From Colombian author Mario Mendoza:
It was said that a Muslim preacher named Ahmed Al-Hayek had been a disciple of Gurdjieff and that he was already in a state of enlightenment. A fellow student in Toledo, Spain, had passed me the information and it seemed perfect to go after such an individual.
A friend I had made in the hostel told me that Ahmed had worked in the port, had collected diamonds in the mines of South Africa and was now a homeless and ate thanks to the charity of others. He had always lived in the worst neighborhoods or on the street, and had performed the lowest paid jobs. He spent long hours in the mosques meditating and fully respected the strict rules of the Qur'an.
I found him, in effect, in a plaza preaching the following Sunday at noon. He was a finished man, with two or three teeth only, long hair on his shoulders and a thick, matted, yellowish beard. The bones were lined by a parchment skin. He spoke in English with an Arabic accent.
Several hippies and foreigners were listening to him in the crowd. His words were calm and melodious, but pronounced with overwhelming vehemence. In the animal gleam of his eyes one could perceive his extreme radicality.
-Do not ever exalt yourself, do not seek to improve or promote socially. Do not save, do not accumulate, try to give everything away. Forget pride and dignity: crawl as low as you can, humble yourself, sink your head in the mud. Accept only the most miserable jobs, eat what the rich leave in their plates, beg all you can. Get dressed in rags, do not bathe, let your teeth fall out of your mouth. Seek to be ugly, dirty and toothless. Here is the path of enlightenment. When you least think, any afternoon in any dirty and smelly corner, the truth will be revealed to you and you will wake up. You will realize that all this that we call reality is nothing more than a phantasmagorical vision, a fallacy, an illusion.
-Don't draw attention, always try to go unnoticed. Let no one know who you are, what you think or what you do. Do not talk about yourself, do not balk. Drink some water. If you have three blankets, sleep with only one. If you have two pairs of shoes, give them both and walk barefoot. It inspires disgust, that people reject you and stay away from you. Do not have any aspiration, do not want anything. Do not fall in love ever, do not have children or family. Live like a solitary animal, die like a free wolf in the middle of the steppe. By detaching yourself from everything, little by little you will also detach yourself from yourself and enlightenment will be your natural state. This is how the chains are broken, the wheel of transmigrations that again and again obliges us to incarnate in these unfortunate and unhappy bodies.
Many of the listeners were with eyes full of tears. He spoke of misery as a blessing, of poverty as an accurate path towards the awakening of deep consciousness. He also said that when we were insulted or attacked, the victimizer was doing us a good because he was helping us to destroy our ego. At some point he recommended always distrusting the powerful and not mixing with them: they are not honorable people, so he said.
I have never been able to forget that man. I have tracked him on the Net, but he does not exist. There is not a single text that speaks of him. Maybe that was one of his goals too: to disappear without leaving traces. The blessing of being nobody.
Taken from author Mario Mendoza in his travels to Spain.