COMMENTARY ON ?THE INNER LIFE? OF HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN BY MURSHID SAMUEL L. LEWIS, SUFI AHMED MURAD CHISTI


TOWARD THE ONE THE PERFECTION OF LOVE, HARMONY AND BEAUTY, THE ONLY BEING UNITED WITH ALL THE ILLUMINATED SOULS WHO FORM THE EMBODIMENT OF THE MASTER THE SPIRIT OF GUIDANCE.
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The Inner Life

CHAPTER II: The Object of the Journey

Gatheka (Hazrat Inayat Khan): The first and principle thing in the inner life is to establish a relationship with God, making God the object with which we relate ourselves, such as Creator, Sustainer, Forgiver, Judge, Friend, Father, Mother and Beloved.

Tassawuf (Samuel Lewis): We may begin with an Abstraction. An Abstraction may be needed as the first step toward Reality. As we turn from Abstraction to identification, there is something which both mind and heart can hold. As Orthodoxy usually accepts the Creator, by feeling we can change that from a concept to something more. This is a first step. Then as Sustainer we begin to feel ourselves in God and God in ourselves. Here we do not merely repeat the Name of God, we begin to ingest the quality needed in ourselves. If we repeat ?Ya Hayy!? we not only get the idea of life and livingness, we begin to draw that magnetism from the sphere, we become more alive. No magic can do that. Life is more than magic. And once we begin to find this Reality of God, we begin to feel Him in various capacities, something much greater than abstraction or idea or ideal, yet not excluding abstraction or idea or ideal.

Gatheka: In every relationship we must place God before us, and become conscious of that relationship so that it will no more remain an imagination; because the first thing a believer does is to imagine. He imagines that God is the Creator, and tries to believe that God is the Sustainer, and he makes an effort to think that God is a Friend, and an attempt to feel that he loves God.

Tassawuf: Once one is aware of the surge of life one finds life has qualities beyond those emanations studied in the physical sciences. When he finds God as Creator and as Living, he also finds in Allah all the qualities, the Sifat-i-Allah, that they are real, that they have expression in life and that they can be absorbed into his personality. Thus man goes from grade to grade in ever greater realizations of the Divinity.

Gatheka: But if this imagination is to become a reality, then exactly as one feels for one?s earthly beloved sympathy, love and attachment, so one must feel the same with God. However greatly a person may be pious, good or righteous, yet without this his piety or his goodness is not a reality to him.

Tassawuf: It is not only that man must feel, but also that man does find. For once the impression of the noble qualities of God become fixated in his consciousness, then all the glories, all the virtues begin to manifest. As they manifest, then there is no more need for imagination; indeed imagination only hinders the living experience, the waking consciousness. It has been needed; it is needed no more.

Gatheka: The work of the inner life is to make God a reality, so that He is no more an imagination; that this relationship man has with God may seem to him more real than any other relationship in this world; and when this happens then all relationships, however near or dear, become less binding.


Tassawuf: This is exactly what does happen. We pray: ?Draw us closer every moment of our lives until in us be reflected Thy Grace, Thy Glory, Thy Wisdom, Thy Joy and Thy Peace.? This is exactly what happens when one pursues the inner life. And there is an ever increasing radiance and ever increasing manifestation of Grace. And this also produces the transformation which means a complete change of values.

Gatheka: But at the same time, a person does not thus become cold; he becomes more loving.

Tassawuf: When the message was introduced first many were efficient in getting a very good intellectual understanding, but they did not have the heart understanding. There was not the warmth. But as the Message spread, and with the times, also there was the manifestation of more warmth. The constant repetition of the prayers in sincerity or not, brought about the condition sought. Very gradually the prayers of the few became the harvest of the many.

Gatheka: It is the godless man who is cold, impressed by the selfishness and lovelessness of the world, because he partakes of those conditions in which he lives. But the one who is in love with God, the one who has established his relationship with God, his love becomes living; he is no more cold; he fulfills his duties to those related to him in this world much more than does the godless man.

Tassawuf: It is this which manifests in the stages of the awakening of heart. There can be no pretense. No man can pretend, no one can imagine the warmth, the magnetism, the glow, the radiance which are signs of the divine presence of which Jesus has said, ?Let your light shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify the Father Which is in Heaven.? The orthodox quote passages, the wise manifest the teachings.

Gatheka: Now, as to the way in which man establishes this relationship, and which is the most desirable to establish with God, what should he imagine? God as Father, as Creator, as Judge, as Forgiver, as Friend, or as Beloved? The answer is, that in every capacity of life we must give God the place that is demanded by the moment. When crushed by the injustice, the coldness of the world, when man looks at God as the perfection of Justice, he no more remains agitated, his heart is no more disturbed, he consoles himself with the justice of God.

Tassawuf: Besides, by remaining undisturbed he makes even of himself a channel for divine justice. Whereas other people look outside for the rectification of the faults of the world, the Sufi does not make such a demand. His very calmness becomes a source of strength for himself and others. And by being calm he also helps make a way for Justice and all virtue in the manifestation. But if he reacts, if he becomes emotional, if he is perturbed, he partakes of the very difficulties which stand in the way of the generality. It is the practice of the Divine Presence which helps most here.

Gatheka: He places the just God before him, and by this he learns justice; the sense of justice awakens in his heart, and he sees things in quite a different light.

Tassawuf: If one feels God as a whole, all the qualities will manifest, but not as the mind of man conceives them. They are all there and they will come to the surface as needed. For the full heart feeling is one of fullness and this includes the whole gamut of the Sifat. But the repetition of the Bismillah will help more than anything else to make man aware of this Presence and with that the Zikar or Remembrance in some form. The zakir will feel the Divine Presence and in that will be the essence of Justice and of all virtues. The Hebrew Bible says that even though the devotee was in the Valley of the Shadow of death he would fear no evil. So it is with the true believer with respect to Allah.

Gatheka: When man finds in this world the motherless and the fatherless, then he thinks that there is the mother and father in God; and that, even if he was in the presence of mother and father, that these are only related on the earth. The Motherhood and Fatherhood of God is the only real relationship.

Tassawuf: And this is manifested when the Sufi also acts as the mother or father to the orphan. He does not expect this from others; he has found this himself in the One, All-Pervading Deity. It is an experience, it is an experience much deeper than all the words, all the philosophies. It enables the devotee to feel all the goodness in the universe and then demonstrate it to others. The Sufi, like everybody else, proclaims the Majesty of Divinity, but unlike many others, he puts it to practice, to use.

Gatheka: The mother and father of the earth only reflect a spark of that motherly and fatherly love which God has in fullness and perfection. Then man finds that God can forgive, as the parents can forgive the child if he is in error; then man feels the goodness, kindness, protection, support, sympathy coming from every side. He learns to feel that it comes from God, the Father-Mother, through all.

Tassawuf: Many religions and traditions proclaim, above all, respect and more than respect for parents. This has established certain forms of society. Then one may ask, may it not be possible for children to be born and to be born more advanced culturally and spiritually than their parents and they have to yield to their parents. They do not always find the virtues in the parents, or they lose their parents through death, misfortune or accident. And the more one delves into the subject the more one distinguishes between the particular processes in time, and those that are aeonic and those that are eternal. And it is only God Who operates in all these three spheres who can give sustenance to body, heart and soul.

Gatheka: When man pictures God as Forgiver, he finds that there is not only in this world a strict justice, but there is love developed also, there is mercy and compassion, there is that sense of forgiveness; that God is not the servant of law, as is the judge in this world, He is Master of law. He judges when He judges; when He forgives He forgives. He has both powers, He has the power to judge and He has the power to forgive.

Tassawuf: Sura CX reads: ?Celebrate the praises of the Lord, and pray for His forgiveness for He is oft-returning (in Grace and Mercy).? (v.3) The full sense of this comes when, after constant repetition, one feels the import of the words of prayer. Modern Sufism teaches the Law of Reciprocity and in this Justice is dominant; there is the sphere of justice and everything is subject to it under the law of cause and effect. But there is also a sphere of deliverance, in which one is not so subject. And we see this in a loving mother, kind father, innocent child, helpful friend and inspiring teacher actually.

Gatheka: He is Judge because He does not close His eyes to anything man does; He knows, He weighs, and measures, and He returns what is due to man. And He is Forgiver, because beyond and above His power of justice there is His great power of love and compassion, which is His very Being, which is His one Nature, and therefore it is more, and in greater proportion, and working with a greater activity than His power of justice.

Tassawuf: This is not always seen by writers and philosophers. They judge from the externals. They are not wrong but also they do not always go deep. If everything were like in the physical law of cause and effect, action and reaction, then there would be no evolution, no progress. Whatever things were, however they were created, there could be no change. But there is change, there is advancement. And when we look more deeply we can find the Sifat-i-Allah pushing themselves, so to speak, through every facet of creation in some way or other.

Gatheka: We, the human beings in this world, if there is a spark of goodness or kindness in our hearts, avoid judging people. We prefer forgiving to judging. Forgiving gives us naturally a greater happiness than taking revenge, unless a man is on quite a different path.

Tassawuf: Despite many injunctions from many prophets, man is prone to judge. Looking outwardly, each sees the injustices of others. But at the same time there is a protective quality. Man wants to protect his own. Some mothers will go far out of their way to protect or excuse or defend their children. This shows that in selfish and unselfish alike there are other factors working than evenly-laid-out justice. Inveighing against injustice is no good. The just man becomes strong. The forgiving man becomes stronger and thus becomes the example to be followed.

Gatheka: The man who realizes God as a friend is never lonely in the world, neither in this world or in the hereafter. There is always a friend, a friend in the crowd, a friend in the solitude; or while he is asleep, unconscious of this outer world, and when he is awake and conscious of it. In both cases the friend is there in his thought, in his imagination, in his heart, in his soul. And the man who makes God his Beloved, what more does he want? His heart becomes awakened to all the beauty there is within and without. To him all things appeal, everything unfolds itself, and it is beauty to his eyes, because God is all-pervading, in all names and all forms; therefore his Beloved is never absent.

Tassawuf: As one progresses on the path to God, one also advances on the path with God. One feels the Presence of Allah, one drinks in all the beauty of all the beautiful Names. They become part of one?s very nature. And so one enters into the universe of love.

Gatheka: How happy therefore is the one whose Beloved is never absent, because the whole tragedy of life is the absence of the Beloved; and to one whose Beloved is always there, when he has closed his eyes the Beloved is within, when he has opened his eyes the Beloved is without. His every sense perceives the Beloved; his eyes see Him, his ears hear His voice.

Tassawuf: This is the ultimate state of the beloved ones of God. We have seen it in people not only of the Sufi line but Swamis like Papa Ram Das who are God-realized and realizing the God they realize the Love, the Beneficence, the Compassion. They realize these everywhere within and without. This becomes their continued state, and one then can see what is in the brochure, ?The Smiling Forehead.? This is the natural condition of the divine lover.

Gatheka: When a person arrives at this realization then he, so to speak, lives in the presence of God; then to him the different forms and beliefs, faiths and communities do not count. To him God is all-in-all; to him God is everywhere.

Tassawuf: The Sufis have beautifully expressed this in their poetry. It was only possible from the poets who had the God-realization. One can tell it for the words came out spontaneously from their lips and pens. And also in their actions, that they do not have to create any maxims, they are the incarnation of everything they speak or write of.

Gatheka: If he goes to the Christian Church or to the synagogue, to the Buddhist temple, to the Hindu shrine, or to the mosque of the Muslim, there is God. In the wilderness, in the forest, in the crowd, everywhere he sees God.

Tassawuf: This has been expressed by many Sufi poets. Many have become suspect. Mohammed did not make the mosque an institution; he made prayer the institution. The Christian Bible also affirms that the human body is the temple of God. The outer forms are all reflections of this inner temple. The same spirit went into their constructions, and the devotee sees those efforts, knows the spirit and thus cannot only worship in many places and in all forms, but can glorify God with the spoken and written word about them. This is also explained in The Unity of Religious Ideals and elsewhere.

Gatheka: This shows that the inner life does not consist in closing the eyes and looking inward. The inner life is to look outwardly and inwardly, and to find one?s Beloved everywhere.

Tassawuf: It is on this point where Sufis have differed from the generality and even suffered martyrdom. The great Sheikh Mubarrak of the Moghul times and his sons Abu Fazl and Faiz could see the holiness in all faiths and all buildings. When they proclaimed that, all the different rival groups were against them, each wanted his own way, not universality. But there is no doubt that God is in all, above all and through all. And now man can see this and practice it. What was once confined to realized mystics can now be the point of view of everybody.

Gatheka: But God cannot be made a Beloved unless the love element is awakened sufficiently. The one who hates his enemy and loves his friend cannot call God his beloved, for he does not know God.

Tassawuf: There are two obstacles here. One is those who make love a sort of thought or philosophy, an idea. And when it is thought or philosophy, when it is idea, it is not love. Love is universal. It is like a flame or a furnace, that may have to be fanned, and when it is operating its heat flows in every direction. One cannot stop it. That which is stopped is not love. When one reaches this state it will be also that the body is warm, the hands are warm, the eyes, and all elements of one?s being radiate. And this can be aroused by repeating the Names of God, constantly calling upon God using Wazifas, repeating mantrams and being aware of the universal life.

Gatheka: When love comes to its fullness, then one looks at the friend with affection, on the enemy with forgiveness, on the stranger with sympathy.

Tassawuf: For then something happens to the personality and especially the eyes. These eyes cannot make differentiations. The glow of the lamp is in every direction, the sun is for the whole earth. When one pauses there is a flickering in the light; it is not so strong.

Gatheka: There is love in all its aspects expressed when love rises to its fullness; and it is the fullness of love which is worth offering to God. It is then that man recognizes in God his Beloved, his Ideal; and by that, although he rises above the narrow affection of this world, in reality he is the one who knows how to love even his friend. It is the lover of God who knows love when he raises to that stage of the fullness of love.

Tassawuf: We find this throughout the Christian Bible, that it was not only the supreme teaching of Jesus Christ but has been repeated in the epistles and other writings. No doubt it was Jewish heritage for the Jewish people were told to love God with all their hearts and souls and might. And then to love the neighbor as thyself. This was one aspect of it. The message of Jesus was to increase this love quantitatively and qualitatively. By quantitatively we mean that the love began to be expressed not only to the Beni Israel but to the peoples in their midst. And then the message of Jesus also went forth to other peoples. And by qualitatively it means that the quality of love was perfected in selflessness, that Jesus was willing to be crucified, symbolizing the ending of the sway of nafs, the ego. The introduction of priestcraft, of ritual and dogma, have smothered the essential message of Jesus Christ. He was not concerned with his personality except secondarily. He began with the Beatitudes which reveal that he was concerned with the increment of bliss within the human consciousness. This is exactly the message of the Upanishads. But too often the teachings remain verbal; they do not become actual. Sufism has at all times tried to make actualities out of these words. The Sufis have been the lovers of God and from that learned how to express kindness to their fellows. They did not make doctrines nor practice separateness. And in the Bayat the disciple is urged to have the heart filled with love, overflowing with love.

Gatheka: The whole imagery of the Sufi literature in the Persian language, written by great poets, such as Rumi, Hafiz, and Jami, is the relationship between man as the lover and God as the Beloved; and when one reads understanding that, and develops in that affection, then one sees what pictures the mystics have made and to what note the heart has been tuned.

Tassawuf: This has been a note long observed by many western writers too. They could not imitate but they could appreciate. And also there are now lessons on this in the literature and elsewhere. Besides during the years the interest in Persian and Sufi literature has grown and many men, believers and non-believers alike have worked in that field. This is one part of it. The most important part is to awaken the response in heart so that one can feel the heart of the poet and the sentiment and then from that come into the awareness of the Divine Presence and the recognition of the Love and Beauty which are everywhere. There are western poets who seem to have had similar outlooks and experiences but not with the same warmth. And this is also true of poets of further east in Asia.

Gatheka: It is not easy to develop in the heart the love of God, because when one does not see or realize the object of love one cannot love. God must become tangible in order that one may love Him, but once a person has attained to love he has really entered the journey of the spiritual path.

Tassawuf: The great Indian, Swami Ramakrishna, said he could see God better than he could see man. This was also true of Hazrat-Ali who could see God everywhere and was perhaps blinded by God, so to speak. This is one condition which may seem unbalanced, but until one has the God experience there may be no balance at all. The word may be used, but that does not mean a state of balance. Anybody caught in the intoxication of life may use words quite apart from experience. But once there is the God-experience, then there is the love-experience to and with all. We also see this in the American poet, Walt Whitman and others. Describing the God-attainment they picture it as a complete love attainment.


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