They were two of the most genuinely humble human beings I had ever met. Every afternoon, Mother Krishnabai sat around with the devotees at the ashram cracking jokes and cackling at her own punchlines. Suleyman Dede was purely sweet. So yes, I was impressed, all right—just not in the way I’d expected.
On the train from Konya to Istanbul, a murid from a more intellectual Sufi order declared, “Suleyman Dede’s knowledge is nothing. He’s just a nice old guy. But his knowledge is nothing.” So I thought about that, and finally thought, Oh! If only my knowledge could be as nothing as the knowledge of Suleyman Dede!
In pondering how humbling it is to accept my own human imperfections, and how good that can feel, I wonder: did Mother Krishnabai and Suleyman Dede know that they had good reason to be humble?
After I got back from my peregrinations, I was blessed to be able to go on one of the walks in Golden Gate Park that Joe Miller led every week. Joe Miller also did not have a great big spiritual star aura: when he arrived at the gathering point, he hugged every single person there. At some point during the walk when we were taking a break, he walked up to me and the friend I was chatting with and said that the core teaching of every religion is Love. He then started talking about being “nothing,” which was a little disconcerting at first; he said, “When you know that you’re nothing, you’re very careful about everything, because you know that you’re nothing. But it’s so easy to be nothing and so hard to be something”—and then walked off, cackling.
Hazrat Inayat Khan addressed this as follows: “To be spiritual is to become nothing; to become good is to become something. To be something is like being nothing, but to be nothing is like being all things. It is this claim of being something which hinders the natural perfection. Self-effacement is a return to the Garden of Eden.”
I used to brag that my highest ambition was to be just another person. Imagine my dismay when it finally dawned on me that just another person was exactly what I had been being all along, all my life. Sheesh, how embarrassing.
George Carlin, in complaining about emphasis on boosting children’s self-esteem, pointed out that if everyone is special, then no one is special. Damn skippy. Everyone is special, and no one is special. Humanity rocks. We’ve got this. We can overcome. All we have to do is let go and let the Love do the healing, and then do the next right thing.
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