Me: Rumor has it that you’re Jewish.
Khidr: Actually Phoenician, ethnically speaking. I spent five hundred years more or less living as a Jew so that I suppose it is natural that I picked up that reputation. Plus I’m circumcised.
Me: So can you tell me a little bit about growing up? Did you have many brothers and sisters? How was your relationship with your parents?
Khidr: Jesus. This is the problem with living in a culture that has a program like Entertainment Tonight. What kind of questions are these?
(I tried to think like a Sufi, or a scholar, or someone other than me.)
Me: You’re supposed to have taught many famous Sufis such as Ibn Arabi?
Khidr: I’ve taught many people, but Ibn Arabi was not among them.
Me: He said you did.
Khidr: You’re right. He did say it, and it was a patent lie.
Me: Why would he lie about a thing like that?
Khidr: The culture he confronted could not respect anything that did not have a long chain of evidentiary authority. Nor did he have power in the world. As Ibn Arabi had neither a teacher or command of an army, the lie about me having taught him at least provided a fig-leaf of having a chain of transmission. I have indeed taught many Sufis. But then again, in another five minutes you could hang out your own shingle as having been personally taught by Khidr. Are you feeling much improved?
Me: So lines of transmission don’t matter? Initiation is unnecessary?
Khidr: The needs of the applicant determine the need for initiation. But there is no ‘chain of transmission’ as it is commonly understood.
Me: No?
Khidr: Nah. Look. There's a universal tendency among people to think of reality in terms of their own society, and in terms of their physical presence in the world. Until recently, there was a king, who ruled over the nobles, who ruled over the warriors, who were over the merchants, who were over the peasants, who were over those that history does not even record at all. There was the Holy space, surrounded by the precincts of the Holy space, which proceeded to the remote from the Holy Space. Yadda, yadda, yadda. And the literally minded made unwarranted conclusions when they substituted the notion of God for King…and heaven for palace…….that there must be equivalent distances, equivalent hierarchies. Same nonsense is still being taught today.
Me: When in fact…
Khidr: When in fact God is closer to you than you jugular vein. To place God further than that away from you is to make remote your realization. God is Here Now. Every person who achieves the spiritual goal finds the same Ground of being. The order in which people find that ground does not matter. It is that Ground that matters, and all else is trivia. If you had even two ounces of spiritual wit, the very stones would teach you of God. You got two minutes left.
Me: Who is the Teacher of the Age?
Khidr: It was Idries Shah. But the New Teacher has not yet arisen since his death.
Me: Idries Shah? The writer?
Khidr: Yes, he wrote. But his importance is not yet commonly understood amongst the ostensible Sufis. It will take one hundred and twenty-seven years before his stature will be fully recognized. At that time, a fragment of a his purported finger-nail clipping will sell for the cost of a new Lexus. Such will be the level of respect for him, and the level of deterioration of his actual teaching. In fact….
There was a PA announcement miked into the employee lounge.
PA: Clean-up on Aisle 7. Al ….Clean-up on 7.
Khidr. Time to take care of the Taliban. I got to go. Your time’s up anyway. If you ever come into this store again, you’ll be dead before you make it six feet from the front door. You will never see me again. Have a nice life.
(Saying this, he took a one-foot wooden ruler (I guess it is a ruler, except it isn't a foot, and the lines on it aren’t regularly spaced and it’s got some sort of strange writing on the back) out of one of the long pockets on his carpenter’s apron and handed it to me, and then he …… well, I guess he winked at me, and I lost consciousness. When I next woke up, the old ladies were back in the lounge having another smoke. It was only about a half-hour later, and if I was their boss I’d be pretty pissed, having them go on a cigarette break for fifteen minutes of every hour. But I guess sometimes you got to take what you get when trying to staff a Home Depot when the unemployment rate is low, and all.)