The Secret of Secrets
A Medieval Islamic Parable of Weed and Trowel
The open secret at the heart of mystical traditions the world over is that right here, right now, you are free. You just don’t realize it. Or you don’t believe that heaven or enlightenment is already within your grasp. And since that is what you believe, that is what your experience will be. Your beliefs create your experiences, so your conviction that you are not already free holds you back from experiencing freedom.
The question we all have, of course, is how do we awaken to this secret? How do we adapt our beliefs to the truth? Why have so few people done it successfully? And what is it like when we finally do awaken?
Nearly a thousand years ago, the founder of the first of the great Sufi orders, Abdul-Qadir Gilani (1077–1166), wrote an extraordinary book aptly called The Secret of Secrets where he unveiled the answers to exactly these sorts of questions. Gilani is widely considered to be one of Islam’s greatest saints and yet “The Secret” was only translated into English in the last thirty years. With gems like these gathering dust it is perhaps not surprising that here we all are (at least in the English-speaking world), almost a thousand years later, still stumbling around looking for answers.
Part of the reason books like “The Secret” have remained a secret is that the audience was restricted to religious elites and dedicated searchers by virtue of the terminology used and the institutional context. Everyone would like to experience the freedom that saints like Gilani spoke of but the overtly religious expressions for how to achieve it limit the audience and obscure the methods.
Gilani expounds on the Islamic and Christian idea that our ‘sinful’ actions and false interpretations are the cause of our suffering. Suffering can be ended through repenting these sins. But “repentance” and “sin” are misleading words that serve to obscure rather than illuminate the secret contained within these teachings.
For example, Gilani writes that there are two kinds of penance. The first kind of repentance, or the “ordinary” kind refers to those who “merely pronounce the words of regret… It is as if such people are trying to get rid of [weeds] by cutting it off at the ground rather than digging out its roots. In doing this, they only help it to grow better.” Right away a discussion of “penance” brings to mind institutional and explicitly religious connotations for people exposed primarily to Christian traditions. Christianity for many people is about feeling guilty for doing ostensibly ‘naughty’ things (many of which can actually be quite joyful and spiritually healthy). The church then offers the Sacrament of Penance (or the like) to allow believers to be absolved of these so-called sins.
As we can see from Gilani’s quote, the Islamic interpretation has a different tone. Repentance isn’t about feeling remorseful or a specific sacrament of confessing your sins to your priest. Expressing or carrying around regret or performing ritualistic acts of penance or praying harder or more frequently is more likely to fall into the category of “cutting the grass” where it comes up into the air from the soil (to use Gilani’s metaphor). The root is as strong as ever and we’ve probably just brought more sunlight and less competition from the neighboring plants into the weeds of “sin” and fooled ourselves into thinking that ‘we’re good now’. The egoic mind is strengthened and, thinking we’ve cleared out our “sin,” our guard is down for the next time it sneaks in to dominate our actions.
This is not the kind of penance required to achieve freedom or enlightenment, which is why most of us don’t feel free or peaceful most of the time. The second kind is true “repentance” according to Gilani, and this is the form that unlocks spiritual transcendence. This form isn’t about guilt or a particular ritual. Instead, it is a long term project that each one of us can engage in to remove the very things within us that caused us to “sin” in the first place (or to be exposed to ‘sinful’ or hellish experiences).
“The one who repents knowing his fault and the cause of his fault and wishing to rid himself of this fault, digs out the roots of this pernicious plant. When it is dug out, it dries, and it does not come back again. The trowel used in digging the roots, the causes of one’s sins, is the spiritual teaching one receives from a true teacher. One must clear the ground before one can plant one’s orchard.” — Abdul-Qadir Gilani, The Secret of Secrets, Chapter 5.
Here we have one of the most spiritually advanced humans to have lived telling us that we can be free of the causes and conditions of “sin”. Anger, greed, negativity, want, envy, sadness, and all the other worst parts of life and human behavior can be transcended. But we can’t follow the typical prescriptions which amount to nothing more than ripping a weed out but leaving the root in the ground. To clear the ground of “weeds” so that they can be replaced with an “orchard”, we have to find a “true teacher” and follow those teachings. Sadly, these teachers are difficult (and often risky) for people to find in the modern world. But fortunately, many teachers from the past have left us books we can read and use. And we don’t have to join a religion, believe in a supernatural being or pay someone for their help. It is all there for us.
Abdul-Qadir Gilani is one of those teachers awaiting our attention. Gilani teaches that once we have truly repented, “divine attributes” such as peace, joy and purity follow so, what is the secret teaching? What is the technique to truly “repent” in the right way, removing the weeds, root and all? If you filter through the 12th Century heavy religious style you will find very Zen like advice such practicing “the annihilation of the self,” and alighting in “the state of nothingness.” In other words, our addiction to a sense of self and our mistaken need for our reality and mind to be filled with something (thoughts, sensory inputs, memories, feelings, etc.) is what is keeping us from awakening. This is the secret that Gilani reveals.
The Secret: our addiction to a sense of self and our mistaken need for reality and our mind to be filled with something (thoughts, sensory inputs, memories, feelings, etc.) is what is keeping us from awakening, from experience our unity of being. This is the secret that Gilani reveals.
If we can become comfortable with letting go of our self and its grasping, never satisfied hunger, we can awaken to our unity of being. Unfortunately, this truth is non-conceptual and non-verbal so putting it into words that our minds can form a conception of will leave us unsatisfied. It has to be experienced through the project of self-annihilation. He explains it thus:
“The false self melts and evaporates when divine attributes enter one’s being, and when the multiplicity of worldly attributes and personalities leave, their place is taken by the single attribute of unity. In reality, the truth is always present. It neither disappears nor declines. … the temporal being finds its true existence by realizing the eternal secret.” — Abdul-Qadir Gilani, The Secret of Secrets, Chapter 6
What happens if we can sustain this project of weeding our garden and repenting our sins? Giliani describes it as follows:
“When the attributes of darkness lift, light takes its place, and the one with the eye of the soul sees… Then he himself is flooded by light and becomes light…The goal that you wish to attain is the realization of your emptiness of all else except the Essence of Allah. This attainment is a becoming. There is no distance, nor closeness, nor fairness, nor reaching, nor measure, nor direction, nor dimension.” — Abdul-Qadir Gilani, The Secret of Secrets, Chapter 10
(* “Essense of Allah” is Gilani’s expression for the ultimate truth or highest level of consciousness)
