CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis
LESSON 10, PART 1
THE UNIVERSEL
[Note: This lesson is similar to Lesson One of the Universel
Curriculum.]

When Siraj Baron Sirdar van Tuyll suggested to Hazrat Pir o
Murshid Inayat Khan in 1925 to set up a school of comparative
religion for cherags, Murshid rejected the proposition. Sirdar was
confounded: it seemed logical that, since we read the scriptures
of all religions at the altar of the Universal Worship, the
cherags selecting these texts should be cognizant of the world
religions and compare them. The answer is that simply presenting
them as initially rendered in the chronicles of history does not
suffice. Endeavoring to compare them, one soon realizes to what
extent they are fraught with contradictions, customs owing to the
thinking and social structures of the time when they were
announced, political concerns obsolete in our advancing
civilizations, historical data and biographies. Within the
framework of our ordinary reasoning, trying to reconcile dogmas
proves counterproductive, albeit its study has some academic
relevance. It is in the testimonies of the mystics of those
religions that a common ground is found. 

Most importantly, traditional transmissions need to be seen in the
perspective in which we think today.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Not knowing the condition of that particular time nor the
psychology of the people at the time when the prophet existed, man
is ready to judge that personality by the standard of ideas which
he knows today; this does not do that personality justice."

"The prophet brings the message of the day, a reform for that
particular period in which he is born."
(HIK, presumably)

"The whole universe has contributed to the way humanity thinks
today. (Spiritual Liberty.) The collective working of many minds
as one single idea and the activity of the whole world are
governed by the intelligence of the planet. The thought of any
person is the thought of the entire human race and so the
intelligence of the whole planet has an effect upon all those
living on the planet....It is the Message of spiritual liberty."
(HIK, presumably)

PRACTICE:

Ponder upon the degree to which your thinking is influenced and
shaped by current trends. In fact grasp the thought that your
thinking is an expression of the way the universe thinks as it
evolves in the evolutionary process.

Envisioning the spirituality for the future, Pir o Murshid could
see that it was more important to overarch our understanding of
the traditional transmissions with the all-encompassing vision of
the Message of our time. This clearly defines the Universel: it is
orienting our insight in an exciting outreach looking into the
future while ranging through the perennial revelation of the
divine guidance by the Prophets of all religions as it proceeded
step by step historically in the great civilizations.

The Universel is the perfume emerging out of distilling the gist
of the sacred yield of the world religions honored in the
Universal Worship; it is also the leaven quickening the dough of
the conventional perusal of sacred texts in the Universal Worship.
It operates as an encompassing embrace, integrating religious lore
beyond apparent differences. It spans the old and the new.

By unveiling radically revolutionary perspectives spelling the
advance of human thinking, Pir o Murshid throws new light on
earlier beliefs, adjusting them to the trend of our modern
thinking.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of
humanity....The planet has culminated into human beings."
(HIK),  (PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, MYSTICISM/ PHILOSOPHY/
INTELLIGENCE.) 

"The soul is God, but man has a body and mind of his own."
(HIK, loc. cit. I assume )

We are living at a time when personal problems have been enhanced
by our availing ourselves of more and more freedom. Our concerns
for the purpose of our lives has become increasingly daunting and
our need to discover 'who we are' desperately crucial, rather than
the somewhat speculative metaphysical enquiries of theologians,
the antiquated reliance on belief systems, mandatory prescriptions
and role models.

Pir o Murshid saw that, to reach clarity in facing these needs,
one had to unmask the hoax of our self-image, modulate our
consciousness beyond its normally limited range, and explore
unfamiliar propensities of our thinking, while trying to
reconnoiter the issues enacted behind our life situations.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"What is meant by concentration is the change of identification of
the soul so that it may loose the false sense of identification
and identify itself with the true self instead of the false self".
(THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS: THE INNER LIFE AND SELF REALIZATION)

"The false ego is what does not belong to the real ego, and what
that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being." 
(HIK), (THE MYSTICISM OF SOUND AND MUSIC.) 

"It is not his true self which is limited; what is limited is what
he holds, not himself." 
(HIK), (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS)

PRACTICE:

Try to get a clear sense of your image of yourself: the
idiosyncrasies that are characteristic of you as you imagine
yourself to be: qualities, defects, skills, ideals, strivings,
fears, misgivings, doubts about yourself, self-assurance,
resentment, guilt, anger, hope, expectations, disappointments,
degree of freedom, courage, incentive, dependence, independence,
detachment.

Now take for granted that many of these evaluations of yourself
are incomplete, subjective, liable of bias, even risk being
deceptive, self-deceptive - parading vainglory, and, perhaps,
wishful thinking.

Now try to capture the potentialities lying in wait in the cosmic
underpinning of your being. You will discover that they are
inexhaustible and sublime.

We have a catalogue of archetypal qualities in the Ism Ilahi
(which we call Wazaif). All these qualities are latent in what one
might call the seed of which your personality is the plant.

Earmark a quality which is of compelling consequence to you, and
try to spot it deep in your being waiting to be aroused and
awakened.

In a further step, explore what would be the effect if you
developed this quality upon how you deal with one of you problems.

BUILDING A BRIDGE WITH THE PROPHETS, MASTERS AND SAINTS FOR
GUIDANCE IN OUR PROBLEMS

While in earlier schools initiates were focused upon the prophet
of their religion or their personal guru, in announcing the
Message of our time, Pir o Murshid opened up a vast outreach
embracing all prophets, masters and saints of all religions. By
contemplating them, we build a bridge with our thoughts and our
hearts through which they can inspire us, thereby guiding us.  

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"People in the world, through their intoxication, even in
following or accepting these wise men, have monopolized one of
them as his prophet or teacher. The Sufi message is a reminder to
humanity - not to any one nation, but to all; not to one, but to
every creed - of the truth taught by all the great teachers of
humanity."

This broad view was in incubation only among the greater Sufi
teachers.

IBN 'ARABI:
"He describes Himself to you by yourself. 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." 
(CF. H. CORBIN, 1969, P. 197)

Imagine that you consult an illuminated being looking at what you
see as your problem in the light of his or her insight into its
programming!    

Here we hit upon the crucial issue. Rather than assessing or
trying to solve our problems by looking at them from our personal
vantage point, which is counterproductive, we will gain an
illuminative insight by learning from great beings how they faced
and dealt with similar issues.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The great thinkers who contemplate the flow of that divine
consciousness, rise in their contemplation above the boundaries
which must limit the view of average men at any and every stage of
civilization."

There is no being in the Universe whose consciousness we cannot
consult; albeit, admittedly, to really communicate, we would have
to be up to their level of thinking and up to the contribution the
pitch of their emotional attunement gives to their realization.

PRACTICE:

Instead of cogitating thoughts, contemplate the beings who
incorporate these thoughts, for thoughts live in beings. Where is
the thinking of the universe to be found if not in beings?

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"In reality, there are no things. They are all beings. It is
simply a gradual awakening from the witnessing aspect to the
recognizing aspect."
 (GATHA I, INSIGHT, THE GLANCE) 

When a person witnesses an event or a thought, it has not yet been
embodied in their being. But if he or she recognizes in his or her
person or that of another the idiosyncrasy that matches that
thought, and thereby arouses it, awakening it, then that thought
becomes a living reality.

The same applies at the macroscopic scale.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"People ask: "If all is God, then God is not a person." The
answer: though the seed does not show the flower in it, yet the
seed culminates in the flower; and therefore the flower already
existed in the seed." "

[ OK, sports fans:  Here's my latest change to the rules of
punctuation.  They taught us in Belmont Junior High School, this
was in the USA 1950's, that if there's a quote within a quote, the
inner quote is in 'single quotes'.  But here I'm encounter
quotations marks to set off remarks that HIK quotes, and I'm
putting all the HIK et al. quotes in quotation marks, so should I
go back into it and replace the single quotes with double quotes. 
Heck no.  For one thing, it might obstruct somoene trying to do a
Search.  For another thing, I like to reserve single quotes for a
term used to designate, not an entity, but a 'concept'.  So I'll
just use multiple quotes, but space them a bit " "like this" "  ,
just I do with a ( parenthetical remark (within another
parenthetical remark) ) . 
Just thought you'd want to no.  
Now back to this Sunday morning's sermon.
Don't think we'll get snow today.
All that grey and no pay. ]


"No doubt it would be a great mistake to call God a personality,
but it is a still greater mistake when man denies the personality
of God.... Man in the flowering of his personality expresses the
personality of God."
(HIK, presumably)

"And if the world has been able to believe in God and to recognize
God in a being, it is in the godly, it is in the soul which
reflects God. It is in man that divinity is awakened, that God is
awakened, that God can be seen."
(HIK, I reckon)

"The divine mind becomes completed after manifestation. The
creator's mind is made of His own creation. The experience of
every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind." 
(HIK), (THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS)

"The Creator is hidden in His creation."
(HIK, I say)

"Man thinks and speaks according to the pitch of his soul."
(HIK, so we supose)

"One's grade of evolution depends upon the pitch one has attained
that makes one conscious of a certain phase of life...."
(HIK, I say today)

"It is not his form, it is not his appearance, it is not what he
says. It is his atmosphere, it is what his presence conveys to
you, it is what his atmosphere tells you." 
(HIK), (SUPPLEMENTARY PAPERS, THE SON OF THE MURSHID IN DELHI)

[ I suppose PVK is here referring to the guy from whom he took a
retreat as a young man -- maybe he had been entrusted with some of
HIK's last papaers on HIK's last trip to Inida ]

[ Toenote kitc10 -- 1 ]

For example, if your thoughts wandered to Mount Kailas to visit
Shiva sitting in samadhi for having mastered physical and mental
functions, and you were still encumbered with addictions, you
could not attune to his consciousness, but the impact of his
powerful being might help you overcome these addictions.

You would not be welcomed to discuss with Dr. Ilya Prigogine his
theory of near equilibrium unless you understood a whole range of
sophisticated physics, but reading his books may lead to entering
his thinking.

If you long to attune to the ecstasy of dervishes, you would have
to let go of being uptight or low key. You would not be able to
communicate with Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi, unless you removed the
bushel (if there is one) of selfishness masking the light of your
soul. Counter wise, the light in his eyes would prove worthwhile
eschewing greed to share its effulgence. To look into the eyes of
Hazrat Babajan, you would have to abandon any guile, deception or
self-deception. Counter wise, looking into her eyes would clear
any vestige of divisiveness.

To be granted an audience with the President, unless you were a
buddy of a celebrity, whatever be your skills or spiritual status
they would not carry much weight!

To appreciate Beethoven's or Brahms's music more profoundly, you
would have to know something of their life's struggles which may
lead to getting into their consciousness and see how they turned
the tables on their most painful problem by harnessing its energy
creatively. This method could be used  in transforming one's
person.

Christ? You would have to forgive those who have abused you - even
love your enemy! That is a very challenging mandate! It is more
difficult to forgive those who have harmed or tortured others than
those who have betrayed or demeaned one's self! Would letting them
off the hook be interpreted or rightly condemned as condoning or
irresponsible tolerance? 

As for Buddha, reaching into his consciousness would make you free
since he has himself found freedom, but he is uncompromising, so
you would have to not only give up your wishes, but wishing for
anything.

To access these perspectives of ubiquitous beings, one has to
carry one's thinking beyond its confinement to the perceptual or
conceptual mode of thinking. 

PRACTICE:

Thinking of a prophet, master or saint has the effect of turning
your attention to and attuning you to levels in yourself in which
he or she ranges. Choose a prophet, master or saint to whom you
feel particularly attuned, envision him or her as described in the
annals of history, then, inspired by this vision, hoist your sense
of identity into its higher levels so as to establish some degree
of concordance. Now try to shift your consciousness into his or
her consciousness and, knowing something of his or her
pronouncements when incarnated, try to glimpse how he or she
thinks and feels in considering your problems from his or her
point of view. 

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Illumination is obtained by rising above one's earthly condition
at the command of one's will and realizing one's immortal self
which is God...."

IBN 'ARABI:
"When God moves any servant through his spiritual states, in order
to show him      His signs, He moves him through His states."
(FUTUHAT) 

It is helpful at this stage to realize that, while our thinking
moves within the framework of space-time, it can take flight
notwithstanding this constraint.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
The soul manifesting as a body has diminished its power
considerably, even to the extent that it is not capable of
imagining for one moment the great power, life and light it has in
itself. Once the soul realizes itself by becoming independent of
the body that surrounds it, then the soul naturally begins to see
in itself the being of the spirit. 
(PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY, MYSTICISM)

"However you need not leave behind your body, you can also become
aware of your higher bodies."
(HIK, pesumably)

Our mind can contemplate 'pure thoughts' while transmuting its
conceptualization of the existential condition of reality within
the space-time frame. Therefore it is irrelevant whether these
beings are disincarnated.

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"This process takes place in two directions: outwardly by being
one with all we see, and inwardly by being in touch with that one
Life which is everlasting."

"The soul manifests in the world in order that it may experience
the different phases of manifestation, and yet not lose its way,
but regain its original freedom, in addition to the experience and
knowledge it has gained in the world." 
(THE SAYINGS OF HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN.) 

"True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has
come to Earth and has realized there its spiritual being." 
(HIK)m (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS.) 

"Illumination is obtained by rising above one's earthly condition
at the command of one's will and thereby realizing one's immortal
self which is God within.... Perfect realization can only be
gained by passing through all the stages between man, the
manifestation of God, the only Being, knowing ourselves from the
lowest to the highest point of existence, and thus accomplishing
the heavenly journey."
(HIK)

Pir o Murshid showed that the emerging spirituality throws light
on human issues and can transform one's being. How can we achieve
this? We know fromexperience that learning consists in replacing
our view by availing ourselves of the grasp of the question at
stake by a wise being endowed with a more informed know-how, or
extrapolating between our point of view and that of another, or
overarching our view by the encompassing overview of an
illuminated being. Pir o Murshid calls this 'the reason behind
reason.'

"The mystic touches the reason of reason, the cause behind the
cause, the purpose beyond the purpose."
(HIK) 

So it is with the assessment of our problems. Let us distinguish
here two dimensions. We learn to see them in their context rather
than in their content. Moreover we learn to see them from the
antipodal vantage point to our personal (obviously biased) vantage
point.

To this end, in a first step, we train our consciousness to see
things from the point of view of another in a grasp including both
our point of view and that of another. One discovers that one can
actually shunt one's consciousness into that of another and
witness how things appear to them. One discovers that one is able
to extrapolate between these views (just as our eyes are able, by
dint of parallax, to extrapolate between two different two-
dimensional perspectives into athree dimensional one).

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"The first sign one notices after the awakening of the soul, is
that one begins to see from two points of view."
(HIK),  (Social Gathekas)

PRACTICE:

Think of a person you know. Imagine that you are that person.
Imagine that you are in the circumstances, the situation, in which
this person is. Imagine how that person feels and sees things.
Imagine what are his or her aspirations, motivations, concerns,
precariousness, and overcoming.

Next proceed likewise with a person who is inimical to you, or has
harmed you. See that they needed to boost their self-esteem by
trying to exercise power over you.

Next, combining more and more differing views from more and more
people, arrive at a multidimensional, all-encompassing grasp.

In a second step, try to see how you appear, or your standpoint
appears, from the point of view of another, or more people.

ST. FRANCIS:
"I thought I was looking at the world, but the world is looking at
me."

In an ultimate step, try to grasp some tenuous clues as to the
meaningfulness of the programming - the code ordering your life's
situation. This is not a knowledge that one acquires by figuring
things out with one's mind, but it may be gradually revealed to
you as you evolve in your realization. Where are the clues to the
programming of life hidden in the particular circumstances in
which you find yourself?

IBN 'ARABI:
"Since the ephemeral being manifests the form of the eternal, it
is by the contemplation of the ephemeral that God communicates to
us the knowledge of Himself." (1975, p 15)

"To Him we attribute no quality without ourselves having that
quality." (Ibid., op. cit.  (1975, p 16) 
                     
[ Toenote 1876 (sa) ]


However, any attempt at making sense of this strategy proves
perplexing to our understanding, and yet dawns upon one, providing
that one forfeits one's reliance upon acquired knowledge. The
Sufis endeavor to make this revealed knowledge prevail upon
acquired knowledge.        

IBN 'ARABI:
"At an advanced stage, one learns to grasp God as He is in
Himself, rather than the knowledge gleaned of Him." 
(CF. VALSAN ET. 4/5, 1962)

"Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God, not by
thyself." 
(IBN 'ARABI, I PRESUME) (1976, P 16)

So, let us recall that our objective is:

(i) to ascertain clearly our assessment of our problems or life
situations;

(ii) to caution ourselves as to personal bias, denial, self-
justification, self-deception, ego trips;

(iii) to shift your consciousness into the consciousness of the 
persons involved with you in your problem or life situation so as
to see the same situation from  complementary vantage points; 

(iv) to try to reach into the consciousness of a prophet, master,
saint or wise being and try to imagine how that being would deal
with this situation. Note that one needs to proceed in two steps:

(a) imagine to oneself that being as described in the annals of
history (in some cases his or her face or demeanor in an
environment );

(b) now in a second step, try to transfer your consciousness into
the transcendent perspective of that honored being, and see how
the situation looks from his or her point of view, while
resonating with his or her attunement.

(v) Now try to match our standpoint with that of this being,
endeavoring to value the wisdom of his or her stance, while
acquiescing to the limitations in one's ability to conform and the
compulsion of one's psychological needs. At first one might only
be able to toggle between one's view and the challenging
superlative one of that being - permutate to and fro to see the
complementarity of their relevances. Can one extrapolate while
honoring one's own stance as relatively valid if not as an all-
encompassing, overarching evaluation?

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Wisdom is born out of the meeting of the knowledge of the heavens
and the knowledge of the earth. When the light from within is
thrown upon the knowledge of the earth, then the knowledge from
outer life and the light from within make a perfect wisdom."

IBN 'ARABI:
"The world of the unseen is perceived through insight, just as the
world of the visible is perceived by sight. When these two lights
come together, unseen things are unveiled as they are in
themselves and as they are in existence."

HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:
"Insofar as man is capable of seeing the seen world, to that
extent he is also capable of observing the unseen world on
condition that he first sees and observes his own unseen world."

The method to reach into the cyber space-time of ubiquitous
beings, or even beyond, consists in shifting one's mode of
thinking and the pitch of one's attunement from one perspective to
another, step by step through the gamut of levels of consciousness
in a sequel of developmental stages delineated in the
transmissions of the classical esoteric school of the world
religions. It is indeed gratifying to notice how they parallel, as
follows.

[ Note (sa):  The following table occurs in 3 columns in Kaivan's
format of the KIT's, but all gets flush_left in my text_only save. 
I'll try to tidy it up a bit:  
So OK, I put the Yoga term in CAPS , and the Sufi term in *Stars*
and leave the Buddhism term in lover_case

YOGA
*Sufism*
Buddhism

7 
ASAMPRAJNATA
*Hahut*
Cessation of determined

6 
SARBIJA??
*Lahut*
Beyond existence and non-existence

5 
ANANDANUGATA
*Malakut*
Beyond consciousness

4 
NIRVEKARA
*Jabarut*
Beyond existence

3 
SAVIKARA
*Mithal*
Consciousness

2 
NIRVETARKA
*??Khayal*
 
1 
SAVITARKA
*??Nasut*
 
[Cf. the improved topography of levels in Part II of this Lesson!
- Kaivan]

It is now clear that, to avail ourselves of the wisdom and example
of hallowed beings, we will have to lift our consciousness to
those levels latent within ourselves at which they are operating.

We will be proposing in the next installments a few basic
guidelines to navigate the meditator through these levels
(sometimes called planes or spheres) based upon a comparative
study of the methods of meditation of some of the esoteric
schools. They are here labeled in the Sufiterminology in a mapping
of topographical perspectives which have their parallels in other
schools(as listed above). They will however need to be elaborated
further as we proceed in the installments.

================================================================
===============================================================

COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY:

TEXT:
[ I suppose PVK is here referring to the guy from whom he took a
retreat as a young man -- maybe he had been entrusted with some of
HIK's last papaers on HIK's last trip to Inida ]

[ Toenote kitc10 -- 1 ]


maybe he saw HIK when, as it now seems clear enough in retrospect,
HIK knowingly ("Yes, Babuly, the Baker will not come again", he
said to NIK when, just before he left, she came to him with a
dream that their Baker had died) went back to India to die.  I
suppose he died of cancer ("Pain, my consant companion .... "
(Collected Sayings) , though some say, I don't know who, maybe
some of the aery_fairy spiritualists, that he was poisoned. -- sa 

[ Toenote 1876 (sa) ]
[ Ok sports fans. Here's a new abbreviation.  'Ibid.' means 'the
dude wot said it' , 'loc. cit.' means locus citatus, the place
where the dude wot said it said it at, and so 'op. cit.' is for
'opus cititatatedatat' meaning, the book wherein the dude wot said
it said it at albeit not necessarily the spot_on_the_dot that he
said it at, hepcat. ]  

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