Sultan Shahin: A Life Positive Magazine Profile: The universe is a manifestation of the one universal consciousness, Spiritual Meditations

Spiritual Meditations

Sultan Shahin: A Life Positive Magazine Profile: The universe is a manifestation of the one universal consciousness

Transformation

Sultan Shahin, a journalist, spoke to Praveen Chopra

Is this man for real, you wonder. He has the temerity to write that Muslims in India should have no qualms in claiming their Vedic heritage. Or that Muslims' prayers remain unheeded because they have forgotten how to pray effectively, to meditate that is. He calls the Babri mosque demolition an opportunity for Muslims to learn some lessons and to feel grateful to God for making it possible.

They can, for example, exert their right to forgive and thus set both parties to the dispute free of the karmic debt. This is provocative stuff. But Sultan Shahin, son of a maulvi (Muslim priest) and married to a Hindu, is an unusual man. His journey of transformation has been atypical too. He was attending a barbecue party in England about eight years ago where one face-reader told Sultan that his birthday must be on October 26. For Sultan, this was too close to reality (October 27) for comfort.

Starting with astrology, Sultan went on to delve into spirituality. One of the things he tried was the Hasidic Jewish prayer about forgiving all people who might have hurt one physically, psychologically or financially in the past. For him, this brought back memories: the experience of hurt and living through the accompanying pain again. It wasn't just a load off his shoulders metaphorically; the pain he used to suffer in his shoulders and back disappeared, too. This demonstrated for him the relationship between experience and the body, which is a store-house of experiences. Growing in knowledge, he becomes aware that all that is is energy. Sultan believes that the less conscious we are of the density of things, the freer we are of illusion.

In retrospect, Sultan says, he had faintly realised such truths even as a teenager. Born in a village in Bihar, he used to take the cattle out for grazing which gave him ample time to reflect. The thinker in him made him argue with his father: "Why do you want me to pray to a God I don't understand?" He stopped doing namaaz (prayers) but promised his father that he would study all religions, particularly Islam, and choose the one that most convinced him.

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