3 posts tagged “nafs”

The Thieves of Time
Jacob Needleman

Each little "self" within us -- and they are many -- has the power to take away a portion of our time. These "selves" do this again and again, over and over, as we repeatedly act out the limited number of inner and outer scenarios that make up our lives. It is the defining essence of our neurosis that we continually and mechanically repeat these scenarios. And that we are not there to witness them. The teachings of wisdom tell us that these scenarios take from us the time and the psychic energy that are given to human beings in order to form within ourselves a presence, a selfhood, that can become free of the tyranny of time -- a presence that can, as is said in some teachings, even survive the fate of the physical body.

Let us be clear what we mean when we speak of these lesser "selves" and their scenarios. We are speaking first of all of what are now sometimes called the negative emotions: fear, guilt, self-pity, hurt feelings, anger, lovesickness and many others. All of us are prey to these emotions, though individuals differ as to which of them predominate. Some of us are almost always nursing some hurt or slight; others are continually angry or irritated, whether we express this anger or only live it in our thoughts; others fall from one occasion for self-pity to another others are constantly guilty about things big and small, from their family relationships or mankind and the earth itself to their cat or dog or even a plant that needs watering.

The list of these emotions is endless and fascinating to consider. Ancient teachings spoke of the seven deadly sins, but what is deadly about them is not so much the harm they may bring to others, but the harm they bring to oneself. And the harm they bring to oneself includes the power they seem to have to take from us our most precious inner property -- our specifically human time and attention. these deadly sins, these devouring emotions, repeat and repeat and repeat. And at the end of these repetitions nothing is left of ourselves, nothing has been brought into ourselves. To begin again (palingenesis) does not mean destroying these reactions; it means removing from them their power to take us away from ourselves.

At a more obvious level, these reactions, by drawing away our attention and influencing the direction of our thought and perception, continually lead us into decisions and situations that we sooner or later realize do not correspond to what we want or need and that take a great deal of time and energy to deal with. Time and again we find ourselves in the same kind of difficulty, surrounded by the same kind of events, the same kind of people -- the same betrayals, the same heartbreak, the same kind of loss in business or romance, the same petty crime or hollow triumph, the same kind of "wrong" man or woman, making the same mistake with our parents or children. And again and again spending time and energy correcting the situation, which leaves us, in the end, at more or less the same point at which we started -- often making vain and powerless promises to ourselves about doing better the next time. It sometimes happens, of course, that one spends one's whole life trying to set right just one of the situations that result from these reactions. One is constantly sweeping away the leaves that are always falling and never actually setting off on the path that the leaves keep covering. thus do we squander our time, our lives.

{Taken from Needleman's "Time and the Soul"}