About the Book

Finding the Way Home,
by Locke Rush Ph.D
Published: December, 2007
Edition: Paperback
Paperback: 286 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9726607-16
List Price: $19.95

 

Author's Introduction

For years, I had a recurring dream in which I found myself in a room with 99 doors. Every time I had the dream, I opened another door. Once I walked into an empty closet. Another time I opened a door into a passageway that looped around and led me back out the same door. One door led to a bottomless pit, another to a tiger. Every door presented a different distraction, sometimes dangerous, and none of the doors led me to anything I wanted. In the 99 doors dream, I was always aware of one particular door, one I had not opened, and I always wondered what was behind that one door.

The journey I have described in this book led me to explore
many wonders and mysteries. It was also full of paths that led to
nowhere and paths that led me around in circles. I opened and
closed many doors and found behind each one an opportunity to
confront my own issues, extract the wisdom to be found, and then
move on. Finally I found the key to the one door that showed me
the way home to my original connection with God. Behind that
one door, I found the path of the 99 beautiful qualities of God. This
book describes how I found my way to that path, and what it has
been like to walk it.

My teacher, Sufi Master M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, spoke of
the 99 beautiful qualities of God as the birthright of a true human
being. He also spoke of the hundredth quality, which belongs to
God alone. In another sense, the 99 divine qualities may also be seen
as 99 steps on the path to God. Each step confronts us with issues related to a particular quality. Sometimes we say that God is testing
us. However, Bawa taught that God does not test us. Instead, each
step is an opportunity to deal with a particular issue and move up
to the next level.

I was born in 1932, and though I suffered intensely from the
disruptive effects that World War II caused in my family, I came of
age during a period of prosperity and relative peace. Perhaps because
of the war, my generation and the next felt a need to make sense of
the world and our lives. Bohemianism, Woodstock, psychedelics,
yoga, gurus, LSD, Zen, psychic stimuli, New Age techniques—
our society was flooded with hundreds of responses to the deepest
questions about the meaning of life.

I had the benefit of living in a privileged strata of our society: prep
school, Ivy League college, and an inherited view that one should
marry well, work for an established company, have children and
grandchildren, go on European vacations, and accumulate wealth
to leave to one’s heirs. Until I was thirty years old, I assumed that
eventually this scenario would unfold as expected. My career was
off to a promising start, and my New York City life was fast-paced,
involving lots of alcohol, women, parties, and what I perceived as
fun. Pursuing this course had led me into a serious relationship
with a woman that lasted for several years and dissolved, leaving me
alone, unfulfilled, and acutely aware of the unsatisfactory nature of
my existence. My life was a black and white movie and I was longing
for living color.

My search took me to Europe and the Far East for eight years. It
involved intensive Jungian analysis, a year as a Zen monk in Japan,
and many other exotic experiences. Upon returning to the States,
I explored psychedelic drugs, the death process, and transpersonal
psychology, and I got to know a host of people who were then and
are now considered the leaders of transpersonal psychology.

The list of people I knew and worked with is long. I gathered
some knowledge along the way, but it took me years to find the
goal I was seeking—the pure, precious gold of truth that needed no
adornment. There were, of course, titillating experiences, sensual and emotional pleasures, and Aha! experiences, but no teacher, philosophy, or technique that truly made me a better or more
compassionate human being.

Many teachers I met and came to know were decent people who believed in their way or method, but I was put off by their worldliness and faults. I had heard or read that any teaching is only as high as the teacher and any therapy is only as high as the therapist, so I wandered from teacher to teacher and therapy to therapy, always seeking completion and never finding it.

After thirteen years of opening and closing doors, I found what
I had been looking for—a real teacher, a true father, a saint, an
enlightened being. He was the kind of person I had read about in
hundreds of spiritual books but never before encountered. His name
was M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. He was a tiny, small-boned, darkskinned man with a white beard and eyes that radiated compassion and understanding. His eyes saw into me, and I sensed that they saw everything about me—past, present, and future. Bawa means Father in Tamil, and he was both the nurturing father I had always longed for and a father of a more divine nature. This good and wise man was truly ‘in this world but not of it.’

I spent eleven years with Bawa. Without having to ask, I received
answers to my most important questions. I did not discover what
had happened to me in New York City, but it doesn’t concern me
anymore. It is not important to have a name for my experience or to
know how and why it happened. It was simply a gift from God.

When I first met Bawa, he told me that everything I had experienced was only half of what exists and that I needed to look at the other half if I wanted to find the peace, understanding, and joy I was seeking. He called these halves left and right, referring to the left as the realm of illusion and to the right as the realm of God. I had been gamboling in the field of the left for years, and he showed me that it was time to cross over to the field of the right. The moment he spoke the words, I knew he was right, and I understood why it had taken so long to find the truth. I had relegated God to the abstract. All my seeking had been worldoriented.

The states and stages espoused by New Age gurus were pleasing and sometimes sublime, but they all enhanced the ego and cultivated a sense of ‘I-ness.’ Bawa’s work focused on seeing through the identification with the ego and practicing the qualities of God. The veils covering our essential, pure being must be lifted, and this lifting is hard work, requiring more than periodic meditation retreats or courses in mind-body techniques. Lifting the veils requires determination and moment-by-moment awareness of our struggle with the darker side of our nature.

Although most of the teachers I met acknowledged the necessity to struggle with worldly desires, they either minimized the struggle or placed the focus of their teaching somewhere else.

The path Bawa revealed leads back to the inherently pure nature that is our true being. He spoke of the world of the souls. For seventy thousand years, Bawa explained, God tried to tell the souls what the nature of paradise was and what evil was, but the souls could not understand what they had not experienced. God saw this and commanded them to go to earth so they could comprehend their true nature and the difference between good and evil. The souls cried out that they did not want to leave the place they were in. But God in His wisdom persisted, saying that when they had separated right from wrong and walked the path to understanding, they would find their way back home.

We all can see how beautiful, clear, and close to God a newborn baby is. Time passes, the child grows, and countless veils obscure awareness of the soul: ego, karma, illusion, anger, lust, racial prejudice, jealousy, greed, fear of death, and many more. When finally the Angel of Death comes to take him away, the same soul who many years before begged to stay in the world of the souls begs God, “No, please don’t make me go. I don’t want to leave this place. I want to stay.”

We didn’t want to come here, and when it is time to die, we don’t want to leave. This is the irony of our lives, but also the catalyst for our progress as souls. This life on earth is a brief stay in a university
of higher knowledge. We are here to experience, to learn, to make our choices, and to act according to our developing wisdom. If we make the effort and pass our final examination, we will return to our
rightful place with God.

This is the path that spread out before me when I opened that one door I had been unable to open in my dreams. The work I did with Bawa did not require a monastery. It stressed the holy place inside and showed me how I could proceed inward to that place.

The path to the inner heart does not require intellectual calisthenics
or complex spiritual technologies. There are, however, many side roads and detours, and what is needed and is essential is a map in the form of the teachings and the example of a truly wise person, an enlightened being.

I am forever grateful for knowing Bawa and for the wisdom he imparted to me and to all people who care to seek it out. It is with this gratitude in my heart that I wrote this book. It tells of my journey toward that inner goal, and I hope it will be of some benefit to you.

—Locke Rush, August, 2007