I just had a wonderful conversation with a divinity school student who wanted to know about Sufism in the United States.  He was taking a course on Islam at Duke, and he was meant to learn about this topic and report back to his class.  We talked for quite awhile, and I don’t know whether I told him anything that was of use to him, but he asked me one question that I thought about afterwards, mostly because I didn’t know how to answer it.  If I understood him correctly, he was asking me what does it mean to become God-realized.  My first response was a flip one, that old “he who knows cannot say” thing, and then I tried to find some way to put into words something that would be useful to him, but I think I escaped answering the question because another topic came up while I was stil stumbling around, trying to find an answer, so I am left with another question:  does my inability to answer this question indicate that I am or am not God-realized?  Oh my, so many ways one could respond.  As a Sufi, it is my understanding that we are all innately God-realized, whether we are in a state of remembrance or not, and I was also aware that there is a dichotomy between a Westerner’s understanding of God-realization and that of someone of a more traditionally Eastern, contemplative orientation, although it is a gap that is narrowing all the time.  Anyway, I struggled to speak of these things, and afterwards, I remember a Ramakrishna story about God-realization, one which might be particularly appropriate, since Sri Ramakrishna had a profound attunement to the Christ spirit.

Because I invariably end up lending my books out and seldom getting them back, I can’t promise my re-telling of this story is accurate, but this is it as best as I recall;