=KITC12.TXT


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 12
IN PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME
AND MEANINGFULNESS
IN REAL LIFE SITUATIONS

Many of us are bracing for the journey through the spheres (Nazut,
Mithal, Malakut, etc.) whose dimensions we plan to explore in the
Curriculum, concretized in practices. However, I feel that before
we venture aloft, we need to make sure that we have a clear sense
of what our ultimate objective is and to be wary of wishful
thinking.

The acid test is to see in what way hoisting our consciousness
beyond commonplace perspectives will ultimately help us to include
alternate vantage points in an encompassing perspective. This is
'awakening in life' rather than 'beyond the beyond.' One might
describe it as seeing back-stage together with seeing what is
happening on the stage.  Hence Hazrat Inayat Khan distinguishes
between waking and awakening:

"God lost in the manifestation is the state which we call waking.
The manifestation lost in God is realization. In my language I
would call the latter awakening and the former a dream." 
(HIK), (SUFI TEACHINGS)

Therefore, rather than conducting the classical retreat, I have
made an attempt at sustaining, yet adapting, the perspectives and
attunements adopted in our prescribed retreats in the midst of the
hustle-bustle of a real-life scene.  My objective was to put
myself to a test and apply strictly the guidelines given by 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), (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS)

"The soul manifests in the world in order that it may experience
the different phases of manifestation, yet not lose its way, but
regain its original freedom in addition to the experience and
knowledge it has gained in the world....The purpose of life is
fulfilled in rising to the greatest heights and in diving to the
deepest depths of life, in widening one's horizons, in penetrating
life in all its spheres, in losing oneself, and in finding oneself
in the end."
(HIK), (THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION, THE INNER LIFE)

As I did this, it became increasingly clear that Hazrat Inayat
Khan's teaching is about awakening in life but it requires
including the perspectives of the higher levels in one's vantage
point. Obviously this means not simply slipping into the
commonplace 'here and now,' but not discounting it either, since
it is here that the Divine programming of the Universe, is to be
found, not 'up there.' It means

"to live in heaven and to live on the earth at the same time."
(HIK),  (THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS, THE SPIRITUAL HIERARCHY,
ATTUNEMENT OF THE PROPHET)

The challenge was to maintain God-consciousness while observing
the world.

"It is in man that divinity is awakened, that God is awakened,
that God can be seen."
(HIK),  (THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS, THE SPIRITUAL HIERARCHY)

"The power of the spiritual man lasts as long as he is conscious
of the spiritual spheres.  No sooner does his consciousness become
reflected with the earth than his power ceases to work and he
falls flat on the ground." 
(HKK), (ESOTERIC PAPERS, SANGITHA II)

"The purpose of every soul is that for which the whole creation
has been striving; and it is the fulfillment of that purpose which
is called God consciousness." 
(HIK), (ESOTERIC PAPERS, SANGATHA I)

"Where are you to find God if not in the God-conscious. ... The
Creator is hidden in His creation."
(HIK, presumably)

"What does God-consciousness mean? Would it be helpful to see that
we are the product of the proliferation of the One and only
being?"
(HIK, presumably)

"Spiritual attainment is to be conscious of the Perfect One who is
formed in the heart."
(HIK),  (THE COMPLETE SAYINGS OF HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN, 591) 

It became clear that our sense of identity (whether personal or
transpersonal) determines our insight. Therefore if I wished to
observe the world from a transpersonal vantage point, I needed to
explore further my identity and shift my identity from my ordinary
self-image.

"The spirit of limitation is always a hindrance to realizing the
spirit of mastery and practicing it. The experience of being
powerless is man's ignorance of the power within him. ... The
outlook becomes wide, as wide as the divine eye."
(HIK),  (SOUL WHENCE AND WHITHER, MANIFESTATION)

It follows that if, to observe the world in an awakened stage, I
need to be God-conscious, I need to discover my divine inheritance
which neither means that I identify with God nor that I am a
discrete individual observer. Rather, my consciousness could be
likened to a beam of light in which the light of the cosmos has
been focalized through a lens.

"A person needs to analyze himself and see, "Where does 'I' stand?
Does it stand as a remote exclusive being...." " 
(HIK), (MYSTICISM OF SOUND AND MUSIC, THE COSMIC LANGUAGE, THE
EGO)

"What is meant by concentration is the change of identification of
the soul, so that it may lose the false conception of
identification and identify itself with the true self instead of
the false self."
(HIK),  (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS)

"When the soul goes further on the path of knowledge, it begins to
recognize the feeling of 'I-ness' and see how it identifies with
what is not itself."
(HIK),  (THE SOUL WHENCE AND WHITHER)

"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..."
(HIK), (SPIRITUAL LIBERTY)

Here lies the paradox, the test as to whether I am up to
practicing Hazrat Inayat Khan's teaching in real-life rather than
absconding in the ambiguity of a delusive would-be semblance of
wishful thinking purported to be samadhi. It, however, certainly
requires a different way of thinking to the usual one.
Consequently, in order to grasp what is being enacted behind the
enigmatic drama played by these unknown people passing each other
(or in clusters) like ships in the night on the pavement of the
Champs Elysees, I am called upon to apply the holistic view of
scientists to my sense of identity.

"Man is a condition of God like a wave is a condition of the sea."
(HIK, presumably)

To investigate this further I had to see that while the
psychological genes that we inherit include those of the universe
(what Christ calls our divine inheritance), some of these are
active and others have been curbed (in biology: recessive and
dominant) in the course of our inheritance from each of our
ancestors. With the consequence that that divine perfection that
we have inherited gets processed, hence limited, albeit it remains
virtual and can be aroused by one's will.

"The soul changes its own identity with the change of its
constantly changing vision."
(HIK),  (SPIRITUAL LIBERTY)

"One finds a kind of universe in oneself."
(HIK),  (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS)

Now I could see the advantage of this constraint upon our cosmic
dimension, because, thanks to the interfacing and interaction
between each of us as fragments of the Totality in which the
bounty of the Totality is virtually present, we enrich each other
reciprocally. And consequently the overall code is enriched by the
feedback of its fragments, like variation on a theme of music.

"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."
(HIK),  (HEALING AND THE MIND WORLD, MENTAL PURIFICATION)

So in this case we can willfully arouse these genes by overcoming
that in our own self, which stands as an obstacle to activating
the divine inheritance.

"Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of
humanity."
(HIK, presumably)

The smartness of the programming is evidenced in the delegation of
responsibility; what is more, in the fact that the programming is
elaborated in its implementation in existence; it is not 'up
there.'

"The divine mind is made of His own creation. The divine mind
becomes completed after manifestation." 
(HIK), (THE UNITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEALS)

Sitting here on the Champs Elysees, trying to maintain Pir o
Murshid Inayat Khan's consciousness, which could be described as a
bird's eye view, one really does have some indication as to what
people are motivating or motivated by. However, while this
scenario offers us an alternative range to our 'storms in our tea-
cups,' it is not an interactive situation (unless we involve
ourselves in it, in which case the chances of losing our
objectivity are at least as great as when confronting our ordinary
problems). Consequently we are in the seat of the observer.

"In spiritual awakening the first thing that comes to man is the
lifting of a veil and this is the lifting of an apparent
condition. Then a person does not see every condition as it
appears to be, but sees behind every condition its deeper
meaning."
(HIK, presumably)

So the daunting question prods one: what is it all about?
Actually, one is not just the observer, but one seeks to grasp the
divine programming behind what one observes.

"It is simply a gradual awakening from the witnessing aspect to
the recognizing aspect."
(HIK),  (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS, THE MEANING OF LIFE)

Awakening in life must signify trying to see purposefulness and
meaningfulness in this lively scene deployed before my eyes.   

"And the sign of that awakening is that upon every person and upon
every object the wakened person throws a light, a light of his
soul, and sees that object, that condition, in that light. It is
his own soul that becomes a torch in his hand, it is his own light
that illuminates his path. It is just like throwing a searchlight
upon dark corners which one did not see before, and the corners
become clear and illuminated again. It is like throwing light upon
problems that one did not understand first. It is like seeing with
x-rays persons who were a riddle before." 
(HIK), (SOCIAL GATHEKAS, THE AWAKENING OF THE SOUL)

"Wherever his glance falls - on nature, on characters - he reads
their history, he sees their future. He sees the cause behind the
faults people have. While an ordinary person can see the action of
another, the seer can see the reason of the action also, and if
his sight is still keener, he can see the reason of the person. He
knows why an event comes, whence it comes, what is behind it, what
is the cause of it, and behind the seeming cause, the hidden
cause. And if he wishes to trace the cause behind the cause, he
could trace it back to the primal cause, for the inner life is
lived by living with the primal cause."
(HIK, Presumably)

"Every person he meets, he begins to communicate with his soul.
Every person and every object stand before him as an open book."
(HIK, presumably)

What strikes me first is that most people seem to be caught in
their own personal trips like puppets oblivious of the threads
that move them.

"It is ignorance when it takes this experience to be real. It does
so because it cannot see itself; as the eye sees all things, but
not itself. Therefore the soul identifies itself with all things
that it sees, and changes its own identity with the change of its
constantly changing vision. ... But as the soul cannot see itself,
it thinks, by the help of the ego: I am sad, I am glad, I
remember, I have forgotten." 
(HIK), (SPIRITUAL LIBERTY)

Most people seem so obviously convinced that they are what they
think they are!

"Striving in the spiritual path is breaking away from the false
conception that we have made of ourselves, coming out of it, it is
realizing our true being and becoming conscious of it." 
(HIK), (SUFI TEACHINGS, HEALTH AND ORDER OF BODY AND MIND)

At the cost of being judgmental, the values pursued by so many
seem trivial or trifle. It looks as though many are pursuing a
furtive chimera, to be entertained by a moment of pleasure that
can never be utterly satisfied - wanting more and more self-
satisfaction.

"To seek to do these things is to give pearls to buy pebbles."
(HIK),  (IN AN EASTERN ROSE GARDEN)

"When man has to choose between his spiritual and his material
profit, then he shows whether his treasure is on earth or in
heaven."
(HIK, presumably)

"Whether to renounce things momentarily precious for everlasting
things or everlasting things for things momentarily precious."
(HIK),  (SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS GATHEKAS, SOCIAL GATHEKAS,
RENUNCIATION)

What is more, getting into the consciousness of so many, one sees
that obviously most people

"...are acting with the idea in mind of what would be to their
interest; what would bring them an advantage." 
(HIK), (THE ALCHEMY OF HAPPINESS)   

Moreover this selfishness will lead to being unjust and may
escalate into cruelty, which can sometimes be detected in
someone's face.

Immediately a note of caution struck my memory of PIR O MURSHID
INAYAT KHAN'S words:

"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."
(HIK),  (THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION, THE INNER LIFE)

Besides:

"Remember: we can never claim to be unselfish; but if we are
selfish, it is just as well to be wisely selfish. The wise selfish
person will obtain money in order that he can express his
generosity with what he has collected."
(HIK, presumably)

Then my attention was drawn to take advantage of this opportunity
of watching others, to see a likeness of these within myself.
Furthermore,

"...the world, busy with its selfish, unimportant occupations,
will surely drag you towards itself."
(HIK),  (SUFI TEACHINGS)

"You must find your ideal in yourself; no ideal in life will prove
lasting and true except the one you yourself make."
(HIK),  (THE SAYINGS OF HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN, GAYAN)     

Interestingly, no sooner than one ceases to be judgmental, one
discovers oneself for having seen oneself in another. 

"...and when this light is thrown within one's self, then the self
will be revealed to a person; he will become enlightened as to his
own nature and his own character."
(HIK),  (THE MYSTICISM OF SOUND AND MUSIC)

Looking at the moving scene of beings of all walks of life in
their stupendous diversity, most people seem to be caught in their
personal concerns regardless of the way that the overwhelming
intention sparking life affects their personal life. Scanning
their motivations from the transpersonal perspective rather than
the personal vantage point, one sees splendor and meaningfulness
trying to blossom and awaken in the midst of defilement and
ignorance.

"Love must be absolutely free from selfishness, otherwise it does
not produce proper illumination."
(HIK), (Spiritual Liberty)

It appears as though only a few are aware of the force impelling
people to socialize. People impelled by the attraction of the
opposite sex seem to be oblivious of the cosmic programming behind
their attraction, that they are fulfilling a cosmic intention to
ensure the perpetuation of form - that is what has been gained by
the configuration of thought into matter registered as form. Where
this completion of one's being by the power of affinity occurs,
the fulfillment of this cosmic magic is optimized. Otherwise one
wonders to what confinement a fortuitous spell, fancy, fantasy or
whimsical fad may lead. In general, one sees people unfolding,
being enriched by the completion gained by the mutual enhancement
of their psyches, wisdom, know-how, or attunement.

In fact ifone can be inspired and enriched by the wisdom and
attunement of another person, it is because they have become
incorporated in one's psyche so that we can find them in
ourselves. There is an osmosis between beings at the level of the
psyche. For this one must not think of them as located in space or
just recall meeting them in time. Communication can be triggered
off by simply reading the words of a person or seeing their
portrait. As we have seen form has value because it configures a
state of being. 

The persons whom we admire are our gurus. We can reach them in
ourselves, because if we admire qualities in them it is because
they resonate with latent qualities in ourselves that they thereby
arouse.

Here again we encounter a paradox:

"There are two aspects of fullness: completion and perfection.
Every new experience, a thought, an imagination, a principle, an
ideal add to one's knowledge that makes man complete. At the same
time by trying to be self-sufficient within oneself, perfection is
obtained."
(HIK) 

"There comes another step in awakening when a man does not even
see the cause, but comes to the realization of the adjustment of
things: how every activity of life, whether it appears to be wrong
or right, adjusts itself."
(HIK)

Amongst such diversity, in the moving scene, one espies in many
people beauty, sensitivity, a sense of responsibility and concern,
idealism, sparkling joy in the marvel of life, the sortilege of
love.    

JAMI:
"From all eternity, the Beloved unveiled His beauty in the
solitude of the unseen; He held up the mirror to His own Face, He
displayed His loveliness to Himself, He was both the Spectator and
the spectacle. ... Although He beheld His attributes and qualities
as a perfect whole in His Essence, yet He desired that they should
be displayed to Him in another mirror, and that each of His
eternal attributes should become manifest accordingly in a diverse
form. Therefore He created the verdant fields of time and space,
and the life-giving garden of the world, that every branch and
leaf and fruit might show forth His various perfections."
 (NICHOLSON, 1975, PP 80-81)    

The manifest beauty displays one's attunement.

"One's grade of evolution depends upon the pitch one has attained
that makes one conscious of a certain phase of life. ... There is
a stage at which, by touching a particular phase of existence, one
feels raised above the limitations of life. At that moment of
supreme exaltation, one is not only united with the source of all
being, but dissolved in it for one discovers that that source is
one's very self."
(HIK),  (HEALING AND THE MIND WORLD)

"Consciousness has become so light and so liberated and free that
it can raise itself and dive and touch the depth of one's being."
(HIK),  (HEALING AND THE MIND WORLD)

"All that man considers beautiful, precious and good is not
necessarily in the thing or the being, it is in his ideal; the
thing or being causes him to create the beauty, value and goodness
in his own mind."
(HIK),  (THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION)

In rare instances one can perceive splendor breaking through in a
flurry of superb beauty for an ephemeral outburst - a moment of
glory as if suspended at the apex of the curve of evolution - then
melt away. This could be illustrated by the life cycle of a desert
succulent.  It can take years for the sugars from the environment
to build up until that magical moment when it erupts in a
supremely beautiful iridescent flower. Within a few hours, it has
paled and faded yet not without having sown seeds that are the
replica of the very seed in which it had been embedded.

"You may think of yourself as a plant in which only a little
bounty latent in the seed is manifest. Yet in you the seed that
caused the whole existence - God - is to be found. The seed out of
which the trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit are made
arises again at the end of the cycle. The same God so little of
whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again and again in
its pursuit of excellence trying to emerge as perfectly as
possible in the midst of human imperfection."
(HIK, presumably)

It would prove ideal if that state would lead to further valuable
attainments instead of being simply recycled in the seed. This
repetitive recurrent rebirthing is precisely what Buddha
illustrated by the samsaric wheel. To eschew this, one needs to
call upon a peri-samsaric dimension of one's inheritance that is
not of the nature of becoming. This precisely what Hazrat Inayat
Khan means by honoring our divine inheritance.

"Man is the product of all planes spiritual and material....in him
alone shines forth that primal intelligence that caused the
whole."
(HIK),  (SANGATHA I)

It would be a feature of simplistic thinking (evidenced by the
commonplace mode of thinking in terms of duality) to assume that
that beauty was pre-established - that the splendor of the heavens
manifest as beauty on the earth already exists in the divine
programming. In the way of thinking in the emergent paradigms
announcing the spirituality of the future, and which corroborates
the perspective arrived at by physics as it has been advancing
over the decades, that congruity and 'elegance' (a term now
current amongst physicists) is self-organized. For example, when
all the niches in the orbitals of an atom are occupied by
electrons, if a further electron is incorporated in the atom, that
electron creates a new orbit.  In contrast, while a car follows an
already existing pathway or road, an airplane blazes its own
trail, one that was not pre-existent. 

While one might suppose that the seed needs an adequate
environmental support system in which to unfurl, paradoxically,
colorful flowers can sometimes bloom in the most unfriendly
circumstances, as for example in a wedge in a rock. It looks as
though, since the seed is transforming the environment into a
plant, its success is a function of the degree to which the
environment lends itself to be thus configured, as against the
fact that the seed is meeting obstacles in the disposure of the
environment to its transformation as a plant. An aware person
needs therefore to modify psychological and physical circumstances
in order that they may lend themselves to be processed in the
person.   

But it is not only in the adequacy of environmental conditions
that resistance to the self-organizing process is to be found, but
also in one's own being. Persons differ in the degree to which
they actualize this splendor and realization. It depends upon how
important and significant it is for them.

To highlight crucial points already stated, I repeat these words
of PIR O MURSHID HAZRAT INAYAT KHAN:

"Man is the product of all planes spiritual and material. In him
alone shines forth that primal intelligence that caused the whole"
(HIK).

"The divine mind is made of His own creation. The divine mind
becomes completed after manifestation."
(HIK, presumably)

"Man is a condition of God like a wave is a condition of the sea."
(HIK, presumably)

"Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of
humanity."
(HIK, presumably)

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