=kit085.txt

KIT 85 - Steps Toward Awakening

            "There comes a time in one's evolution when a passion
is awakened in the soul that gives the soul a longing for the
unattainable. And if the soul does not take that direction, then
it certainly misses something in life for which it has an innate
longing and in which lies its ultimate satisfaction...Every atom,
every object, every condition and every living being has a moment
of awakening. Sometimes this is a gradual awakening and sometimes
it is sudden."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            The forthcoming series of Keeping in Touch's
constitute a study in the steps earmarked in the teachings of Pir-
o-Murshid Inayat Khan and the Sufi mystics of the past, including
sometimes the teachings of various traditional esoteric schools
leading to awakening in life. Each step however represents a
degree of awakening.

            "One's grade of evolution depends upon the pitch one
has attained. It is a certain pitch that makes one conscious of a
certain phase of life. Every belief and every experience for a
wise person is a step of a staircase; when one has taken this
step, there is another step for one to take."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            In the description of the Sufis, the steps towards
awakening are layered in tandem: for each level with which we
identify, corresponds a mode of thinking or realization. As one
shifts one's sense of identity from one level to the next, one
awakens from one perspective to a further realization. Following,
a synopsis:

NAZUT:          Identifying with body. If extended, dovetails with
physical cosmos.

KHAYAL:       The mode of thinking when identifying with the body.

ARWAH:         Identifying with subtle bodies, aura, life-field -
holistically interconnected with implicate network of the
universe.

MITHAL:         Metaphor: creative imagination.

MALAKUT:    Identifying with celestial counterpart.

JABARUT:      The human mind accessing the divine mind.

LAHUT:           The archetypal level - divine inheritance - the
seedbed of personality.

HAHUT:          Identifying with divine intelligence beyond
consciousness.

TAWHID:        Awakening in life. The divine spectator -
stereoscopic consciousness.

            We do not wish to force live experience into a
theoretical system. However, if you consider a change in one's
sense of identity as an awakening, then you could hold that there
are nine awakenings; if you wish to consider the realization
clinched at each shift of identity, then one could list five
awakenings.

I. FIRST AWAKENING: THE COSMIC OUTREACH OF CONSCIOUSNESS

            In the art of meditation, one trains one's mind in the
skill of extending the range of one's vantage point beyond the
usual setting of one's consciousness focalized in a focal point.
This is illustrated by the Wazifa "Ya Basit". By shifting the
focus of your consciousness, you can free yourself from the
constraint of your restrictive vantage point. Just as you can
modulate your glance between encompassing a wide panorama or
pinpointing a letter on a book which you are reading, you can
modulate your consciousness between envisioning the universe as a
global reality while losing your sense of the details or
highlighting an event while failing to grasp all its implications
or ramifications.

            If you achieve the likeness of this by offsetting your
consciousness, you will experience awakening beyond the middle
range. The breakthrough of freedom from any manner of constraint,
in this case freedom from the tyranny of the confinement in the
notion of the personal dimension of the "I", will spark a
breakthrough of bliss.

            "We occupy only as much horizon as we are conscious
of, as far as we can expand. Every individual has their own world.
The world of one individual is as tiny as a grain of lentil, and
that of another as large as the whole world."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            As you exhale, envision your consciousness expanding,
encompassing increasingly wider fields of perception and
mentation. Now if you think that your body was confectioned out of
the stardust - that the outburst of radiance at the instant of the
big bang continues to live now as your body, your sense of
identity - your notion of yourself extends. The cosmic dimension
is evidenced by our sense of participation in the entire cosmos.

 "A million galaxies are a little foam on that shoreless sea...We
came whirling out of nothing, scattering stars like dust. The
stars made a circle and in the middle we dance, Turning and
turning is sunder all attachment...Every atom turns bewildered and
it is only God circling Himself."
RUMI

            Take advantage of your exhaling to merge with the
environment. Inasmuch as we identify ourselves at this first stage
with our body, the very thought that the fabric of the galaxies
has culminated in the cells of our body has an impact on our
identity. But this acts more powerfully still when we feel our
body magnetism - rather like the field of a magnet, which, just as
with the magnet extends beyond its boundaries, our skin - but also
intersperses it. At this stage let us simply try and feel the zone
of magnetic force around our shoulders, arms, and chest. Realize
that it does not have a definite boundary and remind ourselves
that it does intersperse with that of all the beings that
constitute our physical environment.

            Try to experiment. If you stretch the notion of
yourself as you exhale, you run the risk of either losing your
sense of individual identity or identifying with the cosmos. You
will discover yourself as a vortex without boundary. This is
illustrated by the Wazifa Ya Basit. However, as you inhale, you
will notice that the cosmos gets converged as you (Wazifa: Ya
Qabid) . If you do not recover your personal identity, a flood of
impressions will overcome you obsessively which is precisely what
happens in pathological mental states. This is where you will
discover that it is your sense of your uniqueness (reflecting the
incomparable divine uniqueness "Ya Wahid") as an individual that
confers upon you the ability to select those impressions which you
can handle and those which you need to protect yourself from.

            You will realize the danger of eschewing your
individual identity. Our programming provides us with a complex
defense mechanism made up of thresholds which screen and filter
the environment (Ya Muhaimin). This is to be found in the Sufi
idea of "containment, encompassing" illustrated by the Wazifa
Wasi. This is what Buddha meant by the sentinels. Besides it is
our individuality that makes for the rich variety of existence (Ya
Mughni). But its is difficult for our ordinary minds to reconcile
these two aspects of ourselves: the vortex as opposed to the cell
albeit endowed with a permeable membrane unless you think of
yourself as an eddy that intersperses other eddies in infinite
regress without losing its idiosyncratic features.

            Incidentally, this is further illustrated in the dhikr
where one says or thinks "La ilaha". Describing an arc of a circle
with one's head, one expands while the "La" warns one against
assuming that the environment is what we may believe it to be. As
one says or thinks "illa" as one's head turns towards the solar
plexus, one is reminded that this warning applies also to one's
psyche and self-image. These then are the conditions for hoisting
one's consciousness into the higher spheres as one says or thinks
"llah", then awakening to God consciousness in existence: "Hu".
Take advantage of your inhaling to observe that, thanks to your
memory, the physical scene or scenario continues to live in your
psyche while you downplay your perception of it.

            Under careful scrutiny you will notice that you
recollect the physical scene such as it appeared to you from your
vantage point: for example Notre Dame of Paris. If you had seen it
only from another angle, your recollection of it would be
different. Remember, the "here and now" is only a cross-section of
reality squeezed into the framework of our commonplace mind's
incapacity of encompassing the "everywhere and always". Therefore
Yoga draws our attention to the fact that we are carrying a
personally biased picture of the world in our psyche. And this is
the more pertinent in our assessment of our problems. If we wish
to awaken from the middle-range, we need to question our
representation of the physical world, of our body and particularly
of our personal, social situations. Therefore we need to do some
work with our psyche. For example we need to learn to consider our
situations from several view points instead of just asking what
they mean to us in our commonplace self-image. To achieve this, we
need to learn to turn within in meditation. This will bring us
over to the next step: it is not the physical world that is
'maya', but our misassessment of it.

            "To hold that the world is maya is a false claim
unless you can prove it."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            For the Sufis, the physical world is an assemblage of
traces (ayat) of an invisible and unknowable reality (haqq)
devised to give us some clues as to the nature of that reality.
Consequently one needs to reconnoiter "that which transpires
behind that which appears" (Ya Batin).

            Follow the hint rather than cleaving to your personal
perspective or alternately dismissing it as "maya". This requires
the most utter detachment from one's personal bias. Suddenly
everything assumes great clarity; it is as though one had awakened
from an illusion (Ya Khabir). One's psyche had masked reality and
one had taken one's assessment for granted. Now one has shaken off
the hoax. If you apply this to your appraisal of the physical
world, you will enjoy a sudden breakthrough of awakening, so that
your relationship with the physical world will no more be an I-It
relationship but one of deep communion and resonance. The
consequence will be that you simply plunge into the reality of the
universe or the realness of physical phenomena. You will envision
the physical universe as the body of a being and the cosmos as
being that being:

"The world is a man."
MAHMOOD SHABISTARI

[ Note (sa):  Cf. the notion of 'Adom Kadmon' in Jewish
mysticism.]



            Now for our self-image. Since the richness latent in
our personality is constrained by our self-image, the consequence
of extending our notion of ourselves beyond our skin triggers off
an remarkable unfurling of our potentials (Ya Wahhabo) and
enrichment of our idiosyncrasies (Ya Mughni).

            "The spirit of limitation is always a hindrance to
realizing the spirit of mastery and practicing it. The experience
of being powerless is one's ignorance of the power within one...
It is the situation where we are in that makes us believe we are
this or that. Whatever the soul experiences, that it believes
itself to be. If the soul sees the external self as a baby, it
believes I am a baby. If it sees the external self as old, it
believes I am old. If it sees the external self in a palace, it
believes I am rich, If it sees itself in a hut, it believes I am
poor. But in reality it is only I am. When one lives this
limitation, one does not know that another part of oneself exists
which is much higher, more wonderful, more living and more
exalted."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            The consequence of this realization is felt right away
in your impact upon the prevailing circumstances with the result
of increasing your sphere of influence (Ya Malik ul Mulk).

            Every soul has its domain in life consisting of all it
possesses and of all who belong to it. This domain is as wide as
the width of the soul's influence; it is so to speak an mechanism
which works by the thought power of each individual soul.

KHAYAL

            For each notion of identity we entertain, there is a
corresponding mode of thinking. In our ordinary thinking, our
minds think in terms of categories: this tree/that tree,
subject/object, I/it, spirit/matter, immortality/transiency,
transcendence/immanence - "either", not "and". In our  ordinary
thinking it would be considered folly to question that we are the
spectator or subject experiencing the objective world, or our body
or thoughts objectively. This is reflected in the simple faith
which represents God as "other".

            If we expand our consciousness, freeing ourselves from
our personal bias, we will still entertain a conceptualization of
God as "other", but our concept will reflect our sense of
immensity, of grandeur (Ya Mutakabbir).

            "To make God intelligible, you must make a God of your
own... It is, however, impossible to make God intelligible,
really. The God ideal is so enormous that man can never comprehend
it fully, therefore the best method which the wise have adopted is
to allow every man to make his own God. By this he only makes a
conception of God according to what he is capable of making. He
makes Him the King of heaven... in fact he ascribes all perfection
to Him"
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            "The God who is in a faith is the God whose form the
heart contains - who discloses Himself to the heart in such a way
that the heart recognizes Him. Thus the heart only sees the God of
the faith."
IBN' ARABI, FUSUS AL HIKAM

            "Since the form in which He discloses Himself in a
faith is the form of that faith, the theophany takes the dimension
of the receptacle that receives it, the receptacle in which He
discloses Himself. That is why there are many different faiths. To
each believer, the Divine Being is He who is disclosed to him in
the form of his faith. If God manifests Himself in a different
form, the believer rejects Him, and that is why the dogmatic
faiths combat one another."
H. CORBIN

            "On the day of resurrection, God will show Himself to
His servants in a form that they have not known. It will not be
the form of their faith, but some form from among the divine
determinations in which the believers have known their God. The
servants will deny and reject Him and take refuge in God against
this false god, until at last He discloses Himself to them in the
form of their faith. Then they recognize Him."
H. CORBIN

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