“He is not godless who scorns the god of the multitude. He is godless who accepts the opinions of the multitude concerning their God.” Epicurus – Greek philosopher and author of an ethical philosophy of simple pleasure, friendship, and retirement. He founded schools of philosophy that survived directly from the 4th century BCE until the 4th century CE.
“If you die before you die, then when you die, you will not die.” Zen quote
That last quote will make more sense as we go along in this article.
In the West, the understanding of the multitude of people as it pertains to Islam, the Prophet Muhammed and the god Allah, is that the majority of the believers are somehow associated with something blasphemous or negative; violent acts, terrorism, etc. But that is absolutely not the case. Do some of them take their religion to extremists lengths by misinterpreting texts? Yes. Do Christians as well? Yes. But if we look at it from an inner growth perspective that is founded in love and compassion, could that change the world? Of course, it would. So why don’t more of us do that? Because the majority of religions of the world would lose a majority of their followers and by extension, their money. It’s much easier to keep you ignorant and controlled when you don’t question anything.
So, instead of more religious doctrine, literalism and nonsense, let’s take a look at a perspective that is not based on ignorance and misinterpretation.
In this article, I hope to show you the mystical side of the Islamic god Allah that can give us some profound spiritual takeaways which can benefit us greatly in our walk here and now.
Let’s dive in!
Hinduism is built around the mystic. Buddhism is all about the center of the mind and becoming the Buddha yourself. In Hebrew, we find the Kabbalists as the mystic. In Christianity, the mystics are the ones who find the power of God within themselves. In Islam, we find the Sufi Muslim, which is not a literalist or fundamentalist, but very mystical in their interpretation of the Quran, the Muslim Holy Book.
Author and Islamic Scholar Ahmed Hulusi has been an invaluable guide in helping me understand the mystical nature of Islam. He has written numerous books like: “Religious Misunderstanding”, “Revelations”, “Muhammed’s Allah” and many others.
In the preface of Muhammed’s Allah, the following insight is found:
Contrary to conventional perception and striking to established views, Muhammed (saw) declared “There is no God.”
In fact, his primary message negated and nullified the concept of Godhood altogether.
Many might find this a contentious statement, and conceivably discomforting to their conditioned beliefs, but that does not change the truth that Muhammed (saw) never proclaimed the existence of God.
To be precise, his words were: “There is no God. There is only Allah.”
This statement, known in Islam as the Word of Unity, is commonly assumed to mean “there is/are no other God/s, there is only one God, and that God is Allah”…the simple truth is, nowhere in Muhammed’s (saw) teachings is there any suggestion that Allah is a God.
In this book, Ahmed Hulusi presents a contrasting outlook to what has been unquestionably accepted for centuries as the Creed of Islam, urging us to question it:
If there is no God, then what is Allah?
If Allah is not a God, then to what did Muhammed (saw) refer by the name Allah?
If the Allah we have so ardently and devotedly embraced is not the Allah that Muhammed (saw) was referring to, then who or what is Muhammed’s Allah?
An ignorant man is he who has no knowledge, a stupid man is he who knows not that he has no knowledge, and a fool is he who has no understanding of his lack of understanding.
As we begin to explore Islam, there are three Bible quotes that I want you to consider: One is Luke 17-21, which says “the kingdom of God is within you”. This next one is one that somehow found its way into the Bible that always leaves a fundamentalist gasping for air because it says in Isaiah 45-7 and says: “I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the LORD do all these things.” And the last comes from Romans 2-28 in which we are told: “for he is not a Jew which is one outwardly, he is a Jew which is one inwardly”.
Now there’s a whole change of context here. Forget the literalism and fundamentalism because this is a mystical statement; it’s all about the self. You come to realize your own inner power and divinity when you undergo spiritual circumcision (an inward Jew), the cutting away of the lower self, the ego. Lay off of the foreskins people!
No god can clear your vision and make you look at a broader perspective as you proceed onward and upward until the Self within you makes the transition to becoming Allah, Krishna, Buddha or Christ. You have to become the god within. After all…
Psalm 82:6 King James Version (KJV)
6 I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
And if, as Hulusi translates, “there is no god”, where are we to go from there?
The traditional concept of God that we have understood in religious groups never corresponds to the concept of Allah by Muhammed. The point we arrive at now is simply to understand other concepts that your traditions and my traditions have not allowed us to understand. Yet, in light of the Biblical scriptures we have just read, it is completely compatible with the true nature of what we call God: “the kingdom is within you”, “I create good and I create evil”, “he is a Jew inwardly”.
The traditional approach to religion is an isolated institution from the rest of life. We’ll remain groundless because the true understanding of the true being of One as infinite and limitless eludes us because we are looking somewhere “out there” and not within ourselves.
The point of “The One” or universal consciousness is finding Allah in your own essence, not in some religion, or out/up there. Hulusi says: “Purify your heart of seeking a God or denying a god somewhere else far away from yourself which is completely an illusion in your mind. Know that Allah is not a God out there. Know that Allah is not a God. He is the only one who ever existed that is only by himself and therefore existed in what you call your own existence.”
There is nothing outside of yourself because everything outside of yourself belongs to somebody else, separate from you. But that is an illusion propagated by religious tradition, culture and conditioning, nothing more. In the words of the great prophet Yoda:
In the Bhagavad-Gita it says, and I’m paraphrasing here: “Worship Me, Revere Me, Touch Me, and then you will understand Me, which is your own Self.” I love that one.
Hazrat Ali, the Sufi mystic said, “You thought yourself apart, small; whereas in you there is a Universe, the greatest.”
I wonder what the boxer Muhammad Ali was thinking when he would say: “I am the greatest!”? He was a Sufi Muslim after all. Perhaps he understood the true depth of that statement.
The basis of our study of the Sufi Muslim perspective of Islam is that Allah is not a God.
There is a version of God in the minds of everyone, including you and me. This is a God that we sometimes love. “Thank you, God, for my healing.” “Thank you, God, for this food.” “Thank you, God, for finding my car keys for me.” But there is always a duality to this, right? Sometimes we are angry at God, aren’t we? “Why did you let this happen to me?” “Why did you let them die?”
Ahmed Hulusi says that: “We must consider him as some plump grandad or an enraged wrathful sultan who sits on a star far above us.”
But if God is up there somewhere, watching us from a distance as the song goes, then he can’t be God. This is the point Hulusi is trying to make because if God is watching you from a distance then he’s not here.
The Old Testament God was unbelievably wrathful, jealous and vindictive. In the Old Testament, he said: “Kill all of the men and boys, kill all the women who have lain with a man but keep the virgins for yourself.” The same God that said that he would force the Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go free by killing their firstborn. What a standup guy.
Ahmed Hulusi is saying that we’ve really created a monster to justify our own evil and called it ‘God’. We have created a monster and we pray to the monster and we ask for help and then when others say ‘I don’t believe in such nonsense’ we look down and we say ‘there’s an atheist’, ‘there is a godless person’.
Hulusi makes it clear that neither atheists or those who profess this God of love and evil are aware of Muhammad’s Allah. Even those who follow Islam in the same way that fundamentalists follow the Bible have no idea because their very minds are conditioned by their teachers who instruct them to take the literal path and they read all this stuff like actual history, and by default, incorrectly.
Religious teachers have made no effort to understand the symbolic nature of scripture. The Coptics and Agnostics of Greece said that “salvation was made possible through knowledge and not through faith” and that’s what we have to do as well.
Ahmed Hulusi shows us that in the Quran those that have been unable to use their minds have been highly condemned and man has been admonished to realize the facts by using the intelligence in his mind, and he says that it is time to understand what Mohammed meant when he emphasized that “No God ever existed, only Allah” but he doesn’t put the blame simply on the people in the West and this is what he says “I regret to tell you that the Islamic world generally speaking has ignored Muhammad’s Allah and is in a state of believing in some kind of God who resides above in the sky, so countless misconceptions are considered as facts”.
He also says “We’ve literally become slaves to the gods that we have created. They don’t exist”.
We bow down to them, fear them and we love them. We do special things on special days because they might get ticked off if you eat something or do something that’s not approved on their special day. We put oil on our heads, we dip our heads in water because they might get a little ticked off if you don’t do that.
In the Gnostic text entitled “The Secret Book of John” we find exactly who this Christian God Yahweh (Jehovah) is:
THE FALL OF SOPHIA
Now, Sophia, who is the wisdom of afterthought and who constitutes an eternal realm, conceived of a thought from herself, with the conception of the invisible spirit and foreknowledge. She wanted to bring forth something like herself, without the consent of the spirit, who had not given approval, without her partner and without his consideration. The male did not give approval. She did not find her partner, and she considered this without the spirit’s consent and without the knowledge of her partner. Nonetheless, she gave birth. And because of the invincible power within her, her thought was not an idle thought. Something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, for she had produced it without her partner. It did not resemble its mother and was misshapen.
When Sophia saw what her desire had produced, it changed into the figure of a snake with the face of a lion. Its eyes were like flashing bolts of lightning. She cast it away from her, outside that realm so that none of the immortals would see it. She had produced it ignorantly.
She surrounded it with a bright cloud and put a throne in the middle of the cloud so that no one would see it except the holy spirit, who is called the mother of the living. She named her offspring Yaldabaoth.
Yaldabaoth eventually gets tossed down to the Earth realm and the following takes place…
YALDABAOTH DEFILES EVE
When Yaldabaoth realized that the humans had withdrawn from him, he cursed his earth. He found the woman as she was preparing herself for her husband. He was master over her. And he did not know the mystery that had come into being through the sacred plan. The two of them were afraid to denounce Yaldabaoth. He displayed to his angels the ignorance within him. He threw the humans out of paradise and cloaked them in thick darkness.
The first ruler saw the young woman standing next to Adam and noticed that the enlightened afterthought of life had appeared in her. Yet Yaldabaoth was full of ignorance. So when the forethought of all realized this, she dispatched emissaries, and they stole life out of Eve.
The first ruler defiled Eve and produced in her two sons, a first and a second: Elohim and Yahweh.
Elohim has the face of a bear,
Yahweh has the face of a cat.
One is just, the other is unjust.
He placed Yahweh over fire and wind,
he placed Elohim over water and earth.
He called them by the names Cain and Abel, with a view to deceive.
Did you catch that? Yahweh and Elohim are really just Cain and Abel from the Old Testament. People are praying to Yahweh or Jehovah, even though he is a lower deity in the pantheon, not “The Universal Source”, “The One”, “Allah”.
Our ignorance and lack of due diligence is the problem. It’s sometimes easier to let the church think for us, isn’t it? Why look any further if you think you have it all figured out?
Your belief in a separate “up there” God exists because somebody else told you this is the way you should believe. You think of God in a particular way because somebody else told you this is the way, and the way is going to church, going to Bible studies and learning how to think about God. You go and listen to the preacher they tell you that God is male and that’s just the way it is. Sorry gals. But the Serpent, Eve and that dang fruit did you in.
Quran 22:74 “They have not comprehended Allah.”
Quran 25-43 “Have you seen those who have made gods of their own fancies?”
A Hadith of Rasul (saw) says: “Whosoever knows himself knows his Lord.”
Understand that to know Allah, is to know yourself. And what do we see in the Bible in Luke 17:21? Jesus says “the kingdom of God is within you.” And that’s exactly what is being said here. To know Allah is to know yourself.
Ahmed Hulusi says: “If your journey begins with Allah and reaches Allah with the law then it will be a short journey. Let us consequently note that it must be our primary goal and objective to experience his universes through understanding Allah, not trying to attain Allah through understanding the universes”.
In other words, we have to understand the All through the universes. We have to be part of the universes. We have to receive from the universes. Allah has decreed to us to live in a state of constant inward thought free from suppositions, to attain the truth and to prevail in reflecting through the divine that already exists within ourselves.
And how do we find this inward kingdom? Why, we meditate! The answer really is that simple. Your body comes hardwired for it, so why not use this physical vessel to its fullest potential? The choice is yours. Stay wrapped up in this physical, material, emotional world or experience the thoughtless bliss of the separation from the five senses in meditation.
“If you die before you die, then when you die, you will not die.” Remember this quote from the beginning of the article? Does it make more sense now? All it’s saying is that you need to die to the ego, lower self, the physical, and then you will not die spiritually. It’s about the union with your Higher Self, Soul or whatever you want to call it. And all of that happens in meditation.
Just to say it one more time:
No god can clear your vision and make you look at a broader perspective as you proceed onward and upward until the Self within you makes the transition to becoming Allah, Krishna, Buddha or Christ. You have to become the god within. After all…
Psalm 82:6 King James Version (KJV)
pathofthegnostic.com 
Great blog post!
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Thank you! Much appreciated!
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