=kit115.txt

KIT 115 - WHAT IS THE UNIVERSEL?

AWAKENING IN LIFE

Following is an attempt to explore how our vision of the
spirituality of the future (the millennium - Pir-o-Murshid Inayat
Khan's message in our time - the Universel) opens new perspectives
in our quest for awakening. The spiritual itinerary of Pir-o-
Murshid Inayat Khan led him to branch out from the traditional
transmission of his Sufi predecessors into an even more
encompassing span, as found amongst the more liberal Sufis
nurtured in the Chishti Order in India. He incorporated this broad
outreach in the Universal Worship; but he clearly anticipated that
the message for our time could not be a syncretistic collation of
the bountiful gifts of the great world religions in their
diversity. The original insight of the religious pioneers -
patriarchs, rishis, prophets, masters, saints, women dervishes -
has often been distorted or paraphrased by the transmission of
their pupils, interpreters, and by the 'institutionalization' of
spirituality. Their dogmas or methods of meditation at first sight
appear as conflicting. When, however, their doctrines and faiths
are rethought and updated in the perspectives opening up to us in
our day and age, and more particularly in a projected vision of
the future, we can appreciate their congruity in their
complementarity. This is the task that Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
initiated and that we are invited to pursue in the Universel. The
Sufi transmission remains the seed embedded in this splendid
flowering of spirituality he baptized as the Universal Message -
the Universel, announcing the millennium.

We need to first meet a preliminary which calls our attention:
owning to the reality of pain is our compelling concern.

'I hear a call from the Earth - the message answers the call by
the voice of the heart.'    
PARAPHRASING PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

"I wish to know what is your suffering."   
PASTEUR                            

[ Homogenized milk; what's yours. (sa)]

In what way can awakening meet that plea? This is what we are
venturing to explore.

First, let us list a few typical cases of pain:

(i) Physical pain: cancer, Aids, arthritis, acute nerve pains, all
bodily pains.

(ii) Psychological distress: having been abused, humiliated,
snubbed, derided, having been treated unjustly, repressed by the
ego of a person - particularly in a marital relationship, let
down, abandoned by spouse or partner, experiencing unreciprocated
love, a feeling of inadequacy, a poor self-image, a sense of
failure, pathological disturbances, loss at the death of a dear
one, having a retarded child, drugged teenagers, imprisonment, or
being tortured.  

(iii) At the soul level: feeling suffocated by the limitations in
one's understanding, failure to see meaningfulness in life, or in
one's own life,  feeling trapped by conditions that seem to
preclude enlightenment, being disheartened, disgusted  by the
profanity, the grossness in the psychological environment - a
desperate need for the sacred.     

The question before us is what solace, what remedy (if at all),
what help can the new vistas in 'spirituality,' meditation, and
awakening offer? Simply escape from prevailing conditions cannot
offer meaningfulness and joy.

"Unhappy is he who looks with contempt at the world, who hates
human beings and thinks he is superior to them; the one who loves
them thinks only that they are going through the same process that
he has gone through. If he cannot put up with conditions around
him, he may think he is a superior person, but in reality the
circumstances are stronger than him." 
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN,  THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS

It evidences a lack of appreciation of the invaluable legacy of
the great civilizations from which we benefit: Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony, the Chaconne of Bach, Notre Dame of Paris, Persepolis,
Rembrandt, Shakespeare; the technologies - TV, the computer; the
achievements of mountaineers; outer space exploration; the
exploits of the minds of mathematicians, physicists,
psychologists; the dedication of welfare workers, rescue workers,
valor in battle; the exploits in the mind of rishis, physicists,
the divine power of dervishes. The ascetic's 'desirouslessness'
would not bring the universe to that degree of sophisticated
flowering.  It will, however, free us from the constraint of our
personal perspective. It fosters detachment, freedom; provides a
psychological analgesic against anguish due to our dependence upon
environmental conditions that wreak confinement and stress. It is
certainly a refuge when we are stymied by psychological overstress
that has become intolerable; and therefore a useful rescue
vademecum in our psychological first-aid chest. 

"Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a
phenomenon of interest."   
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

In Buddhism, the crucial step leading to awakening is letting go
of the launching platform. Obviously, to awaken from the
perspective of the way things appear to the cosmic thinking behind
it, one needs to downplay the commonplace perspective to highlight
the perspective of the meaningfulness underpinning it, but does
that entail discarding all the bounty of the heirloom of our
civilizations that are essential features of our psyche? To eschew
doing just this, we need to operate a transmutation of these
features in our psyche so as to carry them aloft in our flight
above existential conditions. Beethoven's optimism in the victory
of good over evil, Brahms' conversion of pain into joy, the
glorification of the sacred that inspired the builders of the
Chartres Cathedral, Mother Theresa's compassion, the courage of
firemen and rescue operators, represent the quintessence of the
symphonies, or the monuments in stone, or the sordid details of
the Calcutta slums. The culmination of the thinking of the whole
cosmos at its leading edge is incorporated right into the
electronics and hardware of the rocket hurtling across sidereal
space, carrying the quintessence of the human  ingenuity nurtured
on planet Earth beyond the telluric orb of matter, into the
noosphere.

"Do you not think that our world has intelligence? The whole of
humanity has contributed to the way we think today. There is a
mind behind all minds; there is a heart which is the source of all
hearts; there is a spirit that collects and accumulates all the
knowledge that every living being has had. No knowledge or
discovery that has ever been made is lost. It all accumulates and
collects in that mind as an eternal reservoir - the divine mind.
The divine mind becomes completed after manifestation."    
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

What help does awakening 'beyond life' (as in Samadhi) provide us
to find a solution to suffering? Significantly, this feat of
stepping out of the common-place into a cosmic outreach and
transcendent overarching dimension that motivated the Hindu rishis
and Buddhists is precisely what sparked the genius of creative
people to explore a psychological space beyond the middle range.

"Spiritual attainment is to be reached by the raising of the
consciousness from limitation to perfection. We occupy as much
horizon as is within our consciousness. Then a person does not see
every condition as it appears to be, but sees behind every
condition its deeper meaning."   
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN,  THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS

Here indifference is countered by enthusiasm. These outstanding
achievements of human initiative and strenuous toil are, for the
Sufis, the many-splendored outbursts of the nostalgia of the
universe (the Ishq Allah of the Sufis) breaking through each of
the fragments of itself (we humans) as it evolves (as we evolve). 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan beckons us to exploit that driving
force, while being cautioned by the way this nostalgia can become
deviated in us, where selfishness and greed corrupt us in our
strife to improve our human conditions, in our personal
involvement in existential circumstances, rather than honoring a
concern to share in building a beautiful world of beautiful
people. He therefore urges us to orient that force with a wise,
masterful will (the example of the yachtsperson).

Creativity is sparked by the "homonization" (a word of Teilhard de
Chardin) of the driving emotion of the whole universe, customized
by our diverse uniqueness, in the context of the problems that
arise when the individuated wills of the fragments of the universe
affirm their individual idiosyncrasies and conflict, causing joy
and pain. Creativity, born out of the human drama, peaks in the
cosmic celebration signaling itself to us, sometimes erupting
within that very drama when it inspires us to overarch our
differences out of love and understanding for the sacredness of
the human spirit. Thus the divine creativity is carried further
through the human being, says Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan; spurred
by suffering, it proves healing.

It is our passion for our ideal that fosters our creativity. Our
artwork is our own personality. The beauty is that we can make it
what we wish. Our thoughts, emotions, and realizations -
especially if recurrent - shape our personality and our face.

In our day and age, we are challenged into extrapolating between
our need for freedom and our sense of fulfillment from being of
service by involving ourselves with people and circumstances out
of love, responsibility, sharing the joys and pains together, and
discovering the meaningfulness which we were seeking 'beyond the
beyond' right in the drama and tour de force of life in the world.
The religious tenets need to be updated by virtue of our present
day concern for realism. This is why Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
does not say "give up the world", but "loosen the ties", thereby
honoring your need for freedom within constraining circumstances
while at the same time taking responsibility. For him, awakening
is achieved by downplaying the commonplace perspective while
highlighting a perspective where you see what is enacted behind
the apparent scenario, rather than simply dismissing not just the
physical world but also psychological circumstances as maya  -
awakening in life rather than beyond life. 

Applying the theory of maya  at the psychological level, according
to Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, distress can result from a faulty
assessment of our problems, moreover from our deceptive self-
image. Nirvetarka Samadhi is the first step towards debunking
one's biased self-deception.

But being cautioned against 'what is not' is not sufficient. We
wish to know 'what is.' This is where Sufism holds a complementary
rather than contradictory view about maya. What is enacted in our
problems, that we may fail to grasp - albeit blurred by our faulty
assessment - is signaling to us by dint of those very problems.
Let us consider our problems as clues leading to grasping what the
issues are at a cosmic scale, rather than entrapping ourselves in
our personal bias. Follow the clue by shifting consciousness to
the antipodal vantage point to that of the personal pole of our
being by identifying with the deathless and impersonal pole of our
being, which is co-extensive with that of all beings - in fact
this is what is sometimes meant by the word God.  

This validation of life is in some way connected with an
evolutionary trend in the notion of God - no more 'up there,'
transcendent, out of reach - as the universe, including 
ourselves. 

This breakthrough in the 'concept of God' represents freedom from
the theological conditioning of our minds. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat
Khan was announcing the spirituality of the millennium. He called
it the "Message of Spiritual Liberty", liberated from many of the
hackneyed views of the past.  Notice also that it is a collective
awakening, rather than a personal one, therefore something that is
happening to humanity as we evolve.

"The Message is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to
the divinity of man."  
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

This may serve as a clue to what is meant by the "Universel." It
now becomes clear that on that last day when Pir-o-Murshid Inayat
Khan was with his mureeds in Suresnes, before departing for India
where he was deceased, he was announcing the next step: the
Universel, beyond all 'isms.' The temple could not just be a
building in stone, a housing for the celebration of the unity of
religious ideals, but a temple made of people - people who,
through the power of prayer, are announcing the spiritual message
for the future: the liberated message of spiritual liberty.

The solution to the problem of the day is that the consciousness
of humanity may be awakened to the divinity of the human being.

"O Thou who art the maker, moulder and builder of the Universe,
build with Thine own hands the Universel, our temple, for Thy
divine Message of love, harmony and beauty."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

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