Sir, Malik Saheb has mentioned two things in his very nice lecture, objectivity and subjectivity. Again you call it a lecture, it was just… Anyway, yes please, we understand what you mean. And subjectivity, he classified into the past and the present and the future. And then he correlated the present with spiritualism. Why not the future? No, no, you couldn’t follow the point. This is, you know, an illustration of what I was saying. What the author wanted to do was, he defined time in his own way.
Time is the most difficult problem now facing man, how it should be defined and how it should be treated. So the author attempted to define time and he divided it in two parts, one objective time and one subjective time. Well this is a sort of, I mean in itself it is defective in some ways, but just I am confining myself to what author wants to say. When he came to the subjective time, he defined it as experience of motion within, your thoughts, your experience and so on. So in this experience and your psychic attachments to certain events which you feel through, you can attach yourself to the past, to the present and to the future.
So those who want to shun the realities, they either attach themselves to the past or to the future. They live either in the dreams of the past or the hopefulness of future. But only those who love realities, they live in the present. And this is their subjective time. And this is, he says, what really is meant by a Sufi is Ibn-ul-Waqt. Sufi Ibn-ul-Waqt can be interpreted differently. In our country most people translate it rather reflectively upon Sufis. They say Ibn-ul-Waqt in the sense that they are like weathercocks, whichever way are the ideas of people flowing or their desires moving, they also confirm to those views and follow the same direction.
So this is one meaning of Ibn-ul-Waqt. The other meaning has been described by this author very capably and I fully agree with him that this is the true meaning of Sufi Ibn-ul-Waqt, that he loves time in realities and he is the son of realities. So time in that sense is the father of Sufi. This is what he wanted to say. On this premise, that question does not stand, which you were trying to frame, right? Thank you.
