22 Dec Changing our World
Bayazid Bastami was a Sufi mystic. He is credited with playing a major role in placing the concept of divine love at the core of Sufism.
Bayazid wrote in his autobiography that when he was young he prayed to God ?Give me energy so that I can change the whole world.? Everybody looked wrong to Him. He was a revolutionary and wanted to change the face of the earth.
When he became older and more mature he started praying: ?This seems to be too much. Life is going out of my hands, almost half of my life is gone and I have not changed a single person, and the whole world is too much.? So instead he now prayed to God, ?My family will be enough. Let me change my family.?
?And when I became old,? says Bayazid, ?I realized that even the family is too much, and who am I to change them? Then I realized that if I can change myself that will be enough, more than enough. I prayed to God, ?Now I have come to the right point. At least allow me to do this: I would like to change myself.?
?God replied, ?Now there is no time left. This you should have asked in the beginning. Then there was a possibility.??
When Bayazid died he was over seventy years old. Before he died, someone asked him his age. He said: “I am four years old. For seventy years I was veiled. I got rid of my veils only four years ago.?
Bayazid’s story is a good example of how we focus on the external world and try to change the world to suit us. We often try to make the world revolve around our needs and wants. We sometimes abuse concepts such as justice and fairness by using them to disguise our own selfishness. We battle against reality and try to change things that are often beyond our control.
The more wise among us understand that the lasting contentment we seek is best achieved by changing ourselves through methods and practices such as meditation. As we are part of the world when we change ourselves the world also changes. The people around us have to change to adapt to our new beliefs and behaviour. This in turn has a knock on effect on the people around them. We lead by example even when we don’t intend to.
Reality is far too complicated for our minds to fully comprehend. Instead our minds create a simplified model of the world and that interpretation becomes our world. The world we experience is seen through the lens of our moods, beliefs, expectations and a myriad of other factors.
We all live in our own subjective worlds and when we change ourselves the world, as we experience it, also changes.
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