=kitc02.sxt

CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
Teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan,
Parallels with earlier Sufis,
Comparative religion,
Comments,
Practices

                        LESSON 2
                   MODES OF THINKING:
              LIMITATION   /       COSMIC
            CONSTRAINT     /         FREEDOM
          DETERMINISM      /         CREATIVITY 

[In the Kaivan, this topical outline seems to be arranged in a
pyramid, but I don't know if PVK did that, or intended it -- it
does not seem to make conceptual sense -- these 3 antipodes seem
to me merely different aspects of the same thing, not an ontologic
hierarchy. sa ]
           


"We are as great as our spirit, we are as wide as our spirit, we
are as low as our spirit, we are as small as our spirit."
(HIK, presumably)

"The world of one individual is as small as a grain of lentil, and
that of another as large as the whole world."
(HIK, I assume)

"We occupy as much horizon as is within our consciousness or as
much as we are conscious of." 
(HIK) (HEALING)

"The outlook becomes wide; as wide as the divine eye."
(HIK, I assume)

Mysticism means developing from limitation to perfection.
(Healing)

"The soul, conscious only of its limitation, of its possessions
with which it identifies itself, forgets its own being and becomes
captive of its limitation." 
(HIK) (ALCHEMY)

"The mystic knows, if anyone knows, what limitation means, for it
is in perfection that his joy and his happiness are to be found."
(HIK) (PHILOSOPHY)

Pir Vilayat' s comments:

Of course the obstacle standing in the way of our finding
fulfillment in our lives lies in the inadequacy of our self-image.
But how do we deal with it? Awkwardly one may try to annihilate
oneself. The riddle is that one cannot obliterate the personal
dimension of one's self by dint of the personal dimension of one's
will. Of course the answer is God-consciousness; that is,
discovering the bounty of the universe lying in wait potentially
in our own being and longing to awaken.

PRACTICE:

To start with, check your self-image. This is less easy than one
might at first suppose, because one identifies with it. This is
where the Buddhist techniques of Satipatana will prove helpful.

"As long as one's little personality stands before one, as long as
one cannot get rid of it, as long as one's personality and all
that is connected with it interests one, one will always find
limitation." 
(HIK) (VOLUME 1, CHAPTER IV; GK 27)

"The false self is the greatest limitation.*
(HIK, I presume)

Pir o Murshid coins our self-image as the false ego:

"The false ego is what has been wrongly conceived as one's real
being."
(HIK)  (COSMIC LANGUAGE) 

"It is not his true nature which is limited; what is limited is
what he holds to be himself."
(HIK)  (ALCHEMY) 

"... The false self is the greatest limitation. 
(HIK) (VOLUME 2, CHAPTER X; GG 27) 

"So the ego has its two sides: the first is the one we know, and
the next the one we must discover. The side we know is the false
ego which makes us say "I." What is it in us that we call "I?" We
say, "This is my body, my mind, these are my thoughts, my
feelings, my impressions, this is my position in life." We
identify our self with all that concerns us, and the sum-total of
all these we call "I." In the light of truth this conception is
false, it is a false identity...It is the imperfect division of
the perfect ego." (
(HIK) (VOLUME 9, PROPHETS) 

" ... The real self can rise to perfection; the false self ends in
limitation. (In man there is a real ego; this ego is divine. It is
not that the false ego is our ego and the true ego is the ego of
God, but that the true ego which is the ego of God has become a
false ego in us. 
(HIK) (VOLUME 11, PHILOSOPHY) 

"... But this divine ego is covered by the false ego. 
(HIK) (INITIATION) 

" ... The ego itself is never destroyed; it is the one thing that
lives. In the knowledge of the ego is the secret of immortality.
(HIK) (VOLUME 12, COSMIC) 

" ... If one realized that spiritual development depends upon the
awakening of the false ego to the true ego, its very foundation,
how simple the way to spiritual perfection would become!"
(HIK, I presume.)

How do we proceed?

"A person has to analyze himself and see: 'Where does "I" stand?
Does it stand as a remote, exclusive being?" 
(HIK) (COSMIC LANGUAGE)

PRACTICE:

Observe your self-image. You can only observe it by disidentifying
with it. Then only can one explore (admittedly at first vaguely)
the many-splendored bounty of one's real being latent behind the
idiosyncrasies of one's personality. Here again, the key is in
rating one's commonplace thinking as not sufficiently
comprehensive and therefore incomplete.

Can you reconnoiter your false ego? The key lies in checking
whether you identify with what is perishable (your body) or
transient (your thoughts).

"Then we identify our soul with that which is mortal. This is the
false ego." 
(HIK) (HEALTH)

Imagine that your real being is covered by many veils.

"To become selfless is to realize the self by unveiling it from
its numberless covers which make the false ego." 
(HIK) (THE SOUL, WHENCE AND WHITHER)

One of those veils is our role-playing.

"It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this
or that."
(HIK, I presume)

"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 situation 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 man lives this limitation, he does
not realize that another part of himself exists which is much
higher, more wonderful, more living and more exalted. This is His
unlimited Being...."
(HIK)  (Gk 27) 

"Either we live in our limitation or let God reign there in His
unlimited being."
(HIK, I presume)

"Man's failures in life, together with his impression of
limitation, keep him ignorant of that great power which is hidden
in the mind. Man's life is the phenomenon of his mind; man's
happiness and success, his sorrows and failures, are mostly
brought about by his own mind, of which he knows so little."
(HIK, I presume)

Now let us try to reconnoiter our real being:

"How can one be in tune with the infinite? The nature of being in
tune with the infinite can be seen by comparing one's soul to the
string of an instrument. It is tied at both sides: one is the
infinite and the other is the finite. When a person is conscious
all the time of the finite then he or she is tuned with the
finite, and the one who is conscious of the infinite is tuned with
the infinite. Being in tune with one makes us limited, weak,
hopeless, and powerless; by being in tune with the other we obtain
the power and strength to pull through life under all adverse
conditions." 
(HIK) (Gk 31)

"If man dived deep enough within himself he would reach a point of
his ego where it lives an unlimited life. It is that realization
which brings man to the real understanding of life, and as long as
he has not realized his unlimited self he lives a life of
limitation, a life of illusion." 
(HIK) (Gth 1)

Checking your self-image again, ascertain how limited it is and
then discover how you suffocate in restriction, in constriction,
and long for the vastness. You can find vastness in yourself.
Ponder again upon these words:

"The world of one individual is as small as a grain of lentil, and
that of another as large as the whole world."
(HIK, I presume)

"We are as great as our spirit, we are as wide as our spirit, we
are a low as our spirit, we are as small as our spirit."
(HIK, I presume)

"We occupy as much of the horizon as is within our consciousness
or as much as we are conscious of." 
(HIK) --- (Healing)

"The outlook becomes wide; as wide as the divine eye."
(HIK, Presumaboblly)

[ N.B. -- These quotes also appear at the start of this KIT, but
this is not mirror_text (sa) ]

PRACTICE:

In the tranquility inside, ponderous thoughts regarding the nature
of your being surface with unexpected clarity. You can observe
that, indeed, your self-image is based upon the more overt
features of your psyche, even your body. But if you dive deeper,
you will discover that in one's ordinary experience, one tends to
identify with one's role playing, also with the features of one's
face, also with those thoughts which while formulated in one's
mind, get constrained by trying to articulate them within the
constraint of language. In contrast: try to grasp your real person
behind the pretence of role-playing; try to envision your real
countenance behind the face you see in the mirror, which now
appears as a mask. You will now be able to ascertain that your
sense of meaningfulness is often distorted in your commonplace
thoughts and that your personality only manifests a sliver of the
bounty of that seed of your personality considered as a plant.

Now ponder upon the fact that, in the course of experiencing the
existential world, you have involved yourself with people, with
situations, with the fabric of the Planet. Caught in the narrow
perspective that determines seeing things in detail, you have lost
the overview and consequently forgotten who you are.

Pir Vilayat's comments:

Our consciousness is ordinarily squeezed into a microscopically
small range while we are oblivious of the way it relates to an
infinite totality. What you are experiencing in this room on the
screen of your mind is not only a sliver of what is happening on
the Planet, let alone in the galaxies, but an infinitesimal cross-
section of an n-dimensional world of beings living their lives in
worlds of which we are not familiar (that escape our grasp),
including our world in the past, which is still there, although it
has changed. These far reaches include those whom we have known in
our life-time or whose lives have been recorded in the annals of
history, and those whom, in our inadequate thinking, we tend to
believe are no more.

Consider this screen of your mind as a doorway giving you access
beyond its limitation. Envision that the shadows on the screen are
not simply what you perceive, but clues which if followed would
open vaster and vaster horizons. This could be illustrated by a
radio which functions as a transducer of an infinite web of radio-
waves that we could not make sense of unless this complex network
of waves - this wave-interference pattern (in physics) - were
reduced to fit into the range of our perception.

Can you now see that what we perceive as objects are simply
abstractions of a deeper dynamic reality which could be described
as the interrelationship between events. What we perceive as
events are simply cross-sections of intercepting
interrelationships that criss-cross. Everything resonates with
everything else.

Our consciousness functions like the radio that reduces that
stupendous network that our intelligence would not be able to
extrapolate and therefore make sense of.

PRACTICE:

Now try to expand your consciousness. See the difference between
reading the letters on the pages of a book and scanning a vast
horizon.

Of course it is an ideal situation if you meditate at night under
the stars and think how extraordinary it is that your retin. are
sensitive to light reaching you from distances measured in umpteen
light years! Furthermore, imagine that the  molecules, atoms and
electrons of the cells of your body originated in the "Big bang"
as they coalesced though the .ons of time to provide a support
system for the intelligence of the universe focalized as your
consciousness.

In a further step, see if you can feel a force field around your
arms, in front of your chest, in your back, around your head just
like the magnetic field of a magnet. Identify with it, considering
it as the template in which your body cells are configured.

And further, if you can, sense a light field surrounding your
body, also interfused in your body cells. Now identify with it.

Now we can do the reverse: having expanded consciousness, see if
you can have a sense of encompassing a wide horizon with your
consciousness. Then hold people in your heart. Harbor them in safe
asylum that they may be nurtured, also that they may feel
supported by you, so that you would intercede in their favor.

Now, says Pir o Murshid, since your outreach has expanded: take
stock of the areas, that Murshid calls your kingdom, for which you
assume responsibility and of those people for whom you assume
responsibility to be better able to manage one's affairs.
                              
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