The Perfect I

By Mike Ansari

Books like this don’t come along very often. The Perfect I will astound you. Martial arts expert and mystic, Mike Ansari, describes his forty-year search for God and he comes to a surprising conclusion. Beginning with his first visit to a Moslem shrine when he was four, we follow him through his early years in Iran to his ultimate journey to New Zealand, where his search never faltered. Mike’s belief in the need for fitness in mind, body and spirit led him to follow a strict Sufi regime of self-sacrifice, fasting and meditation. In The Perfect I, he shares his journey and his love for humankind. This is a love story with a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tangerine Publications Ltd
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311203335

Mike Ansari

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1964, Mike is 7th Dan Grand Master in Kung Fu and 7th Dan grand master in Tae Kwon Do. He is a qualified fitness trainer from the Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and is a coach with over 30 years of experience. He has spent over 35 years practicing both martial arts disciplines and studying various religions and philosophies, both eastern and western. His training has been accompanied by decades of transformational meditation and many extended periods of fasting. Mike has achieved total self-awareness. He is on a mission to remind humanity that we are all perfect beings now and forever. As a result Mike is now living his own self-discovery and promotes it through transformational process.

Book preview

FOREWORD

Mike Ansari takes you on a journey of mind, body, and spirit. He is one of New Zealand’s foremost personal trainers of superstars and athletes. He understands the unlimited power of mind and body, and this book, which is an intense spiritual journey, allows the reader to break through barriers of time and space.

He tells a remarkable story of his quest in life for an opportunity to unleash his vision for human perfection. As a writer he has crafted his own story which is both rich and tragic, but it is also a story of triumph, passion and ingenuity. He lives the perfect life that he promotes, moving the physicality of our bodies and the spirituality of our minds in a single transformation. It’s an amazing story as well as an inspiring visionary exercise in understanding our life and death. Unlike any other journey written by a master of mind and body training this is more than a how-to-do-it book. It’s a powerful guide, easy to understand and to follow. The reader will also be able to break free and leave behind the shackles of ill health and behaviour patterns that inhibit and slow the growth of the individual spirit.

The Perfect I will touch the lives of all who read it, with its wisdom and its pure sense of love and possibilities. Much more than a new age manual or a spiritual guide, it is a deeply felt and beautifully crafted story that stretches from the ancient world and teachings of Persia to the new world of New Zealand and the richness of the South Pacific and Polynesia.

Ansari has worked with athletes and All Blacks like Jonah Lomu.

This is a powerful book of awareness and understanding that is unleashed with simple training and dedication that is possible in all of us. Along the way Mike talks about his passion for us all to reach the perfection of our inner selves and come to terms with a pure sense of well-being.

The Perfect I is an astonishing and enlightening work from a true master of spiritual and physical well-being. It’s a great journey and I am pleased to have been invited on it. It certainly worked for me and thousands of other New Zealanders who have been touched by Mike Ansari’s amazing humanity. Enjoy this remarkable book and prepare to embark on a voyage that will make your life more complete and more fulfilling than you ever dreamed possible. Discover the purity of love, its power and harmony.

Sir Bob Harvey

Auckland, New Zealand

DISCOVERING GOD

I had been searching all of my life for answers to the question of how to create an opportunity for you, the reader of this book, to find a universal state of happiness, in which we all would celebrate life in a spirit of mutual respect and love, investing our time in living together in harmony and peace.

Human beings have been searching for confidence in the permanent reality of continued existence beyond the physical that is the after-life, for probably as long as they have had a mind capable of thinking ahead, imagining, and planning. Today, those who still hold to that belief see immortality as the state of being closely associated with perfection.

As human consciousness has evolved, the picture of a vengeful God has also evolved, from the God of Moses, to the God of Jesus, to the God of Mohammed, to the presence of the Perfect I.

The God of Moses (1271-1391 BC) started to build a relationship with His people but abandoned them for not following his rules. About 1300 years later, the God of Jesus communicated His willingness to tolerate more freedom of choice, and to forgive the sinner. Seven hundred years later, the God of Mohammed began to communicate directly with each individual and announced Mohammed as his last prophet in Islam and allowed direct communication with Him. Today the Perfect I sees You as Perfect.

From the age of four I believed God was perfect, and I communicated with Him directly. I, too, wanted to complete my faith and remain resolute, in order to be pure of heart and mind so that I could live into eternity forever happy. My journey is one that began with a quest for God’s love and ended with the realisation that pure love exists in all humans, and is therefore accessible through relationships and the communities that result. In other words, I fell in love with God, and went on through the next forty years of my journey to fall in love with humanity, realising that God is in fact human collective consciousness.

The Perfect I has already joined God and created its own Oneness. The Perfect I lives with and embraces the certainty that changes in the circle of life are welcome, creating perfect peace.

To find answers, I studied the Holy Scriptures and spent more than three decades in daily transformational meditation combined with extreme physical exercises. I experienced the evolution of consciousness over time. With a loving heart I believed and lived, welcoming every experience. I saw everything as an omen. As I grew spiritually as a Sufi master I fell in love with God and the thought of the unseen God found reality. Today I have come to the realisation that the pure reality is the Perfect You. The truth is that we, you and I, are the reality of a perfect present.

My sincere affirmation is that I am Oneness. I live and exist in the Oneness that includes all creation. I am pure loving energy that absolutely encompasses the whole creation. You, too, are a creator. Whatever form you give to your pure energy in your mind, is your own choice for the creation of the entity you can become. You and I are one, the mirror of each other, and collectively we are eternally one. It is only fair to see yourself as perfect, an eternal loving energy. I see you as perfect. I love you.

Today, you have my confirmation that I love and respect you unconditionally because I see you as perfect right now. Love has become the basis of my relationship with life. I am inviting you to share this love with me and to love yourself as a perfect person.

In this part of the book I intend to describe just a few of the many lessons that I have learned on my forty-year journey.

My journey to discover God starts from as far back as I can remember. My family lived in Tehran, the capital of Iran. When I was aged four we went to Mashhad, a city with a population of six million, which lies a thousand kilometres east of Tehran.

Mashhad houses the glorious shrine of Saint Reza, the eighth Imam of Shi-ite Muslims, and draws predominantly Shi-ite pilgrims from Iran and around the world. Prayer to Saint Reza is seen as a stepping stone on the path to God.

Some fifteen family members travelled in three cars from Tehran to Mashhad. The journey took two days with a stop-over midway. It was a cold night when we arrived. We stayed in a hostel within twenty minutes’ walk from the shrine. It was still dark and cold when my mother woke me the next morning for break-fast and soon after, as the sun was starting to rise, we walked to the shrine, where the crowd was converging from all directions. We entered a huge gate leading to a sweeping courtyard with several ablution fountains. In the expanse of this majestic enclosure stood the mausoleum with its dome of pure gold reflecting the early morning sunlight. Elegant minarets at each corner boomed instructions to the pilgrims, accompanied by religious music. My mother gripped my hand tightly to keep me close as she competed with other pilgrims to reach the door of the mausoleum.

Inside the mausoleum were many vast crystal chandeliers, and every space was decorated entirely with tiny cut glass mirrors which reflected the light like a shimmering display of morning dew on grass. I was in awe of this interplay of light across the dome’s interior. Suddenly, the shrine stood immediately in front of us and we were able to reach the Saint’s resting place. We had brought with us a symbolic green silk cloth to tie on to the cage-like lattice. Upon making contact with the golden barrier, my mother released my hand and grasped the bars of the shrine with both hands, as if she had finally found her confessor and wanted to pour out her heart to him. I watched as my mother wept and kissed the shrine.

I felt really alone because for the first time someone or something had taken my mother’s total and undivided attention from me. Then she bent down and lifted me so that I could kiss the shrine. Until that moment, God was only a word to me. Now He became the focus of my life.

As I went to bed that night and closed my eyes, all I could see was the soothing light that had warmed me during the day at the shrine. For me, God was the personification of that light and He stayed with me in my heart.

The following morning our journey brought me face to face with death, when I insisted on accompanying my mother, my aunt and her one-year-old daughter in a taxi to Mashhad hospital. Both women were distraught and in tears. Fatima, my little cousin, cried continuously. Then suddenly she was motionless. She seemed to be in a deep sleep as she lay in my mother’s lap. She never woke up.

By the time we reached the hospital, she was dead. My mother told me that Fatima had gone back to God. I had no concept of death and did not feel loss. I trusted God to keep her happy. But I was sad to see my mother and the rest of the family mourn and cry all day. No one was paying any attention to me, so I walked out of the house and started wandering the city streets until I was totally lost. I knew I was lost, and initially, panic struck me. I cried.

Then I remembered that this was Mashhad, the city of God, so I asked God for help. I began to feel surrounded by God’s light and protected by His power as if He had taken hold of my hand and He was now guiding me through His city. It was late afternoon when I spotted a familiar door and found my way back to our unit in the hostel. God had guided me safely back to my family. My faith in God was complete.

MY FATHER’S UNIQUE LOVE

My parents’ house was a typical Persian home with three generations living under one roof, my maternal grandparents, my parents, four brothers and one sister. I was very lucky to have my grandparents in the house. They taught me that regardless of how people treated me, I should always treat them with respect. They always encouraged my inquisitive nature.

I was fifteen when Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution started. The revolutionary zeal was high and anyone connected with the Shah’s security service was suspect and considered a threat to the survival of the revolution and consequently arrested and interrogated. My father had worked as a technician in the security department for nearly thirty years. He decided one day to explain his situation to the revolutionary guards who had set up their make-shift tribunal in our local mosque, as they had done in mosques all over the country.

The day I was returning from school and saw our street cordoned off with revolutionary guards questioning every passer-by, I asked one of the guards the reason for their presence. I was told they were raiding the home of an ex-Savak officer (the Shah’s secret service police). It was my house! My mother, being comforted by my brothers and sister while two soldiers pointed automatic rifles at them, told me that my father was being held prisoner at the mosque. The revolutionary guards, some of whom were my friends and classmates at high school, ignored my pleas for clemency. Our home was being searched and ransacked by at least twenty guards dressed in civilian clothes, all bearing weapons confiscated from the Shah’s militia. They were ripping the beds apart, emptying the contents of every cupboard and throwing drawers and their contents across the floor.

I ran to the mosque to see my father and was distressed to see hundreds of people jeering at him as he listened impassively to a cacophony of insults. How could I fight with so many vicious and cruel people? This was mob rule in its most vicious form. I realised that I could not plead my father’s innocence to these people who did not care that this was my dad. The mob was screaming for the death penalty, and some were howling, Burn him alive, while others bellowed, Hang him from the tree. It was a living nightmare. When no one would help me I begged God for His help. I felt His immediate response, surrounded by the light. I believed that God would free my father.

God sent our saviour; the Imam Haji Rebbani came into the mosque, tucking in his Abba with his right hand as he ascended his menbar. He commanded the irate crowd to control their anger, and denied their right to decide my father’s fate, stating that he should be taken to the proper authorities at Qasr prison for questioning. When he came down he acknowledged my presence with a smile in his own inimitable way. God had answered my prayer. I thanked Him from my heart.

Dad was tried in prison by a young mullah who sat under the shade of an apple tree in the prison yard. He gave Dad his guilty verdict for having maintained the Shah’s political apparatus and consequently for harming the Iranian people. Thus, he was implicated in the Shah’s crimes by association. Because of my father’s connection with the Shah’s political apparatus, he was pronounced guilty and stripped of thirty years of employment benefits, and all the rights of a normal citizen. This verdict meant our family was black-listed.

MARTIAL ARTS

I was on my way home early one evening, crossing a quiet lane close to my home, when I saw five young men surrounding and bullying an Afghani man, who was part of a crew working and living on a