Emirudin Arosi, who came from a family well known for its commitment to progress, met the sage and said to him:
“My wife and I tried for many years to follow the path of the dervishes. Realizing that we know less than many, we have long been content to spend our wealth in the name of truth. We followed people whose integrity we now doubt. Our grief is not that we wasted money on ineffective business ventures in the name of a supposed Great Cause. We grieve for the time wasted and for those people who are still in slavish subordination to misguided and self-important teachers, false Sufis, who have created a completely abnormal atmosphere around themselves.
The sage, whom tradition calls Khwaja Ahrar, the Lord of the Free, replied:
“You have broken with the false teachers, but you have not turned away from the self-worship that makes you imagine that you are responsible for the captives of lies. Many of these captives have not extricated themselves from the web of deception because they want easy knowledge.
-What should we do? - asked Emir-din Arozi.
“Come to me with an open heart and without conditions, even if these conditions are service to humanity or the reasonableness and meaningfulness of my demands,” said the Master. “Because the release of your comrades may be the work of the experts, but not yours.” Your ability to even form an opinion about me is crippled. In any case, I refuse to rely on it.
Fearing that they were making a mistake again, Arozi and his wife left to look for another person to support them. He, as it turned out later, was just another liar.
More years passed, and the couple headed back to the house of Khwaja Ahrar.
“We came in complete humility,” they said to the gatekeeper, “to surrender ourselves into the hands of the Lord of the Free, as if we were corpses in the hands of a corpse washer.”
“Good people,” said the gatekeeper, “your determination seems excellent and is exactly the same as the determination of those whom the Lord of the Free would accept as disciples.” But you don't have that chance - because Khwaja Ahrar is dead.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru