our Way.  Our emphasis is on the Private Personal Zikr performed secretly, inwardly in the Spirit and Life-energy of the individual practitioner.  Even in a special, temporary group exercise, our emphasis is on Silent Communion of the Zikr as a telepathic tune-up, which can be more easily experienced than explained.

 

Most seekers, whether Western or even Eastern, cannot have a developmental action or occultly operational circumstance or arrangement overtly shown or demonstrated to them because it would only promote a wrong assessment or involvement on the part of the seeker.  Premature entry into something is far worse for the seeker than non-entry.  You should make a big effort to understand why you need to be told this in the light of the truth of the illusion of mass awakening.  The craving for social belonging is still too strong within you.  Only the prepared individual can be brought into a situation with other prepared individuals.  Such a jam, a gathering, has nothing to do with social expansion hopes.

 

What happens to most seekers, Western or even Eastern, is that their belief becomes something more rigid than a temporarily useful mental instrument.  It becomes an egoistic dogma for always feeling “right” through identification with a collective identity.  Such people are truly lost.  They pursue the commitments of prejudice.  Their learning system is effectively blocked.  And they will remain lost until they have learned what belief is really for, which includes the concept of “Faith”.  And do not believe that you yourself are free from this problem.  If you think you are free from all unproductive and progress-blocking belief, you should look deeply into yourself as to what causes you to have such an assumption about yourself.  Many Westerners, for instance, who speak English as their native tongue believe that only people who think in English are “universal” and “unprejudiced” because the New World Order is taking over the World through English and Anglo-American pseudo-democracy with their schizophrenic Technological Christianity or whatever it is supposed to be.  There is the growing and prevailing common assumption in the West that a kind of New Age Scientific Mysticism is the “Universal Unprejudiced Way”.  That this so-called “way” does not actually develop real individuals seems to be lost on the vast number of starry-eyed New Agers and Universalist cults.

 

Haji Bektash once said, “To whomever has sense, a sign is enough.  For the heedless, a thousand explanations are not enough.”

 

Certain kinds of explanations, such as in this particular article, may be registered in your mind on a certain level, but they will have to wait there as inoperative until your actual heedlessness is removed.  The main cause of this heedlessness is the unconscious and automatic reactional character of your nafs, your conditioned physical self.

 

We will stop here today so that you will have time to assimilate the teaching and learn to rise beyond your compulsive, conditioned nature of ignorant unalertness.