Breathe Allah

I.

Let us breathe Allah instead of using the name of God to kill people.

In the Qu'ran, "Allah" is the same name of God found in the Jewish scriptures: "El'." For reasons never completely explained, the Biblical authors used the plural form, "Elohim." In fact, Elohim means "Gods." A Semitic Jew would pronounce the singular name for God in Hebrew as Allah is pronounced in Arabic. Jesus would not have recognized the Germanic word, "God."He would have recognized the Semitic word, "Allah."

We were meant to breathe the name of God, not to use it as an argument or a weapon. Like all divine names, "Allah" flows through our body with the breath, as a mantra. "Mantra" in Sanskrit means "mind-vehicle." The Indo-European roots are "mannas" (mind) and "tra" (vehicle), from which we have the English "mind" and the suffix "tron." As an electron is a vehicle for electricity, so a mantra is a vehicle for awareness: an impulse of sound that carries awareness back to the source of energy in divine silence.

All mantras arise through the breath from specific neural centers in our body. When breathed gracefully, a mantra settles back into the silence whence creation was first breathed forth. As the mantra vibrates into silence, it heals the nervous system, and enlivens the specific quality of consciousness governed by the neural center in the body where that particular sound arose.

When we use the Word of creation to make war, and fight over God's name, we demonstrate complete ignorance. May each of us breathe the divine name we love best. May we cease to dishonor God's name. May we taste the name of God on our lips for no other purpose but healing, blessing, and returning to Source.

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم : "In the name of Allah the All-Merciful and Compassionate."


II.

When I was a merchant marine seaman during my young roving years, I was in Lagos Nigeria one night after curfew, during the Ibo War of 1968. All lights out, no boats running, my ship a mile and a half away in the vast harbor, a lightless shadow barely visible: I had no way to return. A police officer in the dark street told me to go down under the pier and hire a "bum boat." I went down a rickety stairs to the beach, where there was offal and garbage strewn about the sand, tiny grass huts up along the embankment. There lived the men with their "bum boats," thin log canoes, mere tree trunks hollowed out for sitting.

I called out, "Bum boat?" and a thin middle aged man who spoke no English came out of the darkness, pushing his boat into the water. I pointed to the shadow in the distance and said, "Take me to that ship?" He nodded, "Ya ya, two buck." I gave him three American dollars and he started paddling me out into the choppy bay. The situation was precarious. No one in the world knew where I was. This fellow could have knocked me out with his paddle, thrown me overboard, and kept my wallet. What else could I do but trust, like a little child? There was no alternative but surrender. I leaned back and embraced the night, the stars, the water, the face of the man in the stern and welcomed this moment.

Being a little nuts, I often make up chants. In that surrendered now-ness, I suddenly felt so ecstatic that I spontaneously started singing with a big grin on my face, "La la la la la la la!" Spreading my arms, I shouted to the darkness. The boatman broke out in a wide grin, so bright it seemed to illuminate our way. Nodding and pointing up to heaven, he shouted, "Ya, OK, sing God like that: Ala' Ala' Ala." Recognizing this sound as the name of his God, he chanted along with me. He was Muslim. We both delighted in the sound of our divine innocence. That was a wild ride.


III.

Nursery rhyme melodies often contain the refrain "la la la," one of the first sounds a child makes. Yet in Yoga tradition, the sound of "la" is the primordial bija-mantra for the root chakra, connecting the spine to the earth. And the sound of "Ahh" flows down from the throat chakra as the fountain of all alphabets, resonating with the Divine Mother's creative shakti. "Ahh" is the seed of language. So in the Muslim mystical tradition, Sufi's practice "Zikre," singing the name of Allah over and over for hours, not with pious heaviness, but with the energy of whirling children. This same sound vibrates through the central affirmation of Muslim faith, the Shahada: "La ila'ha il'allah," which means, "no God but God."

What a tragedy that the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have transformed the primordial energy of childhood into the heaviest, most warlike God ever invented by man.

Let us return to the breath of delight!