REMEMBERING GOD

by making it a point of reference for God’s remembrance. So, for the Prophet, remembering God, or zikrullah, and other tasks were not two separate activities, rather both were intermingled. The human mind has enormous potential. An American writer, Walt Whitman, has said: “I am large enough to contain all these contradictions.” He said this in a different context. However, this saying applies here as well. While being engaged in different tasks throughout the day, we can be engaged in zikr as well, reflecting on God’s bounties in the context of the tasks we are doing or the things we are seeing. Zikr means living with divine consciousness. When you have attained this state of consciousness, at every moment you will be in a state of zikr, even though you may not be uttering any specific words. Sometimes, you may find yourself lamenting the past, experiencing negative feelings and thinking about negative experiences. In this way, your mind is diverted from zikr of God. This is a very common occurrence. But you can convert even this into a means to remember and thank God. If you have had some painful or negative experience in the past, when you recall it today you can convert it into something to be thankful to God. You can think of it as yet another reason for shukr, or thankfulness to God. You can thank God that He did not make you stay on in that negative moment, and that, instead, He made you reach a better situation today. So, in this way, you can even make the memory of a negative or painful experience into yet another opportunity to engage in zikr or remembrance of God. o Remembering God is not alien to your being. It is interwoven in your being, like energy. You and energy are apparently separate, but in fact both are one and the same. So, at every moment there are bounties of God all around you which you can remember. Patience Patience is no retreat. It only amounts to taking the initiative along the path of wisdom and reason as opposed to the path of emotions.