KABIR HELMINSKI
ONE OF THE 500 MOST INFLUENTIAL MUSLIMS
Kabir was included on the 2023 list of the “500 Most Influential Muslims in the World.” He has toured North America as Shaikh with the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, bringing Sufi culture to more than 100,000 people.
Kabir has explored the sacred traditions of the world, seeking to understand what they can teach us about consciousness and the human heart. The focus of his work is contributing to a new language of spirituality that can meet the unprecedented challenges of our times.
His most recent book is The Mysterion: Rumi and the Secret of Becoming Fully Human (Shambhala Publications, 2023).
His books on spirituality, Living Presence and The Knowing Heart, have been published in at least nine languages. He is a respected translator of the works of Rumi and others, and is a co-director of The Threshold Society (Sufism.org). He teaches internationally, often at inter-spiritual events. His articles and writing have appeared in The Huffington Post, Tikkun, Patheos, and The Times of India, among others.
Yearning and Cosmic Intelligence
KABIR HELMINSKI
YEARNING
Is there a Supreme Being, an eternal and infinite Spirit? And what is our relationship to It? Do our thoughts and actions elicit some response from It? Can we cultivate a relationship with It?
Can we recognize in our lives a yearning for a relationship with something, a “Holy Unknown,” a longing that persists even after our material and personal needs are satisfied?
Religious beliefs and dogmas might intervene and fill the gap of yearning with concepts and doctrines, which can, to some extent, erect a barrier against this existential yearning. Beliefs can be mere second-hand information. Such beliefs then become mere accessories to the ego, subjects to argue about.
Apart from our habitual ego-based emotions, thoughts, and beliefs, we might also recognize a longing for something more, for subtle experiences like awe, wonder, reverence, a sense of the sacred, that carry us beyond the ego-self. These feelings might be so strong that some human beings make them central to their life, cultivating a deeper sense of a numinous, spiritual presence. What they report to us is that this relationship with “X” is more satisfying, more enduring, even more beautiful than the experience of their ego-bound feelings. Should we pay more attention to this portal of yearning?
COSMIC INTELLIGENCE
In the complex, intelligent, and beautiful phenomena of the natural world we glimpse exquisite design, function, and beauty – down to the deepest, darkest trenches of the oceans. But the more we learn about how the natural world operates with interdependent consciousness and purpose, the more we sense that a vast sentience is at play. Nature’s intelligence has not only accomplished these majestic feats of engineering, but the natural world seems to arrange itself in ways that bring balance, provide support, and respond to changing conditions, including even subtle, intangible communication. Nature seems to have an aptitude for looking after life, for nurturing creation. Is the individual human psyche somehow excluded from this interdependent system of communication and nurturing?
It’s curious that we recognize this Intelligence in the natural world and yet we imagine that the realm of inner human experience is merely random and purposeless. Is the Intelligence that is visible in the depths of the oceans absent in the depths of individual consciousness? Is the world of physical nature governed by a “universal intelligence,” while the inner life of the human being is random and accidental, without design, meaning, and purpose? Is the human psyche not equipped to know something about this other dimension of existence? Could it be that we can experience and communicate with this dimension of Intelligent Beneficence? Synchronicity, effective prayer, saintly intervention, and angelic agency are examples of a dimension beyond the materialist paradigm.
Is our yearning for something unknown and transcendent actually the call of the Transcendent Itself? Or as Jalaluddin Rumi says:
The thirsty one moans,
“Water, water!” The Water calls, “Who will drink me?”
Our thirst is the magnetism of the Water:
We are Its, and It is ours.