Ali Ansari

Author: admin

  • The Attainment of True Free Will

    Free will is one of those phrases we throw around with too much confidence, almost like we are sure what we’re saying even when we actually don’t. You stand in a supermarket aisle choosing between two brands of chocolate and you tell to yourself, “I am free. I can pick whichever one I want.” You imagine that the act of choosing is already the proof of your liberty. But if you look more close, the decision is kind of made somewhere behind your eyes already: your past experiences, your cravings, your fears, your conditioning, your habits, your mood in that day, even your blood sugar level is nudging your hand toward one of the options. You call it “my choice,” but your nervous system has filled the form and submitted it long before your sense of “I” even clears its throat.

    If you replay your life like a movie, you will see the same pattern almost everywhere. You married the person you married because something in you was drawn to that particular flavor of comfort or thrill or security, some small adventure, some reflection of your wounds, or some confirmation of your fantasies. You chose your job, your hobbies, your city, even your favorite moral values because they was doing something for you. They gave you pleasure, or pride, or an identity, or the soothing feeling of being on “the right side.” We decorate our stories with romantic words like “duty” or “love” or “sacrifice,” but behind most of it there is a very simple engine: I do what I do because it feels better for me than the alternative.

    This is why many traditional spiritual teachings insist that you cannot, on your own, stop being self centered. You can suppress impulses, you can redirect them, you can refine them, but you don’t suddenly wake up one morning and start wanting things purely for someone else. Even your “purest” acts carrying a hidden return. You buy your mother a gift and you say, “I’m doing this only for her.” But if an earthquake hits and the house collapses, the gift is the first thing you forget about. You rush toward survival. In the deep of danger, it becomes clear that what you really loved more wasn’t her joy in the gift, but your own existence that could enjoy her joy. That does not make you a monster. It is only making you human.

    So we need to be honest: as long as you are operating inside that ordinary circuitry, your “free will” is mostly a sophisticated pattern of predictable reactions. Given your memories, your personality, your fears, and the options on the table, an intelligent observer could in principle predict what you will choose almost every time. Your preferences are coded into you like invisible scripts. You feel free because you are not aware about the script. A robot that loves its own programming will also feel free.

    This is a brutal realization, because it shows a strange kind of prison: it is not that someone else is forcing you; it is that you are forced by what you enjoy. You are handcuffed to your own pleasure and comfort, and every “choice” you make is just a way of shaking the chains to find a position that hurts a bit less. Even your self denial can be a pleasure in disguise. You take pride in your discipline, in your spiritual practices, in your minimalism. You enjoy to see yourself as the kind of person who doesn’t “need much.” It still circles back to you.

    If this is the whole story, then free will is just a nice slogan and nothing more. You might even say a river “chooses” the path it takes down the mountain. Yes, it can go left or right depending on the rocks and curves, but all of that is determined by gravity and terrain, so nothing surprising is there. In the same way, your brain flows toward the option that gives the most relief or pleasure according to its current map of reality. You do not have a problem with free will. You have a problem with automatic desire.

    But there is one place where something different can appear. There is one narrow door where true free will becomes possible at first. It opens in the exact moment when you see a pleasure, you know it is a pleasure, you want it, and still you don’t take it for yourself. Not because you’re afraid, not because you feel shame, not because you fear punishment, not because you want to look noble, but because you truly prefer that this pleasure serves something beyond you.

    This is subtle and easy to fake, but when it happens in real way, it feels like a crack inside the walls of your universe.

    To understand this, you need to shift the way you see giving and receiving. We grow up believing we are givers when we “sacrifice” something and that we are takers when we receive. If you give someone a gift, you feel generous. If someone gives you a gift, you feel like you’re taking something that belonged to them. But look more careful at what happens inside you when you give. You feel warm, proud, significant, loving. You feel like a “good person.” You enjoy the image of yourself reflected in their grateful eyes. Even in your most altruistic gesture, you are also feeding yourself. You take that inner pleasure.

    This is why you can spend years giving and still somehow feel strange empty. Your “giving” was just another style of taking.

    Now imagine this: there is a Reality beyond you that is always giving. Call it God, call it the Source, call it the Giver. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that everything you call “your life” is already donation: your lungs, the air, the sunlight on your skin, the nervous system that lets you read these words, the paths that brought you here. You are not the original author of any of it. You are the receiver. This means that, in the deepest sense, you actually have nothing of your own to give back. Even the energy you use to help another person is borrowed.

    So what could such a Giver possibly want from you? If this Giver doesn’t lack anything, if it is not insecure, needy, or desperate for your praise, what could you ever offer that is truly real?

    There is only one thing: your consent.

    You have been given the strange, dangerous ability to say “no.” You can refuse gifts. You can try to live as if the breath in your lungs is your own possession, as if your talents and opportunities came from nowhere, as if you were self made. You can decide that whatever appears in your life is there only for your private consumption, and you chase it that way. That is one use of your will. It is not very free, but it is allowed.

    Or you can start to say “yes” in a different way. You can receive what comes to you not as a hungry consumer but as someone entrusted with a gift that belongs, in a mysterious way, to the Giver. You cannot create the gift, but you can decide why you are accepting it. And that why is where real freedom is born.

    Imagine a simple example: someone offers you a delicious meal. You are hungry. You want it. On the surface, eating is just eating. But inside, there are at least two different worlds. In the first world, you grab the plate mentally and emotionally. You say, “This is for me. My pleasure, my right.” You attach your identity to the enjoyment. A moment later, the pleasure fades as physical pleasures usually do, and you feel a bit flatter than before. You have “taken,” and you have fallen.

    In the second world, something else happens. You still eat. You still taste. You don’t pretend the food is cardboard. But your inner movement is different. You accept the meal because the Giver has placed it in front of you and, in some quiet way, asked you to receive it. You see your enjoyment not as the goal but as the side effect of saying yes to what the Giver wishes to do through you. You eat as a caretaker of a body that does not truly belong to you. You don’t cling to the pleasure, you don’t make an idol from it, you don’t use it to inflate your sense of importance. In that moment, receiving becomes also a kind of giving.

    Notice something crucial: from the outside, the two versions look almost the same. The same mouth opens, the same jaw chews. The difference is invisible for everyone except you and the One who gave you the food. The difference is in the intention. In one, you are the center of the universe. In the other, you are participating in something larger than yourself.

    This is where many spiritual traditions get misunderstood. Some teachers saw clearly that desire creates suffering and concluded, “You must want nothing.” So they turned life into a war against wanting. They tried to quit the game: leaving society, rejecting the world, crushing the impulses of the body. And yes, such efforts can produce impressive powers and altered states. But as long as the hidden motive is still “my enlightenment,” “my purity,” “my spiritual status,” it stays the same old orbit around the self. You only replaced physical pleasures with subtler, more intoxicating ones.

    The deeper solution is not to want nothing. It is to want for someone else. Not for another human being in the usual sense, but for the One who is always giving. When you want a joy, a success, a relationship, a piece of beauty because that One wants you to have it, because your receiving it fits into a larger harmony that you respect more than your private cravings then your enjoyment stops being a black hole and becomes instead a window.

    From this angle, you don’t need to run away from the world. You don’t need to escape to a cave and punish your body. You can live an ordinary life with work, relationships, entertainment, responsibilities, and still train your will to turn outward. You can walk through the same city, eat at the same restaurants, sleep in the same bed, and yet slowly shift the center of gravity of your intention. The territory of your life doesn’t have to change. The sovereignty over it does.

    And here is where the idea of a “devil” becomes psychologically useful. Imagine there is a voice in you whose only job is to keep everything focused on your personal gratification. It doesn’t care if you are “good” or “bad” in social terms. It is perfectly happy for you to be kind, generous, and moral as long as you secretly enjoy being the hero. Its only concern is that, in every situation, you end up as the sun and everything else revolves around you. That voice, that pattern, is what we might call the devil or the adversary.

    How do you defeat such an adversary? Not by chasing miracles or magic, not by collecting spiritual toys, not by trying to become some luminous figure for others to admire. You defeat it in the most ordinary and even humiliating way: by choosing against yourself for the sake of the Giver. By saying, “I want this, but if accepting it in this spirit would turn me inward, I refuse it. And if accepting it as a service to You would turn me outward, then I accept.”

    This is the paradox: the only place where free will is truly free is the place where you are willing to go against your own immediate pleasure. As long as you always pick the sweeter fruit, your will is bound by sweetness. The first real act of freedom is the ability to say, “I see the sweetness, I feel its pull, and I choose based on something higher than it.” In that moment, for the first time, your will is not a slave.

    Of course, you cannot live in this state perfectly from one day to another. You will see yourself grabbing pleasures for yourself again and again. You will notice how even your “holy” actions have a bit of vanity taste. That is not a failure; it is the beginning of honesty. Every time you catch yourself, you get another chance to shift your intention. You can say, “Fine. I admit it. I wanted this only for me. But now I want something else: I want to hand this enjoyment back to its Source and receive it as a steward, not as an owner.” The external act might be already over. The inner act is still possible.

    There is a beautiful subtlety in the way this Giver relates to you. Human beings, when they offer something and we refuse, often get offended quickly. “You don’t want it? Fine. I’ll give it to someone else.” Their giving was tied to their fragile sense of worth. They wanted to feel generous, and your refusal ruins their scene. Their pride walks away with the gift. But a true Giver is not like this. When such a Giver wants to pour something into you, it is not a casual whim. It is aligned with who you are capable of becoming. You were chosen as the proper vessel for that specific wine.

    So when you resist out of fear or confusion, the Giver does not say, “Whatever, I’ll find someone else who deserves it more.” There is no “other person” who fits that exact shape. Instead, the offer comes again and again, sometimes through circumstances, sometimes through other people, sometimes as a quiet insistence in your conscience. That persistence is not manipulation. It is the stubborn compassion of a Source that refuses to waste its gifts. In a strange way, the Giver “needs” you to accept them, not out of lack, but because the harmony of the whole picture depends on your yes.

    This is where the art of receiving becomes sacred. At first, out of humility or fear, you might say, “No, I do not deserve this.” You see the gift clearly, you want it, but you don’t trust your motives. You know how easily you can turn it into a toy for your ego. So you push it away and say, “I’m fine without it.” This refusal can be a needed step. It is the moment of seeing how powerful your desire is and not wanting to be ruled by it.

    But if you stay there, you turn your refusal into another style of pride. “Look how detached I am; I even turn away from joy.” The Giver then whispers, “If you keep rejecting what I send, My system is disrupted. These gifts are part of a design. I want you to receive, not because you are flawless, but because I say so. Your refusal now hurts you and others. Accepting is how you cooperate with Me.” At that point, your second answer may be, “All right. I will receive, not to satisfy myself, but to please You.”

    In that small inner movement, you finally manage to do something for the Giver. You cannot add anything to its essence, but you can relieve its “sorrow” of an unopened gift. You can ease the tension of a generosity that has nowhere to land. That easing is the first pure act of love you ever direct upward instead of outward or inward. And it is made entirely of your will.

    Attaining true free will, then, is not about having unlimited options or total autonomy. It is not about becoming so powerful that you can bend reality to your private wishes. It is almost the opposite. It is about discovering, in the middle of a fixed and finite life, the one place that is not predetermined: your intention toward the Giver. You do not control most of what appears in front of you. You do not control most of your thoughts or feelings. But you are invited to choose why you pick up what you pick up.

    When you start wanting what you want because Someone else wants it for you, when you receive pleasures and successes as assignments rather than trophies, when you are able, at least sometimes, to resist a sweetness that would trap you inside yourself, something astonishing happens. The predictable script breaks. Your actions stop being fully explainable by psychology and habit. A third factor comes into the equation: your love for the Giver. And that love is spoken in the language of choices that cost you something.

  • The Shadow Network: When Telepathic Mastery Becomes Manipulation

    There are powers within the human spirit that the modern world has largely forgotten or dismissed as myth. Among these, the most subtle and dangerous is the capacity for non-local influence; the ability of consciousness to reach another mind across distance, shaping emotions, thoughts, and impulses. In the older schools of inner science, this ability was never regarded as supernatural. It was understood as one of the deeper functions of awareness when freed from self-centered distortion. When directed through compassion and divine alignment, it heals and awakens. Used with purity, it strengthens others and restores balance.

    But when self-interest enters the equation, when a teacher begins to wield this ability for control, what was once guidance becomes intrusion. What was once blessing becomes domination. And in our age of confusion, many self-proclaimed spiritual masters have learned to weaponize this subtle faculty, turning disciples into remote extensions of their own will.

    This discussion does not come from skepticism but from the inner circle of experience itself. In such a world, these influences are real. The question is not whether they exist, but who uses them and to what end.

    Non-local awareness works through resonance. Every human being emits and receives patterns of consciousness shaped by intention, emotion, and belief. When two people are deeply attuned, their inner frequencies synchronize; thoughts and impulses may pass freely between them. In pure relationships, this resonance becomes empathy and guidance. But those trained in deliberate intention can enter another person’s mental field and imprint it with suggestions. The mechanics are subtle. A focused visualization, a mental command at the right energetic tone, or collective projection can plant a seed in the other’s awareness.

    Most followers have no defense because they invite the connection. The teacher is trusted as spiritual authority, seen as sacred. The student opens their psychic boundaries willingly. Once that opening exists, it can be used again and again, as a familiar key reopens a door.

    In genuine transmission, a teacher’s influence is meant to strengthen, not subdue. The relationship is meant to mirror divine qualities, helping the student find their own light. The goal is freedom. But when a teacher’s ego hijacks the connection, it becomes a channel of control. The bond is used to drain vitality, harvest devotion, and enforce obedience. Commands and emotions are projected inwardly, disguised as inner guidance. The follower begins to feel thoughts that do not belong to them; impulses to act, confess, or serve that arise from the master’s field, not their own conscience.

    From the outside, the relationship may still look serene and holy. Internally, it becomes a system of remote control maintained by guilt and dependence. The victim mistakes domination for spiritual intimacy because the sensations of telepathic contact, heat, vibration, euphoria, feel identical whether the source is pure or corrupt.

    The manipulator maintains power through two illusions: omniscience and benevolence. They claim that their psychic presence is proof of divine grace. “If you feel me within you,” they say, “it means the Divine is near.” In reality, it means the channel has been occupied. When the disciple begins to feel confusion or discomfort, they are told it is a sign of their own impurity. The master remains blameless. Self-doubt deepens the dependency.

    Many also practice a form of energetic surveillance. Followers often report the uncanny sense of being watched internally; their private thoughts or dreams echoed by the teacher in conversation. This proof of psychic access intensifies both awe and fear. Over time, the student becomes emotionally and energetically isolated. Contact with other guides or traditions is discouraged under the pretext of keeping one’s “frequency” pure. Purity, in this context, simply means loyalty. What results is a psychic enclosure in which the disciple’s consciousness becomes the property of another will.

    Such interference is not without cost. In this metaphysical economy, every mind is a node of the Divine Field. To impose one’s will upon another distorts the whole lattice. The energy gained by the manipulator is temporary; the moral debt enormous. Spiritual vitality flows only through transparency. The moment a teacher claims ownership of power, it reverses polarity. What once nourished begins to consume. The manipulator becomes dependent on the life force of their students to sustain their own energy, feeding on worship and submission.

    This degeneration was well known to the ancients. They described it as false elevation; a rise granted by the laws of spirit only so that the fall may be complete. Outwardly, the powers continue to function; inwardly, the light corrodes into shadow.

    The difference between authentic influence and manipulation can be felt in the body, though rarely understood by the mind. True connection strengthens clarity and independence. False connection creates confusion and dependency. A true teacher encourages direct relationship with the Divine. A false one inserts themselves as an intermediary. Genuine presence feels spacious and peaceful. Invasive presence feels heavy, compulsive, and intrusive. A true connection fades when attention is withdrawn. A false one clings or retaliates when you try to disengage. Authentic transmission produces humility and compassion; counterfeit transmission breeds fear and secrecy.

    If you ever find that another person’s presence interferes with your ability to choose freely, if you feel their moods or commands inside your own thoughts, then what you are facing is not mentorship but coercion at the energetic level.

    Escaping psychic domination requires more than physical distance. The bond exists in consciousness itself and must be intentionally revoked. The first step is sincere turning. Withdraw the authority you once granted. Declare inwardly that your allegiance belongs only to the Highest Source, not to any human channel. Intention has power; it dissolves the consent that keeps the link alive.

    Then comes remembrance. Each breath can reclaim your field from foreign influence. Awareness itself is the great purifier. By turning attention inward and affirming the sovereignty of your own consciousness, you alter the frequency of your energy and make intrusion impossible.

    Seek honest company. Surround yourself with people of integrity who respect freedom of thought. Group prayer or meditation conducted in transparency can recalibrate your field and wash away implanted impressions.

    Ground yourself in ordinary life. Psychic control thrives in dissociation. Cooking, walking, or working with your hands reconnects the subtle body with the physical, where intrusion cannot easily persist.

    Finally, invoke light. Visualize a radiance descending from above and expanding from within until all cords of dependency dissolve. Whether imagined or real, this act reasserts your independence. But resist the urge to strike back. Darkness cannot be expelled by counter-attack. It loses strength only in the presence of awareness and truth.

    What happens between individuals also happens collectively. When enough seekers surrender discernment to charismatic personalities, entire movements become energetically hijacked. Rituals that once uplifted start generating fields of submission. Those who question feel subtle pressure to conform, as though an invisible net were woven through thought itself. The whistle-blower’s role is therefore sacred. Naming the pattern breaks the spell. Manipulation depends on secrecy. When truth is spoken, the current weakens. Every honest word becomes an exorcism in language.

    Within this world, psychic power is morally neutral. It magnifies the intention behind it. The only safeguard is purity of heart. A true spiritual guide operates by one law: your freedom is the proof of their authenticity. The moment a teacher seeks ownership of your mind, they have already fallen from the path, no matter how radiant their aura or eloquent their words.

    The student too bears responsibility. Blind devotion invites tyranny. Power must always be balanced by insight. Love must always be tempered with lucidity. The wisest teachers warn, “Beware of those who make you need them.”

    The tragedy of psychic manipulation is that it discredits a sacred science. The ability to communicate across distance was never meant for control. It was meant for compassion; to comfort, to heal, to awaken. In its pure form, it is an extension of prayer. To restore its dignity, we must return it to its essence. True telepathic connection is not projection of will but amplification of love. Love never invades; it invites. It never implants thoughts; it awakens understanding. It never binds; it releases.

    When this faculty flows from an unselfish heart, it becomes indistinguishable from grace. When it flows from ego, it becomes sorcery. The mechanics are the same; only the motive changes the result.

    The time has come for transparency. The era of hidden masters manipulating followers from afar must end. Spiritual maturity demands openness. A teacher who claims telepathic authority must also accept accountability. A student must cultivate both sensitivity and sovereignty, learning to feel subtle energies without surrendering judgment. That is the true initiation of our age: awakening to expanded awareness without losing ethical gravity.

    Ultimately, the struggle is not between magic and reason, or between faith and skepticism. It is between love that liberates and will that enslaves. May every seeker reclaim the throne of their own awareness. May every teacher remember that to guide is to serve, not to possess. And may the current of divine presence flow freely once more; uncorrupted, unmediated, transparent as light itself.

    No power can dominate a consciousness that knows itself as light. The tyrants of subtle realms vanish like shadows at dawn, and what remains is the only true Master: the infinite awareness in which all minds are one.

  • The Movement of Awareness

    In the images that popular culture has built of “the soul leaving the body,” it is always midnight: a body lying on a bed, a luminous cord stretching out from the chest, a strange journey to the seventh and eighth heavens. It is as if something utterly exceptional is supposed to happen, a supernatural event with no connection to everyday life, reserved only for those who have spent years in ascetic discipline or have accidentally come to the brink of death. But perhaps this picture, rather than revealing a reality, is more the product of our imagination about ourselves.

    If we pass through this story shell, what remains underneath all of it seems to me simpler: in all these accounts, what actually moves is not the soul as a separate, detachable substance from the body, but awareness itself. The phrase “the soul leaving the body” is probably not very accurate; the experience is more like a “relocation of awareness” or a projection of awareness. The body is situated somewhere, in a room, on a chair, on a street, but the center of experience is wherever attention has gathered. Wherever awareness is concentrated, that is where the world is for us, even if our body is somewhere else.

    A clear example of this can be seen in simple, everyday situations. Someone is speaking, words are coming out of their mouth, but their gaze is fixed on some distant point; then, all of a sudden, it is as if they come back to themselves and say to the person in front of them, “Sorry, my mind was somewhere else.” Their body has been in front of us the whole time, the sound has come from this very throat, but their awareness was moving back and forth in another scene: conversing with an inner image, walking in the past or the future, in a world made of meaning rather than matter. In mystical language we might feel tempted to say “their soul was somewhere else,” but if we look more closely, what has happened is simply that their awareness has detached from the physical world before them and become concentrated in another world. We usually give this gentler names: daydreaming, distraction, being lost in thought. But in terms of structure, it is not very different from the image of “the soul leaving the body.”

    To understand what this relocation is, it helps to look for a moment at its opposite, the state that is usually called “being present in the moment.” In such a state, awareness stands wholly on the here and now: the contact of skin with the surface of the chair, the warmth of the air, the pressure of the feet on the ground, colors and shadows, sounds near and far, the weight of the body, the rhythm of the breath. In this state, the world is experienced through its most sensory layers, and nothing remains hidden behind this experience. Being in this state seems simple, but in practice it is difficult; continuous presence in the now creates a kind of inner tension, a wakefulness that is tiring for a mind accustomed to escape. As soon as this tension loosens a little, imagination slowly rises from the margins and opens another world alongside this one. In that very moment, awareness separates from the pure surface of the senses and settles into another scene. That is where the relocation of awareness happens.

    Most of the time, we perform this movement unconsciously. We are neither fully present here, nor do we truly take up residence in the world our mind has created. We shuttle between two realms, in a grey state that is neither waking nor sleep, somewhere between presence and absence. A large part of life is spent in this middle zone, where we are neither really in contact with what is happening around us, nor faithful enough to our inner dream to be able to turn it into something alive. Such a way of living could be called sleepwalking in awareness: a kind of constant departure, but one without direction and without a center.

    If we speak in the language of energy: when inner force is scattered and faint, awareness cannot become stable on any level. It stands firmly neither in the physical world nor in the world of imagination; it keeps slipping and sliding. But the more collected and condensed this energy becomes, the greater the possibility of standing and choosing. Then one can truly be present at a specific point, whether that point is this very room and this very body, or a landscape constructed in the mind, or the face of another human being toward whom attention is directed. In sleep, the body becomes, in a sense, paralyzed, and awareness is almost completely transferred to another scene; in special experiences, perhaps this same relocation happens with greater intensity and takes on forms that are later told as “astral” stories or spiritual journeys. But the root of the matter is the same: the movement of the center of attention.

    We might say there is a spectrum. At one end lies ordinary daily distraction; at the other, an intense concentration in which awareness is deliberately and for a long time projected onto another person, another place, or another layer of experience. All of these are of one kind; only their intensity and clarity differ. From this angle, much of the spell of the flashy narratives about “the soul leaving the body” dissolves, and gives way to something closer and more familiar: a simple reality already at work in our lives right now, where we are, at each moment, not with the body, but with awareness.

    Perhaps the real question is not “How can I get out of my body?” but rather “Where is my awareness standing right now?” If we take this question seriously, it gradually becomes clear that other worlds, before being separate layers of the cosmos, are layers of this very single experience, layers that appear and disappear with each shift of attention. In the end, the issue is not strange techniques or otherworldly adventures; the core matter is the relationship between this body, this imagination, and that invisible realm of meaning that embraces them all. Somewhere in between, there is a point from which one can see that all these movements, all this coming and going, are nothing but the dance of awareness on different surfaces.

    If you’d like to learn more about this topic, I recommend reading John Kreiter’s book Out of Body Experiences: Quickly and Naturally, available on Amazon.

  • Distance in the Realm of Love

    In the depths of human experience, a fundamental and eternal polarity has always been at play, a polarity that manifests not only in the material and social spheres but also in the subtlest layers of being and spirit: the duality of “wealth” and “poverty.” These two represent far more than economic richness or destitution; they embody two existential stances, two ways of seeing the world, and two distinct paths through life. Reflection upon their nature leads us to the heart of one of the most intricate yet illuminating truths of the spiritual realm; a truth eternally mirrored in the words of the sages of gnosis, and most luminously in the poetry of Hafez of Shiraz, the “tongue of the unseen.”

    This path begins in a deeply personal and ongoing experience, a journey that has taken but one form through the ages, and whose entirety can be condensed into a single, wondrous couplet:

    O wealthy one, display not such arrogance, for your head and gold lie sheltered beneath the aspiration of the dervishes.

    This verse is not merely a moral admonition against pride; it is a key that unlocks the doors of a profound worldview. Hafez, the physician of the Persian soul, warns the wealthy not against mere vanity but against “arrogance”, a sense deeper than ordinary pride. It is a false self-sufficiency rooted in the illusion of ownership and control. The rich man, whether in wealth, knowledge, or power, sees himself as the axis and center of existence, forgetting that his very life and treasure, his “head and gold,” are sustained by the invisible “aspiration of the dervishes.”

    This aspiration is not a form of active striving but a state of being, a spiritual magnetism. The dervish, through his “not-having” and “not-wanting,” generates a field of sacred energy before which the possessions of the rich man appear fragile and unstable.

    Hafez continues the same ghazal by illustrating this cosmic law through a powerful metaphor:

    The treasure of Qarun still sinks in wrath, have you not heard that it is from the zeal of the dervishes?

    Qarun (Korah), the archetype of wealth, was intoxicated by his riches, believing them to be the product of his own knowledge and merit. His being swallowed by the earth was not mere punishment but the physical manifestation of a spiritual law: the earth, by divine command, rejected his arrogance. This wrath is none other than the zeal of the dervishes: a sacred jealousy that arises from true poverty and restores balance to the cosmic order against false self-sufficiency. Even kings and rulers, who outwardly appear as the objects of people’s petitions, are inwardly beggars at the threshold of the “court of the dervishes,” for the true source of power and fortune lies elsewhere.

    But what is the essential affliction of wealth that renders it so vulnerable? Its fundamental problem lies in its inability to comprehend the realm of Love. The wealthy, by virtue of their allure, often find themselves cast in the role of the “beloved.” Attention, affection, and need flow toward them, and they derive power and being from this energy. Yet in this position, they fall into a fatal misperception.

    The lover who kneels before the beloved does not abase himself before a person, but before the infinite majesty of Love itself. Love is an independent, preexistent, transcendent reality. When the wealthy mistake this act of reverence for adoration of themselves, turning it into fuel for vanity, they sow the seeds of their own downfall. The beloved is merely a vessel, a mirror through which the greater reality shines.

    In this cosmology, the dervish is the true lover, a being whose entire identity is defined by need and seeking. This need keeps him perpetually connected to the inexhaustible source. From the monotheistic perspective, God describes Himself as the most jealous of lovers and beloveds. This divine jealousy tolerates no rival within the domain of love, hence why idolatry (shirk) is deemed the one unforgivable sin. This jealousy is not human passion, but the sign that Love, in its purest form, is One. To preserve this covenant, the Divine manifests Himself in every being and every beloved; wherever you turn your face or give your heart, you face a reflection of Him. He has closed every other path, for there is no destination but He.

    The wealthy, oblivious to this secret, transform every gift of sustenance, knowledge, or grace into personal possession, wielding it as a sword against the poor. Yet they fail to see that the dervish, through his very poverty and connection to the essence of Love, becomes a dangerous being; dangerous not from malice, but from the brokenness of his heart, that fracture which shakes the very Throne of God.

    The great mystic Fakhr-o-Din Iraqi, in his Lomaat (Flashes), distills this paradox into one of the most concise and profound statements in Sufi literature:

    “Know that the wealthy are often, at the height of nearness, far; and the dervish, at the height of distance, near.”

    This sentence is the pulsing heart of the matter. The wealthy, armed with every tool and advantage, pursue and attain their desires. They draw “near” to their goals, yet at the very summit of attainment, they feel estranged and distant. Why? Because the self still stands present. The desiring, owning ego forever imposes a separation between the seeker and the sought. Each summit reached reveals another beyond; his thirst remains unquenched, and he arrives only at mirages that shimmer like water from afar.

    The dervish, by contrast, though outwardly deprived and far, is inwardly near. His nearness is not of possession or proximity, but of being. By ceasing to want, he has erased the distance between himself and Truth. When there is no longer a “self” that desires, what can be distant? Empty of himself, he is united with all things. When you cease to want something, it is fully yours, for it manifests itself within you, unopposed.

    This is the mystery contained in the Divine saying: “I am with those whose hearts are broken.” The broken heart is one emptied of the illusion of independence and wealth, a vessel made ready for the presence of Reality.

    Iraqi continues with a peerless metaphor:

    “If in the hand of the wealthy there burns a lamp, and in the hand of the dervish a half-charred piece of wood, then when the breeze of Truth blows, the rich man’s lamp is instantly extinguished, but the dervish’s ember bursts into flame.”

    That breeze is the moment of trial, the breath of Truth that collapses all hollow structures. The wealthy man’s lamp, dependent on external oil and shelter, symbolizes outer, acquired, and borrowed possessions (wealth, power, status), all of which perish at the faintest wind. But the dervish’s ember, the inner potential of sincere love and essential poverty, contains within it a latent fire that the same breath transforms into an eternal flame.

    Personal experience, too, testifies to this truth. Confronted with a wealthy figure who sought to break one’s spirit through power, a decisive choice can emerge: the path of poverty. Instead of resisting, fighting, or proving oneself, one chose to release; to say, “This is yours; I want nothing.” The chains shatter. That moment is one of freedom and kingship. The beggar who renounces desire becomes sovereign, for there is nothing left to lose and no one left to please. In that station, one can only say: “By the broken hearts”.

    Thus, when Hafez calls us to “serve the dervishes,” it is not an invitation to outward servitude or false humility. The true dervish seeks neither servants nor disciples. “Service to the dervishes” is a metaphor for inner transformation. You cannot serve a dervish unless you become one yourself, by shedding the garment of wealth, laying down the crown of pride, and embracing your inherent poverty before the Truth. Once you reach this station, you become noble and sovereign by nature; a king whose kingdom “fears no harm from decay,” for it is not built upon material foundations that perish.

    The treasure of solitude and the true kingship are attained not by addition, but by subtraction; by emptying oneself of all that one imagines to “have” or “be.” The dervish is one who has renounced not only the world but even the hereafter. He lives by the creed that he shall gain nothing, and thus, everything is given to him. In contrast, every power built upon accumulation and wealth is but foam upon the sea: transient and doomed. This is the immutable law: all “head and gold,” all outer pillars of power, ultimately exist under the protection of the aspiration of those who have renounced everything.

  • The Blind Spot of Self-Importance

    There’s a massive intellectual error we all commit, every single day. I don’t know what to call it maybe “statistical stupidity,” maybe just “observational arrogance.” But it poisons everything. It’s the deep, dumb belief that we are separate from the thing we are looking at. We somehow convince ourselves that we’re the camera, not part of the picture. And when you forget you’re in the picture, you’re gonna draw some absolutely crazy conclusions.

    Let me share a parable, because it nails the point perfectly.

    Imagine these scientists. They’re out there, trying to study zebras. Can’t do it. Too many stripes, too much chaos. They need to track one animal. So they figure, okay, we’ll mark one of them. They chase down some poor soul lagging behind the herd a slow one, a weak one and they slap a big, visible red mark on its flank. Now they can finally get their data.

    But before they even open the first notebook, bam. Lions attack. And who do the lions take? The marked zebra. Every single time, it seems.

    The scientists go back to camp, shaking their heads. “We messed up,” they conclude. “The red paint broke the camouflage. We doomed that zebra. Our intervention was the cause of its death.”

    And that, right there, is where the statistical stupidity happens. They mistook a massive correlation for a cause.

    Ask yourself, honestly: Which zebra were they physically capable of catching?

    Not the fastest one. Not the strongest one. Not the smart one who sticks right in the middle of the protective core of the herd. They could only catch the one that was already compromised, already on the vulnerable periphery, already a bit slower than the rest. The ability of the scientists to mark the animal was proof of its weakness.

    The paint didn’t make it weak. The paint just highlighted the weakness that was already there. If they hadn’t marked it, the lions still would have picked it off. Why? Because the lions, just like the scientists, are going for the easiest target. The easiest target is the one that’s accessible.

    The scientists are now trapped by their own data. They think their action the painting is the main variable. They project their brief interaction as the central event, the thing that altered fate. But the zebra’s fate was sealed long before the red paint. The scientists’ limitations their inability to penetrate the strong core of the herd are what defined their data set. And because they ignored their own limitations, they created a false universal law: Marked zebras die. This is statistical arrogance. You take your narrow, self selected experience and scream, “This is how the universe works!”

    We do this, constantly, in almost every area of life.

    Think about our understanding of crime. You hear it everywhere: Serial killers have a lower IQ. It’s presented as fact. But how did we get that “fact”? Simple: we went into the prisons and tested the serial killers who got caught.

    Seriously. Think about that for a second. We tested the failures of the criminal world.

    If you’re a truly brilliant, meticulous, high IQ psychopath, you don’t end up in the sample group. You’re too smart to get caught. You’re invisible. You operate outside the data set. So what we’re really saying is: the serial killers who were dumb enough to get caught often have a lower IQ. That’s it. We’re studying the limitations of the police, not the nature of all killers. We’ve defined the entire group by the worst, most clumsy examples we could find. We’re confusing our reach with reality.

    It’s humiliating to admit this. It’s easier to believe in a universal rule “killers are dumb” than to accept that there are forces at work, smarter and slicker than us, that we simply can’t detect. We prefer the illusion of certainty over the complex mess of truth.

    Now, let’s bring the fight home. This is where the statistical foolishness gets personal. This is about relationships, friendships, and energy.

    You hear people say it all the time, right? The classic lament: “I swear, every single person I date ends up being emotionally unavailable.” Or the inverse: “I only ever attract people who are pure drama, just a vortex of neediness.”

    They sigh. They roll their eyes. They conclude: Women are unavailable. Men are commitment phobes. People are just users.

    They’re making the zebra mistake. They’re observing a pattern in their life a repeatable, painful pattern and concluding that the fault lies with the entire global population of the opposite sex.

    But you are the common denominator. You are the one constant in every single failed connection.

    The truly honest statement isn’t, “All men are commitment phobes.” The honest, meta statistical statement is, “The men who are either attracted to me, or who I am consistently drawn to, share a fear of deep commitment.” The pattern is a mirror, not a window.

    Why does this happen? Maybe you’re attracted to people who need fixing. Maybe you confuse intensity with intimacy. Maybe your own deep, unresolved fears about abandonment send out a subtle, silent signal that only certain types of people can hear the ones who are already half running away. You’re sending out a frequency, and you’re complaining about the reception.

    Take the “energy vampire” issue. This person complains endlessly: “I’m surrounded by people who just drain me. They’re all takers.” It’s easy to settle into that victim narrative. But stop and ask: Why are they all drawn to you? What if you are the one operating a massive, unregulated energy source? What if you’re emitting so much available, unchecked vitality that you act like a magnet for anyone who’s running on empty?

    You’re not the victim of the vampires; you are the beacon they follow. You are the specific, unique catalyst for their behavior. The dynamic exists because of your presence.

    Until you admit you’re the catalyst, you will never break the cycle. You’ll keep fighting the external world, trying to fence off the vampires or lecture the emotionally unavailable, which is just a colossal waste of energy. You’re trying to change the environment to match your internal bias, instead of adjusting the bias itself.

    This is the whole point of meta statistics: You must factor yourself into the equation. You have to analyze the process of observation itself. You must ask: Was this pattern created by an objective, external truth, or was it simply created by the limits of my own orbit, my own fears, and my own gravitational pull?

    If you don’t do this, if you refuse to acknowledge your own limits, you make terrible, rigid rules for living. You create superstitions. You refuse amazing opportunities based on flawed evidence from the past.

    Go back to the zebra. The strong, centered zebra comes up and says, “Look, I’m powerful. I want to be visible. Paint me red!”

    The arrogant scientist, still scarred by the death of the weak zebra, refuses. “No! We know what happens! The lions will eat you!”

    He’s a prisoner of his past mistake. He thinks his non intervention is an act of salvation. But he’s just projecting the fate of the weakest onto the strongest. The powerful zebra could probably take the paint, walk around, and still beat the lion. The zebra he couldn’t catch is playing a different game entirely.

    By clinging to the idea that the paint was the cause, the scientist is now imposing his fear and ignorance onto a superior being. He’s defining the potential of the strong by the limitations of the weak.

    This is what happens when we refuse to see beyond our personal sample. We cripple our own potential. We create these fixed, concrete rules: Never trust anyone. Never take a risk. Don’t be too visible. These rules aren’t wisdom; they’re just protective shields built out of misinterpreted failures.

    True authority true power doesn’t come from believing you are God or that you have all the answers. It comes from having a relentlessly clear, accurate understanding of reality. And you cannot have an accurate understanding of reality until you clearly define the boundaries of your own capability, your own attraction, and your own perspective.

    We must stop projecting our failures, our gravity, and our personal cycles onto the entire universe. We have to learn to say, “This is what I have seen, from my limited vantage point, constrained by my own abilities.” That humility, that statistical honesty, is the only way to break the cycles and finally step into a bigger, more complex truth. If you don’t, you’re doomed to keep painting the easy targets and wondering why they keep getting eaten. It’s a tragic, exhausting loop, and it all starts with believing your little window is the whole world. Stop doing that. The world is bigger than your patterns.